Calendar Archive 2013

Wise Effort: Moving from New Year’s Resolutions to Reliable Habit
Spirit Rock Meditation Center, Woodacre, CA
January 16, 2013
9:00am-11:00am

Wise Effort, cultivating the wholesome and letting go of the unwholesome, is the engine of the entire noble 8-fold path in Buddhism that leads to awakening and enlightenment. We explore both the wise and the effort aspects of wise effort, and learn practical tools of self-directed neuroplasticity that turn our highest intentions into reliable habits of practice.

Positive Emotions Build Resilience
Esalen Institute, Big Sur, CA
January 18-20, 2013

Cultivating positive emotions—gratitude, serenity, joy, compassion, awe—reverses the impact of negativity on mood, health, and coping behaviors. Positivity immediately broadens our perspectives and options and builds long-term resources of deeper self-acceptance, fosters greater collaboration and connections with others, and strengthens the brain’s capacities to learn new skills, new points of view, new ways of being. You will learn practical tools to generate more optimism, sense of purpose, resilience, creativity and fulfillment, and move from “not so good” or even “good enough” to flourishing.

Emptiness and Equanimity
San Rafael Meditation Group
January 23, 2013

Emptiness and equanimity are two teachings in the Buddhist tradition about how to wisely hold the fullness of a human life – all the joys and sorrows, all the ups and downs – with clarity and compassion rather than confusion and clinging. We will explore the commonalities, differences and practical applications of these two views.

Dualities in Our Lives; Non-Duality in Practice
San Rafael Meditation Group
January 30, 2013

Inevitable in a human life, we are subject to the yin-hang of opposites: success-failure, praise-blame, pleasure-pain, gain-loss, strength-vulnerability, courage-fear, pride-disappointment, hatred-love. All of these contradictory ups and downs can be held in an awareness of the non-dual – the vast oneness of existence that is not this or that but simply is. We will explore how to access and apply an experience of the non-dual to the many dualities in our lives.

Neuroscience and the Art of Self Care
Psychotherapy Networker 2013 Symposium
March 21, 2013,
9:30am-5:00pm

Brain research has shown us how certain interventions can help rewire our clients’ brains, reducing stress, resolving trauma, and recovering resilience. But how much of this knowledge do we bring to the care of our own brains to manage the emotional volatility of difficult clients, reduce our own stress and burnout, to restore our sense of perspective, and recover our intuitive creativity? In this experiential workshop, you’ll practice 10 simple, empirically-validated techniques that harness the brain’s neuroplasticity to resource and regulate our body-brains, enhance coping strategies, and restore our capacities for social connectivity. You’ll learn specific tools to repair ineffective, seemingly stuck patterns of coping and then integrate the rewiring you’ve accomplished. You’ll leave with techniques that create a new neural integration and flexibility in your brain that help recover a sense of balance, wholeness, and open-ended creativity.

Positive Emotions Build Resilience
Psychotherapy Networker 2013 Symposium
March 23, 2013
3:00pm-5:00pm

As clinicians, we use our clinical skills every day to help clients cope with anxiety, depression, stress, and trauma. New research has proven: teaching clients to cultivate positive emotions can help them skillfully undo the impact of negative emotions on mood, health, and coping behaviors. Positive emotions – joy, gratitude, serenity, interest, hope, pride, compassion, delight, inspiration, awe, love – not only broaden perspectives and options; clients see new possibilities and solutions. They build long-term resources of deeper self-acceptance, greater collaboration and connections with others, and strengthen the brain’s capacities to learn new skills, new points of view, new ways of being. In this experiential workshop, you’ll practice 10 simple, empirically-validated techniques that help clients deliberately cultivate the positive emotions that are the direct cause of, not merely the result of, increased optimism, sense of purpose, resilience, creativity and fulfillment. You’ll leave with tools you can use immediately to increase your client’s positivity ratio and help them move from “not so good,” or even “good enough” to flourishing.

