Self-Compassion for a Better World: A Daylong Retreat | with Joe Loizzo and Pilar Jennings

 Saturday, January 24th 2026

10am - 4pm ET 

Hybrid | General Admission | $75

Scholarship Admission | $55

What a better way to start the journey of the new year than to gather with friends to deepen our capacity to access and harness self-compassion—our foundational ability to be the wise, caring presence in our own minds and lives. This ability is especially vital in times like these, when we face so much collective suffering all around us, activating the second arrow of traumatic reactivity that aggravates our present suffering and reinforces intergenerational cycles of misperception, shame, fear and hate.

While self-compassion has increasingly become an integral part of the contemplative path, the psychological insights and healing arts of the Nalanda tradition allow us to take this accessible practice to a deeper, more liberative level. This retreat, led by academic director Joe Loizzo and core faculty Pilar Jennings, will focus on how the wisdom of selflessness and the art of self-love can help us move through self-soothing and self-care to uncover and uproot the core shame memories and beliefs that anchor our traumatic sense of self and world. This deep self-compassion is the vital catalyst we need to transform our traumatic way of being into fully embodied flourishing together with all those whose lives we touch, with our whole human family and with all life on earth.

Please join us in person or online for day of deepening the self-healing capacity we need to metabolize trauma and plant seeds of flourishing for ourselves and our whole world!

In partnership with Tibet House US

BIOS 

Geri Loizzo is Nalanda Institute’s Director of Programs and Community Engagement. She is also a meditation faculty member and has served on the Institute’s board of directors since 2007. She’s had a regular practice of Hatha Yoga since 1982 and since 2006 has studied with Nalanda Institute Yoga Faculty, Mary Reilly Nichols. In addition, Loizzo has been studying and practicing Tibetan meditation since 1999, and has been leading weekly morning meditations at the Institute since 2011. Her mentors include Khyabje Gelek Rimpoche, Venerable Robina Courtin, and Kathleen McDonald.

Pilar Jennings, PhD, is a psychoanalyst focused on the clinical applications of Buddhist meditation who has been working with patients and their families through the Harlem Family Institute since 2004. She was awarded her PhD in Psychiatry and Religion from Union Theological Seminary, a Masters in medical anthropology from Columbia University, and a Bachelors in interdisciplinary writing from Barnard College of Columbia University. Dr. Jennings is the author of Mixing Minds: The Power of Relationship in Psychoanalysis and Buddhism and To Heal a Wounded Heart: The Transformative Power of Buddhism and Psychotherapy in Action. Currently, she is a researcher at the Columbia University Center for Study of Science and Religion and Co-chair of the Columbia Faculty Seminar on the Memory and Savery, where she explores the intergenerational transmission of trauma.