Online Courses
Cynthia’s teaching is offered in numerous on-demand online courses hosted by various partnering organizations
Online Courses from Wisdom Waypoints
Holy Week: A Cosmic Seeing
An unexpected Eastertide gift, this four-part series by Cynthia Bourgeault offers a profound reclaiming of Christ’s death and resurrection as a cosmogonic event. Recorded at her home during Holy Week, these intimate talks are now available to the entire Wisdom Waypoints community on a pay-what-you-can basis.
In these talks Cynthia explores how Gurdjieffian insights on intentional suffering, conscious love, and “the cost of our arising” bring powerful new validation to the classic atonement theology that has been a stumbling block for so many, while reframing it away from its traditional shaming and punitive overtones.
Nurturing Second Body: Building the Higher Collectivity
How does one engage “voluntary acceptance of constriction and diminishment?” Exploring Christian mystical perspectives on aging and the Gurdjieffian second body, this course follows seamlessly on Building Second Body and includes a guest lecture by Gurdjieffian scholar Michael Pittman.
Wisdom and Evil: A One Day Workshop with Cynthia Bourgeault
In April of 2023 a one-day workshop took place in Atlanta to provide a shortened version of Cynthia’s full 5-day wisdom school on The Encounter with Evil provided by Wisdom Way of Knowing. The seminar was such a success that we are delighted to offer you a mini-online workshop that will not only provide teaching and perspective, but also allow you to engage with the material and go deeper. The course includes 6 hour-long video sessions and additional resources that you can explore at your own pace.
The Wisdom Jesus Encounters Our Disordered World
This free course offering includes presentations, readings and discussions based on books by Cynthia Bourgeault and Richard Rohr
The Word and Life team chose Cynthia Bourgeault’s The Wisdom Jesus – teaching the way of the heart as the transformer of human consciousness – to be the primary guidebook for their Winter 2023 series.
This series explores the disorder, trauma, and evil that are arising around us in today’s world.
Encountering The Wisdom Jesus
The Nature of Sin and Evil
Confronting Evil with a Transformed Consciousness
A Journey Through Holy Week: The Passion Libretto
This free course offering is a Six Day free Holy Week offering on the Passion Libretto from Cynthia and Wisdom Waypoints. The idea to offer this gift to the Wisdom network came into being after an inquiry for leads on a Passion Libretto that Cynthia put together back in 2004. It was for a new choral piece, an original Holy Week oratorio, composed for the Aspen Choral Society, by her friend and colleague the resident conductor Ray Vincent Adams. A portion of it was published in some form or another by Episcopal Church Publishing Company, but it’s apparently long since out of print. Cynthia wanted to redesign it and make it available to the whole Wisdom web as an invitation to each of us for reflection, prayer and meditation individually yet together in the heart of God.
The Mystery of Death: A Holy Isle Wisdom School with Cynthia Bourgeault
If you’re looking for an alternative pathway through Lent, Wisdom Waypoints is pleased to announce the release of THE MYSTERY OF DEATH, Cynthia’s teaching on Ladislaus Boros’s profound mystical text, recorded live in June 2022 on Holy Isle, in the Scottish Hebrides, and offering new windows into the teaching not aired before. The course includes over 10 hours of video and audio content, slightly edited for technical clarity but preserving both the content and the flavor of the remarkable original event.
Rebuilding Trust: Cosmic Replenishment for a Malnourished World - Video Teaching with Cynthia Bourgeault
At a time when the trust level in our world has fallen to a catastrophic low, Cynthia Bourgeault provides a deep immersion into another way of working with trust. Drawing on the experience of revered mystics and martyrs, she explores not only the spirituality but the actual practices that allow our hearts to access a potent, hidden wellspring of trust. By skillfully tapping into that source we can begin to rebuild trust within our own lives, and also contribute to its cultivation within our shattered world. Cynthia approaches this teaching from contemplative and esoteric reference points rather than the more typical therapeutic perspectives. An established meditation practice will help support this teaching and the necessary willingness to offer oneself on this pathway of conscious service to the whole.
Rebuilding Trust includes over 10 hours of video teachings by Cynthia Bourgeault and supporting teacher Matthew Wright. Together they provide an illuminating, expansive approach to both encounter and generate trust, as an essential substance and offering, so needed in our world today.
Building Second Body: A Teaching Series with Cynthia Bourgeault
Through the all-important route of steadily enlivening and subtilizing sensation/attention in the first body, one develops the second body as the vessel to hold and enact higher and finer dimensions of consciousness. What you will find here is what Cynthia considers essential, foundational ‘technologies for transformation.”
The video recordings provided here were filmed live at a small Wisdom gathering in Stonington Maine in June 2022. This new teaching series has been curated from a selection of those recorded sessions, offering a unique and practical set of instructions for developing the spiritual substances and conscious presence so needed in our world today.
