Learn key principles and practices for turning the heartbreaking stages of grief into portals for spiritual awakening and transformation.
Advance on your path of integration with loving guidance and the support of a conscious community.
If you’ve been through a heart-wrenching loss, you know just how hard it can be to navigate your way through the stages of grief. Waves of sadness, anger and depression can buffet us for months and even years.
Meanwhile, there’s often pressure from family, friends and colleagues, who try to force “normalcy” before you may be ready. They may want to “cheer you up” and help you “get back on your feet” rather than meet you as companions in the dark and scary places that arise when you’ve had a profound loss.
This can lead to deeper feelings of disconnection and isolation. It may seem that there are few people who have the time, wisdom and patience to help you navigate your loss in a way that really respects what your soul needs and provides you the safe haven in which to transform your heartbreak into healing.
If we try to avoid or abort our natural grieving process, we derail what can be a journey of profound healing, spiritual opening and transformation.
Working our way, step by step, through tragic losses can play a central role in our spiritual life, since grief tends to crack us open to the depths of life in a way that nothing else can.
As we engage grief in a transformational way, we get much more real about what truly matters. We clarify what we believe in. We commit to loving more deeply. And we engage more in making a difference.
Our heartache can turn into what St. Teresa of Avila called the “beautiful wound,” a kind of pain that actually connects us with the Divine. The wound, even while painful, can give rise, eventually, to the serenity, love and even joy that comes from feeling deeply connected with the Source of all life.
Seen through a spiritual lens, grief is thus a profound opportunity for our evolution — both a deeper embodiment of life as well as a greater connection to Spirit.
It’s no accident that many of history’s most renowned mystics were catapulted into their path of illumination and service through profound losses, tragedies and heartbreak. Such events have a way of bringing us humbly to our knees, willing to face whatever truths and emotions that stir within us. This, in turn, can open us to real surrender.
The “move on” mentality that pervades our culture can thus deprive us of a profound opportunity to experience more compassion, sacred connection and a better understanding of life’s meaning.
That’s not to minimize the loss itself, of a loved one, for example. But our grief can be a portal to a deeper, wiser and richer experience of life, when consciously engaged as a spiritual practice. In this way, the path of loss becomes a journey of redemption and healing.
In fact, each of the five traditional phases of grief, popularized by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, can be experienced as a spiritual initiation. For example, feeling the burn of anger FULLY can eventually open us to our inner fire to create change and feel passion for life again. Allowing ourselves to cocoon within ourselves for awhile can help us shed false images and goals.
Ultimately, grief and loss offer the potential for an alchemical journey in which the darkness and suffering we face can turn into the gold of a deeper life and connection to God.
But we need guidance and support to create a container in which our painful emotions can be metabolized and we can safely enter the heart of the fire to be reborn.
And that is where this 12-module virtual program comes in, a profound opportunity in which you will be guided in navigating your own losses as an alchemical path of transformation.
The course title, Caravan of No Despair, comes from a Rumi poem in which he writes, “Ours is no caravan of despair. Come, yet again, come.” It refers to an attitude of welcome, which is ultimately the path of surrender to what is.
Despair comes when we have given up all hope, which is all too common in the journey of grief. Instead, we are offering a sanctuary in which you will be compassionately guided through the natural stages of grief and loss so that you can open to redemption, healing and the promise of a richer life, without feeling rushed through each stage.
Indeed, it’s vital that we absorb the initiation that each stage of grief offers. Each wave is clearing us out for new possibilities to arise.
Get Mirabai Starr - Caravan of No Despair at the sunlurn
The Importance of a Seasoned Guide
Your teacher and guide for this spiritual journey through grief is Mirabai Starr, a beloved spiritual teacher and someone who has faced grief at a profound, soul-wrenching level, including the sudden loss of her daughter in a car accident.
For Mirabai, the loss was both a crucifixion and a journey into deeper spiritual realization. Mirabai has thus walked through the full journey of grief and intimately knows its true, alchemical potential.
Mirabai has also written many acclaimed books on women mystics, including St. Teresa of Avila, and she has walked a path that includes Christian, Jewish, Hindu and Buddhist practices — all woven together in a deeply honoring way.
This course is her offering to your heart. Mirabai will guide you to a powerful reclamation of the path of grief as a way to harvest the “soul lessons” loss unearths, enabling you to live your life more deeply.