CEBTT participants 2001 and 2012 Thayapura, Thailand.
Background
Cultivating Emotional Balance (CEB) is a training program that emerged during a Mind & Life
dialog between behavioral scientists, a neuroscientist, a monk, a philosopher and the Dalai Lama
in 2000. The 2000 meeting in Dharamsala featured many Western experts in different fields of
science who spent a week in dialog with the Dalai Lama on “Destructive Emotions”. Paul Ekman,
world-renowned emotion researcher and professor emeritus at UCSF, presented an evolutionary
view of emotion, in which he maintained that emotions are not inherently destructive, for if they
were they would not have been preserved over the course of evolution (
.
On the fourth day of the meeting, looking directly at Ekman, the Dalai Lama asked if this was just
going to be talk, or whether something was going to happen to improve the emotional lives of
people around the world. Ekman took up the challenge and said he thought an innovative training
program could be developed combining Western exercises to develop more skillful emotional
behavior, with Eastern meditative practices. The Dalai Lama was enthusiastic, requesting that the
meditative practices should be secular in nature, and Alan Wallace was approached to be the lead
for incorporating meditative practices. He is a contemplative scholar and a prolific writer who spent
fourteen years as a Tibetan Buddhist monk, ordained by H. H. the Dalai Lama, and runs the
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