Polishing the Mirror of the Heart

Ideal for: All levels including beginners

Love is the merchandise
which the world demands.
If you store it in your heart
every soul will become your customer.
– Hazrat Inayat Khan

When it comes to love we are all customers. Like a moth to a flame, we are irresistibly attracted to that merchandise because somewhere deep inside of us we know it’s worth. There is an art to entering our true heart and there is a price: the slow surrender of our limited self to the unlimited.

At first, for most of us, this giving over feels like an incomprehensible loss. Yet, just like the moth, something draws us to this firelight, this merging we call love. Understandably, such a prospect may fill us with apprehension and uncertainty. Yet, as we orient our practice (our life) toward the heart, we discover bravery. Bravery is so real and palpable that we willingly turn: turn toward our vulnerability, turn toward the ways we have been less than true in our relationships and to our deepest ideals and values. All of this comprises what the Sufi’s call the accumulated “rust” on the heart. Sobering and healing, when used well, such insights into our vulnerabilities become a gateway into the depth, wholeness, and luminosity of our humanity.

So, dear friends, take heart, this is our lineage – the path of love human beings across all contemplative traditions have walked for eons. In the good company of one another, this weekend retreat is an invitation to explore what it’s like to enter and understand, sooth, relax and polish the mirror of the heart. We’ll take our time to feel our way into this many-chambered domain of our humanness. Through meditation practices from the Sufi and Buddhist traditions, poetry and story, silence and stillness, music and movement, and structured and spontaneous moments of conversation, dialogue, and inquiry we’ll learn to lean into the feeling of love, linger in love, and, so being, open into the fullness we actually are.