Full Course Description

Radical Acceptance with Tara Brach, Ph.D.: Integrating Meditation to Heal Shame and Fear in Clinical Practice

OUTLINE

Radical Acceptance and Meditation Overview

  • Cause of the pervasive sense of personal deficiency in contemporary culture
  • Practice - establishing intention, quieting mind, sensory awareness
  • Understand the cause of emotional suffering from the perspective of
  • Buddhist psychology
  • Western psychology - attraction, aversion
  • Evolutionary psychology- negativity bias
  • Preponderance of shame in western culture

Meditation for Emotional Resilience, Emotional Intelligence and Deep Transformation

  • Neuroplasticity
  • Shifting from “Fight Flight Freeze” to “Attend and Befriend”
  • Present centered non-judgmental attention
  • Cultivate concentration and quiet mind
  • Develop resource states (love, relaxation, peace, etc.)
  • Counter dissociation – cultivate sensory-based attention
  • Current research - efficacy of mindfulness and therapeutic healing
  • Practice & Discussion: Guided exercise in embodied presence.

Radical Acceptance: Cultivate the Two Wings of Awareness

  • Basic principles and components of
  • Buddhist mindfulness meditation
  • Role of concentration in cultivating mindfulness
  • Objects of concentration (audio, kinesthetic, visual)—differential uses of objects
  • Working definition of mindfulness
  • Radical Acceptance: The two wings of awareness
  • Practice & Discussion: The two wings - “yes” meditation

The RAIN Model: Apply Meditation to Emotional Suffering

  • A model for how we get locked into shame and fear
  • Transform shame and fear- pathways of reconnecting
  • Introduce RAIN: recognizing, allowing, investigating, nurturing
  • Introduce version of RAIN with additional resourcing
  • Comprehensive case review
  • Practice & Discussion: RAIN for self-compassion

Releasing Armor: Cultivate a Forgiving Heart

  • Research on forgiveness
  • The process of forgiving- recognizing stories, contacting vulnerability
  • Need for clinical support
  • Sequence of attentional strategies
  • Case study
  • Practice & Discussion: Classical forgiveness

Evolving our Capacity for Compassion

  • The alchemy of arousing compassion
  • Working with both dissociation and the tendency to get flooded
  • Practice & Discussion: Compassion Meditation

Positive Neuroplasticity - “Seeing the Good”

  • The gift of mirroring
  • Deepening intimacy and connection- in our individual and collective psyche
  • Practice & Discussion: Cultivating loving kindness

OBJECTIVES

  1. Identify basic principles of Buddhist psychology and explain their relevance in evaluating treatment options for anxiety and depression.
  2. Examine the role and mediating mechanisms of meditation practices in healing emotional suffering.
  3. Utilize mindfulness and compassion practices in addressing fear, grief, anger and shame.
  4. Recognize the contra-indications of various attentional strategies in addressing traumatic fear.
  5. Explain meditative strategies that address interpersonal conflict.
  6. Differentiate the components of varying attentional strategies.
Copyright : 14/10/2016

Escaping the Cybertrance

Program Information

Objectives

  1. Identify ways to help clients detach from their technological dependencies

Outline

Overview of escaping the cyber trance

  • Becoming aware to the effects of technology
  • Enter the false refuge of world knowledge
Experiencing the cyber trance
  • Develop a sense of mastery when dealing with the cyber world
  • Explore how “cyber world” appeals to one’s sense of self
  • Learn to “leave the screen” to connect with one’s self
Concluding remarks form Tara Brach
  • How technology can be, and is, used advantageously
  • Establishing a sense of reality

Copyright : 08/12/2014

Deliberate Practice and the Inner Life

Program Information

Objectives

  1. Summarize Dr. Brach’s paradoxical approach towards meditation and the implications for treatment.

Outline

  • Introduction of Tara Brach from Richard Simon
  • How the deliberate practice of meditation reveals connectedness
    • Exploration of meditation at is relates to the skills of psychotherapy: Empathy, acceptance, forgiveness, spontaneity, and realness
  • Meditation from the evolutionary perspective
    • The move from fright-flight to tend and befriend
  • Exploring false refuges
    • What are they
    • Why we have them
    • How we overcome them
  • The core skills to waking up compassion and freedom
    • Coming back
    • Mindfulness: Recognizing and allowing
  • A guided meditation led by Tara Brach

Copyright : 23/03/2013