• Neuroplasticity and Spiritual Practice
• Marin Inter-Faith Council annual retreat, San Rafael, CA
• January 13, 2014 10am-4pm

“Do not conform to the pattern of this world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” Romans 12:2 How do modern neuroscientists correlate brain functioning with mental activity and spiritual experience? How does the brain apprehend the transcendent? Join David Richo (How to be an Adult in Faith and Spirituality) and Linda Graham (Bouncing Back: Rewiring Your Brain for Maximum Resilience and Well-Being) in a rich and rewarding exploration of how modern brain science can illuminate and strengthen our spiritual practice.

• Bouncing Back: Rewiring Your Brain for Resilience and Well-Being
• Marin CAMFT
• January 17, 2014 5:30pm-7:30pm

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 presentation, clinicians will learn 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 then connect them to the 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.

• Resilience and Coaching
• Hudson Institute
• January 20, 2014 5pm

More information coming soon.

• Bouncing Back
• NICABM 2014 Brain Science Series
• Begins online January 22, 2014

Brain science is changing all the time (just like your brain)…new discoveries and innovative ideas make the field robust, but can often make it difficult to keep up on the latest ways to change the brain and help you and your clients transform your lives. The NICABM 2014 New Brain Science series is a 6-webinar series featuring some of the leading experts in neuroscience, and it’s free to watch each webinar when it’s broadcast, you just have to sign up. Here’s a look at the stellar line-up:

• Daniel Siegel, MD – The Neurobiology of the Teenage Brain: A New Way of Looking at Adolescent Behavior
• Daniel Amen, MD – Hormones, Hardwiring, and the Female Brain: Balancing Your Brain for Optimal Health
• Rick Hanson, PhD – Happiness and Neuroplasticity: Simple Strategies for Rewiring Your Brain
• Helen Fisher, PhD – The Brain in Love: The Neurobiology of Romance
• Daniel Goleman, PhD – Focus: Why Concentration Can Make Your Brain More Powerful
• Bruce Lipton, PhD – Epigenetics: What Really Controls Our Genes and Why We Don’t Have to Be Victims of Our DNA

If you sign up for a Gold Membership, you’ll be able to view the webinars anytime you wish, and you’ll get 4 additional bonus webinars (you can scroll down to see them): Kelly McGonigal, Pat Ogden, John Arden, and including mine on Bouncing Back. With the Gold Membership, you receive downloadable videos, audio recordings, transcripts, and the four bonus session, all of which you can keep forever. To register for the Gold Membership: http://www.nicabm.com/php/redirects/?id=566 You will learn new and creative ways to navigate the twists and turns of life with more calm, courage, and flexibility.

• Inner Peace, Peace in the World
• Yoga for Peace Sympsosium Sivananda Ashram Yoga Retreat, Bahamas
• February 7-9, 2014

Body-based tools and techniques to cultivate the inner peace that is the ground and the stability for all outward action, and moving that inner peace and resilience beyond the personal self to become an agent of social change in the world.

• The Safety Factor of the Four Noble Truths
• San Rafael Meditation Group
• February 12, 2014 6:45-8:30pm

The Four Noble Truths teach us of the inevitability of suffering, the root causes of suffering, the sure relief from suffering, and the 8-fold path of practices that lead to the complete liberation from suffering. This evening will explore the cultivation of safety and trust as a major factor in reducing and eliminating the causes of human suffering.

• Bouncing Back: Rewiring the Brain for Resilience and Renewal
• Yoga Kula – Berkeley
• February 19, 2014 6:30pm

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 practices from other wisdom traditions as well as 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. Practitioners can learn many practices that skillfully harness the innate neuroplasticity of the brain to reduce the impacts of stress, trauma, and our all-too- human conditioning on how we cope with the inevitable disappointments and disasters of life. We can learn to deepen the habits of generosity, kindness, compassion, forgiveness, equanimity, tranquility, and inner peace that lead to freedom and liberation. Self-directed neuroplasticity supports our wise effort.

