A four-session course with Mary Reilly Nichols and Floss Harry on the contemplative heart of Christianity, and its deep resonance with the philosophy and practice of yoga and tantra.
4 live sessions · 2 hours each · recordings included · $127
For many students of yoga, Christianity is the tradition they grew up with, left behind, or never really met. Yet beneath its doctrines runs a contemplative river two thousand years long: the desert mothers and fathers, the apophatic theologians, the visionaries and the saints of the heart.
Christian mysticism is concerned less with belief than with encounter: knowing God not as an object but by participation, by becoming like what one knows. Its methods and its summits share a striking kinship with the paths of yoga and tantra.
“The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me.”Meister Eckhart
Rather than squeezing “Origen to Merton” into four sessions, we follow a philosophical progression through the tradition, with practice at every step.
Meet the mystical tradition as a path of encounter and transformation, not a set of beliefs: the difference between knowing about God and knowing God.
Why “the Word became flesh” makes matter, the body and the cosmos sites of revelation, and why Christianity is far less body-denying than its reputation.
Silence, contemplative prayer and the apophatic way, practiced together in each session, not only studied.
Shakti and the Holy Spirit, the Blessed Mother and the Goddess, guru and Christ: the parallels with yoga and tantra, explored with care rather than collapsed.
Thursdays at 9am Eastern / 2pm UK, two hours each. Each session moves from teaching to discussion to contemplative practice.
How can God be known?
What kind of reality lets the divine be met in bodies and matter?
How do we cultivate the capacity to perceive it?
What draws us toward it, and what does the encounter do to us?
A map of the Christian mystical tradition, from its biblical foundations in Paul and the Gospel of John. Theosis, or deification; contemplation and prayer as ways of knowing; Jesus as exemplar and the Logos. Read through the lens of yoga and tantra: the siddha, the transmission of grace, and guru yoga.
Begin with the extraordinary Christian proposition, “the Word became flesh,” and ask what follows if the divine is encountered through matter rather than by escaping it. Creation as participation in God, sacrament and Eucharist, microcosm and macrocosm, with Irenaeus, Maximus the Confessor and Hildegard of Bingen. And the Blessed Mother as “Mother of the Word,” alongside Shakti and mātṛkā śakti in Kashmir Śaivism.
A tradition that speaks endlessly of a God its greatest teachers say cannot be spoken of. Cataphatic and apophatic theology, Pseudo-Dionysius, The Cloud of Unknowing and Meister Eckhart, hesychia and the Jesus Prayer. The Kingdom of Heaven within and Christ’s teaching on presence. With a guided period of contemplative silence.
Christian mysticism is extraordinarily affective. From the Song of Songs and Christ as Bridegroom to Bernard of Clairvaux, Hadewijch, Mechthild, Julian of Norwich, Teresa of Ávila, John of the Cross and Francis of Assisi. Mystical union, and the return: how love of God becomes love of the world.
Gustave Doré, The Empyrean (Paradiso, Canto 31). Above: Hildegard of Bingen, Scivias, the Choirs of Angels.
A yoga and meditation teacher for over 40 years, Mary offers yoga instruction emphasizing breath awareness, with insights from neuroscience and evolutionary biology as well as the philosophy of the Upaniṣads, Advaita Vedānta and the Tantric methods of Kashmir Śaivism.
Director of the Nalanda Institute’s yoga teacher training program, she has taught at Tibet House in New York City and the New York Open Center, and has been a keynote speaker at symposia sponsored by the Wonderstruck Webcast and Harvard Divinity School. Mary holds a BA in anthropology from Harvard University and completed five years of residency in meditation ashrams in India and the US.
Floss Harry (MPhil, Cambridge) is a Wisdom School teacher at Embodied Philosophy, Sādhana School’s Integration Facilitator, and project manager of Tarka, EP’s journal of philosophy and contemplative practice.
Four live sessions with Mary Reilly Nichols and Floss Harry, with recordings of every session.
4 live sessions · Thursdays, Nov 12 – Dec 10 · 9am ET / 2pm UK
Enroll nowNo. The course is open to anyone, of any background or none. We build the map from the ground up, and longtime students of Christianity will find plenty of depth.
It is a course on Christian mysticism in its own right, taught by teachers steeped in yoga and tantra. We draw out real resonances between the traditions without pretending they are the same thing.
Thursdays, November 12 and 19 and December 3 and 10, 2026, at 9am Eastern / 2pm UK, for two hours. There is no session on November 26 (Thanksgiving).
Every session is recorded and posted to the course space shortly after it ends, so you can follow along at your own pace.
You’ll receive an email right away with your access details and the link to join. If anything goes wrong, reply to that email and our team will help.
The Word became flesh.
Four Thursdays. Knowing, being, practice, love.
Enroll — $127Want to keep going? Wisdom School opens our full library of live courses and learning pathways.
