Old friends and new friends: welcome.

Dispatches from the Heart is a blog about meditation, storytelling, love, and how to live a wholehearted life.

I’ve been practicing meditation for ten years, and teaching for six. I currently have a fellowship at the Insight Meditation Society (IMS), one of the world’s leading meditation retreat centers (and my favorite place). My job is orienting people to meditation retreat and being there for them when they are going through tough times. I love my work.

Previously, I worked at the National Geographic for many years, and started meditation programs for employees of National Geographic and the Smithsonian. I’ve led seminars and classes at the Department of the Treasury, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Sixth and I Synagogue, the Center for Mindful Living, Flow Yoga, and Blue Heron Wellness. In 2013, I completed a two-year teacher training through the Meditation Teacher Training Institute, led by Tara Brach, Jonathan Foust, Hugh Byrne, and Pat Coffey, and in 2012 received a Master’s degree in Fiction Writing from Johns Hopkins University.

I’m proud of these accomplishments, and for each one there are dozens of aspirations I’d held dearly that didn’t come to pass. This blog is home to the gains and the losses, the triumphs and the failures, the praises and the blames, and it’s my hope that this is the start of conversation with you about how to use it all in pursuit of freedom from suffering amidst this messy human life.

Jared Gottlieb
Forest Refuge
Barre, MA, U.S.A.