You have to let your soul animate.

You have to let your soul animate — otherwise the fire is not on.  There is an unbelievable surrender that happens when that fire moves through you. It’s like getting a blank check from God.

Please enjoy this session from the live workshop “Entering the Castle,” presented in 2007. If you’d like to see the rest of this workshop, you can click here to learn more »

This workshop is shaped by my long and intimate relationship with Saint Teresa of Avila, and by the profound way her life and teachings transformed my understanding of how heaven becomes real in human life. Teresa was not simply a Catholic saint; she became a cosmic one. She entered the world through a specific religious form, yet what makes her immortal is that she transcended that form and gave language to the experience of God beyond it. She expressed this journey in her great work “The Interior Castle”, which became the inspiration for my own writing, “Entering the Castle.”

At the heart of the mystical path is a direct encounter with the divine—an experience that carries you beyond the package you were born into and then returns you to your life altered and disoriented, your inner compass spinning. This is why mystical experience can be unsettling at first: it strips away familiar structures and reorients you to a deeper truth. My intention in this workshop is to share what I have come to understand through this lineage—that the soul is the most powerful force imaginable, and that a mystic is one who has been “called” to know the nature of God directly.