• Resilience Starts in the Brain: Why Understanding Brain Science Is So Important for “Bouncing Back”
• NICAMB 2014 Brain Science series
• March 6, 2014 5:00pm EST

This hour-long webinar is offered free at the time of broadcast and is available indefinitely after broadcast as a bonus for subscribers to the NICABM 2014 Brain Science Series.

• Bouncing Back: Rewiring the Brain for Resilience and Well-Being
• Voices of Healing
• March 10, 2014 5:00pm EST

Psychologist Cathy Roberts interviews Linda Graham about practical applications of modern neuroscience to the healing of relationships and sense of personal self.

• Bouncing Back: Rewiring the Brain for Resilience and Well-Being
• Bread for the Journey Radio
• March 15, 2014 9:00am PST

Marianna Cacciatore interviews Linda Graham about how positive emotions help rewire the brain for more resilience and cooperation among people, and how resilience helps people become effective agents for social change.

• Neuroscience and the Art of Self-Care
• Psychotherapy Networker Symposium, Washington, D.C.
• March 20, 2014 9:00am-5:00pm

Brain research has shown us how certain interventions can help rewire our clients’ brains to reduce stress, resolve trauma, and recover resilience. But how much of this knowledge do we bring to the care of our own brains to reduce our own stress and burnout, to restore our sense of perspective, and to recover our intuitive creativity? In this experiential workshop, you’ll practice 10 simple, empirically validated techniques designed to harness the brain’s neuroplasticity to help you recharge brain and body. You’ll learn specific techniques to strengthen six C’s of coping strategies – calm, compassion, clarity, connections to resources, competence, and courage – that help you restore energy, and enhance socializing and connecting with others. You’ll learn exercises to help reconfigure and rewire “stuck” brain-behavior patterns. You’ll leave with a self-help toolkit to create renewed neural flexibility in your brain—and to recover a sense of balance, wholeness and open-ended creativity.

• Catalyze Brain Change: From Incremental Skills to Quantum Learning
• Psychotherapy Networker Symposium
• March 22, 2014 11:00am-1:00pm

Different kinds of neural activity underlie different levels of client functioning and different paths of therapeutic change. Whether a client is stuck in repetitive defensive patterns, struggling to stabilize a coherent sense of self, progressing incrementally toward new, more resilient behavior, or experiencing quantum breakthroughs, teaching clients what’s happening in the brain in each of these modes of learning can help us guide their therapeutic growth. In this workshop, you’ll learn to integrate catalysts for neuroplasticity for each of four different learning mechanisms in the brain into whatever your preferred approach happens to be. You’ll learn how to:

• Create the “left shift” that can counterbalance the brain’s negativity bias and installs new habits into implicit memory
• Use memory deconsolidation-reconsolidation to heal toxic shame and retire the inner critic
• Strengthen the executive functioning of the prefrontal cortex to strengthen client resiliency and coherence
• Harness the mental play space of the default network to allow insights to break through

• Bouncing Back: The Neuroscience of Resilience and Well-Being
• EarthRise Center, Petaluma, CA
• March 28-30, 2014

Welcome to an experiential weekend of strengthening your inner resources and the natural resilience that supports your well-being and flourishing. You’ll learn more than a dozen tools and techniques – drawn from the intersection of brain science, relational psychology, and mindfulness practices – that will help you reduce the impact of stress and trauma, deepen your self-compassion and self-awareness, and broaden perspectives, possibilities, and sense of purpose. The practical experiential exercises, guided meditations and visualizations, inquiry in dyads and small groups, and stimulating dialogue and discussion in large groups, will help you harness your own self-directed neuroplasticity to rewire your brain for maximum resilience and well-being.

• Bouncing Back: The Neuroscience of Resilience and Well-Being
• Esalen Institute, Big Sur, CA
• April 11-13, 2014

Welcome to an experiential weekend of strengthening your inner resources and the natural resilience that supports your well-being and flourishing. You’ll learn more than a dozen tools and techniques – drawn from the intersection of brain science, relational psychology, and mindfulness practices – that will help you reduce the impact of stress and trauma, deepen your self-compassion and self-awareness, and broaden perspectives, possibilities, and sense of purpose. The practical experiential exercises, guided meditations and visualizations, inquiry in dyads and small groups, and stimulating dialogue and discussion in large groups, will help you harness your own self-directed neuroplasticity to rewire your brain for maximum resilience and well-being. You will learn new and creative ways to navigate the twists and turns of life with more calm, courage, and flexibility.

