Now that we have the beginnings of a sane administration and the real triumph of the Covid relief bill, I believe that this is the time to pour yourself out and go for broke in spreading love and passion for justice and creativity.

Obviously we are still in an extremely fragile and dangerous situation and no one should underestimate the depravity and lack of conscience of those who continue to promulgate the Big Lie and pamper the squads of neo-fascists that seem hell bent on destroying democracy.

On the other hand it would be equally foolish to deny the green shoots of hope that are appearing in millions of people waking up to how essential it is to do everything we can to help those in this appalling health crisis, to bring in voter protection acts, to work on the debilitated infrastructure, and to start doing something real about climate collapse.

For myself I have decided to pour out everything I am and know and to work harder than I ever have to give what I have to give in as...

I want to speak to all of you directly from my deepest experience about what I see clearly is happening in America and in our world. But first I want to take a big step back. I want to share with you the deepest wisdom of all the mystical traditions.

This can be summarized very simply. God and reality are a dance of opposites that emanates from an unknowable mystery of love. What this means is that even the worst tragedies contain seeds of astonishing redemption and even the most astounding advances contain seeds of potential sabotage and destruction.

In order to understand this, all the mystical traditions agree that you need to be as aligned as possible with the mysterious void and with peace and subtle joy, out of which the dance of opposites itself emerges to do love’s evolutionary will.

This is of course extremely and constantly demanding, because it challenges us all to do the inner work to purify our mind so it becomes a stainless mirror into which the mystery can shine...

"It draws down the great God into the tiny heart."

~ Mechthild of Magdeburg

This is how the great Christian medieval mystic described the power of prayer. As we begin 2021, this year of great hope and challenge, I invite you to open your heart to the great power and promise of daily and nightly prayer. Nothing is more important than staying aligned with the fundamental joy, peace, passion and energy of compassion that is our essential divine nature.

Throughout my life, it has been my own deepest experience that prayer is how we learn and stay awake to who we truly are. It helps us stay alert to the nonstop grace streaming to us from the Divine.

I chose to present this first journey of the new year aligned with what so many spiritual traditions believe, that 40 days and 40 nights is the timespan that brings about transformation. In that spirit, I have designed what I am calling 40 Days & 40 Nights: A Prayer Journey for the Soul that encompasses that mystical time frame and...

As a Christmas present to each of you, I offer this hour-long, utterly exhilarating and empowering conversation that Carolyn Baker and I had with Paul Levy. Paul is a genius and his books Quantum Revelation and Dispelling Wetiko are two of the most important contributions to humanity of the last thirty years. I hope you will take fire from the extraordinary perspectives his wisdom opens to all of us and use the joy he shares to deepen your own commitment to trust the divine field and its birthing power.

Everything that I’m about to say about Christmas is for everyone, whatever their religion or lack of it, because I describe it as a universal celebration (which I will unpack). Those of you who may have been wounded by your experience of Christianity are invited to step beyond your wounds to the real glorious meaning of what Christmas is and rediscover a Jesus that your heart may always have yearned for but failed to find in the patriarchal fantasies of the Boys Club....

The lethal and obscene promises of Mad King Donald—that Covid would vanish with the election—have, as you may now know, not materialized. What a surprise! And as you also now know, we are in the dark and terrible beginning of what will be a catastrophic second surge of the virus with half a million dead by the Spring.

Even if everything goes smoothly with the vaccines as we all hope and pray it will, America will never be the same. And all our hearts that are already cracking will be shattered by what we will have to witness and endure.

Unfortunately, none of this surprises me. Carolyn Baker and I knew when we rewrote our first draft of Radical Regeneration that Kali had begun to dance in earnest and would not relent, and that given the abject state of our government, the broken and unequal state of our healthcare, the capacity of millions of Americans to be deluded by terminally insane theories and the unscrupulous greed that now pervades our public realm (just...