Wise Effort
Spirit Rock Meditation Center, Woodacre, CA
March 27, 2013,
9:00am.-11:00am

An exploration of the “unsung hero” of the noble 8-fold path to awakening. Using practices of wise effort to skillfully meet and modify the causes and conditions of suffering, for ourselves and our larger, inter-dependent world.

Integrity as Gateway to Joy
Awakening Joy, Berkeley, CA
March 27, 2013,
7:00pm-9:00pm

The 5-month experiential Awakening Joy course, now in its 10th year, helps participants practice 10 steps that lead to deeper joy and delight: intention, mindfulness, gratitude, working with suffering, integrity, letting go, loving ourselves, loving others, compassion, and resting in being. This evening explores the power of personal virtue and the universal “truth force” to lead to deeper happiness, ease and well-being.

Bouncing Back Author Event
East West Books, Mountain View, CA
April 18, 2013
7:30pm

A brief overview of how our brains develop resilience—or don’t—and how we can harness the innate neuroplasticity in our brains to recover the 5 C’s of coping: Calm, Clarity, Connections to Resources, Competence, and Courage. Question and answer period to follow.

Bouncing Back Author Event
Book Passage, Corte Madera, CA
April 23, 2013
7:00pm

Bouncing Back
Kripalu, Stockbridge, MA
April 26-28, 2013

Resilience is the innate capacity to respond flexibly to the hiccups and hurricanes of life. This workshop blends discoveries in modern brain science with tools from mindfulness practice and relational psychology to teach you practical, brain-savvy ways to bounce back from dilemmas and disasters. Using guided meditations, breath and movement exercises, dialogues with a partner, inquiry in small groups, and large group discussions, you learn to efficiently harness the innate neuroplasticity of your brain to rewire old patterns of coping. This rewiring is often immediate and permanent.

In this experiential weekend, you learn to

Stay calm in a crisis
Find clarity in seeing possibilities and creating options
Connect to resources and community
Become competent at being flexible and adaptive
Nurture the courage to persevere.

Rewire your brain from the neurons up, recovering a resilience that can last you a lifetime.

Bouncing Back Author Event
Readers Books, Sonoma, CA
May 2, 2013
7:30pm

Bouncing Back: Resilience and Renewal
Institute of Noetic Sciences, Petaluma, CA
May 24-26, 2013

A weekend of strengthening your inner resources and the natural resilience that supports your well-being and flourishing.

In this experiential weekend, you’ll learn to use more than a dozen tools and techniques – drawn from the intersection of brain science, relational psychology and mindfulness practices – that will help you handle the everyday disappointments and extraordinary disasters of life with more calm, courage, and flexibility.

No matter how you may have been impacted by stress and difficulties in the past, you can learn new and creative ways to navigate the twists and turns of life more flexibly and resiliently now.

Practical exercises help you learn to use the power of positive emotions to put the brakes on negativity, broaden your perspectives, and create a “left shift” in your brain toward more optimism and exploration.

You’ll cultivate the mindful awareness that can help you reflect on your experience, shift perspectives, discern options and choose actions wisely.

You’ll strengthen the resonance circuit in your brain that allows you to connect skillfully and intimately with others.

You’ll practice the self-compassion that leads to genuine self-acceptance and self-care. You can not only get through hard times but thrive in their midst.

Through exercises imaginative designed to help you rewire your brain, you’ll learn to harness the neuroplasticity innate in your own brain that encodes the learning of new capacities, immediately and permanently.

You’ll leave the workshop with new skills to chart your course with confidence across the great seas of life.

Resilient Consciousness in Turbulent Times
Beyond Awakening tele seminar with Terry Patten
June 17, 2013

Resilience is the inner capacity we cultivate to meet the flux of external events, whether the external events are good news or bad news. Our inner resources to respond skillfully – with consciousness and compassion, a moral compass, and flexibility of action – is what determines how resilient and how effective our actions will be in the world.

