A Year of the Heart

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The Journey Begins

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Dozens of us have walked the Elephant Path together, completing the 12-Week Foundational Mind Training — the 9 Stages of Calm Staying. Along the way, we've built the attentional foundation to navigate not just psychedelic space, but life itself. The same awareness that moves through a meditation moves through a Tuesday morning. There is no division. It is one continuous field.

The Elephant Path is a dear and trusted friend that will travel with us— but knowing how to paddle was never the point. It's about where we are going and the journey to get there.

We are explorers. We are healers. We are here to grow and discover the life within us that's begging to come forth.

We have our paddle. We're now ready to embark on the real journey.

Let’s Go In

A MESSAGE FROM ME TO YOU

A year of the heart is exactly what it says it is.

For one year, we will dedicate ourselves to living into and opening our most central energy center. We will use all of the tools available to us — meditative practices, psychedelic medicines, somatic work, and most importantly, each other. First and foremost, this is a community. It is comprised of skilled, seasoned, and committed practitioners living in service of the beautiful wholeness of being. We need to open our hearts, but we cannot do it alone.

This is about getting in the same room as our wounded parts and sharpening our perception — training it to be deep enough, subtle enough, soft enough, gentle enough — to actually see what's happening inside us. Like a perfectly refined key into a lock, we learn to give our parts the kind of love they have been screaming for, perhaps our whole lives.

How exquisitely soft, tender, and receptive is our love? What is its texture? Can we get interested enough to listen deeply enough to hear how the part wants to be loved? Can we apply a softness that works like nanotechnology — awareness so refined, so gentle, so attuned, that the part feels called to step into the light?

THE JOURNEY

This is a year-long living practice with two sessions each week. It is not envisioned as a curriculum you move through, but as a community you grow inside of. The view we have been cultivating together is not something we arrive at. It is something we go deeper into for the rest of our lives. A Year of the Heart is where that deepening begins in earnest.

This journey unfolds in a rolling four-week cycle of practice, each week its own current. Each week will be repeated twelve times across the year. This journey design emphasizes a process of returning anew. It is inspired by the principles of neuroplasticity and encourages new pathways to deepen through regular recurring practice.

We meet on Mondays and Thursdays at 7am PT with psychedelic meditation every 3rd Sunday.

Week 4 — Group Tonglen + Sunday Psychedelic Meditation

We practice as one organism, inhaling collective adversity into the crucible of the shared heart, alchemizing together what we have long been resisting alone. We energetically rest our backs into one another, facing outward as one body. Sometimes we hold hands in the imaginal space, exploring configurations of energetic intimacy that prepare us for the in-person work ahead. Sometimes we presence one practitioner's adversity and breathe it into our collective heart. The vastness we have been cultivating becomes the container; the fineness becomes the medicine.

On Sunday, we gather at 8am PT on Zoom to unite meditation and medicine, working with an actual psychedelic as a community, bringing everything we have been cultivating into direct contact with the expanded state. These Sunday low-dose medicine-assisted meditations are called Sunday at Sea.

Themes: Tonglen · One body, one mind, one heart · Collective alchemy

(These meditations cycle throughout the year, keeping our exploration fresh and dynamic)

Cause and Effect — An analytical meditation on how our actions plant seeds that sprout and grow later, renewing our motivation to practice and our commitment to cultivating positive seeds.

Walking / Standing — We rest into the ground, releasing tension, staying with its stability. This contact grows groundedness within while training the stability of our attention.

Loving Self Touch — How can we be with ourselves if we don't love ourselves? This practice lets us meet our need for love right here, with our own hands, rather than seeking it elsewhere.

Cultivating Yin-Heart and Yang-Heart — We cultivate the Yin Heart, soft and receptive, and the Yang Heart, fierce and protective — the two qualities required to meet reactivity and adversity on the path.

Ideal Parent Attachment Repair — Working with the five apects of secure attachment — safety, attunement, soothing, delight, and encouragement — we build an internalized secure attachment model that replaces the old insecure map we were born with.

Week 2 — 9 Stages of Calm Staying

We return to the foundational practice to increase our capacity to calmly love experience, our parts and our wounding. We train in staying with determination, not abandoning our parts when the mind wanders. We develop metacognitive awareness, learning to meet suffering without fusing with it. We practice returning to stillness with effortlessness. We cultivate meditative joy, training the heart to meet experience with delight, so that joy arises not from circumstance but from the ground of practice itself. This is a lifelong cultivation. Here, together, we go to deeper levels of it.

