A living mystery school
Mysticism as lived experience.
Guided multi-week explorations into the teachings of the great mystics, not to study what they said, but to enter what they discovered.
Through direct attunement and practice, you are trained to go where they went.
Led by Bība · Live via Zoom · Private Circles
For the sincere seeker
There comes a point where understanding isn’t enough
You have read.
You have listened.
You have recognised truth when you hear it.
The question now is how to go further in. Towards something that can be embodied.
The great mystical traditions have always pointed to the same reality.
Meister Eckhart called it the ground of the soul.
Teresa of Ávila, the Interior Castle.
The Sufis, the heart of the heart.
The Tantrikas, pure awareness.
Different languages for the same destination.
What you are seeking is not outside you. It is already within you. You may have spent years, even decades circling this truth. Touching it in moments. Sensing it in glimpses. Returning to it again and again.
And yet it does not remain. It does not deepen. It does not fully change how you live.
The honest diagnosis
Wide without deep. Informed without transformed.
We are living in a moment of unprecedented access. The entire body of mystical knowledge across traditions, centuries, and lineages is now available instantly on Amazon with a credit card.
And yet access to wisdom has never been less correlated with depth of realisation.
We have become a culture that understands everything and embodies almost nothing.
Overexposed. Overstimulated. Under-trained.
Spiritual insight alone does not transform you, because transformation requires capacity. The capacity to sustain attention, regulate the nervous system, remain present beyond discomfort, and stabilise what is revealed long enough for it to become integrated rather than remembered.
Without this, even profound insight fades. Not because it’s not real, but because there’s no trained embodied, gradient of physical, emotional and mental capacity to hold it long term.
Across traditions from the Neoplatonic academies to Sufi lodges to contemplative monasteries, the same understanding is consensus.
The sacred does not reveal itself through intensity alone. It reveals itself through consistent integration.
This is the work we are doing here. Not more information. Not more seeking.
Practice.
Training your nervous system to expand your spiritual capacity
How the shift occurs
Over time, what people consistently notice is that intuition becomes something they can trust without second-guessing.
States of genuine stillness stop being rare events and start becoming accessible.
The gap between spiritual insight and daily life begins to close as a result of trained capacity.
They feel less itchy about seeking and more settled in direct experience. Less concerned about the next retreat, the next teacher, the next book that might finally make it click.
More internally resourced. More present in the ordinary moments that used to pass unnoticed.
This is what embodied practice does. It makes the sacred less occasional and more lived.
Introducing
Spiritual Study Circles
A core pillar of the Mystic Soul Academy
This is a living mystery school for sincere seekers who are ready to move beyond the surface into direct, living encounter with the sacred. Through a sequence of deep immersions, each one complete in itself, drawing on the greatest mystical texts of our human inheritance.
No prior background in mysticism, religion, or contemplative practice is needed. No particular belief is required. Only sincerity and a genuine willingness to go within.
THE EXPERIENCE BEGINS HERE
Inner doorways to a vast world.
In the tradition of spiritual circles of old, the study itself is the doorway into direct encounter, living practice, and intentional community. No need to read an entire book.
CIRCLE I - June 9 2026 | 5 TUESDAYS 5.30PM PST | US $288
The Unstruck Sound
DRAWING ON THE POETRY OF KABIR, TRANSLATED BY VARIOUS ARTISTS & ACADEMICS
“But if a mirror ever makes
you sad
you should know
that it does
not know
you.”
CIRCLE DETAILS
Kabir was a weaver in fifteenth-century Varanasi who belonged to no religion and claimed no temple. Hindus said he was one of theirs. Muslims said the same. He refused both, and kept weaving. What he gave the world through his poetry which was spare, unadorned, and occasionally fierce was not a philosophy but a inner direction to a place inside the human body where something is always sounding, and where the soul, upon finding it, recognises itself as home.
He wrote in the language of ordinary people, about the most extraordinary thing. Kabir used whatever was close at hand to point at what was closer still, access to the inner current. Reading these translations feels less like literature and more like being invited in.
