Remembering the Joyful Heart
“Love is the cause of genuine happiness.
Its nature is all-pervasive like space.
Love is the sunlight of the mind.”
— Garchen Rinpoche
Most of us know the moment… Listening to the forest at dawn, looking up at the sky at the end of a workday, lying in our bed after a long journey: the body lets go, the mind falls quiet, and something beneath it all is spacious, simply content and at peace. We are who we were a moment ago; our life is what it was. Yet, through weariness or delight, without even trying, the hard edges of “I, me, and mine” have melted. Beneath the rush of doing and the spinning in our heads, for a moment, we have returned to ourselves.
The loving wakefulness through which we have returned to ourselves is the Joyful Heart. What we have remembered in that return—the exquisite simplicity of our being within the ongoing flow of creation—is equally the Joyful Heart.
The Joyful Heart is not a heart in which everything is perfect, nor a search for any kind of perfection. It is a heart that relishes its sacred nature while living a fully human life, with all its joyful joys and all its growing pains. A heart of undiluted presence, in friendship, well-being, and love as much as in uncertainty, illness, and grief. A heart that meets whatever comes, celebrating what blossoms, tending what needs care; one with the vastness of space, and still a devoted witness to the movement of the sun and the stars.
The Joyful Heart neither comes nor goes; it is who we are. Yet most of the time, we forget.
This is why spiritual traditions across the world offer us ways to remember, and to let that remembering become stable, until what we tasted for a moment becomes the ground we stand on.
To help us remember the Joyful Heart we are, these traditions describe our I-ness, our experience of being, as layered: a physical body that carries our awareness; an energy body, bound to the breath, that keeps this body alive; an emotional body through which we feel; a mental body through which we think, understand, and create; and ever finer spiritual layers, opening into the source from which all things arise.
Each layer has its own character. Each opens its own way to relate, to create, and to take part in the divine life, and each brings its own difficulties and its own gifts. The same traditions that help us remember teach us that as we bring loving intention and sustained attention to each layer, and to the relationship between them, we keep growing. They call this the path of awakening.
Inspired by those spiritual and healing traditions, and by the insights of modern psychology, the twelve aspects that follow tend these layers of our being through practices and reflections, leading us from grounding ourselves in the present moment through the body and the breath, to remembering the light that shines as the heart of all things. We explore them together in our classes, retreats, and pilgrimages.
The twelve aspects
- 1Healing and Renewal
- 2The Joy of Meditation
- 3Inner Guide and Life Purpose
- 4Purification and the Emotions
- 5Sacred Sound and Mantra
- 6The Five Elements and Daily Life
- 7Relationship and Sexual Alchemy
- 8Family and Ancestry
- 9Dreaming and Dying
- 10Pilgrimage and Sacred Journeys
- 11Sacred Space and Geometry
- 12Remembering the Light of the Heart
1Healing and Renewal
Remembering the Joyful Heart begins where we are: in the body, in this breath, in this moment. When we connect mindfully with our vital force in the present, we lay the foundation for our healing and spiritual path.
Here we learn how body, energy, and mind interact, and how to use that interaction to transform stress, worry, and fatigue into clarity, joy, and well-being. These core practices underlie the exploration of all the aspects that follow:
- Breathing exercises and meditations
- The Healing Smile
- The Five Elements Healing Meditation
- The revitalizing self-massage of the Dry Bath
- The gentle movement of Dao-In yoga
- The movements and standing meditations of Joyful Heart Qi Gong
They are meant to become part of our daily routine, helping us regain and maintain our well-being and live a joyful life, for our own benefit and for the benefit of all beings.
ExploreHealing Now, the book·Guided meditations·The Dry Bath·Qi Gong Warm-Up
2The Joy of Meditation
The Joy of Meditation runs through all twelve aspects, like the central vein of a tree. Building on the ground of the Healing and Renewal practices, it carries our practice from well-being toward the ripening of our fullest potential—from the deepest roots to the most exquisite fruits and flowers.
The Joy of Meditation is not about pushing thoughts away to empty our mind, but about learning to stay with what is, and gradually developing the stability to see through mere appearances. The practice unfolds through five principles: Arriving, Relaxing, Focusing, Exploring, and Resting. Together they give daily practice a clear and simple structure, and within that structure every other practice finds its place.