Recent discoveries of modern neuroscience are beginning to illuminate how capacities for resilience – to navigate the twists and turns of our personal and collective lives, to cope with everyday disappointments and extraordinary disasters, to bounce back from the terrible – develop in our brains in the first place, how those capacities can become derailed by stress or trauma, and what practices we can use to rewire our brains to cope more resiliently again, even strengthen the structures of the brain that do that rewiring.

One of the most useful discoveries of neuroscience in the last ten years has been the empirical validation of neuroplasticity – the capacity of the brain to grow new neurons and to create new connections among those neurons – lifelong.

Because it is experience that kindles the brain’s neuroplasticity, when we know which experiences will best catalyze the growth of new more resilient patterns of response flexibility in our turbulent times, we can use self-directed neuroplasticity to rewire our brains for more skillful coping, more well-being, more flourishing, for ourselves and others.

Modern neuroscience has shown that mindfulness practice and empathic resonant relationships are two of the most powerful agents of brain change known to mankind. When we intentionally cultivate our capacities to pause, notice and accept our experience with compassion rather than judgments, see clearly our experiences and our reactions to our experience, and dis-entangle our “self” from our experience, we can shift perspectives, discern options, and choose new options wisely, while strengthening the structures of the brain that allow us to do so.

When we attune to, empathize with, and have compassion for the pain and suffering inherent in the human condition, in times of turbulence or relative peace, we create a neural receptivity in the brain that allows us to reach more collaborative solutions to the problems of our times.

We use an integration of tools and techniques drawn from Eastern wisdom traditions and from Western psychology to come into 6 C’s of coping: calm, compassion, clarity, connections to resources, competence, and courage. All 6 C’s are the essential platform to move our resilience beyond our personal self to become effective agents of change in the world.

The Fullness and Flow of Emptiness
San Rafael Meditation Group
June 19, 2013

An ongoing exploration of the rising and falling away of experience and the states of consciousness that lead to awareness of selfing, wise effort, and awakening.

Bouncing Back Author Event
San Leandro Public Library
300 Estudillo Avenue,San Leandro, CA
July 11, 2013,
7:00 pm-8:00 pm

A brief overview of how our brains develop resilience – or don’t – and tools to harness the brain’s innate neuroplasticity to recover the 5 C’s of Coping: Calm, Clarity, Connections to Resources, Competence, and Courage.

The Fullness and Flow of Emptiness
San Rafael Meditation Group
July 24, 2013

An ongoing exploration of the rising and falling away of experience and the states of consciousness that lead to awareness of selfing, wise effort, and awakening.

Shift Happens: Rewiring Your Brain for Resilience and Well-Being
InsightLA
July 27, 2013

Mindfulness and compassion practices are among the most powerful agents of brain change known to modern science. A wise use of Buddhist contemplative practices and tools from modern relational psychology can help practitioners let go of unwholesome coping strategies and cultivate wholesome ones, leading to more clarity, response flexibility and resilience and less greed, hatred, delusion and suffering.

This workshop teaches participants many practices that skillfully harness the innate neuroplasticity of the brain to reduce the impacts of stress, trauma, the hindrances, and our all-too- human conditioning on how we cope with the inevitable disappointments and disasters of life, and to deepen the habits of generosity, kindness, compassion, forgiveness, equanimity, tranquility, and inner peace that lead to freedom and liberation.

The workshop will deepen practitioners’ experiences of and faith in self-directed neuroplasticity as a genuine support of wise understanding and wise effort.

Bouncing Back Author Event
Mystic Journey Bookstore, Venice, CA
July 27, 2013, 6pm-8pm

Bouncing Back: The Keys to Resiliency
Voice America Health and Wellness
August 13, 2013, 10am

Why is it that some people can pick themselves up after a traumatic experience and move forward in life, while others remain stuck and unable to move on? In this hour-long interview, Linda Graham, will define resiliency and explain the role that our brains play in allowing us to compassionately “bounce back” from traumatic and stressful life events. She will also explore how to get our brains back on-line and restore a sense of equilibrium after an overwhelming experience occurs. She will discuss the importance of developing secure attachments, the ability to incorporate mindfulness, empathy, and acceptance, and how these internal and external resources allow us to work through and transcend challenges. Linda will offer listeners a number of tools and strategies for successfully creating narratives that promote self-compassion, resiliency and healing after a traumatic experience. She will also explain her 5 C’s for coping and how we can strengthen those capacities within ourselves.

