with facilitator Judith Keller
and author Mary Conrow Coelho

This 6-week reading group took place in the summer of 2021.

Mary Coelho joins discoveries in new physics with mystical wisdom to reset our orientation to the inner and outer life. In her hopeful vision, the transformation of the self and the beneficence of the natural world spring from the underlying sacred Presence or seamless plenum, opening a path of healing for our wounded souls and our world.  -- Beverly Lanzetta, speaking about Mary Coelho's new book

Join a Reading Group . . .

The Depth of Our Belonging: Mysticism, Physics, and Healing

Facilitated by Judith Keller with author Mary Conrow Coelho

Six Zoom Sessions:
Wednesdays, June 23 to July 28, 7:00 - 8:30 PM ET

Carefully check your own time zone by clicking here.

$125; $95 Early Bird Price Till June 9th
Premium Members receive 10% discount ($85.50 with Early Bird Discount)

Limited to 25 participants.
Participants purchase a copy of the book.

Please check to see that you can commit to all 6 sessions, including being drawn to both traditional book discussion and interaction, and to the contemplative practice associated with one of Mary’s paintings each week that Judith will lead.

About the Book: 

The Depth of Our Belonging: Mysticism, Physics, and Healing by Mary Conrow Coelho, Producciones de la Hamaca, 2021

In her early studies, author Mary Coelho learned that science was claiming full explanatory power of our world, hence, she pursued several years of formal theological studies to understand spiritual experiences. Then she learned that knowledge from physics has changed profoundly with the discovery that atoms are almost entirely comprised of a powerful, nonvisible nonmaterial reality. The human person and everything on Earth is comprised of this nonvisible realm that the manifest world of daily life has risen within and continues to emerge within. We are given a new understanding from science of the actual existence of a nonvisible reality. In her book, The Depth of Our Belonging: Mysticism, Physics, and Healing, we are encouraged to not be intimidated by the seemingly difficult and foreign world of the quantum physicist but to explore our transformed worldview with the guidance of careful teachers.

Dr. Coelho shows how this new information at the level of physics connects with descriptions in the writings of mystics of their experiences, such as, from Julian of Norwich, John Yungblut, Catherine of Genoa, Meister Eckhard, Hafiz, Teresa of Avila, and others. She proposes that these mystics are actually describing the seamless plenum.

At a personal level she shows how this new information has provided profound healing for herself. She writes, "Thanks to my deepened understanding of human identity within our evolutionary story and the breakthrough in the recognition by physicists and mystics of the nonvisible sacred Presence integral to my very being, I dared to know with confidence that the loss of adequate nurture and the resulting suffering I experienced as an infant and young child are not the final word. The situation of the person who suffers is profoundly different within our new context as compared to a dualistic world that separates our bodies and the natural world from spirit (prana or ruah). In the dualistic world we do not know that the spirit, the dynamic and life-giving energy of the universe, is intrinsic to our very being, always present and active. In our new worldview there is an identity not circumscribed by the loss and suffering; the ongoing sacred Presence (seamless plenum) provides a place to stand, a willingness to feel the suffering deeply with confidence in the possibility of fresh emergence, a fresh expression of the Self. We can be confident that we can become true differentiated subjects in communion with our world and other people, given the ancient archetypal patterning intrinsic to the person."

The Depth of Our Belonging is beautifully illustrated with paintings by the author.

About the Reading Group

This reading group will be conducted over 6 weekly sessions for 1.5 hrs each week. The first session is introductory and invites introductions and clarifications about our format and subsequent sessions. In session 2 we will begin reading the book, taking a chapter each week. In the final session we will take time to express our insights and appreciations. Following on the tea break in each session, Judith will lead us in a contemplative practice of sacred seeing to invite us ‘inside’ one of Mary’s water color paintings that accompany the text. We will move into a breakout group each session. To open and close our sessions, we will breathe and settle together with 2-3 minutes of quiet meditative ‘presencing’.

As the sessions will be online in Zoom, participants will need to have latest update of Zoom, to be able to mute/unmute and to turn on their video.

Author: MARY CONROW COELHO has a background in both science and theology. She has an MDiv degree from Union Theological Seminary and a PhD from Fordham University. She is the author of Awakening Universe, Emerging Personhood: The Power of Contemplation in an Evolving Universe.  She has been a watercolor painter for many years.  She has been a member of the Steering Committee of the Friends Committee on Unity with Nature, is on the board of The American Teilhard Association and founder with others of the New Story Group at Friends Meeting at Cambridge and a similar group in New York City. She has led a number of workshops on the integration of the epic of evolution and the Western contemplative/mystical tradition.  She brings her theological studies, her background in science as a biology teacher and her excitement about our transformed worldview to her work as a water painter of images evoking the new cosmology.  A few of her paintings and some accordion books are on her website: http://newuniversestory.com. Mrs. Coelho is a signature member of the Northeast Watercolor Society, exhibiting her paintings in the northeast.

Reading Group Facilitator: JUDITH KELLER is an adult educator who has graduate qualifications in education and in the arts. She has a University background in teacher and distance education at Australian Catholic University QLD and the University of Newcastle NSW. She has a body of published work in both refereed and non refereed journals in Australia in the areas of religious education, and Australian spirituality and the arts. Judith has been a member of the DTN for around a year volunteering as a mentor recently for the allurement group The Spiral Way- the Way of Contemplative Cosmology. She has facilitated two online reading groups, one of which was co-facilitated with the current chair of Eremos Council Australia. Judith is a lifelong reader of the Christian mystics and offers prayer and retreat days in the Australian Network for Spiritual Direction ANSD drawing on the writings of the mystics, and Australian poets and visual artists. Judith is a sacred dancer and runs online meditation. She is a volunteer guide in her Regional Botanical Gardens. A recent article in the journal ‘Coolamon’ describes the walks she leads and her Earth advocacy work there. Judith is passionate about the transformative and expressive arts, music, meditation, movement and newly interested in how these can explore and express Deeptime principles. Judith Keller M Ed (Rel. Ed.), Boston Coll., MA, and Grad Dip Arts (Christian Spirituality), Broken Bay Institute NSW.