Integral Light Shining in the Dark: An Advent Teaching by Cynthia Bourgeault
In this groundbreaking audio teaching, Cynthia Bourgeault takes us on a deep dive into the profoundly Christian and incarnational mysticism at the root of Jean Gebser’s Integral Evolutionary theory. She explores how some of Gebser’s core ideas, particularly around time, transparency, spiritual generativity, and “intensification of the present” open up whole new windows of insight on classic Advent themes. She also explores how the great incarnational themes of Advent illuminate and “shelter” Gebser’s thinking, transforming it from an intellectual tour de force to a luminous offering of the heart—and how the practical, attention-based “exercises” developed Gurdjieff can help to “put legs” under the whole enterprise and offer us a way forward in our own uncertain times.
Online Courses from Wisdom Way of Knowing
An Encounter with Evil Wisdom School eCourse with Cynthia Bourgeault
In this timely advanced wisdom school course, Cynthia inquires into the nature and presence of evil as a discernible force, with a focus on these key questions: What is a useful, contemporary understanding of evil? How can we effectively deal with evil, at both an individual and collective scale?
Imaginal Wisdom School eCourse with Cynthia Bourgeault
Drawing from her groundbreaking book EYE OF THE HEART, Cynthia Bourgeault illuminates the particular qualities and gifts of the Imaginal realm as an accessible world just beyond our own, and available to us for spiritual nurturance and exchange.
Online Learning from Center for Action and Contemplation
Introductory Wisdom School
Christian Wisdom teachings have been around since the earliest days of Christianity. In this 30 session online course Cynthia teaches from that ancient perspective in ways that suit today’s world.
The Divine Exchange
This course is a continuation of Cynthia’s Introductory Wisdom School, delving deeply into the principle of exchange (“giving-is-receiving”), the spiritual foundation of The Christian Wisdom tradition.
Mary Magdalene: Apostle to Our Own Times
Discover one of the most misunderstood and forgotten characters in the Gospels.
Online Courses from Center for Spirituality and Practice
Mystical Hope Today
While the course is anchored in the original Mystical Hope book, it is not simply a rehash of that book. It combines the best moments in the original book with the growth that has unfolded in Cynthia over the years with the circumstances in which we now find ourselves personally and planetarily. It is a whole new course, rooted in the old, but directed toward the present and future.
The Mystery of Death with Cynthia Bourgeault
An introduction to a little known contemporary mystical gem, The Mystery of Death by Hungarian-born Jesuit theologian Ladislaus Boros, which has been a mainstay of Cynthia’s own spiritual work for more than forty years. She teaches against the backdrop of our own point in history, “where death has weighed so heavily on people’s hearts these past few years and our own individual and collective terror of it has been so brutally exposed.”
New Windows on The Cloud of Unknowing
In this 4-week online course Cynthia Bourgeault opens up new windows of perspective on The Cloud of Unknowing, showing how this classic medieval text offers profound insights and relevance for our own times.
Spiritual Gifts from the Imaginal Realm with Cynthia
In this e-course, Cynthia specifically explores the gifts of the imaginal realm that can help us adopt a larger perspective and make a difference today using the cosmic assistance available to us all. She introduces the teachings in her groundbreaking book, Eye of the Heart: A Spiritual Journey into the Imaginal Realm, but approaches the material afresh within the context of the global pandemic and Lent 2021, when the program was first offered.
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Thomas Keating's The Secret Embrace
This course material focuses upon the eight poems in Thomas Keating’s The Secret Embrace, his final spiritual legacy to the world composed the last winter of his life. Through Cynthia’s teaching you see through their shimmering facets and key aspects of his final journey of transfiguration.
Becoming Truly Human: Gurdjieff's Obligolnian Strivings
A study of George Ivanovich Gurdjieff’s Five Strivings.
Centering Prayer with Cynthia Bourgeault
Learn this no-frills form of Christian meditation from one of its most potent teachers.
The Gospel of Thomas with Cynthia Bourgeault
A complete “Thomas starter kit”: everything you need to know to get you up and running with this remarkable text.
A Simple Immediacy: Desert Wisdom for Advent 2023
Teachings from the Desert Fathers and Mothers on classic Advent themes - revised for 2023!
A Simple Immediacy: Desert Wisdom for Advent
Teachings from the Desert Fathers and Mothers on classic Advent themes.
The Wisdom Jesus with Cynthia Bourgeault
Presenting this universal cultural treasure whose extraordinary teachings and heart exemplify the highest consciousness.
The Gospel of Thomas for Advent with Cynthia Bourgeault
A way to prepare our hearts for a truly blessed Christmas.
Spiritual Practices from the Gurdjieff Work with Cynthia Bourgeault
Plunges you right into the heart of these transformative practices.
Coping and Thriving with Catastrophe
A benefit e-course about recovery from disaster given by six pioneers of InterSpirituality.
Online Courses from Shambhala
The Way of Wisdom Jesus
Going beyond the mind to the heart of Jesus’ teaching. Cynthia shares Jesus’ teaching through the lens of nonduality and letting go. The course includes videos, readings, and downloadable PDFs.