Cloister Mysticsm
Cloister Mysticism explores a lived approach that does not distinguish between the sacred and the mundane. We are each divine incarnations with direct access to soul and wise knowing; in this light, Cloister seeks to radically reclaim our unique relationship to Spirit in order to enlarge our conceptions of love and foster our ability to serve.
Inspiration
Cloister Mysticism draws inspiration from reformative religious mystics who articulated personal ecstatic experiences of direct contact with the divine. Counter to the teachings of the predominant religions and cultures of their time, they powerfully maintained the possibility of finding God in the soul without intermediary.
Cloister looks upon this moment like a fold in time, seeing connections to our present as we live in an era where dominate forces induce and maintain alienation, subjugation, hierarchy, and inequity. We suffer while these forces profit from keeping us small, in lack, out of touch, disconnected, distracted, and depressed.
Self-empowerment is an act of resistance that will help break through these strictures and enable us to build a better world. We do this, in part, through learning to better love ourselves so that we may better love and support others. This reciprocal act is Cloister’s understanding of Divine Love. We are the keepers of Divine Love. It is up to us to enact it here on Earth, ever questioning how, in our uniquely inspired ways, we can serve.
Reclamations
Sensual Body
Cloister Mysticism refigures the body as the cloister. Rather than being a walled-off fortress, our bodily cloister is the communicative seat that grounds us in our spiritual and experiential knowing. The body is a tool through which we come to know ourselves—as souls and subjects—and the tool through which we come to know the divine. Our bodies are intuitive vessels that resonate with higher knowing and put us in sensuous contact with divinity, both inborn and external. It is the enclosure of our body that makes us available for ecstatic experience and allows us to move through and express our purpose like only we are able. Every body listens, understands, and articulates uniquely. In this light, we endeavor to shed shame, hold space for the uniqueness of our bodies, and express reverence for the bodies around us.
Divine Love
Cloister Mysticism seeks a radical reclamation of love in its most benevolent and broadly connected iteration. Capitalist culture has reduced conceptions of love to the stricture of romance commodified through competitive possession; here, love is leveraged to alienate and segregate. Cloister calls for a seminal reopening of love that motivates individuals to appreciate our connections to one another—conceiving ourselves to be individual parts of a larger whole—so that we may better care for and serve one another. We radically reclaim our ability to love and heal ourselves so that we can better love others and meet them in thoughtfulness and service.
Innate Divinity
Cloister Mysticism roots in the belief that all beings are intrinsically divine: each of us are incarnations of divinity and house within us the trinitarian relationship of mind, body, and soul. Cartesian dualism is a binary that must be complicated and transcended. We are inheritors of the Holy Trinity—each of us carry within us the divine embodied and our work is to live in and live up to this potential. From this position, Cloister moves to heal the violence of dispiriting concepts such as the simplistic equivocation of ‘man’ with ‘sinner.’ We are perfectly imperfect: our imperfections are the grace through which we not only grow, but come to expand, practice, and offer the divinity within us. We are here to enlarge our capacity to act from this inextricable divinity and to connect with the divinity inherent in all that surrounds us.