It is the central vein of our path because, little by little, it shows us how much of our well-being rests on our habits of mind and the way we see things. We are all interconnected, and the people and circumstances around us affect us deeply. Yet in the intimacy of our own being, we can choose how we meet them. As the meditation master Garchen Rinpoche teaches:
“When the mind is disturbed, one finds suffering anywhere, even in positive circumstances. If the mind is at ease and filled with love, one finds happiness even while surrounded by seemingly difficult outer circumstances.”
As we cultivate relaxed wakefulness, in formal practice and in the middle of daily life, the heart grows more loving and kind, and body, energy, and emotions begin to heal by themselves.
3Inner Guide and Life Purpose
Building on healing and meditation, the third aspect helps us establish a clear connection with our inner guide: the voice of the sacred presence within us, our awakened nature. This wisdom is always with us, quietly showing us how to enjoy our lives and make them meaningful. Yet to hear it clearly, we often need to listen beyond the intellect, beyond the limited ego, and beyond the conventions of the world around us.
Hearing our inner guide with clarity changes how we live. It helps us make decisions, keeps us connected to the deeper purpose of our lives, and fills ordinary days with a playful sense of the sacred. From there, purpose becomes vision, and vision becomes concrete goals. And as we learn to trust our own inner guide, we can help others recognize theirs.
4Purification and the Emotions
Purification means to acknowledge our essential nature and to allow that potential to shine by clearing subtle blockages from our energy channels and our mind. Often held in place by repetitive patterns of thought and limiting beliefs, these blockages can show up as physical, emotional, or mental difficulties in our own lives and in the lives of our families. As they clear, we rest more easily in our innate, joyful nature and in the virtues of the heart: love, compassion, joy, and equanimity.
As part of the purification practices, we explore the role and qualities of our emotions. Emotions reflect the movement of energy within us as we meet life. When our energy is in tune with our inner guide, emotions stop being storms to endure and become part of how we navigate. To understand them and their potential for transformation, we explore the Six Human Needs, which show us where we are acting from and how to adjust with awareness as we grow toward emotional maturity and fulfillment.
5Sacred Sound and Mantra
Since ancient times, healing and spiritual traditions have taught that we are vibrational beings in a vibrational universe. Of all the vibrations that touch us, none is as intimate as the sound of our own voice. Carried on the breath, it has a unique power to integrate body, energy, and mind.
Sacred sounds, healing mantras, and prayer gather our attention and intention into one. Shared with others, they become a thread that binds families and communities together. They help restore inner balance, transform obstacles, and open us to the essential nature of life. Mantra and the repetition of the divine name have always been held in the highest regard, precisely because they are so simple: they can be done anywhere, at any time, aloud or in silence, without long retreats or special conditions.
Here we explore the sacred origin of sound, the healing power of speech, how sound shapes body and mind, how sound can deepen prayer, and mantras for healing, longevity, prosperity, happiness, compassion, and liberation.
6The Five Elements and Daily Life
Observing the rhythms of nature, ancient healers and meditation practitioners understood that our bodies and the world around us are made of five basic energies, which they named after nature’s foundations: Water, Wood, Fire, Earth, and Metal. By following these energies through the cycle of the year and adjusting to their changes, we find it easier to stay healthy and to thrive. As the Yellow Emperor’s Classic, the foundational text of Chinese medicine, recalls:
“In the past, people practiced the Tao, the Way of Life. They understood the principle of balance, as represented by the transformations of the five elements and the energies of the universe… They maintained well-being of body and mind.”
Here we learn to observe and follow these natural rhythms in daily life: in hygiene, nutrition, herbal support, exercise, immunity, sexuality, sleep, and spiritual practice.
7Relationship and Sexual Alchemy
If the Joy of Meditation is the central vein of the path, relationships are where the heart of transformation takes place. Everything is a beautiful theory on our meditation cushion and in our favorite books, until we have to face our parents, siblings, spouse, children, and everyone else we share our lives with. Relationships are where our practice meets the road.
The exploration of relationships begins with how we relate to ourselves, the foundation of every other relationship. From there, we look at the models we inherited from our parents and our culture, and return to the Six Human Needs to discover healthier ways of expressing and receiving love. This deeper understanding helps us create loving relationships that honor the well-being and growth of everyone they touch.
Sexuality, too, is energy, and sexual energy is the most powerful force in the body. Directed outward, it has the power to create life. Guided upward through the energy channels and suffused with the virtues of the heart, it renews our vitality and supports spiritual awakening. Through the practices of inner alchemy, we learn to distill this energy into spiritual essence.
