Cultivating Emotional Balance: Three Day Intensive with Dave Smith and Lani Potts

3-Day Online Retreat

Friday January 28, 2022 – Sunday, January 30, 2022

9am-5pm PDT (9am-12pm and 2pm-5pm)

Please plan to attend all days, no partial retreat available

Retreat Fees: $300

Scholarships available, please email diamondlight.sac@gmail.com to request a scholarship.

The Cultivating Emotional Balance (CEB) training was sparked during a meeting between behavioral scientists, a neuroscientist, a monk, a philosopher, and the Dalai Lama in 2000, as a new approach to understanding our emotional lives. Combining contemporary emotion based scientific research with contemplative practices and psychology drawn from Buddhism, the Cultivating Emotional Balance training gives participants new tools to use emotion as a path for transformation.

Join an original format for learning and integrating the basic tools of Cultivating Emotional Balance. In this workshop, participants develop attention, restore motivation, identify the root causes of enduring happiness, explore anger and sadness, investigate different pathways of empathy, practice self-compassion, and build connections through vulnerability and trust.

Our goal is to support the participants in acquiring tools for cultivating emotional balance in daily life. Your guides are CEB teachers, Lani Potts and Dave Smith. Together, they are a dynamic duo with experience teaching the fundamental concepts of CEB.

Day 1:

• Lay the groundwork for emotional awareness
• Learn how to track emotions
• Cultivate a basis of joy in meditation and stabilize attention in the body.

Day 2:

• Investigate the roots and strategies for working with the emotions of anger and sadness
• Develop mindfulness, introspection and compassion for your mental and emotional habits.

Day 3:

• Explore your internal longing for contentment and flourishing,
• Reflect on on genuine well-being and a meaningful life
• Meditations that establish the clarity of intention and commitment to you and others well-being.

Each day focuses on learning and practice:

• 9am-12pm PDT Emotion Awareness Workshop:
  Includes powerpoint instruction, small group breakouts, activities, and interactive discussion

• 2pm-5pm PDT Contemplative Practice and Meditation:
  Includes guided practice and instruction on contemplative themes.
  These sessions will be recorded
  **Can be watched the next morning for those in later time zones.

Dave Smith is an internationally recognized Buddhist Meditation teacher, addiction treatment specialist, CEB trained teacher, and published author. He has extensive experience bringing meditative interventions into jails, prisons, youth detention centers and addiction treatment facilities. Dave teaches residential retreats and classes, provides training and consulting in both secular and Buddhist contexts and works with students through his meditation mentoring program. He recently founded the Secular Dharma Foundation and lives in Paonia, Colorado.

As a Dharma practitioner and certified Cultivating Emotional Balance teacher, Lani Potts 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. In her “retirement,” Lani actively teaches CEB, coaches CEB teachers and students, and serves as the Cultivating Emotional Balance Program Director. She also teaches mindfulness and meditation as part of a UCSF study on mindfulness with cancer patients and lives in San Jose, California.