The Lotus and The Lily
Harvest 2023—Seed 2024
“The Buddha said…
when conditions are sufficient, there is a manifestation”
You Are Here, Thich Nhat Hanh
“Here Jesus says…
when we pursue a right relationship with the Universal One and allow that relationship to realign our lives, we produce a condition of receptivity in which anything we need to help us complete our purpose in life will be supplied by the universe.”
Blessings of the Cosmos, Neil Douglas-Klotz
What is The Lotus and The Lily: Harvest 2023—Seed 2024 prayer intensive?
For 13 years, mystics around the world have gathered from mid-November to mid-December to identify and integrate all that has happened in the year coming to a close. We are always surprised by the meaning and wisdom that reveals itself as we take the time to look back eleven months. Then, as we approach Solstice, we listen for whispers from the seed that wants to be brought to life in the coming year. With that tender seed in our hands, we create a Mystic Mandala infused with our commitments to nourish that seed throughout the next solar year.
Without fail, we are stunned by how the mandala we make with our hands—the mandala we think we understand—sings a song all her own, delivering insights, surprises, and synchronicities throughout the coming year, guiding us gently but firmly into a far more beautiful version of who we came here to be than we thought possible.
The Lotus and the Lily is not a standard issue manifestation process. Indeed, it is the diametric opposite of both the patriarchal drumbeat to set goals and work hard to achieve them and the new age “law of attraction” command to focus on what you want. It is not a treasure map, vision board, or any other materialistic process packaged as spirituality.
The Lotus and the Lily is a radical mystical exploration based on the eerily similar teachings of Buddha and Jesus on what really creates a beautiful and abundant life.
The Lotus and the Lily is:
- a unique way to recognize, harvest, and celebrate the hidden gifts of 2023
- a gentle way to hear echoes from the future of the life that wants to be lived in 2024
- a deep dive into the ancient feminine mysteries of the labyrinth and the mandala
This miraculous process comes to life without any attempts to manage, control, or predict the outcome. It is a powerful and delight-filled vehicle for alchemical transformation. And a vibrant example of the shared magic that happens in the Theatre of the Miraculous.
What will we explore together?
Gathering 1—Why and How We Look Back
We will open our intensive listening to the surprising parallel teachings of Buddha and Yeshua on the primacy of creating the conditions that create a fertile environment for the life that wants to be lived. Their teachings are radical, thrilling, and ignored in the mainstream.
Fed by these radical teachings, we will begin the deep process of looking back at the 11 months of 2023, listening for each month to sing its song, and noticing how each month formed and fed and changed us in ways we didn’t recognize at the time. To help us get started, Cathy Stevens Pratt will teach us how to make a simple 3-circuit labyrinth, then we will walk that labyrinth, capturing January’s song in colors or words, or perhaps a phrase, image, or symbol. During the following week, each of us will make little labyrinths and listen for the songs of February through November.
Gathering 2—Listen for the Harvest Song of 2023
We will record the words or symbols of the 11 songs of January through November on a medieval 11-circuit labyrinth, and then, in a Theatre of the Miraculous community experience led by Emma Kupu Mitchell, we will walk that labyrinth together, listening for 2023 to reveal her final song. This experience is always a revelation and often a total surprise. This is the moment each of us realizes what the year coming to a close has really been about.
Gathering 3—Create Space for 2024
A foundational teaching in The Lotus and the Lily is that if you want to create something new, you must first untie the knots of the stories and wounds held deep in your body and psyche. Forgive, in Greek, means “untie the knot.” In a shared deep soul writing experience, 2023 will ask us 9 sacred questions we have not asked ourselves. Then 2023 will invite us to identify and shed all that is too small for us and return it to the earth in a ceremonial and sacred way, cleansing and clearing our bodies to prepare to create the year to come. This week of release and forgiveness is the secret to the magic that is The Lotus and the Lily.
Gathering 4—Listen for the Seed
Having untied old knots and shed what has constricted us, we are ready to begin the process of creating 2024 by tuning into what we really want. We ask our hearts to reveal our most precious values, and the sacred medicines we long to embody, embrace, and share. (This is a far deeper and more meaningful exploration than making lists of the surface things we think we want.) Then, we will share a silent walk on the 11-circuit labyrinth aware that we have dropped into the mystery of Her Divine Womb where all creation begins. At the center, we will listen in silence as the seed whispers its secret, perhaps as a color, word, symbol, image, or phrase. It is always a mystery.