8Family and Ancestry
We are each born into a family that offers us, in its own way, the conditions and opportunities we need to grow. With its joys and its challenges, our family often presents the most demanding and the most complete spiritual training we will ever receive. Meeting it with awareness and love, rather than exhaustion and resentment, takes practice, insight, and a ton of good humor.
Here we explore the energetic structure of a family, and we look at our own: what we can learn from it, and how we can be of benefit to it in ways that begin lasting change. From that appreciative ground, we can also look honestly at the difficult patterns handed down through generations, and contribute to their healing.
Finally, we learn to plant the seeds of healthier patterns for present and future generations, to strengthen the voice of the inner guide within the family, to connect our family tree with the finest energies of Heaven and Earth through the healing sounds of the central channel, and to awaken the spiritual strength of our ancestral line through Bone Breathing Qi Gong.
9Dreaming and Dying
The contemplative traditions teach that our human consciousness journeys through four states: waking, dreaming, deep sleep, and the all-encompassing state of pure awareness that holds them all. In this aspect, we explore each of these states, with special attention to sleep, dreams, and dying.
We spend about a third of our lives asleep, some twenty-five years in a life of eighty. That time can restore us and reveal the wonders of the mind. The dream practices teach us to balance body and energy before sleep, to fall asleep with awareness, and to use sleep and dreams for healing, for creativity, and for recognizing the nature of awareness. Each night’s passage into sleep also becomes a daily rehearsal for dying with a calm, loving, and joyful mind.
Death is the second great threshold. Here we explore why spiritual practitioners regard it as an opportunity for complete awakening: what death is, how to prepare for it, what happens during and after it, how sleep and death are related, and how to help the dying and the dead. The purpose is simple: to meet death with calm, clarity, and joy.
ExploreIntroduction to Dream Yoga I·II·Awakening Within the Dream
10Pilgrimage and Sacred Journeys
Pilgrimage leads us, slowly, to places where people have gathered in reverence for thousands of years: ancient stones, sacred wells, hermitages, caves, and forests where great practitioners lived, and where their presence still lingers. Unlike a tourist’s trip, it is a retreat in motion, undertaken for the benefit of all beings. Each moment along the way, pleasant or difficult, becomes part of the practice.
Traditionally, pilgrimage is also a rehearsal for the great journey of death. It reminds us how precious life is, and so, before leaving home, the pilgrim closes cycles and resolves what is pending.
It unfolds in three stages. First comes the preparation before leaving home, which may take months or even years. Then the journey itself, held by vows and daily practices that keep us focused on our purpose and open to the places we visit. Finally the return, when supportive practices help us integrate what we have received, for ourselves and for those around us.
Sacred journeys are a gentler alternative: visits to sacred sites to experience their energies and learn from what the ancient master builders and spiritual practitioners left behind. Both blend personal practice with the traditions of sacred art. Our model is the Way of Saint James, across northern Spain.
11Sacred Space and Geometry
The art of the ancient master builders
The spaces we live in deeply influence our health and well-being. Beyond light, air, and decoration, two influences matter most: the energies of the land where a building stands, among them underground water veins, geological faults, and the energetic meridians of the Earth; and the orientation and proportions of the building itself.
The master builders understood the bond between how we feel and the energetic field of the Earth. This aspect explores their art of creating spaces that support health, harmonious relationships, creativity, and spiritual growth, on three levels: Earth, human, and Heaven. First, we experience the Earth as a living being and learn to sense its energies. Then we explore how human consciousness interacts with them. Finally, we learn to create proportions from the paths of the sun, the moon, and the stars, the foundation on which the temples and sacred sites of the past were built.
ExploreWhere Heaven and Earth Unite
12Remembering the Light of the Heart
Having journeyed through the other eleven aspects, we leave behind theories, techniques, visualizations, sounds, movements, and prayers. Practitioner, practice, and fruit arise together as the spontaneous vibrancy of presence, the heart of all things.
Like a sailor adrift who, his senses purified by the winds of grace, realizes that he is both the sky and the ocean, our natural experience of being blossoms from undistracted non-meditation. Simple awareness of being becomes the practice of all practices, the mantra of all mantras, the prayer of all prayers. From this awareness all energies and sounds emanate, and to it everything returns.
Here and now, in an effortless pilgrimage into the undefinable essence of life, we remember the freedom and joy of our simple identity, the light at the heart of all things. And as we remember, we become healers for others, echoing the aspiration of all aspirations:
“May all beings care for one another with love and joy. May all beings delight in the bliss of wakeful presence.”
Each aspect opens when we are ready for it. If you wish to explore them in company, check upcoming activities in gatherings.