Matthew Fox has been one of my dearest friends for 25 years as well as a beloved mentor and inspiration. We have worked together innumerable times and I continue to be amazed at his focused mystical brilliance and the ceaseless flow of amazing work that has poured from him. His latest book, Julian of Norwich: Wisdom in a Time of Pandemic—and Beyond, is one of his greatest, and in this masterwork, he dives deep into the sacred and joyful vision of one of Christianity’s greatest mystics, a woman who spent most of her life working in the black plague that killed two-thirds of Europe.

He shows us how Julian never gave up on her vision of essential joy, gratitude and celebration without ever shirking the real agonies and sufferings of life which she saw exploding all around her from her anchoress’s cell in the middle of Norwich.

I beg you to give yourself the gift of this book. I have just read it for the second time and have found it to be thrillingly inspirational...

I want to invite you on what I consider to be one of the most thrilling mystical adventures—the journey into the depths of the shadow to discover the diamonds that are hidden in its darkness. As anyone who is half awake knows, the shadow is having a Babylonian orgy in every realm all over the world, and as I have pointed out many times, this is causing a massive evolutionary crisis which is showing up as a global dark night.

This is of course in one sense terrifying and there are two approaches to shadow work which I find dangerous and unhelpful.

The first is the New Age approach which is hippy dippy about the light and idiotically in denial of the shadow; this approach only makes the shadow darker and more lethal. Another slightly wiser but still dangerous approach is to become obsessed with the shadow and hunt it down to its minutest particulars in such a way that the person who pursues this path becomes paralyzed, depressive, pseudo-brilliant in their pessimistic vision of...

Everyone who isn’t dead or senile knows that America is facing its greatest ordeal, and the choices that will be made in the next week will determine whether the United States plunges into irremediable chaos or crawls out of the horrible divisiveness that has rent families, separated friends and seen an unprecedented amount of hate-filled rhetoric and violence.

The question that obsesses me is this: if Biden wins, and if this long dark night of the Trump horror ends, how will those who have won tend to those who have lost? How will those who have suffered so much trauma and despair in these last four years find the spiritual depth and courage to turn to those who have abetted this trauma and see them not as deplorables, traitors and lunatics but members of our large American family?

What do we need to be and what do we need to do to help Biden in his mission of being not simply a president for those who voted for him but a president for all Americans? Nothing is more...

A few years ago when I was living with my cats, Topaz and Jade, in a ramshackle cabin in the forgotten depths of the Arkansas Ozarks, I wrote this prayer:

In this age when history itself is on fire

In this time of the convulsion of the beast

Of the final dance of the enraged demons

May I keep faith, Lord, in Your sublime alchemy

That has ordained the mystery

That from deepest darkness births the Highest Light.

(from Light the Flame: 365 Days of Prayer, 2013.)

As you know, tonight I begin a class that I am honored to teach for the Shift Network, Embrace the Dark Night to Become the Phoenix Rising, which outlines the birth of the Divine Human.

I have known for the last 20 years two interlinked truths that have kept me awake night after night, and wildly and exhaustingly on the road. These truths are that humanity was heading for a terrifying global dark night and that this global dark night was potentially not at all the end but the shattering, amazing and terrible beginning of the...

I am thrilled and honored to announce that I will be teaching a 7-part class for Shift Network, Embrace the Dark Night to Become the Phoenix Rising. We are living in terrifying times and I know we are all suffering intensely the horrors and ordeals that are exploding everywhere.

As I write this, fires are burning along the U.S. west coast, Antarctica is melting faster than even the doomsayers predicted, the Coronavirus pandemic is still out of control and millions of people worldwide are facing economic collapse.

Given all we are going through, it’s easy to run into the sordid embrace of magical thinking—as we can see from the idiotic and dangerous proliferation of conspiracy theories—or to fall into exactly the kind of nihilistic despair that increases the danger already afflicting us.

What I want to offer at this moment is a way through that is neither grounded in fantasy or tainted by the pessimism that saps will and robs us of the kind of rugged hope that we...