Moving from Separation to Authentic Connection - Kaira Jewel Lingo

Discover profound teachings and deep wisdom on cultivating true love and interconnectedness – with everyone and everything

The world is divided enough without being separated from your own heart.

Painful and dangerous levels of divisiveness and conflict are growing around the world.

Yet the heart practices presented here can help us to find and nurture the thread of connection that is always there between us and others.

The four immeasurable minds of love, as taught by the Buddha, are: Loving Kindness, Compassion, Joy, and Equanimity.

These are profoundly powerful tools to understand the separation from our own hearts and others, and learning how to work with them is ultimately only way we dissolve it.

This will be our path and practice in this 8-week study program with Kaira Jewel Lingo, a former nun who studied directly under Thich Nhat Hanh. Join Kaira Jewel on this journey as she guides us through a unique, in-depth exploration of these heart practices and teachings, and as we learn to cultivate and express the wisdom of love in all its forms.

Together we’ll explore how to cultivate true love, and how to strengthen and bring greater fulfillment into all of your relationships – whether with yourself, loved ones or friends, in the workplace or wider community.

Kaira Jewel brings her more than 2 decades of deep practice and teaching to life in this wonderful opportunity to experientially engage in teachings, dialog practices, meditations and homework exercises, all around the theme of cultivating authentic connection.

Module 1 – Loving Kindness for Ourselves

If our love does not bring joy to both ourselves and others, then it is not true love.
— Thich Naht Hahn

Practices of metta, or loving kindness, are simply a cultivation of friendship.

We often forget, or intentionally neglect, our needs for our own love, our own friendship.

In order to open our hearts to others, we need to first learn how to open to ourselves.

In this module we will explore teachings and practices that connect us to the depth of our own hearts, awakening the promise of loving kindness that is our inherent birthright.

Module 2 – Loving Kindness towards Others

“Love doesn’t just sit there like a stone; it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.”
— Ursula K. Le Guin

Love is a verb and therefore, as something to do or be done, becomes a practice.

To truly love others we need to understand them, relinquishing our ideas of how we think they should be.

We do not awaken outside of our relationships to others.

In this module we will discover how, in relating to others, we realize the deepest truths about ourselves.

Module 3 – Compassion for Ourselves

“If we have compassion in our hearts, every thought, word and action can generate a miracle”
— Thich Nhat Hanh

We have the tendency to shrink from what is painful, including our own suffering and discomfort.

This doesn’t actually alleviate our pain.

Compassion, the willingness to be with suffering with kindness, is what gives us the capacity to relieve it.

In this module we gently learn to open to our own suffering as an essential act of true love.

Module 4 - Compassion for Others

“Don’t throw anyone out of your heart”
— Neem Karoli Baba

Karuna (Compassion) can be understood as the quivering of the heart in response to suffering.

Our willingness to be moved by the suffering of others, rather than moving away from it, has an extraordinary effect on our minds and hearts: the radical understanding that our lives are inextricably connected.

The teachings and practices in this module skillfully guide us towards this understanding of our interconnection with all beings.

Module 5 - Joy for Ourselves

“How can we experience Joy for another if we do not experience it for ourselves? Joy is for everyone”
–– Thich Nhat Hanh

We can each do something every day to bring joy to ourselves and others.

This is a key element of true love. With mindfulness we see that while there is much suffering in us and around us that needs our attention, there is also much to celebrate and be grateful for.

The teachings and practices in this module help us to deepen our capacity to see the goodness in life, and to bring more joy to ourselves and others.

Module 6 - Joy for Others

“Sometimes your joy is the source of your smile, but sometimes your smile can be the source of your joy”
— Thich Nhat Hanh

The practice of celebrating in the joy of others is very helpful in opening us up and freeing ourselves from our small sense of self.

Practicing appreciative joy and creating joy for others disrupts the view that others’ experience of joy means less joy is available for us.

It nourishes us and becomes the antidote to jealousy and envy. We then discover the limitless nature of the quality of joy.

Module 7 - Equanimity within Ourselves

“Equanimity is the ground for wisdom and freedom, and protector of compassion and love.”
–– Gill Fronsdale

The Buddha describes the practice of equanimity as learning “to stand in the middle of all this.”

This element of true love is powerful in our personal lives, helping us ride the waves of fortune and misfortune.

The teachings and exercises in this module offer us a powerful opportunity to practice standing in the middle of our lives without being knocked over by the intensity of each passing wave of experience.

Module 8 - Equanimity and Inclusiveness towards Others

“If we knew the secret history of our enemies, we would find in each person enough sorrow to disarm all hostility”
— Henry Wordsworth Longfellow

While this fourth practice of true love is often translated as equanimity, Thich Nhat Hanh also translates it as inclusiveness, which adds a more active interpretation of how to apply it.

It is also an antidote to discrimination, dogmatism and intolerance, which is increasingly breaking down our social fabric.

The teachings of inclusiveness in this module support us us to stay open so we can overcome barriers and biases.

We will learn the capacity for reconciliation, which has the potential to lead to deep transformation, and to the authentic connection we long for.

On-Demand Course Details

Eight Recorded Modules

Filmed in high definition with teachings and experiential exercises to help you bring the practices into your daily life. These teachings can be watched at your own pace throughout the week. Each recorded teaching is roughly 30 minutes.

Five Guided Meditations

Guided meditations of 30 minutes are offered to support you in experiencing the teaching directly and deeply in your own practice.

Reflections for Daily Life

Kaira Jewel offers reflections and contemplations within each session to support your integration of the material into your daily life.

Total Flexibility

Complete this course independently, on your own schedule, at your ideal pace. Watch and re-watch the videos as you please.

About Kaira Jewel Lingo

Kaira Jewel Lingo is a Dharma teacher who has a lifelong interest in blending spirituality and meditation with social justice.

Having grown up in an ecumenical Christian community where families practiced a new kind of monasticism and worked with the poor, at the age of twenty-five she entered a Buddhist monastery in the Plum Village tradition and spent fifteen years living as a nun under the guidance of Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh. She received Lamp Transmission from Thich Nhat Hanh and became a Zen teacher in 2007, and is also a teacher in the Vipassana Insight lineage through Spirit Rock Meditation Center.

Today she sees her work as a continuation of the Engaged Buddhism developed by Thich Nhat Hanh as well as the work of her parents, inspired by their stories and her dad’s work with Martin Luther King Jr. on desegregating the South. In addition to writing We Were Made for These Times: Skilfully Moving through Change, Loss and Disruption (2021), she is also the editor of Thich Nhat Hanh’s Planting Seeds: Practicing Mindfulness with Children (2007).

Now based in New York, she teaches and leads retreats internationally, provides spiritual mentoring, and interweaves art, play, nature, racial and earth justice, and embodied mindfulness practice in her teaching. She especially feels called to share the Dharma with Black, Indigenous, and People of Color, as well as activists, educators, youth, artists, and families. Click here to learn more about Kaira Jewel Lingo.

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