Compassion and heart practices involve developing and extending care and goodwill towards yourself and others, particularly when experiencing suffering or difficulty. These practices often include heart meditations, and many modalities that cultivate a broader sense of empathy, connection, and positive emotions such as loving-kindness and forgiveness. Key heart practices include loving-kindness, compassion, empathetic joy, and equanimity, which, through consistent practice, lead to a more open, resilient, and nurturing heart. 

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Most often, just noting and inquiring into what’s happening inside ourselves is often not enough. We need to embrace ourselves. While mindfulness tells us, ‘Hold your suffering in spacious awareness,’ the wisdom of self-compassion says, ‘Be kind to yourself when you suffer.’ Self-kindness opens a new path to healing. We learn that spacious awareness is a loving awareness. Warmth, kindess, and gentle tenderness creates space. Mindfulness invites us to ask, ‘What am I experiencing right now?’ Self-compassion invites us to ask, ‘What do I need right now?’”

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Maintaining self-compassionate body practices moves us through the rest of our life with grace and courage. Maintenance is the key to a successful practice: Learning about our personal values and continually reaffirming our soul’s purpose helps us to stick to a regimen of self-care because we see our practice in the context of our life goals. Ongoing community support and developing beautiful daily rituals for ourselves shepherd us through our lives with grounding, nourishment, and a sense of meaningful connection. Ongoing practice builds and maintains our emotional resilience muscle. One-by-one we change the cultural paradigm of stress, and as we do that we give others the permission to do the same.

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I help guide you with a soft and powerful practice of self-compassion and self-kindness, employing mindful and embodied approaches to integrate compassion into your daily life more fully, oftentimes transforming your relationship to yourself, others, the world, and your life in surprising, profound, way. As you begin to re-experience a visceral connection with the need of your body, there is a brand new capacity to warmly love the self. You experience a new quality of authenticity in your caring, which redirects our attention, with a ripple effect, to every aspect of your life. 

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Guided activities include discussion of topics, experiential exercises, meditation, guide-student interaction exploring what comes up in a safe environment, and home practices. Self-Compassion and Heart Practice is an opportunity to explore how we typically respond when difficulties arise in our lives and to learn tools for becoming a warm and supportive companion to ourselves.