The Fullness and Flow of Emptiness
San Rafael Meditation Group
August 21, 2013

An ongoing exploration of the rising and falling away of experience and the states of consciousness that lead to awareness of selfing, wise effort, and awakening.

Neuroscience of the Non-Dual
Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health, Stockbridge, MA
August 25-30, 2013

Assisting Richard Miller, PhD, in teaching The Transformative Power of Being: The Non-Dual Yoga of Delight, Wonder, and Astonishment.

In this workshop, Richard Miller shares the path of Non-Dual Yoga, teaching us how to

Meet and welcome all that we are: body, senses, mind, and emotions
Free our attention to investigate the transformative power of the mystery itself
Allow conceptual understanding to give way to heartfelt love, compassion, joy and self-knowing.

Through periods of silent and guided meditation, gentle yoga, co-meditation, interactive dialogue, and pointing-out instruction, learn to relax and recognize your non-dual presence as the mystery of being. Only when we are willing to be and live as the mystery, will we—and the world—be at peace.

Bouncing Back: Rewiring the Brain for Resilience and Well-Being
Island Institute for Trauma Recovery
September 6, 2013, 9am-4pm

Dealing effectively with the challenges and crises of life is the core of our resilience and well-being. Helping our patients develop flexible and adaptive strategies for coping with everyday disappointments and extraordinary disasters is the heart of the therapeutic process.

Modern neuroscience is discovering how the brain encodes its strategies of coping in the first place, and illuminates how we can help patients use their own self-directed neuroplasticity to rewire strategies that no longer work so well, even strengthen the structures of the brain that develop rather than derail our resilience.

In this daylong training, clinicians will learn through didactics, experiential exercises, and group discussions, which tools and techniques of brain change best help patients reverse the impact of stress and trauma, deepen the self-compassion, empathy and resonant relationships that connect them to resources and the perseverance that develops resilience, and shift perspectives through mindful awareness and reflection to discern options and make wise choices.

You will learn to apply these tools and techniques, which underlie the therapeutic modalities we are already familiar with – Internal Family Systems, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy, AEDP. DBT, EFT – to help patients strengthen the 6 C’s of Coping: Calm, Compassion, Clarity, Connections, Competence and Courage and recover the natural resilience that supports well-being and flourishing.

The Neuroscience of Building Resilience through Positive Emotions
Esalen Institute, Big Sur, CA
September 13-15, 2013

This brain-savvy workshop will help you strengthen your inner resources and the natural resilience that supports your well-being and flourishing. In this inspiring weekend, you’ll practice the empirically-validate techniques that help you use positive emotions to put the brakes on negativity, open horizons and options, foster self-acceptance and connections with others, increase resilience, creativity, and optimism, and move you from “not so good” or even “good enough” to flourishing.

The Neuroscience of Resilience and Renewal
Esalen Institute, Big Sur, CA
September 15-20, 2013

Dive deeper into the practices that help you navigate the twists and turns of life with calm, courage, and flexibility. You’ll learn the tools and techniques – drawn from the intersection of brain science, relational psychology and mindfulness practices – to help you most easily and effectively reduce stress, recover clarity, reconnect with resources, as you rewire your brain for more resilient coping.

