Guilt
Anguish
Regret
Envy
Anxiety
Trauma

Life makes us all susceptible to these painful states of mind. And sometimes memories of suffering and trauma – either which we have experienced directly or vicariously to the pain of others – continue to be powerfully disturbing long afterward, despite our attempts to change them through understandings from meditation, spirituality or psychotherapy.

New advances in trauma therapy and memory research, together with Buddhist perspectives on consciousness, can help us neutralize or greatly diminish the disturbance such memories have held for us.

These passing contents of consciousness can be seen as illusions, similar but in contrast to the “willing suspension of disbelief” we engage in when enjoying movies and theatrical productions. (Those “people” we see on the movie screen are really projections of light or are patterns of pixels from the digital world; the interesting “characters” we are focusing on in a play are actually actors – often with extremely different personalities than those they are portraying).  Memories can be seen as illusory also, with memory research highlighting the “perceptual errors” inherent in them.

In this two-hour seminar, we will explore understandings of consciousness from mindfulness, Zen and Tibetan Buddhism, together with recent research on memory reconsolidation, and will have demonstrations of and opportunity to experience an adaptation of the Flash Technique® for traumatic and disturbing memories, which has been taught internationally in the past three years by Phillip Manfield, Ph.D. and Lewis Engel, Ph.D. to approximately 6,000 EMDR trauma therapists.

Added to this workshop will be insights from in-depth conversations David has had with Tibetan Buddhist scholars Robert Thurman, PhD and Thupten Jinpa, PhD.; senior Zen teachers; UCLA  neuro-psychoanalyst Allan Schore, MD; trauma expert Bessel van der Kolk, MD; and psychedelic researcher and psychologist William (Bill) Richards, PhD of Johns Hopkins Medical University.

General:$25/Members:22.50   REGISTER HERE 

Photo by Masaaki Komori on Unsplash