• Bouncing Back: Resilience and Renewal
• Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health, Stockbridge, MA
• April 25-27, 2014

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.

• Cherishable…and Perishable
• San Rafael Meditation Group
• May 28, 2014 6:45pm-8:30pm

An exploration of the importance of connection in our most important relationships, to self, to others, to the world, in light of the ever-changing nature of those connections.

• Resilience in Our Students, Our Schools, Our Communities
• Utah School Counselors State Conference, Salt Lake City, UT
• June 11, 2014

An exploration of practical tools and techniques to foster the 6 C’s of coping – Calm, Compassion, Clarity, Connections to Resources, Competence, and Courage – in students, teachers, counselors, and in the spirit of our schools in general.

• Bouncing Back: Rewiring the Brain for Resilience and Renewal
• Spirit Rock Meditation Center
• June 21, 2014 9:30am-5:00pm

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 daylong teaches participants many practices that skillfully harness the innate neuroplasticity of the brain to reduce the impacts of stress, trauma, 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: The Neuroscience of Resilience and Well-Being
• Hollyhock, Cortez Island, British Columbia
• June 25-29, 2014

Welcome to an experiential weekend of strengthening your inner resources and the natural resilience that supports your well-being and flourishing. Learn more than a dozen tools and techniques – drawn from the intersection of brain science, relational psychology, and mindfulness practices – to help you reduce the impact of stress and trauma, restore your equilibrium after overwhelm, deepen your self-compassion and self-awareness, shift perspectives through mindful reflection, identify options, and broaden perspectives, possibilities, and sense of purpose. The practical experiential exercises, guided meditations and visualizations, inquiry in dyads and small groups, and stimulating dialogue and discussion in large groups, help you harness your own self-directed neuroplasticity to rewire your brain for maximum resilience and well-being. You will learn new and creative ways to navigate the twists and turns of life with more calm, courage, and flexibility.

• The Transformational Power of Resilience
• The Neuroscience of Change
• June 26, 2014

An hour-long dialogue on the Transformational Power of Resilience with Joel Monk of Coaches Rising, part of The Neuroscience of Change summit, a 6-part series of interviews with thought leaders about the science of human change. The series includes:

1. How to Harness the Biological Learning Process to Create Change by Amanda Blake, author of Your Body is Your Brain. (Released June 24, 2014)
2. The Transformational Power of Resilience by Linda Graham, author of Bouncing Back: Rewiring Your Brain for Maximum Resilience and Well-Being. (Released Thursday, June 26, 2014)
3. Encoding Your Clients Desired Future into Their Neurological System by Doug Silsbee, author of Presence Based Coaching and The Mindful Coach: Seven Roles for Facilitating Leader Development. (Released July 1, 2014)
4. How to Create Stories through Neurosculpting by Lisa Wimberger, author of New Beliefs, New Brain: Free Yourself from Stress and Fear. (Released July 3, 2014)
5. Entering the Emotional Gym and Accessing the Upward Spiral by William Larkin, author of Growing the Positive Mind. (Released July 8, 2014)
6. The Neurobiology of Change by Dan Siegel, author of Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation. (Released July 10, 2014)

All six sessions will be freely accessible and downloadable as soon as they are released and will remain so indefinitely. To subscribe: http://www.coachesrising.com/landing/neuroscienceofchange/

• Bouncing Back: The Neuroscience of Resilience and Well-Being
• San Leandro Public Library, San Leandro, CA
• July 10, 2014 7pm-9pm

Resilience is the innate capacity to respond flexibly to the hiccups and hurricanes of life. Discoveries in modern brain science help us integrate tools from relational psychology and mindfulness practice to efficiently harness the neuroplasticity of the brain to rewire old patterns of coping and bounce back better from difficulties, disappointments, and disasters. In this program, you will learn empirically validated techniques to reduce stress, take self-compassion breaks, come to clarity and discernment in decision making, retire the inner critic, and revive a sense of competency and connection with others. You’ll learn to create new neural flexibility in your brain and a fresh sense of well-being and flourishing.

