Heart Openers:

Audio love letters, movement & writing for hard times.
A monthly live immersive workshop.

Heart Openers Begins January, 2024.

With all that’s happening in the world, is it possible to be a tender-hearted person without burning out or escaping in distraction?

Our old ideas of self-care don’t cut it. A spa-day will not address our collective grief and heartache.

We need a new model of care.

Join us for Heart Openers, a monthly immersion in lavishing your heart with care that embraces creativity, makes space for celebration and sorrow, and opens portals to inhabiting your body with more ease.

Through audio love letters, gentle movement, and invitations to write, we’ll play with not escaping but arriving, finding refuge and connection as an everyday practice.

We’ll work with specific sites in the body - the feet, hips, belly, hands, shoulders, throat and heart - to listen for inner knowing, breathing new life into postures and habits.

True to the theme, this monthly live course will be light, playful, and requiring little effort.

We cannot make sense of suffering, but we can widen, soften, and fortify our hearts.

Heart Openers supports you to:

  • Develop embodied practices for care

  • Discover new portals for listening to your inner knowing

  • Become more familiar with your own rhythms & resources

  • Bring gentleness to your body and health

  • Connect to your own creativity, intuition, & even joy

“If you want to expound on love,
take your intellect out and let it lie down
in the mud. It’s no help.”
— Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks
“the heart is a front line and the fight is to feel in a world of distraction. ”
— adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy

Heart Openers is for those who:

  • Are weary and tender-hearted and need support every day (that doesn’t feel like more to do)

  • Seek support for their nervous systems

  • Are interested in inhabiting themselves with more fullness

  • Want to make space for celebration and sorrow

  • Believe in an inclusive, new model of care

  • What folks are saying.

    Heart Openers was exactly the medicine I needed right now. It was gentle, invitational, and full of deep permission. The audio love letters were the highlight of my days these past two weeks! The content was delivered in such a caring, lighthearted way, helping it feel incredibly digestible and supportive for this busy season in my life. This course is the perfect touchstone if you're looking for a light yet grounding way to come home to yourself in the midst of challenging times. - Bridgett

  • What folks are saying.

    “This course brought me back to very basic concepts of aliveness and growth, and unexpectedly catalyzed me to uncover some important revelations…Jones brings extraordinary expertise in embodiment, creativity, spirituality, and daily living in good times and bad to her teaching alongside a loving, generous and humorous spirit. It reminded me what's important, and brought these concepts to life in new ways that opened doors for creation of what works.” — Alexa Miller

  • What folks are saying.

    “Such profound reverence for ‘Reverence’. Each morning I woke early to open this ‘love letter’ in the form of a daily email to bask in its creative beauty, inspiration, and generosity of spirit. It’s essence will resonate long past these 30-days. Feeling the deep infusion of poetry, embodiment practices, sound, and gentle nudge to let my voice spill. Jones is a brilliant healer and humble creative genius. Don’t miss your chance to sip this nectar, it is worth it’s weight in gold.” — Lara, Portland, ME.

  • What folks are saying.

    “There truly are no words that come close to expressing my gratitude for your infinite love, exquisite skill, and generosity in these offerings to all of us… As a group we are swimming in the sweetness of your invitation to come alive together.” - B.E.

  • What folks are saying.

    “A space full of support, permission, courage, and care where we could all show up just as we were in each moment. What an extraordinary gift! … The themes you used to move us through this course feel like guides for moving through life. I want to take the course again right now!” - E.A.

Facilitator

 

I’m Johanna

a biodynamic craniosacral therapist, a teacher, a writer, an audio producer, and someone who knows autoimmune disease from the inside out. I create spaces where we can listen to what our bodies are actually saying in order to inhabit ourselves more fully. I believe in abundant permission, reverence, and the vitality of creativity. Read more.

 

Course Themes

We’ll explore each site in two-day duets, first through audio and then with movement and writing.

  • Permission: Listening inward, reverence, arrival

  • Feet: Ground & gravity, roots

  • Hips/pelvis: Creativity & connection

  • Belly: Nourishment, digestion, gut feelings

  • Shoulders: Habits of bearing, responsibility, widening

  • Hands: Reaching & releasing

  • Throat & neck: Singing, voice, hearing, naming

  • Heart: Coherence, bringing it all home

How it works

Each month, you’ll receive an email including some combination of:

  • Audio love letters (2-5 minutes in length) to nurture care and embodied awareness

  • Deep inquiries to help you hear your own inner, embodied wisdom

  • Informed by somatic & myofascial work, invitations for gentle movement that focus on various sites of the body in order to amplify their knowing and offer stretching and softening

  • Writing prompts to creatively explore your discoveries

Full scholarships and sliding scale options are available, particularly for marginalized folx and those in financial need. Please be in touch if you’d like to learn about scholarships or donate to make this option more widely available to others.

Questions & Answers

How much time will this require?

In our live classes we remind each other of the only real principles of this work: reverence and permission. And, in the Northern Hemisphere - it’s late spring / early summer! If you’d like to set aside time, you may want to dedicate 5-20 minutes each day to play. But if you’d like to dip in and out of the material or see what appeals to you and engage a la carte? That’s great too. There’s no right way to engage with this material, no benchmark outside yourself for how this needs to look. My hope in creating these materials is to support you in building your own self-trust, your own willingness to make space for the truth of your body, your own capacity to tend to yourself, moment to moment.

What if I’m not a writer?

Identifying as a writer is no prerequisite! Heart Openers offers invitations to follow prompts as you’re moved to do so.

How long will I have access to this material?

You’ll have access to all the prompts and audio meditations on our password-protected web portal through December of 2022.

Can I buy this course as a gift?

Absolutely. There’s an area in the checkout for you to designate Heart Openers as a gift, and to share the email of the gift recipient (you’re also welcome to let us know if you want us to hold off contacting the gift recipient until after a particular date).

I have another question - where can I find the answer?
Please be in touch directly via the contact page.

Many thanks to the Maine Arts Commission, whose Project Grants for Artists supported the creation of Heart Openers.