An Exciting Announcement
New Offering: Awakening to the Heart
Dear Friends,
With utter delight and a little childlike anticipation, I share with you today a new offering I have been working on for quite some time:
~ a forthcoming 12-week online course, “Awakening to the Heart,” followed by an (optional) onsite “deepening/culmination” retreat as an inner pilgrimage to the divine Presence at the heart of our being.
These offerings will dovetail with further reflections on the “Matter of the Heart,” our current series of Sunday essays. They are intended for you who wish to deeply engage the organ of the heart as an organ of perceptivity and inscape of presence.
In last week’s compilation, we said this:
To engage the heart is to pledge the fullness of our being within the organ of the heart, to give ourselves to the vortical cave of invisible depths, to abide inside the pulsating aliveness out of which flows presence into the innocent immediacy of incarnate experience with and as the world. It feels like our natural state, forgotten long ago.1 Engaging the heart, we recall the potency of the heart.
We cannot follow the arc of this inner work in a weekend or over a week or two. Surely, it is the journey of a lifetime. But our semester-long exploration beginning September 2 hopes to set a path before us, engaging the heart gently, tenderly, with immediacy and receptivity to its radiant im/emanation, revelatory potency, and indwelling spiritual sensorium. We engage the heart not as metaphor but as vital force. And so, in this work, we transform not only our understanding of the heart but are transformed by our experience.
I hope you will join me.
Ever in gratitude and with love,
Renée
12-Week Correspondence Course + (optional) Onsite Retreat
September 2–November 23, 2025 || (optional onsite retreat) December 3–7, 2025
By becoming what we are present with—through the rhythms of our body, intensified most completely within the heart—we know by communion rather than by the distance of mental-ness.
~Robert Sardello, Heartfulness2
In his visionary work, The Human Phenomenon, Jesuit priest, mystic, and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin offered that as much as the universe is evermore in the process of evolution, it is, in the same way, in the process of involution. This process of involution is a movement toward interiorization, toward the innermost invisible depths of our being, toward soul—the inner kernel of originary Presence expressive in and as our lives. In a later postscript to this work, Teilhard intimated the emergence of a next evolutionary mode beyond the noosphere, the sphere of thought, given birth in the human some thirty thousand years ago, which rose from the biosphere, the sphere of life itself.3 Louis Savary, who has been teaching Teilhardian spirituality for over forty years, has named this next evolutionary step the cardisphere, from the Greek, kardia, meaning heart.4 This next mode of being that Teilhard began to see brings us closer to a more unified way of being.5 But there’s a but. Teilhard urged in another work, The Divine Milieu, that all soul development is funded by intention.6 It does not come without our willing participation.
Drawing insights from science and contemplative spirituality, in this course, we will abide in the immediacy of experience to understand the heart as an organ of radical receptivity, perceptivity, and radiance, as the ground of inner feeling, vessel of presence, and reflection of soul and spiritual sensorium. Over twelve weeks and six segments, we will come home to the heart, not as the mere anatomical pump the physical heart is imaged to be, but as a cosmic vortex of interiority. We will nurture intimacy and communion with self, Other, and the Natural World.
Over six segments, we will explore. . .
~ The Heart as Inner Sanctuary: Coming Home to the Felt Sense of the Heart ~ The Heart as Radical Receptivity: Opening to the Heart's Way of Being ~ The Heart as Perceiver: Attuning to the Heart's Way of Knowing ~ The Heart as Cave of Soul: Entering Inner Feeling (distinct from 'emotional drama') ~ The Heart as Chamber of Communion: Becoming Heartful Presence (I-Thou presence with) ~ The Heart as Grail: Living as a Vessel of Soulful Intimacy
Each segment will call us into presence of the heart through:
~ Weekly reflective readings
~ Interoceptive (inner sensing) practices to attune to and abide in the organ of the heart
~ Heartful practices of presence, inner feeling, intimacy, and communion
~ Written "assignments" [brief]
~ Weekly Zoom gatherings for practice and reflective conversationOnsite Deepening/Culmination Retreat (optional)
December 3–7, 2025 || Valle Crucis Retreat Center, Banner Elk, North Carolina
Valle Crucis Retreat Center has invited us to return this year. This retreat in Silence will deepen our practice of heartful presence with originary Presence as the divine milieu in which we are ceaselessly bathed. A daily rhythm of meditation/prayer of the heart, deepening practices and reflections, contemplative reflective time for Earth walks, integration, and rest, and reflective conversation by the fire will nurture an inner pilgrimage.
Our gathering will take place at the Inn at Valle Crucis in Banner Elk, NC. The Inn is an old schoolhouse deep in the heart of the southern Appalachian mountains on 450 acres of sacred ground, some of the most ancient mountains on Earth, and home of the Cherokee. There are miles and miles of walking trails for all levels. During our time together, we will make a daily pilgrimage (by van) up to the peak of the grounds to St. Anthony’s Chapel, where we will be bathed in sacred Silence—a daily highlight for many of us during last year’s Valle Crucis pilgrimage.
Teilhard said that Love is the affinity of being with being.7 This pilgrimage, as a culmination and deepening of our online course, “Awakening to the Heart,” allures us into the primordial depths of Presence ever streaming toward us as Love. We become intimate with and begin to see through all that is with awe, amazement, and adoration, enlivened as the embodiment of Love.
