Over the last six months, I’ve been asked one question repeatedly by friends and clients: 

“How can I keep my heart open when the world feels so frightening and chaotic?” 

My answer often begins with an ancient Taoist understanding of life that speaks of the world as a place of Ten Thousand Joys and Ten Thousand Sorrows.

Joy and sorrow are part of the endless, cyclical unfolding of life. Like night and day, they are complementary aspects of a single whole. So, too, are love and pain. If we shield our hearts from pain, we also shield them from love. We get into trouble when we cling to one and attempt to avoid the other. 

We are living through a time of global disorder, political extremism, natural disasters, and extraordinarily rapid technological change. We are exposed daily to events that can leave us feeling frightened, angry, overwhelmed, or helpless. 

Perhaps the deeper question is not how to escape these feelings, but how to live with them without allowing them to close our hearts. 

How do we remain open, vulnerable, and loving when the world around us feels so uncertain? 

These questions have led me to create a new four-week workshop, The Way of the Heart.

During our time together, we will explore how to stay centered amid uncertainty, not by spiritually bypassing our fears, but by developing the capacity to stay present with discomfort, vulnerability, and the unknown.

We will draw from meditation, neuroscience, psychology, ancient wisdom traditions, poetry, and our own lived experience. We will explore fear and resilience, the shadow and the heart, impermanence and uncertainty, and the possibility of finding presence and wonder even when the world around us seems to be unravelling.  

The intention is not to become detached from what is happening in the world. 

It is to become more deeply present to it without being consumed by it. 

To hold uncertainty in one hand and resilience and wisdom in the other. 

To discover that an open heart is not necessarily a fragile heart. It can also be a loving and spacious one.

As Wendell Berry writes in The Peace of Wild Things: 

When despair for the world grows in me 

and I wake in the night at the least sound 

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, 

I go and lie down where the wood drake 

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.

I come into the presence of still water. 

And I feel above me the day-blind stars 

waiting with their light. For a time 

I rest in the grace of the world and am free.  

Class Information:

Four Sundays | 10:00–11:30 AM PT
October 4, 11, 18 & November 1

$395 — Four-Week Workshop - CLICK HERE TO PURCHASE

$595 — Four-Week Workshop + a Private 1 hr Consultation

All classes will be recorded and sent to you within 48 hours