Wise Paths To The Heart
with Marina Vinyals and Hans Burghardt
The course “Wise paths to the heart” focuses on cultivating warm-heartedness and prosocial attitudes, which are essential for human evolution, well-being, and flourishing. It presents the four immeasurable attitudes of loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity, as drawn from the Buddhist tradition, and explores the mind of awakening, which embraces all sentient beings. It is complemented by references to the current scientific understanding of the nature and biological basis of altruism, empathy, compassion, and self-compassion.
This course is a part of the FPMT “Buddhist Mind Science: Activating Your Potential” series, which introduces the Buddhist knowledge of the mind and meditation to provide practical techniques and insight on the mechanisms of suffering and happiness, finding purpose and mental balance, and how to discover and activate our inner potential for warm-heartedness and wisdom, including a comparative modern scientific perspective and with the aim to contribute to the welfare in this world.
The Journey
“Wise paths to the heart” gradually unfolds as a journey along different topics:
1. Warm-heartedness as a source of well-being explores whether warm-heartedness is a source of well-being, with research on the nature of altruism and ethics, and on the biological basis of warm-heartedness. We also explore whether it can be trained.
2. To care for yourself to care for others starts by seeing how to take care of oneself, and how taking care of oneself also entails taking care—or connecting—with others.
3. The four immeasurables work with specific aspects of warm-heartedness and prosocial attitudes: the four immeasurable qualities of loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity. It also presents how to move from empathy to compassion.
4. Strengthening warm-heartedness deepens into the four immeasurables, by exploring their relation with wisdom, and by finding ways to replace afflictions for the four immeasurables.
5. The mind of awakening goes further to explore the possibility of fully developing our potential of warmheartedness and wisdom with the mind of awakening, which aims to attain enlightenment for the benefit of all beings.
6. Alchemy of the heart presents unique and provoking approaches to cultivating such a mind with methods that allow us to gradually replace egoism and self-centeredness for altruism and awareness of others.
About the Teachers
Marina Brucet Vinyals holds a BA an a MA in Biochemistry and a PhD in Molecular Biology in Immunology from the University of Barcelona, where she also performed postdoctoral studies. After this, she decided to change research in the laboratory for research of the mind and its possibilities. To this aim, she completed a six-year full-time study program Masters Program of Advanced Buddhist Studies of Sutra and Tantra at Lama Tzong Khapa Institute, Italy. She studied with great Tibetan lamas such as His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Lama Zopa Rinpoche, Lama Jampa Monlam and Khensur Jampa Tegchok, amongst others, and has completed a one-year individual meditation retreat, among others. Presently, she combines continual development and meditation retreats with teaching meditation and Buddhist philosophy, at both general and specialized levels, with an approach that always takes into account the context and circumstances of Western life. She mainly teaches at Tushita Meditation Center Spain and other FPMT centers, and collaborates with SEE Learning (Emory University) in Spain.
Hans Burghardt holds a BA and a MA in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and a PhD from the University of Barcelona, where he spent seven years doing research. Since 2002, he meditates and is a student of great Buddhist masters including His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Kyabje Lama Zopa Rinpoche, Kirti Tsenshab Rinpoche, Lama Jampa Monlam, Khensur Jampa Tegchok amongst others. He has completed the Masters Program of Advanced Buddhist Studies of Sutra and Tantra at Istituto Lama Tzong Khapa (Italy) and has completed a one-year individual meditation retreat. He currently teaches meditation and Buddhism at Tushita Meditation Center Spain and other FPMT centers, and is co-founder and coordinator of the Initiative for an Emotional, Ethical, and Social Education, that promotes the establishment of Emory University’s SEE Learning in Spain.
