Retreat: Opening the Heart to Lovingkindness
Discover a sense of inner abundance and connectednessSharon Salzberg

Lovingkindness is a meditation that cultivates your natural capacity for an open and loving heart. It gives you a new way to connect with everyone—even the difficult people in your life. Practice meditations to enrich compassion, joy and peace for yourself and others. These practices lead to the development of concentration, connection, fearlessness, and genuine happiness. Join Sharon Salzberg, one of the most influential meditation teachers in the West and the author of The Force of Kindness, Faith: Trusting Your Own Deepest Experience, and Lovingkindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness.

Kindness is a skill as well as a quality of the heart. It deepens as you pay attention to yourself and others with awareness. When you step out of your comfort zone and experiment with speaking, listening, and caring for others in a different way, kindness grows. The fruits of greater kindness are revealed in your mind, life, and community. Cultivate these qualities through direct instruction and guided meditations using classical techniques in a modern idiom. You will have ample opportunity for discussion, questions, and practice of loving kindness teachings to support your own experience. Go deep into the practice to find:

That lovingkindness meditation can reduce the stress of daily life  
The value of lovingkindness for yourself and others
Deep peace with lovingkindness meditations

It is all too easy to consider kindness a secondary virtue, the one you reach for only as a last resort. You will discover a sense of inner abundance and will feel connected to others rather than feel isolated and apart. Appreciate kindness as the force it is, an ally of wisdom and courage. Experience the time to quietly hold others in your heart and wish them well. A sense of empathy and understanding for people broadens your avenues of response to a problem and engenders greater creativity as you seek options to ease suffering.

This retreat is for both new and experienced meditators. Bring a cushion if you would like to sit on the floor. Chairs are provided. An informational letter will be sent a couple of weeks prior to the retreat.

Course 101160 CEUs available
Date Saturday, June 26 and Sunday, June 27
Time 10:00 AM - 4:30 PM, Sat. night optional Q & A 7:00-9:00 PM
Cost $310/285 by May 26
Place Techny Towers, 2001 Waukegan Rd., near Northbrook, IL
note Retreat general information and registration

Opening the Heart by Sharon Salzberg

Lovingkindness meditation gives you a new way to connect with everyone - even the difficult people in your life. Rachel, who is one of my meditation students, surprised me with her enthusiastic greeting. “I’ve fallen in love with my dry cleaner!” she said. I’d last seen her six months earlier at a retreat I’d taught on the power of lovingkindness, or metta, a Buddhist term for boundless friendship toward oneself and others. Noticing how puzzled I looked at her sudden confession, she laughed. “No, I haven’t fallen in love with him romantically. My dry cleaner was the person I chose to focus on at the lovingkindness retreat.” I had instructed the participants to focus on someone they didn’t have strong feelings about, someone they normally might hardly notice, and to direct wishes for well-being toward that person. “Now every day when I meditate, I hold this man in my heart and consciously wish him well,” Rachel said. “I find that I’m eager to go into the store to see him. I really care about him.” Rachel hadn’t deepened her relationship with this man because she owed him something, or felt obliged by a favor he’d done. She didn’t know the particulars of his life, his challenges or his sorrows. Rachel came to care genuinely for the dry cleaner simply because she’d begun including him in the attentiveness of her heart. By doing so, she awakened to the humanity of someone who’d barely registered before.

The practice of lovingkindness meditation brings to life our innate capacity for connecting to ourselves and others. The lovingkindness we cultivate breaks through the habit of indifference or judgment that keeps us feeling separate from others. A capacity for friendship and kindness exists within each of us, without exception. No matter what pain we might have gone through in our lives, that capacity is never destroyed. It may be, and often is, obscured, but it’s there. The key to uncovering this potential is paying attention in a positive way. So often we don’t have the time or the patience to take an interest in people; instead we look around them or right through them. Being attentive to someone opens the door to discovering who she or he actually is.

We begin with ourselves because truly caring for ourselves is the foundation for being able to care for others. Over time our anger begins to subside as we care for ourselves and again practice opening our attention to those from whom we’re estranged. This part of the meditation can be hard, but it’s the place where we deeply contact our innate capacity for lovingkindness. Venturing beyond our preconceived limitations, we see how much love we have within.