This enquiry sits with this poetry as a living transmission, and each week includes guided practice led by Biba. She guides the group into direct attunement with what this tradition calls the Anahata Nada — the unstruck sound. Attention is drawn inward to a specific place in the body. What opens from there is its own teaching.
Biba has practiced within this living lineage for three decades. She knows this territory from the inside, and that is what she brings into the room each week.
No background in Eastern traditions is needed. Just genuine curiosity, and a willingness to listen in a direction you may not have listened before.
5 Weeks
SANT MAT TRADITION
SOUND CURRENT
Live via Zoom
CIRCLE | Dates to be announced by expressions of interest
The Ground of the Soul
Drawing on the sermons and writings of Meister Eckhart
“Theologians may quarrel, but the mystics of the world speak the same language.”
MORE DETAILS
Meister Eckhart was a Dominican friar in fourteenth-century Germany who was tried for heresy and never stopped preaching. What he taught — in plain German, to ordinary people — was the most radical thing imaginable: that there is a place in you that has never been touched by time, fear, or separation. He called it the Grunt, the ground. And he said that place is identical with God.
This enquiry enters Eckhart slowly, one sermon at a time, through six weeks of guided reading, silence, and live conversation. We sit with his central teachings: the birth of the Word in the soul, Gelassenheit — the letting-go-ness that is the doorway to everything, living without a why. Eckhart does not ask you to believe anything. He asks you to discover something. The sermons are the invitation. The enquiry itself is the threshold.
Eckhart is now recognized across traditions — by Zen teachers, Sufi scholars, Vedanta practitioners, and Christian contemplatives alike — as the great Western mystic of nonduality. Richard Rohr calls him “the height of Western nondualism.” You don’t need to be Christian to find your way in. You need only be willing to be surprised by what you already are.
5 Classes
Christian Mysticism
Nonduality
Live via Zoom
CIRCLE | Dates to be announced by expressions of interest
She Who Knows
Drawing on Mary Magdalene Mysteries
“The separation of feminine and masculine has torn us into pieces. The balance of feminine and masculine will bring us back to peace
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There is a gospel that was buried. For sixteen centuries it disappeared — until a fragment was discovered in Cairo in 1896. In it, Mary Magdalene is not a penitent. She is a teacher. She is the one the risen Christ addresses first, entrusts with teachings the others could not yet bear, and commissions to carry what she knows back to the world. Peter’s response is fury. Her response is steadiness.
Jean-Yves Leloup’s translation works line by line through the Coptic text with both scholarly precision and contemplative depth. We follow Mary’s account of the soul’s journey — not as doctrine, but as living map. What does it mean to know something not through the mind alone, not through the body alone, but through the eye of the heart? This is the question the gospel poses. It is also, perhaps, the question many women have been carrying without words for centuries.
This enquiry is for women and men who have found themselves at the edge of inherited spiritual frameworks, who have felt the authority of their own inner knowing dismissed or explained away, and who are ready to meet a tradition in which that knowing is not incidental — it is the entire point.
5 Classes
Sacred Feminine
Gnostic Wisdom
Live via Zoom
Enquiry | Dates to be announced by expressions of interest
What the Self Is Not
Drawing on New Seeds of Contemplation — Thomas Merton
“A life is either all spiritual or not spiritual at all.”
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Thomas Merton was a Trappist monk, a social critic, a poet, and one of the most honest writers the contemplative tradition has ever produced. He wrote New Seeds of Contemplation in silence, from inside a life structured entirely around the question of what is real — and somehow the result is a book that speaks directly into the noise and fragmentation of the twenty-first century.
At the heart of this enquiry is one of the most quietly devastating ideas in all of mysticism: that the self we defend, present, and suffer over is not actually us. Merton calls it the false self — the persona we’ve constructed in the face of the world’s demands. And he insists, with both ferocity and tenderness, that underneath it, utterly intact, is what he calls the true self: the person God knows, the life no one can take.
Over six weeks we move through the book’s great themes — contemplation, solitude, the nature of love, the dark night, the problem of action. Merton writes prose that is slow and cumulative, built for rereading. This enquiry gives it the time it deserves. We read carefully. We sit in silence together. We let the distinctions he makes begin to do their work.
