Metta Earth Institute is a small nonprofit educational retreat center integrating contemplative practice, deep ecology, regenerative food systems, and social activism to create resilient community.
Metta Earth institute offers retreats, trainings, programs, workshops, and consultations to integrate:
• contemplative practices such as yoga and meditation
• ecological, sustainable community life ways
• wilderness awareness and ways to reconnect with nature
• creation of sanctuaries for communication, art, soul & psyche
Metta Earth Institute is a place to explore solutions for a global shift of consciousness supporting the revitalization of a care based society and a rejuvenation of nature and earth.
MEI is hosted on acres of fields, pastures, and forest surrounded by a bowl of mountains. The land also supports a biodynamically oriented, organic farm and garden with a small CSA, a few Milking Shorthorn grass-fed, hand milked cows, a small, growing flock of Icelandic sheep, heritage breed chickens, orchards, the Metta Earth main house with kitchen, dining, library, bathing, laundry, yoga room, and bedrooms, greenhouse, a post and beam barn, 4 yurts, 4 wall tents, a new net zero, carbon neutral Elder House, and energy systems powered by solar, wood, and the work of many hands.
As the focusing organization for the green development work of a small ecovillage project based on the land, MEI also includes a larger community of faculty, board, friends, stewards, and guests in concert with the beautiful energies of this land.
Metta Earth Institute intends to support others in cultivating consciousness in deep reconnection with nature and Earth. MEI programs are essentially designed to be experiences in living, learning, and loving community.
Metta Earth Institute invites you to engage in cultivating creatively compassionate responses to the ecological challenges in bioregional communities and the global community.
Philosophy
As the world grows increasingly complex, it is easy to lose touch with the simplicity of peace that lives in the heart. Metta Earth Institute is dedicated to developing pathways for reclaiming the connection to the joy of each present moment and enhancing the capacity for compassionate action. We offer you opportunities to nourish the deeper relationship to self, society and nature through contemplative and ecological practices.
We support living lightly and compassionately on the planet.
We support living lightly and compassionately on the planet.
Regenerative principles include:
• Interdependence and a cooperative work ethic
• Conservation efforts for the protection of wild lands and native species
• Innovations in human-scale farming and gardening
• Contemplative practices including mindfulness, yoga, and meditation
• Culturally enhancing arts and healing practices
• Permaculture design
• Appropriate technologies, renewable energy, and green building
Core Areas
Metta Earth Yoga
yoga, meditation, contemplative practice
An expression of “green yoga”, Metta Earth Yoga refreshes our connection to earth through movement, silence, mindfulness, and other spiritual life practices. The classical forms of yoga including asana (posture), pranayama (breathing), meditation, and kirtan (chanting) provide vital enlivening pathways for healing our relationship with the planet. We balance practice time in community with opportunities for solitude close to nature. Our practice is informed by an affinity with engaged Buddhism and Zen.
Metta Earth Wild Ways
wilderness awareness, conservation, restoration
With this focus we embrace a commitment to protect wilderness environments, wild lands, and wildlife corridors through conservation and restoration endeavors. Agricultural efforts integrate the notions of preserving wildness with food growing by establishing the “wildfarm”. We also honor the indigenous arts of herbal wisdom, sustainable wildcrafting, and traditional earth skills to strengthen our wilderness awareness and awaken our sense of interconnection and interdependence with all of life. Retreats, quests, and pilgrimage walks energize the dedication to living lightly and quietly on the earth.
Metta Earth Arts & Sanctuary
creativity, communication, soul & psyche
A refuge for the work of deep ecology and ecopsychology, experiences in the arts and in sanctuary enhance our creativity, communication, and the vibrancy of soul and psyche. Poetry, visual and performing arts, myth, dream, festival, and ceremony support the transformational evolution of personal and community life, and create a sense of essential connection with nature.
Metta Earth Community
community practices, ecological sustainability
We support the cultivation of ecological sustainability with the practices of organic farming and gardening, permaculture, alternative and appropriate energy technologies including solar and wind power, composting systems, green building, and locally sourced hand crafts. Exploration for a renewed stewardship between land and people comes from such models as Community Land Trust (CLT) and Community Supported Agriculture (C.S.A.). These structures help to reduce our ecological footprint. We also look to the Earth Charter as a global document guiding us to create a just, sustainable and peaceful future. We infuse these principles and ways of living with community process practices such as consensus, council, and attunement as a forum for collaborative inquiry. The interweaving of an enlivened contemplative consciousness with the ecology of daily life nourishes the sensitivity to earth and its inhabitants renewing a compassion for all life.
By bringing these four paths together, under one organization, we collectively express our passionate voices of hope for the array of changes that are necessary in these most challenging, yet thrilling of times on the planet.
Contemplative Ecology
Contemplative Ecology is the integration of yoga, meditation, and other contemplative practices with pathways for ecologically sustainable, and even thriveable lifeways. In a time of collapsing social constructs and a highly degraded environment, this work is dedicated to cultural renewal generating compassion for all life.
“Metta” in the Pali language means “loving kindness”
Metta Earth is “Compassion for Earth”
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