Since the beginning of time, humans have used art to explore the big questions and express that inexplicable ‘something more’ within and beyond the material world.  From the original cave paintings to the Natyashastra, an ancient Indian text detailing the performing arts and general aesthetics as an important vehicle for spiritual enlightenment, to Aztec dance, Japanese rock gardens, and medieval Christian passion plays, art has expressed and facilitated our relationship with the transcendent.  Images, stories, music, and movement validate, and invite seekers into, a reality beyond the material world.  Mystery comes alive in the spiritual imagination through art-making and participation in the arts.

Breaking free of religious baggage, art expresses the wisdom of contemplative practice and speaks to the modern seeker.  The key gestures of contemplative practice (consent, gratitude, willingness, compassion, presence, curiosity, courage, faithfulness) can be found in every art form.  The rigors of craft can be a trustworthy framework for spiritual growth.  

In a culture where art is commodified and consumed, we seek to reclaim participatory, reverent, and community-building experiences of art.  We create an environment where art is taught as a practice and understood to be a means for traversing the path of personal and collective transformation.  Through beauty and contemplation, we intentionally generate experiences of reverence and awe; we create art experiences that focus on, acknowledge, and name something more than the self.

We understand contemplation to be any means of heeding the life force within creation.  This source is ultimately a mystery.  The mystical lineages of the great Abrahamic, Eastern, and Indigenous traditions have preserved this contemplative wisdom, often in spite of institutional religion’s attempts to suppress it.  We believe contemplation is key to any transformational path, for individuals, for communities, and for our planet.  Why?  Because humans alone cannot solve human problems.  We need one another, we need the earth, and we need to be in relationship with mystery.  In the alchemy of elements necessary to create a just and sustainable world, contemplative listening, seeing, and movement are key--and often dismissed.  We make space for contemplative exploration, education, and ever-deepening practice.  As Angel Kyodo Williams says, “Love and justice are not two. Without inner change, there can be no outer change. And without collective change, no change matters.”

As our materialistic culture leaves people increasingly bereft of connections to community, the earth, and the inner life; as the crises of our time (threats to the environment, to equity, to our democracy, to peace) overwhelm us, induce anxiety, and often lead to despair, we offer a haven for the formation of purpose and meaning.  We provide seekers with connection, guidance, inspiration, healing, and the deep structures that support spiritual growth.  We practice letting go–a revolutionary act in a culture of production, noise, competition, and commerce, all of which focus on the external; inner receptivity and attunement are foundational parts of being in relationship with Mystery–that is, with something larger than ourselves.  Our world needs people grounded in love--for self, for others, for the planet, and for the source of life--to do the work of creating the beloved community.

In every second of a creative endeavor or a spiritual endeavor, we’re offered a choice: Take the usual, well-worn route or turn from a solitary endeavor into an co-creative conversation. This minute leap into newness is a way of choosing life.  Contemplation is, at its heart, creative. Creativity is, at its core, contemplative.

As artists and art-lovers, we cherish alternative ways of welcoming the Spirit’s movement in our work and lives. We wanted to expand and inclusify how seekers think about transformational practice.  The phrase “creative contemplation” comes from Beatrice Bruteau, a teacher of Christian mysticism and a pioneer in the integration of science, spirituality, and philosophy. Contemplation to Bruteau is seeing with the eye of the heart while also manifesting that vision in life. Contemplation and action don’t sit on opposite sides of the see-saw. We don’t rise from the meditation cushion, charged by a moral mandate to balance our inward time with outward efforts to change the world. No. Contemplation’s creative nature is a profound type of action, born of great mystery, containing a life-force all its own. 

That infinitesimal moment when we place ourselves in relationship with mystery is a seed.  Our work, both within and without, is to help it grow. Action without its creative contemplative root is like rearranging the chairs on a sinking ship. Action with this creative contemplative root continually surprises and renews us with compassion, reconciliation, and beauty.

We believe connections among people and between people and the land are essential for spiritual well-being and collective resilience.  Our programs, both in person and online, always ground participants in place and work toward the formation of community through opportunities for conversation and connectivity.  We cultivate supportive community for teaching artists and staff that we might deepen one another’s practices and strengthen our presence.

Because we’re focused on community formation, hospitality is a central value of our ministry.  We create inviting, inclusive environments with a culture of openness and respect.

Practice is the centerpiece of contemplation and creativity.  To build our capacity to let go, listen, be humble, be truthful, be honest, and connect more deeply to one another, we must practice.  To gain creative freedom, authenticity, and power–for our art to effectively work transformation in our audience–we must practice.

When our artistic or spiritual practice becomes a trustworthy, ongoing means of transformation, both personally and communally, it becomes a path.  Eye of the Heart creates environments where participants discover their own practices and walk their unique paths.

We believe our means shape our ends, that our process forms our product.  Therefore we attend to how we are together, practicing creative contemplative listening, not just within our programming but in every process of our organization.  In this way, every activity is an opportunity for practice.

Our future survival depends on humanity transitioning away from ego-driven, product-oriented, extractual, colonizing activity toward cooperative listening, compassion, hospitality, intuition, community, reverence for the body and the natural world, valuing beauty, yielding to mystery,  and deep understanding of our interdependence.  Because women’s wisdom and leadership traditionally honor these values and have been historically oppressed, we uplift them as central to our organizational structure and functioning. 

More significantly, we recognize the toxic effects of male-dominated religion and millennia-long oppression and repression of the divine feminine.  As a counterbalance, we raise up divine feminine energy in all its manifestations, especially those attributes most denied by our culture–darkness, descent, the womb, yielding force, the power of listening, birth, and the capacity to hold contradictions.