Gathering 5—Create Your 2024 Mandala and Prayers
We will talk about how to create a Soul Day—a personal retreat to tune into the conditions that will nourish the seed of the life that wants to be lived—and how to create a Mystic Mandala that holds that seed and the conditions that will generate an abundant and beautiful life. As we make and name our mandalas, we acknowledge that we are not making the mandala, our soul is. The mandala is the physical expression of the core principle: you are not praying, you are being prayed. You think your hands are making the mandala, but in truth, it is making you. You won’t really know what your soul has put into form until next November, when we gather once more to look back at the year ending. That’s when you will discover the inner meaning of your 2024 mandala. And it will be a surprise. A holy and sweet surprise.
Gathering 6—Celebrate and Bless our Mandalas
We have no gatherings for several weeks so that everyone can enjoy the Solstice and holiday season. During our hiatus there will be plenty of time to revisit your looking back and release experiences, and hold your Soul Day and create your 2024 mandala.
We gather a final time on Sunday, January 7, 2024 to share, bless, and celebrate our 2024 mandalas. And talk about how to keep them alive all year long with prayer.
Then, we will watch in awe as the life that wants to be lived in 2024 emerges in ways more magical and exciting than anything we could have planned.
You will leave The Lotus and the Lily with an array of prayers including:
- A Magician’s Anointing Spell
- Prayer of a Strong Container
- Song of 2023
- Seed for 2024
- The Name of Your 2024 year
- Mystic Mandala for 2024
- Personal Conditions Chant
- Personal Solar Vow—received on the first day of 2024 and repeated all year in your deep soul writing
What will you receive?
Six 2 ¼ hour live sessions with prayer artist and mystic witch Janet Conner, and guests: depth numerologist, elemental astrologer, and labyrinth facilitator, Emma Kupu Mitchell, and Her Sacred Image artist and journey guide, Cathy Stevens Pratt.
Access to a password-protected resource page with Welcome Handbook PDF and Prayer Handbook PDF, recordings of all sessions in both video and audio formats, plus several bonus videos:
- The Lotus, The Lily, and the Labyrinth! with Janet Conner
- How to Make a 3-Circuit Labyrinth with Cathy Pratt (including seed pattern and instruction PDFs)
- Master Class on How to Look Back with Janet Conner
- How to Use a Labyrinth to Look Back with Emma Kupu Mitchell
- How to Make a Mystic Mandala with Janet Conner
- Numerology of 2024/8 with Emma Kupu Mitchell and Janet Conner
- A Magician’s Anointing Spell sacred anointing oil with Janet Conner and Emma Kupu Mitchell
- Seven Steps to Get Into Theta with Janet Conner
- Theta Music to support your soul writing and labyrinth walking
Membership in a private Facebook discussion group (optional)
Our Schedule
Note:
We will meet on TUESDAYS (not Mondays as we have for several years) at 6pm Eastern not 7pm. Both changes were suggested by intensive members.
- All sessions are recorded and available within 2 days on our Resource Page
- To support our friends in Europe, Janet will host a UK/EU watch party on Thursdays or Fridays at 7p UK/8p EU. Everyone is welcome, no matter where you live
- To ensure everyone can come to our mandala celebration, it is held on Sunday January 7 at 2pm Eastern
- Tuesday November 14, 6:00-8:15 pm Eastern
- Tuesday, November 21, 6:00-8:15 pm Eastern
- Tuesday, November 28, 6:00-8:15 pm Eastern
- Tuesday, December 5, 6:00-8:15 pm Eastern
- Tuesday, December 12, 6:00-8:15 pm Eastern
- Sunday, January 7, 2024, 2:00-4:00 pm Eastern—Mandala Blessing and Celebration
If you are an international student, use this tool to convert time zones.
Registration
If you require financial assistance, Janet invites you to choose the self-selected scholarship option.
If you wish to support this initiative, which has made it possible for hundreds to join these intensives, please consider adding a donation of $50 or more to your registration. Note: The $50 is not a registration option, it is an additional gift to support others.
