This is a curated selection of Cynthia Bourgeault quotes (primarily sourced from publicly available videos, and personally curated by me on my own lifelong learning journey). This page is intended as a learning resource for educational purposes and only meant to offer an overview/introduction. Short quotes aren’t a substitute for source material, so if this page sparks your interest, explore more deeply by checking out Cynthia Bourgeault’s books (Amazon).
Page Contents:
- Religions & Christianity Quotes
- Body & Self Quotes
- Contemplation & Nonduality Quotes
- Centering Prayer Quotes
- Wisdom Way of Knowing Quotes
25 Cynthia Bourgeault Quotes on Wisdom, Contemplation, Centering Prayer, & More
Cynthia Bourgeault Quotes on Religions & Christianity
“I’ve worked closely with many of the religious traditions, and I have a great belief that like colors of the rainbow they all belong together, and it requires every one of them to show the full spectrum of divine love.” — Cynthia Bourgeault
“While I hold down the corner in Christianity, it really is a universal work. Each of the traditions participate in it in their own way to reveal what divine love looks like in created form.” — Cynthia Bourgeault
“I don’t have any sort of special notion of my importance or of being in some sort of consecrated path … Every human being is consecrated just by the fact of being born.” — Cynthia Bourgeault
“Life hangs together by some deeper coherence and compassion, and our theologies, and our doctrines, and our dogmas, and our principles try and take that and put it in mental form, but the mental form never touches that sense that something holds together … These are all kinds of things that are absolutely real, but they make no sense on the level of the mind alone.” — Cynthia Bourgeault
“Try, wherever you are, to be conscious and to be grateful. See what needs to be done in the moment, and to do it in such a way that you’re moving in a direction of greater compassion, greater love, and greater understanding.” — Cynthia Bourgeault
Cynthia Bourgeault Quotes on Body & Self
“This era is about embodiment … We’re in the body for a good reason, and the body is our profound vessel of truth and spiritual exploration … The world calls us to embodiment with every breath. We just have to learn to attune to it again and to value the body as a sacred temple of perception.” — Cynthia Bourgeault
“The ego is merely the mirage of self that you get by running the egoic operating system which is a program that perceives reality by discriminating/differentiating subject and object.” — Cynthia Bourgeault
“Most of us think we’re free and yet we’re not free at all because we’re under the absolute compulsion of agendas, addictions, and aversions that have been programmed into us from early life and sometimes from the womb.” — Cynthia Bourgeault
“At the obvious level, ‘freedom’ is what you’d call freedom from the false self … Freedom begins when you can stabilize in yourself this thing that some of the Eastern traditions helpfully call ‘witnessing presence.’” — Cynthia Bourgeault
“As you finally become free to follow what you might call the ‘homing beacon’ of your own inner calling, you realize that it’s only in complete obedience that freedom lies … ‘Obedience’ comes from Latin, meaning ‘to listen deeply.’ As we listen deeply to the fundamental ‘tuning fork’ of our being—which is given to us not by ourself and is never about self-realization because the self melts as that realization comes closer—you find the only freedom is to be your own cell in the vast mystical body of God. But, you have to get free of the false self to see that.” — Cynthia Bourgeault
Cynthia Bourgeault Quotes on Contemplation & Nonduality
“Contemplation is the closest equivalent in the Western Christian experience to what’s known in most of the world as ‘nonduality.’” — Cynthia Bourgeault
“The real meaning of ‘contemplation’ is not resting in stillness, but it designates a path of luminous knowledge—knowledge of an extremely high order of intensity, and coherence, and magnitude. It’s not content-free by any means; it’s simply that the content is so high, and so ordered, and so intense, and so brilliant that it tends to overwhelm the faculties of our usual rational mind and the mind falls still and silent before it.” — Cynthia Bourgeault
“Contemplation is a luminous seeing, very often it’s described as a pure beholding—in other words, a direct perception. It’s sometimes described as knowledge impregnated with love … The contemplation, the inner work, is the ground for a deeper seeing, and in that seeing, a participation in this evolutionary journey of our planet and of our universe toward the fullness of love.” — Cynthia Bourgeault
“The Christ teaching comes from a nondual level, and you can’t run it when you’re running a dualistic program.” — Cynthia Bourgeault
“The shift into second tier (see Integral Theory) is contingent on the mind being in the heart, and mind and heart working together to run the nondual program which can perceive from oneness … The nature of heart-seeing is that it’s intrinsically moral—this is not because of what it sees but how it sees.” — Cynthia Bourgeault
Cynthia Bourgeault Quotes on Centering Prayer
“Jesus taught a method, and once you saw it, you saw it everywhere. His method was let go—it was a basic non-clinging practice … The mind in this attached state identifying with everything, he practices let go, let go, let go.” — Cynthia Bourgeault
“Letting go is in association with what Christian theology calls ‘kenosis’ or the non-clinging or self-emptying of Jesus … Kenosis is the word in Greek which Saint Paul used to depict putting on the mind of Christ. It basically is pretty close to what the Buddhists mean by non-clinging—doesn’t hang on, doesn’t insist, doesn’t assert, doesn’t grab, doesn’t brace, doesn’t defend.” — Cynthia Bourgeault
“Centering prayer is boot camp in meditation form for putting on the mind of Christ, for putting the mind in the heart, for rearranging the neurology and the theology of perception.” — Cynthia Bourgeault
“In centering prayer, your intention is to let go of every thought … It really works with the simple idea of release, release, release—moving our mind from a state of being attached to an object to a state of letting go … Every time you let go of a thought—even if another comes back—you’re practicing this deep motion of non-clinging, letting go, consenting, surrendering … It’s the depth and sincerity of your intention that will carry how quickly you notice when you’re hooked by thinking and return to the practice.” — Cynthia Bourgeault
“The inner action of letting go becomes the outer action of letting be.” — Cynthia Bourgeault
Cynthia Bourgeault Quotes on the Wisdom Way of Knowing Wisdom Lineage
“The wisdom tradition has been a great underground stream feeding and nurturing the life of all traditions … Wisdom is not about knowing more, but knowing deeper—knowing with more of you engaged, with more of your perceptual understanding awake and online.” — Cynthia Bourgeault
“The first and most important thing to say about our lineage is that it’s a practice-driven, practice-based lineage. It’s not about speculation, it’s not about cognitive knowledge, it’s not about books of esoteric doctrine.” — Cynthia Bourgeault
“Silence is not just a place you go to but a way of knowing in and of itself. And, without this silent way of knowing, knowledge itself begins to become too cognitive, cerebral, and confrontational.” — Cynthia Bourgeault
“The direction in which the divine is manifest in this world is not by sucking us back into an eternal spirit but by birthing ever new, and more complex, and more intricate, and messy forms—the journey is always through matter into new forms.” — Cynthia Bourgeault
“Our work concentrates … at the level of guiding the transition from identity based primarily in the narrative or egoic self to identity stabilized at the level of witnessing presence, or ‘permeably boundaried’ selfhood … What the wisdom schools have traditionally attempted to do is shift the center of selfhood out of which we work.” — Cynthia Bourgeault
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