Cave Heart

Jnana yoga is the path of direct knowing: the way to freedom that works not by adding anything to you but by letting go of a wrong idea about what you are. Jnana is the Sanskrit word for wisdom, and it does not mean information. Sri Ramana Maharshi, who lived at the foot of the mountain Arunachala in southern India until 1950, is one of its clearest modern voices. Cave of the Heart Retreats draws inspiration from Sri Ramana Maharshi on our silent retreats at Karuna Retreat Center in...

Self-Inquiry is much more than a meditation practice. It is the very quest to find the Truth of our own being, which implies a profound change in our attitude and in the direction of our attention. In Self-Inquiry meditation, the attention turns back on itself and looks for the one who is aware. Instead of attending to the breath, or to sensation, or to a mantra, we follow the simple sense of being back to its source, held in the question "Who am I?". Cave of the Heart Retreats teaches it as...

A mindfulness retreat usually means one of two things: a residential course in the secular, clinically studied kind of mindfulness that came out of MBSR, or a Buddhist retreat teaching sati, the quality of attention. Cave of the Heart Retreats runs neither. We mainly run Hridaya silent meditation retreats at Karuna Retreat Center in Monchique, in the Algarve, Portugal. We have never called them mindfulness retreats, and the word appears nowhere else on this website. What people mean by a...