From Carolyn Myss

ENTERING THE CASTLE: Exploring Your Mystical Experience of God

A mystical Renaissance is at work in our world, awaking in people a deep and increasingly familiar passion to pursue the mystical landscape of their lives. Mystics, contrary to what most people think, are not individuals who seek life in a monastery or ashram because they want to be isolated from the rest of the world. Mystics are individuals who have been "called" by the Divine to engage with life through inner vision, to understand the mysteries of the Divine, and to be of service in this world through the power of the soul. Most of the renowned mystics that so many people are familiar with, like Francis of Assisi and Teresa of Avila, had dynamic and powerful personalities. Heaven chooses rebels to be mystics because so much is expected of them. These great mystics changed their worlds, and many of them rarely left their monasteries. Their souls did the work for them. They knew what it was to develop a "soul with stamina" and to utilize that stamina within their lives.
Today there is a new archetype for the mystic that is emerging, a "mystic without a monastery". These mystics are individuals just like you - a person who has an ordinary (or somewhat ordinary) life, a family, a partner, a profession - and yet is simultaneously seeking to develop a mystical interior life and through that connection, find a path of service in this world.
ENTERING THE CASTLE: Exploring Your Mystical Experience of God, is an intensive year-long program centered around three weekend workshops. These workshops are based upon the material from my new book, ENTERING THE CASTLE, which will be released spring, 2007. My inspiration for this work came from the brilliant 16th century mystic, Teresa of Avila, who wrote in her masterpiece, THE INTERIOR CASTLE, that the soul was like a crystal that had seven mansions and each mansion had many rooms. I was struck by her description of seven mansions, as that is the universal template that drew me to write ANATOMY of the SPIRIT. As I studied her work, I realized that she was not following a chakra map, but rather a path of mystical illumination based on a journey of prayer that took the student through seven mansions on deep interior work. I realized that it would be a worthy task to bring her work into our contemporary lives and in the process, ENTERING THE CASTLE was written and this extraordinary workshop was created.
ENTERING THE CASTLE is an Institute for the soul. It is a guided excavation of the rooms of your soul, and instructions on what to do with the content of those rooms. This is a workshop in which spiritual direction and soul stamina as well as the fundamental skills of healing are emphasized because these are the essential tools for someone who is a "mystic without a monastery", as I believe many people to be these days. Spirituality through books is not enough and meditation alone is not a spiritual path. Heaven knows intuition and intuitive practices are hardly a spiritual practice... so how does one access the soul? How does one "enter the castle" without a guide?
I believe that to be a "mystic without a monastery" is a new "soul's calling", in the same way that people were once called to the new spiritual path of Buddhism and Christianity. We've had fifty years of exploring this new age human consciousness movement, and it's not new any more. It's middle-aged and needs to mature into a stronger and more dynamic spiritual and social force on this planet. Instead of making people withdraw from the world, to constantly seek their quiet little cabins in the woods and focus on their own healing endlessly, it's time for the generation of mature souls to emerge who can live in both worlds simultaneously - who can be of service to humanity and maintain their contemplative, private life.
The new age created any number of mythologies, not the least of which is that to follow one's highest potential, a person has to leave their home and their relationships and start a healing center or do some other such thing…and most of these people end up waiting and waiting and waiting for their highest potential to come to them - with a guarantee that it won't cost them any money and they won't be alone. All that is such nonsense. A person does not have to leave hearth and home to change this world nor do they have to do something dramatic in the outside world; a mystic never had to leave the monastery to draw his or her followers. Let your soul do the work for you. Learn how to channel grace; learn how to be still and let a healing force run through you to others; learn how to use silence to heal a room in chaos. These are among the true gifts of the spirit and are of more benefit to humanity than you can possibility measure.
ENTERING THE CASTLE is my way of leading you into this new soul calling, of becoming a "mystic without a monastery", of discovering what it means to live a fulfilling life exactly where you are, as who you are, and with the people who were born to walk this life with you. Too many people are in pain because they feel they need to leave their homes to be happy - nonsense. You need to learn how to channel grace into your home front. You need to learn how to "spiritually renovate" your life, all of which is a part of this upcoming Institute.