Love: Learning to Inhabit the Heart

To be of any real use, meditation and mindfulness must offer us an effective means of meeting the stresses and strains, demands and challenges of everyday life. Tens of thousands of people around the world who have participated in mindfulness and MBSR programs report the discovery of stability, resiliency and greater peace of mind in the midst of their everyday lives. Mounting scientific research is verifying these claims.

As these capacities unfold, people often ask questions like, “What’s next?” “Now that I’ve learned to cope and even thrive, is there something more to me and to this life?” “What has mindfulness practice got to do with my heart, my soul, my deeper sense of wellbeing — with love?” In your own way, you too may be wondering about this. The questions point to something within us, like hidden treasures in our chests calling to us.

During this weekend retreat, we will enter the vastness and mystery of the heart. We’ll explore what it’s like to sooth and relax the heart and become increasingly familiar with this invisible yet palpable domain of our humanness that allows us to know love directly, extend love to others and be love itself. Through meditation practices from many traditions, poetry and story, silence and stillness, music, movement, and structured and spontaneous moments of conversation, dialogue, and inquiry, we’ll experiment with leaning into the feeling of love, lingering in love, and, by being so, fall open into what we actually are.