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Category: Abbess love notes

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Monk in the World Video Podcasts (Hospitality) + Breath Prayer ~ A Love Note from Your Online Abbess

Dearest monks, artists, and pilgrims, We continue our exploration of the Monk in the World Prayer Cycle Video Podcasts with morning and evening prayer for Day 2: Hospitality. Hospitality invites us to welcome the stranger both within and without. The ancient practice of breath prayer is a lovely way to engage with the principle of hospitality. The reflection below comes from my new book Breath Prayer: An Ancient Practice for the Everyday Sacred to be released in the US and Canada on Oct 12th.  I surrender the ache, and the worry. Breathe in stillness, breathe out anxiety. Monks used to awaken

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Monk in the World Video Podcasts being released! ~A Love Note from Your Online Abbess

Dearest monks, artists, and pilgrims, We are thrilled to start releasing the Monk in the World Video Podcasts today beginning with Day 1 on Silence and Solitude. We will bring you morning and evening prayer for each day over the next seven weeks. Inspired by the principles of the Monk Manifesto we created the 7-day prayer cycle in the spring and released the audio podcasts then. Now we are adding the video versions – created by Betsey Beckman – for those of you who prefer visual guidance and want to dance along with the gesture prayers Betsey has created for each song and prayer

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The Refreshment of Sabbath ~ A Love Note from Your Online Abbess

Dearest monks, artists, and pilgrims, When I moved to Seattle in 2003 one of the first people I met was Rabbi Zari Weiss through a mutual friend who introduced us. Zari quickly became a dear friend, especially when my mother died soon after moving, and she was one of the few people I knew at the time who had also lost both parents. She shared with me the tremendous wisdom of the Jewish mourning process where the person who loses someone significant goes into special status for a year and nothing additional is asked of them during this time to

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Honoring the Equinox (Join us for Yoga & a Writing Retreat) ~ A Love Note from Your Online Abbess

Dearest monks, artists, and pilgrims, The autumn equinox falls officially on Wednesday in the northern hemisphere, a time when the sun rests above the equator, and day and night are divided equally. It heralds a season filled with change, celebrates the harvest, and ushers in the brilliant beauty of death. Autumn is a season of transition, of continual movement. At the heart of autumn’s gifts are these twin energies of relinquishing and harvesting. It is a season of paradox that invites us to consider what we are called to release and surrender, and at the same time it invites us

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Creative Flourishing with Hildegard of Bingen ~ A Love Note from Your Online Abbess

Fire of the Holy Spirit,life of the life of every creature,holy are you in giving life to forms.Rivers spring forth from the watersearth wears her green vigor. –Hildegard of Bingen Dearest monks, artists, and pilgrims, I am delighted to be offering a mini-retreat with Betsey Beckman celebrating St. Hildegard of Bingen on her feast day this coming Friday, September 17th. We were supposed to have been traveling to the Rhine Valley this year with a group of pilgrims, but due to the pandemic have had to postpone until next year. This means we can invite a much larger group of pilgrims

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Joy Unspeakable ~ A Love Note from Your Online Abbess

Dearest monks, artists, and pilgrims, We have a new featured book for September in our Lift Every Voice Book Club – Joy Unspeakable: Contemplative Practices of the Black Church by Dr. Barbara Holmes. You can listen to the conversation Claudia Love Mair and I had about the book at this link. (And you can join us for a community conversation on September 24th).  This quote on page 111 of Joy Unspeakable especially touched me:  “Today’s wilderness can be found in bustling suburban and urban centers, on death row, in homeless shelters in the middle of the night, in the eyes of a hospice patient, and in the desperation of

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The Holy One is Breathing in Us ~ A Love Note from Your Online Abbess

Dearest monks, artists, and pilgrims, Recently in a podcast I was listening to between Alexander Shaia and Mirabai Starr, Shaia was talking about the passage which begins John’s gospel:  “This text is not about something that happened back then but is about the eternal now that is happening in us. That we are here in this moment because the Holy One is breathing us. And the Holy One is breathing, every cell in the cosmos, there’s one source . . . therefore we’re already brother and sister, not only to each person, but to every tree, every ounce of water, every

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