Cultivating the Heart: 8-Week Course

Cultivating the Heart is an 8-week online meditation course in the Insight Meditation tradition, rooted in Buddhist teaching on the Brahmaviharas, the "divine abodes" of the heart: loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity. It is taught live on Zoom by Stan Eisenstein, a full teacher with the Insight Meditation Community of Washington, and offered from De Pere, Wisconsin. It suits anyone looking for a structured, practice-based way to grow kindness, connection, and steadiness of heart.

What to Expect

The course meets for eight live, two-hour experiential sessions, held in the evening on Eastern Time. The approach is that these heart qualities can be cultivated directly. Through intention, attention, meditation, reasoning, and embodied and imaginal practice, the capacity for them grows over the weeks.

The practice moves outward in stages. You begin by bringing kindness to yourself, then to people you find mildly or moderately challenging, and finally to all beings. From there the course turns to compassion and its difficulty: how to stay present when you meet suffering rather than pulling away. Forgiveness and gratitude are explored, along with ways of moving through grief effectively.

Equanimity has its own place in the arc, as the quality that keeps an opening heart balanced and discerning. The course closes by touching the Spiritual Heart, the heart of loving awareness, and how it can be experienced for ourselves and for others.

Alongside the live sessions, participants receive eight guided meditations designed to cultivate the heart, so the work continues between meetings.

About Stan Eisenstein

Stan Eisenstein is a mindfulness and meditation teacher whose work centers on mindfulness, embodiment, self-kindness, self-inquiry, meditation, and inner guidance. He says his teaching comes largely from life experience: decades of working to resolve an early trauma through a self-awareness training, therapy, inquiry-based meditation, integrated breathwork, energy practices, and ongoing study of Buddhist teachings.

He has meditated since 1988 and has practiced Insight Meditation since 2004. He is a full teacher with the Insight Meditation Community of Washington and a graduate of the Meditation Teacher Training Institute. He trained in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction with Jon Kabat-Zinn in 2004, and has also studied Somatic Experiencing, Integrative Breathwork, and Tantric Qigong. He holds a Masters of Social Work from the University of Maryland and taught high school physics for 32 years.

Before You Go

The course takes place entirely online over Zoom, so you can join from wherever you have a quiet space and a connection. No specific experience level is required for the main course. A separate deepening practice track is offered for graduates of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR).

Tuition covers all eight live sessions and the eight guided meditations. Some scholarship support is available for those who need it, and you can apply by contacting the teacher directly. Registration and further course information are handled through the Insight Meditation Community of Washington.