Building Resilience through Balanced Empathy
with Tenzin Chogkyi
Our lives can sometimes feel overwhelming as we face global and national crises, in addition to difficulties in our work and family lives. And sometimes in the face of others’ distress and suffering, we can feel overwhelmed or shut down. How do we generate a compassionate response in the face of others’ suffering and our own? How do we increase our own resilience and ability to meet these challenges?
The answer is balanced empathy, which helps us build a way of relating to others that doesn’t burn us out, but draws forth our best ability to help ourselves and others.
Building Resilience through Balanced Empathy is a dynamic and practical 2-hour workshop designed to explore empathy and emotional resilience. You will learn techniques empowering you to relate to yourself and others in healthy and more balanced ways.
This course will help you:
- Explore what causes you to feel emotionally overwhelmed
- Increase mental and emotional resilience
- Learn how to skillfully balance your responses and behaviors
- Develop better self-understanding and therefore real empathy for others
- Identify what pushes you out of balance, allowing the space for wiser choices
- Build closer, more nurturing relationships with family, friends, and co-workers
Who is the course for?
This course is for people of all ages and backgrounds. It is designed for those who want to strengthen their inner resources which help build deep and sustainable connections and relationships.
Additional Materials
Recording
About the Facilitator
Tenzin Chogkyi (she/her/hers) is a teacher of workshops and programs that bridge the worlds of Buddhist thought, contemplative practice, mental and emotional cultivation, and the latest research in the field of positive psychology. Tenzin first became interested in meditation in the early 1970s and then started practicing Tibetan Buddhism in early 1991 during a year she spent studying in India and Nepal. She completed several long meditation retreats over a six-year period and took monastic ordination with His Holiness the Dalai Lama, practicing as a monastic for nearly 20 years. Since 2006 she has been teaching in Buddhist centers around the world and taught in prisons for 15 years.
She is also a certified teacher of Compassion Cultivation Training and the Cultivating Emotional Balance program. Tenzin is especially interested in bringing the wisdom of Buddhism into modern culture and into alignment with modern cultural values such as racial and gender justice and environmental awareness. She feels strongly that a genuine and meaningful spiritual path includes not only personal transformation, but social and cultural transformation as well. She loves interfaith collaboration and is a volunteer for the Interfaith Speakers Bureau of the Islamic Networks Group in the greater San Francisco Bay Area. She is featured on a monthly radio show called “Reflections on Buddhism” on KSQD 90.7 in the Santa Cruz area. She also finds time to create her Unlocking True Happiness podcast which you can check out at unlockingtruehappiness.org where you will also find her current teaching schedule. She is currently based on traditional Awaswas Ohlone land, in what is now known as Santa Cruz, CA.
