The Dharma of Emotional Regulation
A Daylong Meditation Workshop with Blake Abramovitz
Saturday, April 27 10 am-4:30 pm.
Cost: $65 suggested (sliding scale 30$-100$)
Please register with the link below:
Human beings are relational beings to the core, advanced herd animals hard wired to connect. There is no way around this, no bypassing our irreducible nature. As the Buddha famously declared when his student Ananda asked whether he was correct in his conviction that the sangha (community) was half of the entire spiritual path:
“No, Ananda. It is the entirety of the path.”
Social isolation invariably leads to a level of suffering we simply cannot withstand without intense medication. Netflix, Instagram, a nice Cabernet, or something harder— whatever your distraction of choice, you will use it to run from the sorrow of this dislocation again and again, until you decide to return from your exile and re-enter the commons, the kingdom, your true home— relationship.
But here is a pre-requisite for completing this sacred homecoming:
Emotional regulation!
Adult relationships invariably produce intense emotional states— excitement, sadness, yearning, anger, joy, anxiety— and we must learn to manage them with clarity and equanimity if we are to remain meaningfully connected.
This day-long will present:
-Further conceptual underpinnings to increase understanding of emotional regulation:
What is it? How does it work?
-Specific meditation practices, both alone and seated across from a partner, to directly increase your skill at emotional regulation.
-May this day of study and practice represent a step toward a deeper connection with the people who matter to you most, and to all humanity.
Bio:
After many years as a sometimes focused, sometimes hard-partying Hollywood actor, I decided to take the plunge into some serious yoga and meditation practice. I had always wanted to undertake a bona fide contemplative journey, had read a thousand books about it, from Rumi and Carlos Castaneda to classic Buddhist and Taoist texts, and could think of nothing more exciting than to try my own hand at it. But it had always seemed to me that the undertaking was somehow out of reach, beyond my powers.
Call it low self-esteem stemming from a difficult background. And so it was a profound overcoming when I finally pushed through my fear, and began.
In yoga, I trained extensively with Hala Khouri and Julian Walker in their psychology-informed Awakened Heart Embodied Mind training; with Saul David Raye in his devotional Atma Yoga style; and with Jason Frahm and Sifu Matthew Cohen.I have also practiced rigorously in the vipassana meditation tradition for ten years with senior Buddhist teachers, including George Haas, Shinzen Young, Jack Kornfield, and Trudy Goodman; and I have attended over twenty-five silent residential retreats in that time (including a month in silence at IMS). I studied and mentored closely for eight years with Dharma maverick and recognized attachment theory expert George Haas, and was honored to teach alongside him for two of those years before striking out on my own.
By now I have been teaching meditation and yoga in Los Angeles for seven years. I believe passionately in the transformative power of these interior technologies, and in the uniquely modern intersection of neuroscience, spirituality, psychology, and meditation.
And as a longtime poet, musician, playwright and actor, I remain fiercely devoted both to creativity as a spiritual path, and to exploring the ways in which spirituality itself informs creativity and lends vitality to the aesthetic domain.
Please register with the link below:
WHEN
April 27, 2019 at 10:00am - 4:30pm
WHERE
CONTACT
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