5 Classes
Christian Contemplation
True / False Self
Live via Zoom
CIRCLE | Dates to be announced by expressions of interest
The Seven Mansions
Drawing on: The Interior Castle — Teresa of Ávila (MIRABAI STARR TRANSLATION)
“Believe the incredible truth that the Beloved has chosen for their dwelling place the core of your own being because that is the single most beautiful place in all of creation.”
MORE DETAILS
Teresa of Ávila was a sixteenth-century Spanish nun who reformed a religious order, founded seventeen convents, argued theology with cardinals, crossed swords with the Inquisition, and in her spare hours wrote some of the most precise and luminous accounts of the inner life ever set down in any language.
She was also funny, practical, occasionally exasperated, and deeply suspicious of any spirituality that floated above daily life rather than going deeper into it. She is not what most people expect when they hear the words “medieval mystic.”
The Interior Castle was written in 1577, in six weeks, at the direction of her confessor. Teresa herself said she wrote it in a kind of sustained interior illumination, not stopping to think, simply transcribing what she was shown. What she was shown was this: the soul is a crystal castle with seven dwelling places, arranged in concentric rings around an innermost chamber where God already lives. The journey of the spiritual life is not a journey toward the divine. It is a journey inward, through rooms you have never entered, toward a centre that was never absent.Each of the seven mansions describes a distinct stage of interior development — from the outermost rooms where we are still largely asleep to ourselves, through the middle chambers of deepening self-knowledge, prayer, and encounter with our own darkness, to the innermost rooms where union becomes not an aspiration but a lived reality.
Teresa was declared a Doctor of the Church in 1970 — the first woman ever to receive that title. The Vatican took four centuries to catch up with what her readers have always known: that she belongs in the first rank of spiritual teachers, in any tradition, in any century.
8 Classes
Carmelite Mysticism
Soul Map
Live via Zoom
✦ ✦ ✦
This is a living curriculum. As the Mystic Soul Academy grows, so will the library of explorations drawing from the full treasury of the mystical traditions: Sufi poetry, Jewish Kabbalah, Celtic mysticism, Zen koans, the Neoplatonists, and beyond.
Each year brings new doorways that open into a personal unfolding mystery.
The practice
What is Direct Attunement?
Every mystical tradition has understood that genuine spiritual transmission is not the transfer of information. It is the awakening of recognition. The moment when the seeker stops reading or thinking about the spiritual ideas and discovers they are already living it.
I teach a practice called Direct Attunement alongside the texts. It is a way of shaping the nervous system to hold the energy that comes through the awakening process, and relaxing into what is. Letting go the defended ego-knowing, the spiritual persona, the endless accumulation of data points, until what has always been present, beneath all of that becomes simply, unmistakably obvious.
A meditation practice designed to support extremely active and over stimulated minds.
I developed this approach for people whose minds do not simply stop on command. People whose attention is fast, well-trained in other directions. It draws on the somatic wisdom of nervous system regulation, Kriya Yoga, and thirty years practice within the living current of Surat Shabd Yoga. It is about developing your felt sense of your inner experience that cannot be explained, only encountered.
Conditions for genuine encounter
Each Spiritual Study, unfolds in three interwoven ways:
The writings as a mirror
We read not to understand a teacher’s mysticism but to let it reveal us to ourselves. The great mystics wrote from inside the territory they describe. When we read them carefully, they can reveal the way to us.
The body as your temple
Awakening that bypasses the body will evaporate into a memory. Somatic practices and nervous system regulation are woven into every session, to allow your insights to begin to feel integrated in the body.
The field is your teacher
In an intentional circle, something happens that cannot be manufactured. The collective field of sincere inquiry becomes its own transmission. We learn from each other in ways none of us can learn alone.
Move beyond the surface of daily life and touch something more real, more alive, more essentially you.
Access to your inner life
Dear New Friend,
What I have witnessed, across three decades of practice, is a deep and abiding hunger where people yearn for space for the Spirit. For context for their inner life. For genuine companionship on the journey inward. So much has been turned upside down its become harder than ever.
The Mystic Soul Academy is my answer to that hunger.
