Cultivating an Awakened Heart: A Four-Week Course

How do you cultivate a heart that can hold all the challenges in your life?

This program offers two fundamental trainings.:

1. You will explore four qualities of heart you can cultivate: Kindness, Compassion, Joy and Equanimity.

2. You’ll take on a practice to develop focus and resilience. For thirty days, you’ll select an ‘observance’ or practice you’ll do daily as well as one ‘restraint’ — one activity you elect to avoid.

The weekly class focuses on cultivating, developing and strengthening the attitudes of your mind and heart to enhance your ability to experience life in an open-hearted, creative and rewarding way. Your resilience to life’s surprises and upsets grows the more you live from an undefended heart and let go of your pre-conditioned thoughts.

To support you in this thirty day program you’ll also take on a commitment to a daily practice. You are asked to commit to doing one thing every day that brings you joy and to restrain from doing one thing that you know decreases your joy.

For example, a person may commit to offer a daily compliment to a family member, a co-worker, a service provider or all three. The same person might also commit to refrain from one form of unhealthy eating each day.

Your observation and restraint are entirely your choice. The opportunity is to give more attention to the things that bring you true joy and less time given to the things that take away your joy.

You’ll be invited to choose “check-in” partners to share how each of you is doing with your daily observation and restraint.. Having a check-in partner (s) helps deepen your self-discipline in achieving your goal, creates opportunities for learning from your friends and deepens connections.

This exercise is something that whole families can do together as a way of bonding and deepening mutual understanding.

Sessions

1 Cultivating Kindness

2 Cultivating Compassion

3 Cultivating Joy

4 Cultivating Composure, Calm and Balance