Cultivating Emotional Balance: Structure,
Research, and Implementation
Introduction
Cultivating Emotional Balance is a 42-hour, secular, emotion and mindfulness skills training
designed to help participants improve emotional life by cultivating constructive emotional
experiences, decreasing destructive emotional experiences and developing mental balance. The
training consists of overarching conceptual knowledge and experiential exercises drawn from
Western scientific research on emotions and traditional Eastern attention focus (
Shamatha
) and
contemplative (Four Immeasurables) practices.
CEB is designed to provide useful skills for individual development and interpersonal
communication across non-clinical populations. CEB encourages participants to set their
aspirations for exceptional mental health (genuine happiness) through attentional, emotional,
cognitive and conative balances.
CEB Creates Choices
• Whether to engage emotionally.
• If you do engage, to have a choice over how to engage.
• Have your emotions work for you not against you.
• Have your experience of emotions be constructive not destructive.
• Identify the root causes of suffering and move towards genuine happiness.
CEB Skills
• Understanding how emotions work.
• Recognizing your hot triggers and their scripts.
• Developing stable attention and relaxation.
• Developing awareness for self monitoring capabilities for:
ο Emotions arising in the self.
ο Impulses that arise to engage you emotionally.
ο When you are in the grip of an emotion.
ο Emotions arising in others.
ο Desires and intentions.
ο The quality of attention and mindfulness.
ο Activities and behaviors that foster and/or prevent genuine happiness.
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