It is built around something simple: the profound books of the inner life explored intentionally, in community. Not as a book club or course. As a spiritual study circle, a few weeks of genuine attention given to a great teaching or master with space for what arises to be experienced and embodied.
This is the beginning of the academy. I am inviting its founding circle to choose in. People who recognise this as a spiritual endeavour, who are ready for depth, and who understand that the inner journey is better travelled with rigorous, honest company.
If this lights you up, not just as an interesting idea, but as something you recognise, I would be honoured to have your company.
From Biba, with love xo
MEET BIBA - Your Guide
Thirty years in. Still going deeper.
Bianca Rothschild, known as Bība, has spent three decades in contemplative practice, initiated within a living lineage of Surat Shabd Yoga: the ancient mystic tradition of the sound current.
Her method, The Practice of Direct Attunement™, weaves together inner awareness, Polyvagal nervous system science, and somatic practice, bringing people into living contact with what is most real in them.
Bība holds a coaching license from the True Purpose Institute and ongoing studies somatic practices with The Embody Lab. She has worked with seekers, executives and organizations around the world. She lives and teaches in Nosara, Costa Rica, and works with people globally.
She turned 52 in 2026, the Mayan tradition calls this the abuela threshold, the moment when accumulated knowledge becomes wisdom offered outward. The Academy is Biba’s offering in practice.
Mystic soul Academy FOUNDING CIRCLE
Your invitation to a grand inner adventure.
Our founding circles rate.
$288 per study
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
Between sessions, you sit with a short passage. Not to analyse it. To let it work on you.
By the last week, something has usually shifted — not because of anything that was taught, but because of what became available when a group of sincere people turned their attention, together, toward what is most real.
There are no lectures. No tests. No certificates. No one is trying to fill you with information. The study is designed to do the opposite — to create the conditions in which something can be released, recognised, or remembered.
I don't teach at the group. I hold the space, guide the practice, and — through my method of Direct Attunement — meet each person in what is most alive and real in them in that moment. That quality of being genuinely met is rare. It changes things.
Some people experience, for the first time, a genuine depth of spirit — not forced but natural. Some find that a long-held sense of contraction begins to soften. Some encounter something they can only describe as divine presence — a quality of aliveness in themselves that was always there but had never had a the chance to emerge.
Others find the group itself to be the unexpected gift — the discovery that deep, honest spiritual conversation is possible, that they are not alone in this, that community can be a doorway too.
What people consistently report is not that they learned something new — but that they recognized something true. Something they already knew, somewhere underneath. The enquiry simply helped them find their way back to it.
That said, if you choose to read or listen to the full book between sessions, the study goes deeper. Living with the text — sitting with a chapter in the evening, letting a passage accompany you through a week — creates an interior conversation that enriches everything we do together in the group. It's the difference between visiting a country and living there for a while.
For those who want more, reading or listening to the full book between sessions is warmly encouraged — but it's an invitation, not a requirement.
That said, I want to be honest with you: this is not a self-study programme. There are no recordings to catch up on. The heart of each Spiritual Study is the live field we create together — the particular alchemy of these specific people, in this moment, turning toward something real. That cannot be replicated in a replay.
If you know in advance that your schedule makes consistent attendance difficult, this may not be the right time. When you're ready to be fully present, the enquiry will be here.
When people know they can catch up later, something subtle shifts — the quality of presence, the willingness to be vulnerable, the sense that this moment is irreplaceable.
The live container is the work. Protecting it is how I protect your experience. My preference is no-one asks for recordings and we each attend each circle.
What matters is not your background, but your willingness to enquire. A long-time meditator and someone who has never sat a day in their life can both belong here, if both come with sincerity.
The circles are designed to be entered spiritually, not academically. I guide each session with that in mind, meeting people wherever they are. If you come with openness, that's enough.
That said, if you want to talk through which study might be the right starting point for where you are right now, I'm happy to help you find your way in just send me an email.
There's no word count, no journal prompt to submit, no one checking in. The practice is yours to carry however it fits into your life.
LET'S BEGIN
The door is open. You are welcome here.
Whether you’re taking your first step inward or deepening a practice already underway come as you are.
Founding circle studies are US$288 for a limited time.