Tara Brach – Radical Acceptance with Tara Brach, Ph.D.: Integrating Meditation to Heal Shame and Fear in Clinical Practice

Outline

Radical Acceptance and Meditation Overview

• Cause of the pervasive sense of personal deficiency in contemporary culture
• Practice – establishing intention, quieting mind, sensory awareness
• Understand the cause of emotional suffering from the perspective of
• Buddhist psychology
• Western psychology – attraction, aversion
• Evolutionary psychology- negativity bias
• Preponderance of shame in western culture

Meditation for Emotional Resilience, Emotional Intelligence and Deep Transformation

• Neuroplasticity
• Shifting from “Fight Flight Freeze” to “Attend and Befriend”
• Present centered non-judgmental attention
• Cultivate concentration and quiet mind
• Develop resource states (love, relaxation, peace, etc.)
• Counter dissociation – cultivate sensory-based attention
• Current research – efficacy of mindfulness and therapeutic healing
• Practice & Discussion: Guided exercise in embodied presence.

Radical Acceptance: Cultivate the Two Wings of Awareness

• Basic principles and components of
• Buddhist mindfulness meditation
• Role of concentration in cultivating mindfulness
• Objects of concentration (audio, kinesthetic, visual)—differential uses of objects
• Working definition of mindfulness
• Radical Acceptance: The two wings of awareness
• Practice & Discussion: The two wings – “yes” meditation

The RAIN Model: Apply Meditation to Emotional Suffering

• A model for how we get locked into shame and fear
• Transform shame and fear- pathways of reconnecting
• Introduce RAIN: recognizing, allowing, investigating, nurturing
• Introduce version of RAIN with additional resourcing
• Comprehensive case review
• Practice & Discussion: RAIN for self-compassion

Releasing Armor: Cultivate a Forgiving Heart

• Research on forgiveness
• The process of forgiving- recognizing stories, contacting vulnerability
• Need for clinical support
• Sequence of attentional strategies
• Case study
• Practice & Discussion: Classical forgiveness

Evolving our Capacity for Compassion

• The alchemy of arousing compassion
• Working with both dissociation and the tendency to get flooded
• Practice & Discussion: Compassion Meditation

Positive Neuroplasticity – “Seeing the Good”

• The gift of mirroring
• Deepening intimacy and connection- in our individual and collective psyche
• Practice & Discussion: Cultivating loving kindness