Name: Cultivating Emotional Balance: Monthly Practices for Making Our Tender, Messy Emotions the Path
Start: 2026-02-17T18:30:00-08:00
Location: The Alembic

Cultivating Emotional Balance: Monthly Practices for Making Our Tender, Messy Emotions the Path

Each month, we explore a different emotional terrain through the lenses of contemporary emotion science, Tibetan contemplative traditions, and the core principles of Cultivating Emotional Balance. Sessions weave together guided meditation, reflective inquiry, and shared discussion, helping us recognize the arc of an emotion, including its triggers, bodily signals, thoughts, and action tendencies. By mapping these emotional episodes, we learn to meet experience with clarity rather than confusion, compassion rather than avoidance, and enough inner balance to choose how we respond.
As the practice deepens, emotions that once felt destabilizing begin to reveal their inner resources — tenderness within sadness, clarity within anger, wisdom within fear. When met directly and held with awareness, each emotion becomes its own medicine, guiding us toward steadiness, insight, and a more open heart.
We will work with a different emotion each month. January’s theme is Wisdom & Fear: exploring fear as a form of intelligence, learning how to stay open when fear tightens, and how to listen to its signals without being ruled by them.
Online version can be found here: https://momence.com/l/vrh2jlMQ
Eve Ekman, Ph.D., MSW, is a teacher, writer, and contemplative social scientist whose work rests at the confluence of modern emotion science and living wisdom traditions. She is a longtime student of Jennifer Welwood and Tsoknyi Rinpoche, and a newer student of earth-based lineages that deepen her commitment to embodied, relational practice.
Eve teaches widely, including a monthly meditation and book group at the SF Dharma Collective, and offers trainings for clinicians and healthcare professionals on the science and practice of compassion, emotional balance, and well-being. Her research spans burnout, emotional awareness, meditation, and psilocybin-assisted therapy.
With the support of the Dalai Lama, Eve co-created the Atlas of Emotion with her father as a tool for deepening emotional understanding. She is the lead trainer for the Cultivating Emotional Balance program, previously served as Well-Being and Mental Health Lead at Apple, and is a Senior Fellow at UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center as well as a Mind & Life Institute Fellow.