For your own life
Build the capacity to stay with yourself.
Start with the language of Heart iQ, turn it into a lived daily practice, then enter the deeper retreat room when you are ready.
A living experience of connection
We go deeper together than we ever could alone.
Heart iQ turns the idea that we’re all connected into something you can feel in the body. In a well-held room, people can reach places together that none of us could reach alone.
25+years of practice
5,000+people reached
Hundredsof retreats
Why circle matters
Some parts of us only appear in the presence of other people.
Most personal growth happens alone. We read, reflect, journal and work on ourselves. Yet the parts shaped in relationship often remain invisible in solitude. They return when another person comes close.
Heart iQ creates the conditions for those places to be met. When a group is held well enough and for long enough, it begins to develop a coherence of its own. Something becomes possible that nobody brought into the room and nobody could create alone. Heart iQ calls this Unity Consciousness.
The same movement can happen within one person, between two people, across a room of twenty, or at the level of a community. Circle Work gives people a lived experience of connection rather than another idea about it.
A circle isn’t a place to perform or be fixed. It’s a place to be met.
The three ranges
What Heart iQ actually is
Heart iQ isn’t therapy, and it isn’t another round of self-improvement. It’s a map of where a person can be open or closed, and a practice for opening all of it.
There are three parts to the map. Two of them run through you, and the third is what happens between people.
↑↓
The Vertical Range
Your connection upward, to something larger that holds you, and downward into your body and the ground beneath you. The full channel between spirit and earth, running through you.
←→
The Horizontal Range
Relationship with others: your capacity to express all of who you are without shape-shifting, and to receive love, intimacy and care without shutting down. The give and the receive of being met.
◯
The Field
The living space between people, which has its own weather. It can open, tighten, or settle, and it usually tells you more than the words being spoken. When a room opens together, the field carries each person further than any of us can go alone.
When any one of these is closed, we compensate. We override, numb, perform or quietly withdraw. Heart iQ trains you to open the vertical, the horizontal and the field together, so you can stay present across the full range of being human.
Drawn another way, these are four directions: up and down through the vertical, in and out through the horizontal, all of them meeting in the heart.
The emotional spectrum isn’t selective. If you repress your anger, you also repress your joy. If you repress your grief, you disconnect from your aliveness. You can’t push down one part of your range and expect the rest to stay intact.
What is Heart iQFor practitioners
Three free sessions on what a group can do that you can’t do alone.
If you coach or facilitate and have felt the ceiling of one-to-one work, this is the clearest introduction to how Circle Work operates. Ninety minutes, no cost.
Three ways in
Start where your life is asking for something more.
You don’t need to understand the whole path. Choose the doorway that feels closest to the life you’re living now.
They all teach the same thing. They differ only in where you’re standing when you begin.
I’m here for
The Heart iQ app
Keep the work closewhen the lesson ends.
Your courses, lesson notes and progress live together in the custom Heart iQ app. Begin on your computer, continue on your phone and return to the exact place you left.
Selected programmes also include Z, your private Heart iQ guide. Ask a question by text or voice, use Practice with Z to explore what is alive, or find a human practice buddy inside the Hub when you want another person beside you.
Video and written teaching together
Progress shared across app and web
Text or speak with Z when included
Community and practice-buddy connection
Enter the room
Coming up
Online gatherings and in-person retreats where the work becomes something you can feel.
Sep 11 — 13, 2026
Online · 3 Days
Three live days with Christian guiding embodied practice, teaching through real facilitator-training footage and staying in dialogue with the whole Zoom room. Friday to Sunday, 4 PM to 10 PM CEST.
Learn More
Oct 1 — 4, 2026
New Eden, Netherlands · 4 Days
An intimate retreat exploring the heart of your relational world. Four days of deep inquiry into love, intimacy, and what it truly means to show up fully in your most important relationships.
Learn More
Oct 4–18, 2026
New Eden, Netherlands · 14 Days
A facilitator immersion in healing, alchemy, and corrective experience. Fourteen days of intensive practice, embodiment, and deep facilitation training at New Eden, learning to hold space and facilitate transformation.
Learn More
The founder
Christian Pankhurst
Christian has spent more than twenty-five years developing Heart iQ through live group facilitation. He has never seen his work as fixing or healing anyone. He creates the conditions where another person’s own capacity and goodness can finally emerge. He still teaches from inside the room, where the work continues to evolve.
Meet Christian
The home of the work
New Eden
Fifty acres of forest and meadows in the Netherlands, with a residential retreat centre built for the kind of work that needs time, beauty and a shared home.
Discover New EdenFrom inside the work
The distance in your relationships started as a distance from yourself.
These reflections come from people who have met Heart iQ through private study and the live rooms.
“This work helped my nervous system recognise a healthy relationship when it finally showed up.”
Sarah · London, UK
“Heart iQ made it safe for me to access my emotions, and it changed everything in my marriage.”
Marc · California, USA
“I have been a therapist for 30 years. If others like me want to move into real heart-centred, transformative work, this is the place to be.”
Joyce Lynn · Therapist · Heart iQ graduate, 2013
“This training is heart-centred, heart-led and heart-opening. Most of all, you will deepen in an experience of what it is to truly feel loved and to love others authentically from your innermost heart.”
Priya Mahtani · Heart iQ graduate, 2014
From Christian
Ideas for living the work.
Essays on love, emotional life and the places where self-awareness becomes something we can live.
You don’t have to know how far you want to go.
Foundations was made for people meeting Heart iQ for the first time. Begin privately, at your own pace, and discover what the practice opens in you. You don’t need to have it worked out. You only need to be willing to begin.
Begin with Foundations