$ 223 if this is your first intensive in 2023
$ 178 if you have taken 1 or more intensives in 2023
$ 124 self-selected scholarship
$ 50 donation to support scholarships
Guides in the Theatre of the Miraculous:
Janet Conner
I am a prayer artist, mystic witch, creator in the Theatre of the Miraculous, and mistress of the Threshold—the mystical theta brain wave state. But first and always, a devoted daughter of the Sacred Feminine. My first book, Writing Down Your Soul, was a surprising success and led to The Lotus and The Lily, Soul Vows, and more. All that was only the warmup. In the dark one morning in 2018, my beloved voice whispered prayer artist in my left ear. I knew prayer artist would change everything, but I said yes anyway. I began writing a new genre of prayer, redefining prayer, and offering radical prayer intensives. Two years later, witch arrived in a stunning endorsement from Rabbi Tirzah Firestone. I was ecstatic; my agent was not. I ended that relationship to follow witch where she wanted me to go. She knew exactly what she wanted: transmute witch from a word that strikes terror back into an honorific that awakens a bone-deep memory of being revered for our spiritual gifts.
I trust witch. I trusted her when she asked me to create The Return of the Witches Jeanne d’Arc Listening Pilgrimage. I trusted her when she asked for a year-long mystery school Re-membering the Songlines of the Witches. I trusted her when she insisted I gather a team to create The A.R.T. of Becoming a Witch: How to Awaken, Remember, and Trust Your Body’s Natural Intuitive Senses. As that intensive was ending, witch guided me to see that ART wasn’t one intensive; it was the first of 7 in The Witch Sequence—an 7-circuit labyrinth walk to awaken all 7 of our original sacramental gifts. As my collaborators and I listened intently to what wanted to be created, we began to see a sacred purpose far beyond anything we could imagine. We are here to walk this path, embody these 7 sacred gifts, and become a truly whole and holy witch because this is the way we heal the wasteland. It may be the only way we can heal the wasteland.
To do this profound witch work, I need massive amounts of time in silence and mystical theta. I think that’s why witch is holding me in Ozona, a tiny village on the Gulf of Mexico, where I am surrounded by screeching ospreys, swooping woodstorks, and one very precious redtail hawk.
Emma Kupu Mitchell
Aloha! I'm Emma Kupu Mitchell, a Spiritual and Creative guide for women in Midlife (and beyond). As a practitioner of holistic therapies for 33 years, I use my extensive knowledge of ancient healing practices (medicines) to help you understand and discover new depths of Self. My focus is to support you living the second half of life with greater vitality, clarity and confidence and be in alignment with who you really are on a Soul level. Weaving shamanic astrology, creative visual journaling (CVJ), plant medicine, and many yin practices in a new online Midlife Immersion community, I support your journey in finding deeper meaning, purpose and wholeness at this sacred time in life.
I believe Hawaii called me (all the way from England where I was born and lived for the first 30 years of my life!) to this ancient energetic land – the heart chakra of Mother Earth, the perfect location to hear the senses of our Soul and to be in harmony with nature and our natural rhythms and cycles of Midlife.
I value and celebrate creativity of all kinds and the beauty of nature as a Spiritual practice and I strongly believe our senses are the pathways to healing and medicine for the Soul.
Cathy Pratt
I lived all over this crazy country, sampling places, but where is my home? My design work for the corporate realm was exciting and schooled me about overculture. I can paint any food item but wanted my work to shift into being of service. I’ve been in a searching mode my entire life studying tarot for 30 years, teaching yoga, studying crystals, learning about aromatherapy and reading everything theology.
20 years ago, we settled on the side of a mountain in Vermont. The trees, rascal chipmunks, bears and everything green grew their tendrils into my heart and became what I care most about, our gorgeous planet and all creatures. We humbly nurture our land, trying to make wholistic decisions on a daily basis for the pollinators, the deer, the water, the wind.
My art had to shift so I could be content and Her Sacred Image was born. I paint magical places and allow mystical beings to show themselves to me so I can make them more real on the page. Black Moon Lilith is my constant companion. She’s a forthright ball of electricity who knows all the places to travel. Archangel Michael taught me about the divine masculine which frees me from my anger at patriarchy’s wasteland. My ancestors are real and working with me to create miracles and wonder. Praying a feral rosary reminds me to walk softly, in reverence. My mystical everyday-witch life fills me with color and joy.