This is the second retreat in the year long Path Program Buddhism and Psychotherapy: A Healing Partnership. Please click here for more information on the full path program.

You are invited to register for the program even if you did not attend Part One. By registering for the program, you are committing to attend retreats two and three and to attending monthly Tuesday Zoom Gatherings from 7:00 – 8:30 PM Eastern Time/4:00 – 5:30 Pacific Time on July 18, September 19, October 17, and November 21.

Part 2: Compassion & Working with Difficult Emotions

In this module, we will explore the role of compassion in the Buddhist and psychotherapeutic traditions with an emphasis on our emotionality. In the West, it is common for people to pursue Buddhist spiritual practice in order to better understand and heal their relationship to powerful and challenging emotions, including anger, despair, envy, and fear. Similarly, most patients pursue treatment having struggled with these emotions and their contribution to feelings of depression and anxiety. In both traditions, there are far-ranging and divergent methods for responding to the suffering of our emotional lives predicated on the ability to care about emotional suffering and respond with patience and skill. We will read Buddhist commentaries on the critical role of compassion in restoring our well-being, alongside psychoanalytic authors who emphasized compassion as a central healing modality in clinical work, including Sandor Ferenczi, Bernard Brandchaft, and Donna Orange.