The Rose and the Thorn: Through the Mystic’s Looking Glass
Wed, 20 May
|Redfern
With Ayya Yeshe For those curious about a life less ordinary — and willing, even briefly, to step beyond the known.
Time & Location
20 May 2026, 6:00 pm – 9:00 pm
Redfern, Pitt St, Redfern NSW 2016, Australia
About the event
There are moments in life that undo us.
Loss. Illness. Beauty so overwhelming it rearranges something inside.
Or a quiet, unexpected opening — where the world as we knew it no longer holds.
These are not detours.
They are doorways.
What do these gateways offer us?
What is the human potential for transcendental, yet deeply embodied, spiritual experience and transformation — experiences that resist explanation through the rational mind?
Mysticism lives here — in the tension between the rose and the thorn.
Between ecstasy and unravelling.
Between what can be understood… and what must be felt.
What is this unbearable lightness of being?
What is this spacious, vivid awareness for which words fall short?
How might these experiences open us to insight, freedom, and awakening?
For centuries, mystics have tried to name this space — a luminous, disorienting, deeply embodied encounter with truth.
A way of seeing that dissolves certainty yet reveals something far more intimate.
But this is not reserved for saints or nuns in seclusion.
It belongs to anyone willing to stand at the edge — to let the familiar fall away, and step into the vast, the unexplainable, the alive.
In a time that asks so much of our nervous systems, what do these thresholds offer us?
Not escape — but expansion.
Not answers — but a deeper capacity to be with what is.
Join us for an intimate evening with Australian Buddhist nun Ayya Yeshe, returning to share how luminous awareness can be accessed and sustained, and how both bliss and rupture can become portals to freedom.
This is not a lecture.
It is a lived inquiry.
A gathering at the edge of language.
To encounter the terrible, the beautiful, the infinite.
A supper for those curious about a life less ordinary — and willing, even briefly, to step beyond the known.
A passage through the mystic’s handbook.
Come, and be — metaphorically — ravished by the divine.
Come sit at the table.
The rose and the thorn are both waiting.
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This special supper is supporting The Bodhicitta Foundation. All proceeds go towards enabling women and girls in India to attend school.
ABOUT OUT GUEST
Ayya Yeshe has been a Buddhist nun for 22 years. She founded Bodhicitta Foundation, a grassroots charity working with "ex untouchable" people in the slums of Central India and lived in India for 17 years. Ayya is an international Buddhist teacher, author, feminist and contemplative. She wrote "Everyday Enlightenment" (Harper Collins) and has 120k hits on youtube with "Dakini" the sacred music album. Ayya has also started Bodhicitta Dakini Monastery, in the UNESCO world heritage area wilderness of Northern Tasmania.
https://ayyayeshe.wordpress.com
Tickets
Seat at the table
Sale ends
19 May, 9:00 pm
This ticket includes a 2-course dinner and a copy of 10-year edition of YOKE: An Experiment with Destiny (RRP $45)
$93.00
+$2.33 ticket service fee
Total
$0.00