December 3 – Arrive by 4 pm, settle, dinner, communion by the fire in the Inn, enter Silence December 4 Theme – The Human Heart as 'Cosmic Vortex of Interiorization': Belonging to the Interior Depths of Heart December 5 Theme – Seeing through the Eye of the Heart: Insight, Intuition, and the Imaginal December 6 Theme – Abiding in the Divine Milieu of Originary Presence: Awe, Amazement, and Adoration December 7 – Closing Circle, depart by noon
Your Fellow Travelers of the Heart
Renée Eli
My life is devoted to human becoming—as an eco-contemplative philosopher, lay monk, and mentor. I hold a Ph.D. in Transformative Studies with a concentration in Consciousness Studies from the California Institute of Integral Studies. I am the recipient of a 2015 research fellowship from Esalen Institute’s Center for Theory and Research for work contributing to The Future of the Body project. From 2014–2025, I served on the Educator Council Board for the Center for Education, Imagination and the Natural World, a work closely mentored by the late cultural historian and eco-theologian Thomas Berry.
In November 2022, I took to the road in a converted Sprinter, a roadhorse made vanhome by a man who grew up on sailboats. I did not know where I would go. I could not say how long I would stay. I vowed on Day 1 and each thereafter to not know, to unplan, and to lean headlong into every fear and fall. There were lots of falls. After nine months, bumbling toward what, at the time, I could not say, I leapt out of the Arctic Ocean breathless with the revelation that longing has no end. It comes to meet you in all that is, an originary Presence closer to you than you are to yourself. I came home a forever pilgrim.
Toni Monsey
I was born and raised beneath the dancing northern lights of Fairbanks, Alaska, where wildness shaped my bones and longing stirred my heart. Leaving Fairbanks for college was less an escape and more a pilgrimage—a winding journey toward wholeness that has carried me through many landscapes, inner and outer. Nearly forty years later, I find myself splitting time between Charlotte, Vermont, and Salcha, Alaska—two places that keep teaching me how to live with roots in family and wings of freedom.
Along the way, I earned a Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology from the University of Vermont, trained as a spiritual director at the Institute for Spiritual Development in Burlington, and I co-steward The We ONEing, an online spiritual community devoted to shared presence and awakening together. I am also the author of the forthcoming book Luminous Truth: Breaking the Dark Patterns of Intergenerational Trauma by the Light of the Heart.
Through the opening of my heart, I’ve come to see that the path is truest when traveled with others, into the vast Heart of God—curious, stumbling, learning, and laughing—because, truly, it’s the best way to go.
Registration + Details
Course & Retreat Offered on a Suggested Donation Basis
12-Week Online Course: $275 (suggested donation) Online Course + Onsite Retreat: $555 (suggested donation)
If you have the means to contribute more than the suggested donation, please offer what you can. It means so much to those who need scholarship funds and helps make these offerings possible on a donation basis.
Please let me know if you require financial assistance.
Payment plan is available to ease burden of cost. Please ask.
Room & Board for Valle Crucis Retreat
Room + Meals & Doreen’s delicious teas and snacks + Transportation to and from Asheville airport = $540/person
A simply furnished, private room at the Inn, without telephone or internet, offers the necessary quiet for retreat from the world. Each guest room has a private bath.
Meals are simple, hearty, organic when available, with plenty of gluten-free and vegan options.
For participants traveling by air, a shuttle will depart Asheville Regional Airport to Valle Crucis by 2 pm on December 3 and return by 2 pm on December 7.
Registration
Please email me: reneeeliphd [AT] gmail [DOT] com to register for either the online course or both the course and retreat.
For you who plan to attend the retreat at Valle Crucis, I will put you in touch with Doreen Tanenbaum, Retreat Coordinator, who will assist you with details to coordinate your arrival, transportation, departure, meal preferences, and any details that will make your experience more comfortable and a retreat in the truest sense.
Retreat Refunds
Full refund 30+ days prior to retreat; November 2 is the final day for a full refund. 50% refund 15–29 days prior to December 2. No refunds for cancellations less than 15 days prior to retreat, except for emergencies.
This culmination retreat is optional but encouraged.
Essays in this “Heart” Series
~ Matter of the Heart – Part I
~ Matter of the Heart – Part II
~ Matter of the Heart – Part III
~ Matter of the Heart – Part IV
Notes & References
Robert Sardello, Robert Sardello, Heartfulness (Gainesville, TX: Goldenstone Press, 2015), no pagination.
Robert Sardello, Heartfulness.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Human Phenomenon, trans. Barnard Wall (New York: HarperPerennial, 1958).
Louis Savary, “Teilhard’s New Sphere: Emergence of the Cardisphere,” (unpublished manuscript).
We see in these modes, the biosphere, noosphere, and cardisphere as the embodiment of evolution expressed in the human, an intimate correlation with Jean Gebser’s integration of the unfolding structures of consciousness.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Divine Milieu: An Essay on the Interior Life, trans. Barnard Wall (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1960). For in-depth reflections on The Divine Milieu, see Kathleen N. Deignan, The Divine Milieu: Teilhard de Chardin (Silver Spring, MD: Learn25, 2017).
Teilhard de Chardin, Human Phenomenon.
This sounds wonderful, Renee, and so necessary.
Beautiful and necessary offering friend. If I weren’t heading into an already full autumn with the book launch, I’d be seriously considering this. Your work lights up my own.
And wow I’m intrigued by this, the movement out of the thinking mind: “this next evolutionary step the cardisphere, from the Greek, kardia, meaning heart. This next mode of being that Teilhard began to see brings us closer to a more unified way of being.”