Transforming Adversity Into Insight: Feeding Your Demons and Cultivating Emotional Balance

Across various wisdom traditions, there is a common yet paradoxical invitation: Turn toward what is difficult to find freedom from what is difficult. However, when we find ourselves feeling anxiety, loss, judgment, irritation — the full bouquet of difficult emotions — facing these feelings is the last thing we want to do. Fortunately, there are trainable, evidenced-informed practices to help us transmute adversities into joy and insight. By turning toward our challenges, we uncover the wisdom within them, and they transform into our allies. 

Teachers and authors Chandra Easton and Eve Ekman have been teaching these transformative tools together and apart for more than a decade. Easton’s expertise draws from her intimate knowledge and practice of Tantric Buddhism and her teachings on the evidenced-based practice of Feeding Your Demons® (FYD) internationally. FYD is a guided five-step process that transforms our so-called “demons” of difficult emotions into our allies. Ekman’s expertise lies in her application of contemporary psychological science of well-being and emotion awareness, sharing the evidenced-based practice of Cultivating Emotional Balance (CEB) with the world. CEB draws from contemporary emotion science and develops our emotion granularity by mapping our emotion episodes.

In this training, Easton and Ekman guide participants to transform the mind, which is afflicted by our tendency toward enacting destructive emotions. At the heart of all these practices is an ability to transform adversity and joy into the path of our awakening. In contemporary psychological terms, we investigate our so-called “negative” emotional experiences to identify the stories and patterns that occlude our innate compassionate, pro-social nature.

This weekend will include guided meditations based on FYD and CEB, discussions, and time for integration and practice outdoors, weather permitting.

Suggested reading: Feeding Your Demons: Ancient Wisdom for Resolving Inner Conflict by Tsultrim Allione & Start Where You Are by Pema Chodron. 

This workshop includes an additional $50 in faculty tuition and $5 materials fee.