OUR TEAM
EVE EKMAN
Dr. Eve Ekman is a second-generation emotion researcher, an experienced speaker, researcher, and group facilitator. She brings a unique background ideally suited to training individuals and organizations in the science of happiness, resilience, compassion, mindfulness, and emotional awareness.
She worked for years as a social worker in health care, criminal justice, and social welfare systems. This experience inspired her to earn her master’s and Ph.D. at UC Berkeley and complete her postdoctoral training at UCSF Osher Center for Integrative Medicine. During her doctoral studies, she pursued an interdisciplinary approach to research through public health, sociology, education, and psychology. Also, during this time, she took over from her father, the role as one of the lead teachers for the Cultivating Emotional Balance program. Her father, Dr. Paul Ekman, scholar and researcher in the field of emotions, along with Buddhist scholar and teacher, Dr. Alan Wallace developed the Cultivating Emotional Balance program at the request of the Dalai Lama at the conclusion of the 2000 Mind and Life Conference.
Her research has focused on helping professional care providers prevent burnout by teaching them practices to improve their attentional stability, insight, and resilience. Building on her research, she developed trainings to address burnout in national and international organizations and has delivered keynotes and workshops for a wide range of companies, including Airbnb, Salesforce, and Kaiser Permanente. In 2019 Eve participated in the World Economic Forum as a speaker to address compassion and stress.
Eve’s research interest includes technology that fosters emotion regulation and mindfulness, developing a dynamic measurement for empathy, and assessing the impact of provider empathy on the quality of patient care. In addition to her role with CEB, Eve is currently the Director of Training at the University of California Berkeley Greater Good Science Center.
RYAN REDMAN
From an early age, Ryan began developing a keen interest in contemplative-based practices and eventually traveled to India at the age of twenty to pursue his interests in meditation. Upon his return, Ryan began teaching and studying contemplative-based practices while studying at the University of California in Santa Barbara (UCSB). In addition to completing an undergraduate degree in Environmental Studies at UCSB, Ryan met his primary meditation teacher Dr. Alan Wallace. After graduation, Ryan returned to India several times and spent over three years there deepening his personal practice and furthering his understanding of various contemplative traditions. As a result of these experiences, Ryan has dedicated himself to exploring the interrelationship between mind transformation, personal well-being, benevolent social action, and environmental stewardship. Ryan has been teaching in the Sun Valley Idaho area for the past 20 years and has completed a Masters degree in Contemplative Education from Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. In addition to his role as one of the lead instructors for the CEB Certified Practitioner Program, he has served a pivotal role in developing and evolving the CEB curriculum for both teachers and students.
Ryan is also a co-founder and the Executive Director of the Flourish Foundation, a social non-profit dedicated to inspiring systemic change through cultivation of healthy habits of mind that promote personal well-being, benevolent social action, and environmental stewardship.
TENZIN CHOGKYI
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 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.
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 worked in administrative positions in several Buddhist centers in the 1990’s, and also completed several long meditation retreats over a six-year period. Tenzin took monastic ordination in 2004 with His Holiness the Dalai Lama and practiced 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.
In addition to CEB, Tenzin is a certified teacher of Compassion Cultivation Training, a secular compassion training program developed at Stanford University. She is also a training and curriculum specialist for the Conflict Resolution Center of Santa Cruz. County and is on the Sustainable Caring teaching team.
She also finds time to create her Unlocking True Happiness podcast which you can check out at unlockingtruehappiness.org where you will also find her current teaching schedule. She is based in Santa Cruz, California, on traditional Awaswas and Amah Mutsun Ohlone land.
LANI POTTS
As a Dharma practitioner and certified Cultivating Emotional Balance teacher, Lani also brings to CEB her training and experience as a yoga and meditation teacher along with a long-established Buddhist meditation practice. Lani is a recently retired educator with over 38 years of experience as an elementary teacher, principal, teacher and administrator coach, and Assistant Superintendent for Curriculum and Instruction. She is well versed in practical curriculum development, pedagogy, and effective professional development training for educators.
Using one’s heart and mind well represents a major emphasis throughout Lani’s personal life and career. To help manifest her focus on nurturing the social and emotional well-being of children and families, Lani implemented Project Cornerstone, an asset building program committed to helping all children and youth feel valued, respected and known as they grow into healthy, caring, responsible adults. Building a sustainable school climate and culture that is positive, respectful, predictable and safe represents the heart of this work, which includes mindfulness and resiliency. To accomplish this goal, Lani was also instrumental in introducing Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports (PBIS) throughout all the schools in the school districts where she worked.
In her “retirement,” she serves as the Cultivating Emotional Balance Program Director. It is Lani’s aspiration to cultivate connections among the CEB teacher community making both practice and service more powerful.
LITZULI ZARATE-RICO
Litzuli Zarate-Rico, PhD, MA, is an interdisciplinary social scientist focused on human experience and Indigenous studies exploring them through anthropology, phenomenology, sociology, and economics. With a Master’s in Anthropology, her research intends to answer her life-long question: why is it so difficult for humans to collaborate for the common good? Her research digs deep into human organizational processes and their relation with perceiving the quality of interdependence of this shared reality as a trigger to collaborate for the common good.
Litzuli has been a CEB-certified teacher since 2019 and has taught CEB in diverse contexts such as open public, education, and corporate environments.
Certified in micro-phenomenology, an innovative methodology to study human experience, Litzuli applied this method in her PhD research project working with an iconic Indigenous-Nahua women group in the Northeast Sierra of Puebla in Mexico. She is a member of the Micro-Phenomenology Lab and an active participant in Mind and Life programs both in Europe and the US. Her perspective is multi-disciplinary, multicultural, and in multi-diverse contexts since academia, consultant for ONGs, private and public organizations, and corporations.
MICHAEL LOBSANG TENPA
Michael Lobsang Tenpa is a Cultivating Emotional Balance teacher, Tibetan Buddhist translator, meditation instructor, and student of EcoDharma.
Born in Siberia, he earned BA and MA degrees in South Asian studies, worked in social media, and eventually received ordination in Nepal, spending nine years as a Tibetan Buddhist monastic before switching to the path of a lay practitioner. In addition to years of Buddhist studies and translator work (including translating and interpreting for His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche, and other masters), he also trained as a secular ethics and mindfulness instructor in the Netherlands, the UK, and the US, and has offered classes and retreats in Asia, Europe, and the Americas.
Serving as a translator/interpreter for the CEB founder Dr. Alan Wallace since 2012, Tenpa eventually completed the CEB teacher training in 2020 and has been regularly teaching the different versions of the program ever since. His primary area of expertise is the use of the four immeasurables (loving-kindness, compassion, empathetic joy, and equanimity) in the cultivation of emotional balance, attentional stability, and existential intelligence.
You can find more info about Lobsang Tenpa and his work on his website.
