What would it feel like to meet yourself and others with unconditional kindness—to let down the walls around your heart and discover the strength that lives in tenderness?
Whether you are new to metta practice or deepening an established loving-kindness practice, you'll find support for opening your heart more fully to yourself, others, and all of life.
Each day we engage in multiple periods of guided metta meditation, systematically cultivating loving-kindness, beginning with ourselves and gradually extending goodwill toward loved ones, neutral people, difficult people, and all beings everywhere. You learn the traditional metta phrases and explore various approaches to loving-kindness practice that can soften the defended heart, heal old wounds, and awaken our natural capacity for warmth, generosity, and compassion.
The retreat includes instruction in working skillfully with obstacles that commonly arise in metta practice—including self-judgment, anger, grief, and the fear of vulnerability. Through daily dharma talks, you discover how an undefended heart is not a naive or unprotected heart, but rather one that meets life with strength, wisdom, and radical acceptance. We explore how loving-kindness practice supports the other brahma viharas (compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity) and deepens insight into our interconnected nature.
Daily structure includes guided metta meditations (sitting and walking), silent meditation periods, dharma talks on the path of the heart, daily Q&A sessions, mindful eating instruction, small group practice discussions with the teacher, and time for rest in Omega's beautiful natural surroundings.
