CEB BOOK RELEASE

Why Embark on This Journey?

Because our emotions can make our life feel complicated and sometimes challenging, many of us try to avoid, deny, suppress, and distract from difficult experiences. Or we search for ways of living that we can avoid or get rid of triggers. Unfortunately, even if we can temporarily prevent or suppress our difficult emotions, it is not a long term solution. Sooner or later, we find our emotions breaking through our repression attempts, and we end up misdirecting caustic feelings towards ourselves and others. Repressing is harmful to our body and nervous system, creating stress and blocking our authentic feelings, as evidenced through decades of stress and emotion research. Alternatively, trying to avoid any triggers through crafting a world free from conflict and disappointment is profoundly limiting. It can’t account for the emotions triggered within our minds from thoughts, memories, fantasies, and anticipations of the future.

Modern psychological research in neuroscience, physiology, facial expressions, and vocal tones has improved our intellectual understanding of the universal experience of emotion. However, to utilize emotions as a path for cultivating personal and collective well-being we must rely upon a first-person approach for investigating, understanding, and transforming our emotions. Nobody knows more about our emotions than we do. As conscious beings we have a privileged access to what we are sensing, thinking and feeling in any given moment. Even though psychologists may infer the presence of an emotion from our facial expression, vocal tone, or brain activity they cannot tell us why and how we are experiencing this emotion, nor can they control how we choose to relate and respond to our emotion. In this way we are the experts of emotion and will either experience emotions as obstacles or precise indicators of a meaningful life and deep-seated well being. To harness the full power of our expertise, it is necessary to blend contemporary scientific methods with the time tested scientific approach of self-inquiry through contemplative practice. With contemplative practice, we gain access to tools for studying our emotions from the inside out. We become scientists of our experience; running experiments, closely observing emotions, and garnering transformative insights . It is this unique blending of wisdom traditions that characterizes the origin and application of Cultivating Emotional Balance, or CEB.