On Demand Workshop: Cultivating Self-Love – A Four-Week Self-Love Meditation Course Integrating Buddhist Practice, Yoga Therapy and the Science of Neuroplasticity

Description

Self-love meditation is one of the most prescribed and least understood experiences in contemporary wellbeing culture. Spoken about as though it were a choice, something arrived at through intention, affirmation, or the right practice, yet for those who need it most, these well-intentioned but surface-level approaches fall short and can lead to further hopelessness and pain.

Many people spend years searching for how to love yourself, yet what the wisdom traditions of yoga and Buddhism have always known, and what two decades of neuroscientific research are now confirming, is that self-love arises in conjunction with a physiological state before it can become an enduring, or even possible, feeling.

The nervous system must first settle into genuine ease. When that happens, a distinct shift occurs: we move into the activity of the social engagement system, a physiological state in which warmth and connection toward others and toward ourselves become neurologically available. From that ground, kindness toward the self is no longer something to be effortfully constructed. It arises on its own.

The contemplative traditions of yoga and Buddhism built their practices around exactly this understanding, long before the science existed to name it. Through practices such as loving kindness meditation (metta meditation) and self-compassion meditation, they developed methods for cultivating the internal conditions in which genuine self-love can emerge.

What to Expect From Four-Weeks of Self-Love Meditation

Each week, participants move through yoga postures, specific breathwork sequences, and loving kindness meditation, with each session building cumulatively on the last. Home practice suggestions are provided between sessions to deepen and extend the effects of the work.

Session recordings are also made available, both for those who cannot attend live and as a resource for participants to practise the same sequence daily, gaining the full benefit of repetition over time.

This self-love meditation course is designed to support real change in the felt sense of self-love, not as a concept, but as a physiological experience that can become more available through sustained practice.

4-Week Self-Love Meditation Course: Practical details & Pricing

• All teaching sessions are recorded and uploaded shortly after each event, allowing you to catch up on missed sessions or revisit the practices throughout the series.
• Q&A sessions are not recorded in order to protect participant privacy.

About Heather Mason

This course is taught by Heather Mason, founder of The Minded Institute. Heather comes to this subject with a depth of understanding that is not easily replicated.

During her years in Buddhist monasteries, her struggle with self-love was profound enough that her teachers developed practices specifically to reach her; practices that went beyond what conventional teaching could offer. That experience became the foundation of a knowledge that has since been tested and refined through decades of clinical work, through teaching students and training teachers, and through serious engagement with the neuroscience of how nervous system states influence our capacity for self-compassion.

The result is a perspective that is at once personal, contemplative, and scientific, and a course that could only have been built from all three.

Prerequisites

This course is not suitable for beginners. It draws on breath practices that participants must already be familiar with, including ujjayi breath, a rapid breathing technique such as kapalabhati, and alternate nostril breathing. A working knowledge of yoga postures is also required.

If you are newer to yoga and breathwork, we recommend beginning with the Yoga Therapy for Anxiety series. It is designed to move practitioners through the material in a sequence that reflects how the nervous system and mind gradually change and become ready for deeper practice.

This self-love course is an introduction. Practice must be sustained for real change to emerge.