A Teacher
Cynthia Bourgeault
Centering Prayer as a path to nondual awakening and the Wisdom way of knowing
The transmission
Cynthia Bourgeault, born in 1947, is an Episcopal priest, writer, and retreat leader who was ordained in the Episcopal Church in 1979. For more than thirty years she was a student and then close colleague of Thomas Keating, the founder of Centering Prayer, and she became one of the principal teachers carrying that practice forward, working alongside figures such as Richard Rohr and the Camaldolese monk Bruno Barnhart.
She divides her life between periods of solitude in a seaside hermitage in Maine and an international schedule of teaching and retreats. Bourgeault has worked to recover what she calls the Christian Wisdom tradition, an interior path of transformation she sees running through the Gospels, the desert and monastic literature, and later contemplatives, and she draws as well on the “inner work” lineage associated with G.
I. Gurdjieff. Her books include The Wisdom Jesus, Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening, The Wisdom Way of Knowing, Mystical Hope, and The Holy Trinity and the Law of Three.
Through her writing and her Wisdom Schools she has helped frame Centering Prayer not merely as relaxation or devotion but as a rigorous discipline of awakening.
What they gave
Centering Prayer as kenotic surrender: She presents the practice as a discipline of “letting go” modeled on the self-emptying (kenosis) of Christ, where each release of a thought rehearses the deeper surrender through which the seeker is transformed.
- The Wisdom way of knowing: Bourgeault distinguishes ordinary egoic cognition from a “Wisdom” knowing seated in the heart, an integrated, perceptive faculty that apprehends reality directly rather than through analysis.
- Toward nondual awakening: She frames the contemplative path as a movement from the binary, separative operating system of the ego toward a unitive, nondual awareness in which the seeker recognizes their grounding in the One.
- Recovering Jesus as a Wisdom teacher: In The Wisdom Jesus she reads the Gospels as a manual of inner transformation, recasting Jesus less as object of belief than as master of a practical path of consciousness and surrender.
In their words
In every life circumstance, Jesus always responded with the same motion of self-emptying—or to put it another way, descent: taking the lower place, not the higher.
The line they stand in
Influenced by: Thomas Keating and the Centering Prayer lineage, The Cloud of Unknowing, the inner-work tradition of G.
I. Gurdjieff, the philosopher Beatrice Bruteau, and the broader Christian Wisdom and contemplative heritage.
- Influenced: contemporary Centering Prayer practitioners, the Wisdom Schools network she has built, and the growing movement of Christian nondual and contemplative practice.
Revelations they taught
Orders & Societies
Essential Works
- Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening2004
- The Wisdom Jesus2008
- The Meaning of Mary Magdalene2010