• Bouncing Back: The Neuroscience of Resilience and Well-Being
• Stanislaus County Behavioral Health and Recovery Services
• July 11, 2014 7pm-9pm

Dealing effectively with challenges and crises in life is the core of resilience and well-being. Helping clients develop flexible and adaptive strategies for coping with everyday disappointments and extraordinary disasters is the heart of the therapeutic process. Helping clients rewire coping strategies that are defensive, dysfunctional, and blocking of growth, and encode new more flexible patterns of response, is the focus of this workshop. Modern neuroscience is discovering how the brain encodes strategies of coping in the first place, and how to use the brain’s own mechanisms of change to rewire them, even when they are seemingly “stuck” and intractable. By learning which tools and techniques are the most effective catalysts of the brain’s innate neuroplasticity, we can teach clients to 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 their resilience.

• Shift Happens: Mindfulness and Compassion Are Powerful Agents of Brain Change and Spiritual Transformation
• Insight Meditation Central Valley
• July 12, 2014

Mindfulness and compassion practices are among the most powerful agents of brain change known to modern science. We can learn to wisely use Buddhist contemplative practices and tools from modern relational psychology to harness the innate neuroplasticity of the brain to reduce the impacts of stress and trauma, deepen our self-compassion and self-awareness, learn new and creative ways to navigate the twists and turns of life with more calm, courage, and flexibility, and deepen the wise effort that leads to inner peace, equanimity, and well-being.

• Resilience
• Omega Institute
• July 18-20, 2014

Linda Graham joins Jungian analyst Polly Young-Eisendrath, author of The Self-Esteem Trap and Chris Martenson, teacher of economic resilience, in a weekend dialogue and exploration of resilience in the psyche and in the world.

• Mindful Self-Compassion
• Yoga Kula, Berkeley, CA
• July 23, 2014 7:30pm-9pm

Mindfulness and compassion, two wings of the dharma that lead to liberation from suffering, are also two of the most powerful agents of brain change known to science. Mindful self-compassion allows practitioners to respond to difficult moments in their lives with kindness, care, understanding, and wise action. Practices in loving kindness and compassion allow us to keep our hearts open in moments of struggle and suffering. Practices in mindfulness allow us to see our experiences more clearly and accept them more calmly and resiliently. Understanding our common humanity brings us out of isolation into connection and resources again. This evening’s dharma talk will explore practices of loving connected presence that allows us, not just to feel better, but to cope wisely when we are feeling bad.

• The Neuroscience and Psychology of Resilience
• Cape Cod Institute, Cape Cod, MA
• August 4-8, 2014

Teaching Clients to Rewire Their Brains for More Skillful Coping 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.

• Bouncing Back
• Western Conference on Behavioral Health and Addictive Disorders
• September 6, 2014

Plenary: Bouncing Back: The Neuroscience of Resilience and Well-Being Resilience is the innate capacity to respond flexibly to the hiccups and hurricanes of life. Discoveries in modern brain science help us integrate tools from relational psychology and mindfulness practice to efficiently harness the neuroplasticity of the brain to rewire old patterns of coping and bounce back better from difficulties, disappointments, and disasters. Afternoon workshop: Brain Care is Self Care In this experiential workshop, you will learn empirically validated techniques to reduce stress, take self-compassion breaks, come to clarity and discernment in decision making, heal toxic shame, retire the inner critic, and revive a sense of competency and connection with others. You’ll leave with a self-help toolkit to create new neural flexibility in your brain and a fresh sense of well-being and flourishing.

• Mindful Self-Compassion
• Mindful Self-Compassion
• Thursday evenings, September 11 – October 30, 2014

Mindful Self-Compassion is an 8-week training in empirically-supported tools and techniques that enable participants to respond to difficult moments in their lives with kindness, care, understanding, and wise action. MSC teaches practices of loving connected presence that allows us not just to feel better but to cope wisely when we are feeling bad. 2014 Mindful Self-Compassion trainings will be held Thursday evenings, September 11 – October 30, 2014 in San Rafael, CA.

