FRIDAY, JUNE 30
10:00-11:00 AM ET
connected: heart practices for embodiment & expansion
Yourself—Holding the Heart: Self-Compassion & Love
“It’s not simply that we share with each other a common humanity, but that individually we have no humanity without each other.” —Sara Maitland
Join us for a four-week immersion of loving-kindness to kick off a summer of love through Metta meditation, yoga, and relaxation. Let’s gather in community and fortify our ability to feel more connected to ourselves, each other, and the world around us. With practice, we can all spread a little more peace and love this season.
DESCRIPTION
Yourself—Holding the Heart: Self-Compassion & Love (Slow Flow)
While it is most traditional to do Metta beginning with ourselves, I tend to practice and offer it last because it is hard to truly know what it feels like to have self-compassion. It is often easy to go numb or meet resistance, or fall back on the habitual critical self-talk we’ve unconsciously offered ourselves. However, we can practice learning to receive loving compassion from ourselves. It is also true that once we learn to truly offer ourselves unconditional compassion, we can also truly offer it to others... So while we practice it here last, I highly recommend that you then go back through the series and begin with YOURSELF.
REGISTER FOR SINGLE CLASS
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REGISTER for the full series (5 live + RECORDED PRACTICES)
Each Friday will begin with a Traditional Metta Meditation that is free and open to the public (register here). Often translated as “loving-kindness,” Metta has been used to foster patience, compassion, and acceptance for over 25,000 years. Research now shows that practicing a simple mantra-based meditation for 12 minutes a day can transform how we handle conflict and feel more connected and open—even life gets really stressful.
We’ll then integrate the principles of our Metta meditation with a loving-kindness slow flow and relax practice. Progressively, we will balance the nervous system, release tension, and expand our breathing in order to fully embody our compassion practice. Step by step, you'll build a supportive foundation allowing you to release deep stress, which is a barrier to energy, healing, and self-love. Most importantly, you'll learn simple, repeatable, tools that you can take off the mat and into your daily life.
As you come home to your body, breath, mind, and heart, you will replenish essential resources—physically, mentally, and emotionally—and create a container where we can embody and integrate our loving-kindness practice in our lives.
Cultivating this compassion helps us set conditions for more clarity—seeing, listening, feeling, sensing—and create more ways to connect rather than cut off. It is through this deep warmth of loving friendship that we are able to really open our hearts to ourselves and others. So when we do befriend ourselves this way, it’s not only good for us, it's good for everyone we come into contact with.
PAIR THIS PRACTICE WITH MY FREE WEEKLY DEEP LISTENING MEDITATION FRIDAYS AT 9:30 AM ET.