Journey into the Deep Heart

Course Description

Over the course of 6 live webinars John Prendergast leads us on a daring journey into our own hearts. His warmth, insight and confidence in the process awaken the same in us.  

John first describes how our innately open nature becomes covered with armor in response to wounds and traumas. Then he shows us how we can rediscover our original freedom and sensitivity. Surprisingly, we need to stop trying to get rid of the habitual defenses that have come to bind us. When we simply let ourselves be with our experience just as it is we find that it softens, unfolds and integrates on its own.

In this six week course we will explore the heart center’s subtle multidimensionality, including the impact of early attachment wounds and trauma on our sense of worth (ego), our unique vibratory signature and gifts (soul), to our innate wholeness and non-separateness from the totality of life (Self). 

We will also evoke the healing power of Presence -awake awareness- that supports the natural unfolding of the heart. 

This course will include guided meditations, talks, group meditative inquiries, and experiential conversations. 

Come back to your heart. Find your place in the world on the way.

This course is ideal if you want to:

• Help integrating old wounds.
• To witness how people enter their inner experience.
• To connect with your essential nature.
• Encouragement in opening to the depths of the heart.

Course Overview

Session 1: Journey into the Deep Heart: Introduction and Overview

The human heart is the portal par excellence into our true nature as open, loving awareness. It is what we guard most closely and, at the same time, most want to open and share. Despite our yearning to come home to this deep way of knowing and feeling, we often lose partial or complete touch with it. Opening the heart requires self-honesty and vulnerability. Our conscious access to the heart area is deeply influenced by our core limiting beliefs, our feelings of unworthiness, as well as our sense of interpersonal safety. As our heart opens and awakens, we discover personal, soulful, and ultimately universal dimensions of sensitivity and understanding. The three primary portals to our true nature – head, heart, and ground – interact in subtle concert with one another.

Session 2: Heart as a Center of Feeling, Sensing, and Knowing

The heart area is a center of deep feeling, sensing, and knowing. It is where we feel love, compassion, kindness, gratitude, connection, and grief, as well as unworthiness, abject aloneness, alienation, self-hatred, and separation. Our hearts can feel warm, open, radiant, expansive, and full or, alternatively, cold, closed, numb, dark, contracted and empty. Depending upon how open and awake our heart is, we can be in touch with the quiet inner knowing of our essential wholeness and non-separateness, or be enmeshed in our chaotic thoughts and feelings; we can feel deeply at home or completely lost. 

Early family conditioning deeply impacts the openness of the heart area. As humans, we need to feel safe, loved, and connected; we need to experience being seen, held, protected, and cherished. If we are neglected or abused, or experience significant trauma, our body/mind system in general, and the heart area in particular, will shut down. As part of this process, we adopt core limiting beliefs about what is missing or wrong about us. These in turn trigger emotional reactions. We then suppress and exile these child parts as we try to navigate our lives. 

Opening the spiritual depths of the heart will at some point flush out our unfinished early childhood needs and feelings to be healed and integrated. As this happens, it is easier to sustain contact with the deepest dimensions of the heart.

Session 3:   Welcoming and Exploring the Human Heart from Presence and with Meditative Inquiry

We attune with Presence by allowing our attention to rest back in and as spacious, open awareness. Presence does not have an agenda to fix or change our experience; it accepts and is intimate with our experience as it is. 

When we approach our conditioned heart from Presence, there is a natural relaxation and unfolding. Contractions begin to spontaneously soften, warm, release, and integrate. Difficult experiences are more easily tolerated and exiled parts reveal their hidden, essential qualities of being. 

Often a contraction in the heart area will be connected to a core limiting belief about ourself that induces a feeling of being unworthy and unlovable. If needed, we can recognize and question our core limiting beliefs with a powerful form of meditative inquiry.

Session 4:  Discovering the Soul

As our attention deepens into the heart area, we may discover a subtle and very potent intermediate layer between the personal self and unbounded awareness that we can call the “soul.” It is a non-egoic, individuated expression with a signature vibration and specific gifts to share with others. It exists within an archetypal and subtle energetic domain that may arise spontaneously in dreams or visions or be evoked through active imagination, vision quests, plant medicine, certain forms of meditation, or dyadic gazing.

When we are in touch with this soul level of experience, we feel aligned with our life’s calling and are able to experience the most profound interpersonal intimacy. 

Session 5:  The Universal Heart

The deepest level of the heart is universal. It is a field of loving awareness that is shared by all beings, just as the ocean is the source of all waves. Regardless of our conditioning and whatever apparent limitations and flaws we may have, our essential nature is inherently whole. When attention rests in the universal heart, we feel deeply at home in ourselves. There is a sense of deep self-acceptance and inner peace.

The universal heart is also non-separate from everyone and everything. It welcomes, embraces, and recognizes all experience as itself. It is unconditionally loving. Any remaining sense of separation, disconnection, or alienation falls away. Yet to sustain a stabilized access to the universal heart, we must feel safe on a foundational level. This requires an intimacy with our deepest ground – the felt-sense of spacious stability in and beneath the physical body.

Session 6:  Grounding the Heart

We are unable to sustain a profound open-heartedness unless we feel deeply grounded. This requires that we intimately explore our experience of the ground – our felt-sense of spacious stability that lies within and below the lower half of our body. 

The openness of the heart area usually does not transpose directly to the hara (belly) and the ground. Often we will need to face and explore our deepest survival fears and welcome them into the light of awareness in order to discover our true ground. This takes considerable courage. As we traverse similar personal and archetypal layers to the ground that we encountered in the heart area, our experience of the ground opens up to a realm of silence, stillness, and darkness, as well as pure potentiality. As we open to the Unknown, we also open to a primal upwelling of an essential life force that supports the full flowering of the heart.

By the end of this course you will be able to:

• Explore your heart and grounding through meditations.
• Inquire into limiting beliefs.
• Establish a sense of the deep grounding that is available to you in and beneath the physical body.
• Be aware of the universal heart within and beyond your own heart.
• Connect to the essential wholeness of the heart healing of our unmet needs and exiled hurt can happen .