• Brain Care Is Self Care
• California Institute of Integral Studies
• November 1, 2014 10am-5pm

When we tap the innate neuroplasticity of the brain to reduce stress, regain our equilibrium, and restore perspective and resilience, we can avoid compassion fatigue and burnout and recover the rejuvenating creativity and flow of our work. In this experiential daylong workshop, you will learn empirically validated techniques to calm down the nervous system, take self-compassion breaks, come to clarity and discernment in decision making, heal toxic shame, retire the inner critic, and revive a sense of competency and connection with others. You’ll leave with a self-help toolkit to create new neural flexibility in your brain and a fresh sense of well-being and flourishing.

• Shift Happens
• Insight LA
• November 8, 2014 10am-1pm

Mindfulness and compassion practices are among the most powerful agents of brain change known to modern science. We can learn to wisely use Buddhist contemplative practices and tools from modern relational psychology to harness the innate neuroplasticity of the brain to reduce the impacts of stress and trauma, deepen our self-compassion and self-awareness, learn new and creative ways to navigate the twists and turns of life with more calm, courage, and flexibility, and deepen the wise effort that leads to inner peace, equanimity, and well-being.

• Bouncing Back: The Neuroscience of Resilience and Well-Being
• Utah School Counselor Association conference St. George, Utah
• November 14, 2014

Resilience – the qualities of flexibility and perseverance that allow students to cope with challenges and crises, bounce back from adversity, and achieve their life goals – can be developed in our students in terms of 6 C’s of Coping: Calm: managing disruptive emotions, tolerating distress, and down-regulating stress to return to a baseline equilibrium that allows them to “keep calm and carry on.” Compassion: especially self- compassion; care, concern, understanding for problems and blocks that de-rail resilience and empathy for others; staying open to skillful behaviors in response to difficulties and differences. Clarity: mindfulness or focused attention training that improves cognitive functioning and academic performance, and also leads to self-awareness, self-reflection, shifting perspectives, discerning options, and choose wise actions. Connections to Resources: accessing the relationships and practices that will best counterbalance the brain’s innate negativity bias and strengthen a person’s inner secure base, the pre-requisite for resilience, thriving, and well-being. Competence: the empowerment that comes from not only learning how to change old coping strategies that don’t work so well and encode new coping strategies that work better, but learning that “I am somebody who CAN do this.” Courage: working with the nervous system, using signal anxiety as a cue to take risks, try something new, and persevere to achieve life goals. The brain learns from experiences and rewires itself through interactions with parents, teachers, counselors, coaches, peers, partners – lifelong. Modern neuroscience is teaching us which tools and techniques will create the experiences that will most safely, efficiently and effectively rewire out students’ brains to be more flexible and resilient.

• Resilience in the Face of Trauma, Violence and Abuse
• The Jewish Community Confronts Violence and Abuse Jerusalem, Israel
• December 3, 2014

Neuroscience is helping mental health professionals help clients deal with, survive, and thrive in the face of trauma, teaching techniques to regulate the nervous system and stay within the window of tolerance in current acute trauma, even rewiring the implicit memories stored in the body of past traumas. This training will focus on applying these emerging techniques to domestic violence and child sexual abuse.

• Compassion – for Self and Others
• Spirit Rock Meditation Center, Woodacre, CA
• December 13, 2014. 9:30am-4:30pm

We practice mindfulness to become aware of our experience – and our reactions to our experience – so that we can be with our experiences, moment to moment, and discern options and make wise choices for the next moments. We practice compassion to bring kindness and care to the experiencer in moments of difficulty, pain, and loss. Compassion – for ourselves and for others – allows us to meet the traumas and troubles inherent in the human condition with an open heart, an understanding mind, and a genuine willingness to act wisely to alleviate suffering. This experiential daylong offers many practical tools to reduce judgment and resistance and strengthen sincere motivation to ease our own suffering and alleviate the pain and struggles of others. Meditations, inquiry, and discussion deepen our practice in ways that make compassion practice immediately useful, with lasting benefits.