Heart Broken OPEN: Cultivating Emotional Balance in the Middle of it All

Develop compassion using modern psychological science and Tibetan Buddhist practices with acclaimed teachers Eve Ekman and Chandra Easton

Our hearts naturally care, ache, and break in the face of personal or global tragedies. Heartbreak may provide a portal to openness or can manifest as rage, despair, shame, or anxiety. These emotions hold important teachings if we take the time to decode their messages; unaddressed they can lead to the exhaustion and depletion of burnout.

Embark on a half day of practice and reflection, dedicated to nurturing a wellspring of sustainable compassion. The workshop will be guided by the wisdom of Cultivating Emotional Balance (CEB), a curriculum that weaves together contemporary psychological science and contemplative mind training rooted in Tibetan Buddhism to provide practical and transformative understanding of our emotional lives.

This practice will be augmented with guided meditations on Arya Tara, the “Noble Savioress” whose blessings “ferry beings across the ocean of samsara.” We can understand meditations on Tara as a vehicle for meeting, befriending, and healing our own challenging emotions and stepping into a more expansive experience of our deeper nature through embodiment meditations utilizing mantra, visualization, and breathwork as traditionally practiced in Buddhist tantra, or Vajrayana. As the embodiment of loving compassion, Arya Tara is a Buddha and an archetype that enables us to come home to our basic goodness, our true nature, which is the union of compassion and emptiness, an understanding of the interdependent nature of everything.

This session will cover the basis of compassion, facets of empathy, dimensions of burnout, and the anatomy of emotion. You will leave with practical tools for continuing to deepen and sustain compassion and contentment in your life.

Interested in volunteering for this event? Fill out this form.

Eve Ekman Ph.D, MSW is a contemplative social scientist and teacher designing, delivering and evaluating interventions to support emotional awareness in the fields of health care, and more recently through technology.

Eve did her MSW and PhD at UC Berkeley and Post Doctoral Training at UCSF Osher Center for Integrative Medicine. Her research area is compassion, emotional awareness and meditation training to address burnout. Eve is the Wellbeing Lead at Apple on the Health Team, Director of Cultivating Emotional Balance Training, a Senior Fellow at the UCB Greater Good Science Center and with the Mind and Life Institute and is consulting for the training program at the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics

Chandra Easton is a Dharma teacher and author of Embodying Tara: Twenty-One Manifestations to Awaken Your Innate Wisdom (Shambhala, 2023). She has taught Buddhism and Hatha Yoga since 2001. She studied Buddhism and Tibetan language in Dharamsala, India, and at UCSB’s religious studies department. During her studies, she co-translated Sublime Dharma: A Compilation of Two Texts on the Great Perfection (Vimala Publishing, 2012) with B. Alan Wallace. In 2015, she was given the title of Vajra Teacher, Dorje Lopön (Varjāchārya), for Tara Mandala Retreat Center by Lama Tsultrim Allione and H.E. Gochen Tulku Sang-ngag Rinpoche. Seeking to bring forth the voice of the empowered feminine in Buddhism, Chandra regularly leads retreats and classes for various organizations, develops programs and curricula for Tara Mandala, and teaches Dharma nationally and internationally. She co-founded the 21 Taras Collective with Nina Rao and Genevieve Walker, to record music for the twenty-one Taras mantras found in her book, Embodying Tara. She teaches regularly at the Berkeley Alembic and the SF Dharma Collective. Visit www.chandraeaston.com to learn more.