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Once or twice a quarter, Texas and I offer enrollment into our Mentorship Circle, a small group of people who have demonstrated accountability and leadership in their own lives and are ready to come more fully into their place in the world, ready to let their light shine beyond their own circles of safety and grow and learn in a group setting.
This is an 8-week, online group where we meet weekly for 90 minutes to discuss all things consciousness and expansion.
We've had all kinds of folks join us, from shop-keepers to artists to retired teachers to farmers to small-business owners to tradespeople to caregivers to those actively engaged in the helping professions to those who are fascinated by the stock market.
What's so exciting for us is that we get to sit in a (virtual) room with all these incredible people from all walks of life and begin to develop some shared language for their consciousness journey.
We explore words like alignment and coherence and sovereign agency, and we don't just intellectualize these words, but help group members to have an in-the-body experience of what they mean.
But there are some concepts that we haven't been able to find a word for in the English language, for example, the Arabic word taqwa.
Loosely translated, this means "God-Consciousness", but if you are familiar with this word you can see how this translation falls flat.
Taqwa is about seeing through a different sort of lens. When you look through the lens of taqwa, you discover that every being, every object, every interaction here in this known, three-dimensional reality is infused with something Sacred.
You realize that everywhere you look, the glow of that Divine Presence is pulsing. And you won't see this with your physical eyes, but you will feel it with what the Sufis call your "inner eye". Even the things that seem outside of the realm of morality and social correct-ness begin to take on a different kind of hue when you acknowledge that sacred Presence that infuses all.
We introduce this notion of taqwa in session two of the eight-week program, because we want to set the framework early that some concepts don't even exist in the English language.
English is really good at identifying, describing, and assigning ownership to physical objects, but not as fluent in the languages of love, art, and the mystical.
And if you speak a language other than English, you may notice that there are words that you know in your mother-tongue that simply do not translate because the concepts simply do not exist in the Western paradigm.
But here's the good news: the world is changing.
As we have more and more people from different backgrounds and cultures share ideas and perspectives and deep wisdom with each other, we get to enrich and grow our old worldviews, and literally increase our vocabularies. We can gently borrow and share these ideas and concepts that our cousins from other lands have mastered.
We invite you in to this expanded, nuanced, and layered understanding over this next week as you ride the waves of what's happening for your personally and what's happening in our global village.
Yours in Finding the Words,
Dr. Saira
P.S. If your curiosity is peaked about our Mentorship Circle, we will be accepting new members in a few weeks. To be invited, you have to be a member of The Expansion Project Community by starting the Foundations in Consciousness Course, where we set the stage for some of the deeper work that happens in the small groups. You can get started by registering for the course here and replying to this email to let us know you are interested in joining us!
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