with Tenzin Chogkyi

Two Saturdays
September 28 and October 5, 2024
10:00am – 1:00pm PDT (Pacific Daylight Time)

in person only

Our emotions can lead us to our greatest joys and most painful sorrows. In their most creative capacity, they are guides pointing us towards our deepest needs and what is most meaningful in our lives. At their most destructive, they have us in their grip and we can become lost in anger, sadness, fear, or overwhelm. This suffering is something we have all felt, but we can create more space, choice, and ease in the face of it.

The Cultivating Emotional Balance training was sparked during a meeting between behavioral scientists, a neuroscientist, a monk, a philosopher, and the Dalai Lama in 2000, as a new approach to understanding our emotional lives. Combining contemporary scientific research with contemplative practices drawn from Buddhism, the Cultivating Emotional Balance training gives participants new tools for working with emotion.

The full program is a 42-hour training, but in this two-day workshop you will be introduced to some of the key components of this training:

• Understanding how emotions work, and how they can work for and not against us;
• Recognizing and working with emotional triggers;
• Investigating the nature of happiness;
• Managing difficult emotions such as anger;
• Increasing compassion for the self and others;
• Cultivating genuine happiness and mental balance.

This workshop will include lectures, meditations, and experiential learning in small and large groups. For the maximum benefit, we recommend that you attend both sessions though this is not required.

Day 1 – September 28: Investigation of the characteristics and function of emotion, the nature of happiness, the universal emotions, and the emotional episode timeline

Day 2 – October 5: Strategies for emotional regulation and managing difficult emotions such as anger, increasing constructive emotional states

All are welcome. This class is open to all levels of meditation experience.

Tenzin Chogkyi (she/her/hers) is a teacher of workshops and programs that bridge the worlds of Buddhist thought, contemplative practice, mental and emotional cultivation, and the latest research in the field of positive psychology. Tenzin first became interested in meditation in the early 1970s and then started practicing Tibetan Buddhism in early 1991 during a year she spent studying in India and Nepal. She completed several long meditation retreats over a six-year period and took monastic ordination with His Holiness the Dalai Lama, practicing as a monastic for nearly 20 years. Since 2006 she has been teaching in Buddhist centers around the world and taught in prisons for 15 years. Currently based on traditional Awaswas Ohlone land, in what is now known as Santa Cruz, CA, she teaches locally at Insight Santa Cruz and the Wisdom Center, is a regular visiting teacher for the San Francisco Dharma Collective, and Lion’s Roar Dharma Center in Sacramento.

She is also a certified teacher of Compassion Cultivation Training and the Cultivating Emotional Balance program. Tenzin is especially interested in bringing the wisdom of Buddhism into modern culture and into alignment with modern cultural values such as racial and gender justice and environmental awareness. She feels strongly that a genuine and meaningful spiritual path includes not only personal transformation, but social and cultural transformation as well.

She loves interfaith collaboration and is a volunteer for the Interfaith Speakers Bureau of the Islamic Networks Group in the greater San Francisco Bay Area and also volunteers for the Conflict Resolution Center of Santa Cruz County. You can find her current teaching schedule as well as an archive of podcasts, audio, and video teachings at unlockingtruehappiness.org.