Profile
The Open-Hearted Awareness Institute is a national non-profit Public Charity open to everyone.
Contemporary and Ancient Meditation Methods
The institute is dedicated to the teaching of direct methods of meditation, inquiry and compassion training to support awakening as the next natural stage of human development. The primary practices offered are effortless mindfulness and turning awareness around using small glimpses throughout your day. The primary mission is to offer trainings, which help us discover open-hearted awareness (bodhicitta) as the source of intelligence, compassion and flow to improve our overall well-being and to increase loving and respectful relationships with others.
Open-Hearted Awareness Institute provides unique, contemporary versions of ancient methods of meditation and inquiry available to everyone, regardless of their background or beliefs. The workshops, retreats, and 8-week Effortless Mindfulness Training help us learn how to navigate our own consciousness in order to relieve the bind of suffering and increase compassion. The institute has a research component called The Effortless Mindfulness Center for Research, which is focused on bringing together science, contemplation and psychology to discover and verified real results in the reduction of suffering and improved human relations.
Teacher Loch Kelly
Lead teacher Loch Kelly, M.Div., LCSW, is the author of the award-winning book Shift Into Freedom: The Science and Practice of Open-Hearted Awareness. He is a meditation teacher, psychotherapist, and founder of the non-profit, Open-Hearted Awareness Institute.
Loch is a graduate of Columbia University and Union Theological, who spent 10 years establishing homeless shelters and community lunch programs and working in a community mental health clinic in Brooklyn, New York. He also worked extensively with families recovering from the trauma of 9/11.
Loch has studied and practiced in many contemplative and Buddhist traditions. He began in college going on retreat with Zen Roshi, Philip Kapleau. He traveled on a graduate school fellowship to train in Theravada monasteries, a university in Sri Lanka, with Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche in Nepal. Loch has extensively studied with Tsoknyi Rinpoche and Mingyur Rinpoche. He served on the New York Insight Teachers Council and is affiliated with nondual teacher Adyashanti and IFS psychotherapy founder Richard Schwartz. Loch has collaborated with neuroscientists at Yale, UPenn and NYU in the study of how awareness training can enhance compassion and wellbeing. As a licensed psychotherapist, Loch has been teaching seminars, supervising clinicians and practicing Effortless Heart Mindfulness Therapy in NYC for 30 years.
Loch teaches throughout the US and Europe and currently lives in New York City with his wife Paige and their cat Duffy. For more information, please visit www.effortlessmindfulness.org
