"The Healing Museum"
A collaboration with the BODE Museum Berlin to bring mindfulness into museums
We’re excited to announce a new collaboration between Vipassana at Home and the BODE Museum Berlin: The Healing Museum, launching in April 2025. This groundbreaking project—first of its kind in Germany—integrates mindfulness practices into the museum experience and explores how art and meditation can support mental health and emotional well-being.
Through this partnership, we’ve created six guided meditations (each about 10 minutes long) designed specifically for museum visitors. These are accessible via the BODE Museum’s free audio guide, mobile phone, or website.
© Staatliche Museen zu Berlin / David von Becker
What to Expect: Mindfulness in the Museum
How can mindfulness deepen our experience of art?
In this project, mindfulness becomes a tool for slowing down, arriving fully in the body, and opening up to the richness of the museum space. The meditations guide you through a gentle progression:
Arriving: Grounding in the body and becoming present in the space.
Grazing: Letting the eyes wander, sensing how different artworks begin to touch the body-mind.
Looking Closer: Choosing one piece and spending time with it—letting go of mental concepts to experience the artwork directly, as a real-time sensory event.
Sitting Meditation: A dedicated room within the museum, set up with meditation cushions, invites visitors to pause, sit, and reflect—either with guidance or in silence. This space offers a rare moment of stillness in the museum setting.
Witnessing: In a partner game, visitors observe one another as they interact with the art—practicing clear, non-judgmental observation of self and other.
Family Meditation: A playful and accessible meditation designed for children and their companions.
© Hahn Hartung
A Meeting of Traditions
One of the project’s most compelling aspects is a specially curated room that brings together artworks from Buddhism, Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, and Stoicism—tracing their historical influence on today’s mindfulness movement.
In the West, much of our historical art is religious in nature—depicting saints, prophets, or scenes of spiritual devotion. As contemporary society becomes less religious in the traditional sense, many are turning toward secular or non-sectarian practices like mindfulness and Vipassana. This exhibition invites us to see beyond the dogmas and institutions and to reconnect with the universal human aspiration toward clarity, compassion, and inner transformation.
Personal Reflections
As someone raised in an atheist household, I resonate with Vipassana for its pragmatic, non-sectarian approach to working with the mind. It gave me a clear and systematic way to grow in happiness, wisdom, and ethical living—without requiring belief in any doctrine.
But over time, I’ve felt drawn to revisit places of worship: sitting in awe under cathedral domes, absorbing the stillness, and contemplating the reverence captured in the faces of Mary, Jesus, or the saints. I now recognize the essential role these traditions have played in fostering self-reflection, ethical behavior, and community. Their stories and spaces were often vehicles for the same intentions we hold today: to purify the mind, open the heart, and live with wholesome guiding principles.
Just as Vipassana offers the framework of Buddha (the awakened qualities we cultivate), Dhamma (the path of practice), and Sangha (the community of fellow practitioners), the religious traditions housed in the BODE Museum offer their own expressions of these timeless truths.
And beyond their theological context, many of the artworks in the museum speak directly to the body. As a meditator, dancer, and artist, I’m deeply inspired by how these sculpted forms honor the body—not as a mere 'brain taxi', but as a sacred space of perception, presence, and transformation.
Written 7 April 2025 by Reimar
Visit the Exhibition
If you’re in Berlin in 2025, I warmly invite you to explore The Healing Museum at the BODE. Come experience the interplay between art and awareness, stillness and beauty, contemplation and culture.
To make this unique experience accessible to as many people as possible, the BODE Museum—supported by sponsorship through Charité—is offering 2,000 free tickets for visitors who register through the project website. Don’t miss the chance to take advantage of this!
Direct link to the Museum website:
🏛️The Healing Museum - Register for Free Tickets
Direct link to Audio Guides:
Project Partners
Experimental and Clinical Research Center (Cha-rité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin und Max Delbrück Center)
Andere Zeiten e.V.
Berliner Fachstelle Suizidpräven-tion
Bonifatiuswerk
Freundeskreis der Charité e.V.
FUTOMANIA Berli-ner Manufaktur für Naturmatratzen und Futons
Senatsverwaltung für Wissenschaft, Gesundheit und Pflege
Stiftung Bibel und Kultur
Stiftung für Seelische Gesundheit
Vipassana at Home / vipassanaathome.org