Kundalini Splendor

Jeff Carreira––Summer Retreat


I strongly recommend this retreat.  You can still sign up online to be a virtual participant.  Jeff now has distilled years of practice and contemplation to become an authentic teacher, one who understands the joys and pitfalls of the spiritual path.

Hi Dorothy,

The start of my annual summer retreat is now just about a week away, and I wanted to share some of what I’m thinking and feeling heading into this event.

For the past five years this summer retreat has been the most powerful event that I do annually. It has over 70 participants in-person and well over 100 when we include our virtual participants who take part from home. (By the way there is still time to register for virtual participation.)

These summer retreats have also acted as a focal point for the entire global community of people who are engaged with this work. The experiences that we explore on retreat shape the direction of my teaching and the engagement of the community for months after.

As the retreat draws near, I’m thinking back to the first summer retreat I led in 2015. So much has happened since that retreat five years ago.

A community has gathered and strengthened, people are staying connected all year long through The Mystery School for a New Paradigm, and my first meditation teacher training is nearly complete. In fact, some of those teachers will be teaching during the summer retreat.

Spiritually I feel that there is more power and insight flowing through our community and as a result, I feel moved to speak about purification and devotion on this retreat in ways that I haven’t before.

Love,
Jeff

Devotion and Purification

As we gain access to spiritual power, it becomes more important to remember that the aim of spiritual work is always and only to be more surrendered to divinity.

Have you ever seen the musical Jesus Christ Superstar? There is a powerful moment in the story where Jesus is asking God to help him understand why he must die and he sings:

Why then am I scared
To finish what I started

-pause-

What you started
I didn't start it

At this point, Jesus has an epiphany and reconnects with all of the inspiration that had fueled his early ministry. He realized that he had mistakenly started to think of what was happening as if it were his agenda. When he remembers that his work had always been dictated from something higher, he feels a surge of courage and faith rush back in. Suddenly he is not just a person trying to enact a plan, he is surrendered to a divine plan that he is ready to see through to the end.

As we open more deeply to our own spiritual potential, we inevitably gain access to greater power. We’re able to see with piercing clarity, we find wellsprings of strength and conviction within, and we often find that we have tremendous influence over the people around us.

As these extraordinary characteristics grow within us, our spiritual work must expand to include more practices of purification, renunciation, devotion, and worship. In the excitement of realizing expanded human capacities it’s easy to forget who started this.

Your spiritual path was not started by you, so you could become a superman or a superwoman. It was started because you were touched by a source of love and wisdom that wanted to shine through you into the world.

When increased human capacities are overly glorified on the spiritual path, it tempts the ego to run away with the show and make it all about glorifying itself.

Over the last eight months I’ve been adding more practices of devotion and purification to my own personal ritual. That means more time spent in silent contemplation of the divine, it meant setting up an alter that displayed realized beings that I admire, and it means spending time in prayer asking for the strength, clarity and sensitivity to be true to the path. It also means reading sacred texts – not to learn, but simply to commune with the sacred spirit of the wisdom they contain.

Purity doesn’t mean being perfect. It means remaining in service of divinity. And whenever you discover that you’ve lost sight of who started this, it means returning to the source and connecting once again with the reason you entered the spiritual path in the first place.

We entered the spiritual path because something opened us to a higher possibility. It might have been pain, trauma, or personal tragedy that opened us up. It might have been revelation or spiritual insight that did the trick. But something made us recognize an immaculate source of love and wisdom.

We saw it, maybe for just a minute, or maybe longer, but we saw it. We knew that we were capable of being a vessel of that immaculate love and wisdom. In fact, we realized that only that was truly worthy of our lives.

We embarked on the spiritual path. We found ourselves in the world, but not of it. Maybe we were living a human life that was in many ways normal, but we were not motivated by the same things that motivated most of the people around us. We now had our heart set on the possibility of becoming a reflection of divinity and grace.

That sacred purpose moved us along the path, and eventually we started opening to profound insights, powers and capacities. At that point our ego tries to muscle in. "Hey, I want this!" it will say, "Yes, be a vessel for divinity, but do a little something for me too."

Practices of devotion and purification protect us from being fooled by the ego’s beckoning, and if we do get fooled, they help us find our way home again. The way home is always back to the source, back to whatever it was that introduced us to the divine in the first place.

...the end...

I truly believe this growing community has the chance to become a spiritual beacon of hope in the world. And the explorations we engage with together on retreat will help guide us there.

It will be a privilege to explore the sacred practices of purification and devotion on retreat with so many of you.

If you want to join us virtually, you can find out how here.

Love,
Jeff
e: jeff@jeffcarreira.com
w: jeffcarreira.com
w: mysteryschool-memberscircle.com