CEB LINEAGE
HISTORY
The CEB Training emerged from the Destructive Emotions dialogue between behavioral scientists and the Dalai Lama, Buddhist monks, and scholars at the Mind and Life Institute in Dharamsala, India, in March, 2000.
At the culmination of this meeting, the Dalai Lama requested that the important ideas raised, specifically how to manage the everyday obstacles of our destructive emotions and cultivate a wholesome way of being, be turned into a secular training. Dr. Paul Ekman, Dr. Alan Wallace, Dr. Mark Greenberg and Dr. Richard Davidson accepted the challenge and began to sketch out what such a training program could look like and how to evaluate its impact. Through these discussions, “Cultivating Emotional Balance” was born.
Dr. Paul Ekman, world-renowned emotion researcher and Professor Emeritus at the University of California San Francisco, and Dr. Alan Wallace, a Buddhist Scholar and prolific writer, continued developing CEB with consultation from the original Mind and Life group.
For this project, the Dalai Lama donated $50,000. That, along with support from Jon Kabat-Zinn, Dan Goleman and the Fetzer institute, an additional $800,000 was raised to conduct a thorough research trial on the first CEB training offered by Alan Wallace and Margaret Cullen. Details on the findings from the original research can be found here.
PURPOSE
In Cultivating Emotional Balance we learn to develop clear intentions, stable attention, and deep insights by harvesting the lived experience of emotions, both enjoyable and regrettable, as a path for leading a more constructive emotional life supporting our own and others well-being. We do this through:
- Observing and studying our emotions we gain deep insights into behavioral patterns, physiological and psychological experiences, and our way of viewing ourselves and the world around us.
- Learning about the powerful and often invisible influence that prior life experience has on our perceptions of the present moment.
- Challenging cognitive shortcuts that are filled with errors and distortions that inhibit our capacity to meet the needs of the present.
- Harnessing our human potential for clarity, spaciousness, and compassion and insure a wholesome relationship with ourselves, others and the world around us.
CEB TODAY
The lineage of CEB is carried out by Eve Ekman, Paul Ekman’s daughter and emotional awareness heir, Ryan Redman, a long time student of Alan Wallace, contemplative practitioner and teacher,and supported with pedagogical support from Lani Potts a 30 year veteran in designing and teaching through the public school system and Venerable Tenzin Chogkyi a 30 year practitioner and teacher of both secular and traditional meditation practices .
The landscape of secular practices has evolved in the more than 20 years since CEB was first conceived with myriad offerings available from all corners of the globe. The consciousness around the appropriation and colonization of contemplative practices has also evolved. CEB as an organization, movement, and collective of teachers is committed to ongoing work to dismantle both internalized and external structures of oppression and inequality, and to standing with the BIPOC (black, indigenous, and people of color) movement of transformation. As the founders and the majority of the teachers of CEB are white identified and socialized, we are dedicating ourselves to the work of examining and undoing the unconscious bias and internalized racism that invisibly rises up through the privileges of our positionality. Needless to say, this work is ongoing and we are evolving our offerings and our admissions and scholarship criteria to reflect these values we aspire to uphold.
