Jeff Carreira

Life has conditioned all of us to be fearful and self-protective. Some of us eventually feel suffocated by the mental and emotional habits that keep us from living a passionate and spontaneously free life. We long to be liberated from the invisible ties that seem to bind us. We know more is possible and we start searching for a life that matches our true potential.

I was quite young when my own spiritual search began. At the age of about seven, I began spending time locked in my father’s car in our driveway trying to stop my mind from thinking. Somehow, I knew that if I could do that, I would discover something wonderful.

But like so many of us, I forgot about my early spiritual aspirations and got swept up in the cultural script of career and relationship. I studied physics, worked as an engineer and got married. Eventually my work as an engineer felt empty, so I earned a graduate degree in education and became a schoolteacher and later a school administrator. By most standards I was pretty successful, and yet I felt empty and existentially unfulfilled.

My life took a dramatic turn when I left everything and everyone behind and joined a radical spiritual community. For the next twenty years, I devoted myself entirely to spiritual pursuits. I spent many hours every day meditating, chanting, reading and studying, all in a single pointed pursuit of the ever-elusive goal of enlightenment.

During those years in community, I was blessed with many spiritual breakthrough experiences. I was ripped open by dramatic bursts of kundalini energy shooting up from the base of my spine through the top of my head. I spent days in states of conscious awareness that remained steady through all stages of waking and sleeping. I felt a mystical expansion that didn’t stop until my body was the size of the entire cosmos. And in the middle of it, I remembered that I had been able to freely will myself into this sense of cosmic consciousness as a young child.

In the summer of 2001, during a two-month long retreat, I entered into a shared state of enlightened mind with other participants. This dramatic opening inspired me to create spiritual education programs that guided thousands of individuals through their own journey of spiritual evolution. Four years later, in 2005, and once again while on retreat, I heard a call to expand my teaching work. I started traveling and teaching meditation and spiritual philosophy more extensively throughout the world.

In 2012, I left the community I had been living in, and for the next three years co-created and co-facilitated a transformational practice group called The Evolutionary Collective with Patricia Albere. After that, I partnered with Craig Hamilton to create and lead a yearlong meditation and awakening program called Opening to the Infinite that we ran for three consecutive years.

Currently, I lead retreats throughout the world and run a teacher training program to develop the teaching capacities of others. I am the founder and lead teacher of The Mystery School for a New Paradigm – a virtual practice and study community that provides guidance and inspiration to a global group of awakening individuals.

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