Bouncing Back: Rewiring Your Brain for Resilience and Well-Being
West County Health Centers, Guerneville, CA
October 3, 2013
9:30am-4pm

The Neuroscience and Psychology of Resilience
Community Institute for Psychotherapy, San Rafael, CA
October 19, 2013
9am-4pm

Teaching Clients to Rewire Their Brains for More Skillful Coping, taught with Daniel Ellenberg, PhD

Resilience is the capacity – hardwired in the human brain – to cope with the inevitable challenges and crises of life with skill and flexibility. Our coping strategies, ranging from very adaptive to maladaptive, are learned initially in interactions with our earliest caregivers. Patterns of response to everyday disappointments or extraordinary disasters become deeply embedded in the neural circuitry of the brain where they unconsciously drive our behaviors of coping throughout life, even shape the development of the brain itself.

This workshop includes the latest discoveries of neuroscience that illuminate how life experiences trigger the brain to encode learned patterns of response, along with which specific new experiences can most safely, efficiently, and effectively rewire these old coping strategies, even strengthen the structures of the brain that do the rewiring.

The workshop offers tools drawn from two of the most powerful agents of brain change known to science – empathic relationships and mindfulness practices – to help clinicians help their clients harness the innate neuroplasticity of their brains to develop new ways to navigate life’s twists and turns more resiliently. Therapists will learn how to help clients address two of the most powerful de-railers of resilience – anxiety and shame – and learn tools to recover their own resilience when de-railed in therapeutic sessions.

Mindfulness and Compassion Lead to Resilience and Well-Being
San Rafael Meditation Group
November 6, 2013
6:45pm-8:30pm

Bouncing Back: Rewiring Your Brain for Resilience and Well-Being
Insight Meditation Community, Berkeley, CA
November 7, 2013
7:30pm-9:30pm

Bouncing Back: Rewiring Your Brain for Resilience and Well-Being
Spirit Rock Meditation Center, Woodacre, CA
November 16, 2013
9:30am-5pm

This daylong teaches participants many practices that skillfully harness the innate neuroplasticity of the brain to reduce the impacts of stress, trauma, the hindrances, and our all-too- human conditioning on how we cope with the inevitable disappointments and disasters of life, and to deepen the habits of generosity, kindness, compassion, forgiveness, equanimity, tranquility, and inner peace that lead to freedom and liberation.

The daylong will deepen practitioners’ experiences of and faith in self-directed neuroplasticity as a genuine support of wise understanding and wise effort.

Bouncing Back: Rewiring Your Brain for Resilience and Well-Being
YogaKula, Berkeley
November 17, 2013
1pm-5pm

The daylong will deepen practitioners’ experiences of and faith in self-directed neuroplasticity as a genuine support of wise understanding and wise effort.

Neuroscience, Mindfulness and Compassion
California Institute of Integral Studies
November 21, 2013
6:15pm-9:15pm

The CIIS Public Programs & Performances Certificate in Mindfulness and Compassion in Psychotherapy brings together local and national leaders in the field to provide 150 hours of in-depth study of the core skills and applications related to the field. The certificate is intended for mental health practitioners who are interested in developing a deeper understanding and application of mindfulness and compassion in their professional practices

The program has a unique emphasis on development of the internal state of the psychotherapist. It extends beyond ideas and skills acquisition to address the deeper issue of how a psychotherapist can utilize her or his own compassion and mindfulness to inspire clients, and to create a healing relationship that encourages the unfolding of the psyche at its most essential levels.

Conscious Compassionate Communication: The Brain Science of Resonance and Resilience in Couples
Non-Violent Communication Couples Tele-Conference
December 6, 2013
5:45pm-7pm

Our automatic survival responses to distress and disconnection – fight-flight-freeze-collapse – can derail even the most loving and intimate of relationships. Modern neuroscience is illuminating how we can rewire the brain’s habitual coping strategies to foster more calm, clarity and connection with those we love. This teleseminar offers tools – drawn from the intersection of relational psychology, mindfulness practices, and neuroscience – to help us “bounce back” from the everyday disappointments and extraordinary disasters of committed relationships and foster more love, happiness and fulfillment with our loved ones.

Linda Graham, MFT

Calendar Archive 2013

Calendar Archive 2013

Linda Graham, MFT