Themes: Determination · Metacognitive awareness · Effortlessness · Meditative Joy · Psychedelic Meditation

Week 1 — Integrating & Weaving Learnings

In our first session of the week, we create space to integrate transferable learnings from the psychedelic experiences in our lives, as well as The Other Shore group journeys offered by Awakening the Navigator throughout the year. In the second session, we gather more informally — getting to know one another, sharing feedback, weaving the intelligence of the group back into the community we're building together. Integration and communion, held as one.


In our second session of the week, we hold a community call that is more informal: a space to share experiences, longings, and feedback, and to build community together. We take the group intelligence and feed it back into the community we are building.

Themes: Integration · Community

*This journey is open only to those who have completed the 12-week Awakening the Navigator foundation training and to those of us who recognize the pain and suffering in our world and who are moved to heal through their actions.This means we are all paddling in sync, from the same source, with conviction, and we’re helping each other deepen our understanding of the way.

Our intention is to construct a coherent vessel that gradually, week by week, opens our hearts and inspires us to live with ever deeper intimacy with life.

Specifically, we are committed to:

  • Growing a community of people devoted to bringing healing to themselves and others

  • Encouraging regular meditative practice and continued training in stabilized attention

  • Integrating meditative learnings into psychedelic medicine journeys in service of healing

  • Centering this initial yearly cycle around what we deem the most fundamental need: opening and living into the heart

Week 3 — Wild Card Meditations

The Other Shore Medicine Journeys

Woven throughout the Year of the Heart, we offer intimate four-person medicine journeys called The Other Shore, where everything we have been cultivating meets the psychedelic medicines directly. In these hands-on, relational healing containers, we combine our meditative training and powerful group field with psychedelic medicines to create truly exceptional opportunities for healing and connection. It is here that a view as vast as the sky and as fine as light through water becomes something you can actually navigate by. In relationship to our daily lives, these journeys will feel like standing on new ground together. Another shore. Everyone who has entered these waters has told me it introduced them to a new level of what this work can be. See testimonials.

Investment

A Year of the Heart

Annual: $1,800 - $4,000+

Monthly: $222 - $333+

  • Annual commitment, monthly contribution

The Other Shore

$700 - $2,222+

These range exists because we want this work to be accessible and sustainable. The program has real costs—teacher compensation, community infrastructure, the care required to hold this work well. When those who have capacity contribute at the higher end, it creates space for those who genuinely need the lower end.

We invite you to choose an investment that reflects both what you can offer and what this work is worth to you. Not what feels safe or minimal, and not what strains you beyond what's sustainable. What's true.

Enroll

Your Questions, Answered

  • The four week cycles begin every four weeks. You can join at the beginning of a monthly cycle.

  • We hold a present and consistent container. If you anticipate missing more than 20% of calls, let us know ahead of time.

  • One hour, twice per week.

  • No explicit prep is required, though readings or practices may be suggested to support the work.

  • Between 6 and 20 people.

  • The 3-month Awakening the Navigator Foundation training is the 9 Stages of Calm-Staying. A Year of the Heart is putting that training to work in service of opening the heart and living with intimacy. Once we have a relatively stable attentional system, we can do deeper work together and integrate other practices, which require stable attention.

  • A Year of the Heart Sunday at Sea journeys happen once every four weeks and are included in the program. The Other Shore journeys are separate engagements and should be discussed directly with Ryan.

  • Both. We're refining foundational training and using it to travel deeper.

  • We offer a sliding scale. For inquiries beyond this, schedule a call with Ryan.

  • This is an annual commitment. You can pay upfront for the full year or monthly, but the agreement is for a full year.

  • We have a strict no-refund policy. If a serious life event arises—illness, family emergency, major crisis—reach out to Ryan directly to discuss your situation.

  • The foundational training sets you up for success. Our application process is designed as self-inquiry to help answer this question. If this offering speaks to your heart—if you feel light and awake as you come in contact with it—you're likely ready.

  • The intention is that no one is left behind. This is group work. We're here to help each other grow.

  • This is it.

Join the Journey

To care for the coherence and integrity of this container, enrollment for A Year of the Heart will be a discerning process. We are looking for those who have done the foundational work — who carry a genuine resonance with the Elephant Path, who can hold themselves with stability in group journey space, and whose presence contributes to the coherence of the field we are building together. If this isn't the right moment, it doesn't mean the door is closed. It means the work of getting there is the next step.

Enroll