Turning Poison into Medicine: Half Day in the Inner Garden

Step into a half-day of deep practice and gentle transformation. In this immersive workshop, you’re invited to tend the garden of your heart and mind — preparing the soil, seeing what grows, and learning to transform even the most difficult emotions into sources of wisdom and compassion.

Drawing on Buddhist teachings, emotional science, and embodied practices, Chandra Easton and Eve Ekman will guide you through a journey of personal reflection, insight, and skillful engagement with the subtle architecture of the kleshas — habitual emotional responses like ignorance, anger, pride, craving, and jealousy. Together, we’ll explore how these afflictive states can be seen clearly, uprooted at their source, and transmuted into the Five Wisdoms.

Just as a gardener works with roots, stems, leaves, and flowers, we’ll approach our emotions as whole systems — learning to distill their essence and plant new seeds of freedom. Through guided meditation, breath and movement, seed syllables and mantra, storytelling and dialogue, we will:

• Prepare the Soil by grounding in awareness and compassion
• See the Roots of emotional patterns through the lens of the kleshas
• Pull from the Roots by working with the imprints of past and present experiences
• Transmute into Medicine using embodied presence and contemplative tools
• Seed the Garden by cultivating the Four Immeasurables: loving-kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity

We’ll explore the subtle anatomy of afflictive emotion and come to recognize fear as the hidden root beneath much of our suffering. In meeting this fear with compassion, we return to the unshakable ground of our being.

This is a day for inner weeding and replanting, for remembering that healing is not just possible — it is our nature.

This event will be in-person and streamed online. Please reach out to [email protected] for volunteer and scholarship opportunities.

Eve Ekman Ph.D, MSW is a writer, teacher and contemplative social scientist designing, delivering, and evaluating tools to support emotional awareness. Eve draws from interdisciplinary training in clinical social work, integrative medicine, social psychology, and contemplative practice. Eve is the lead trainer for the Cultivating Emotional Balance training program, wellbeing lead on the health team at Apple, and a Senior Fellow at Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley and Mind and Life Institute fellow.

Chandra Easton is a Dharma teacher and author of (Shambhala, 2023). She has taught Buddhism and Hatha Yoga since 2001. She studied Buddhism and Tibetan language in Dharamsala, India, and at UCSB’s religious studies department. During her studies, she co-translated (Vimala Publishing, 2012) with B. Alan Wallace. In 2015, she was given the title of Vajra Teacher, Dorje Lopön (Varjāchārya), for Tara Mandala Retreat Center by Lama Tsultrim Allione and H.E. Gochen Tulku Sang-ngag Rinpoche. Seeking to bring forth the voice of the empowered feminine in Buddhism, Chandra regularly leads retreats and classes for various organizations, develops programs and curricula for Tara Mandala, and teaches Dharma nationally and internationally. She co-founded the 21 Taras Collective with Nina Rao and Genevieve Walker, to record music for the twenty-one Taras mantras found in her book, Embodying Tara. She teaches regularly at the Berkeley Alembic and the SF Dharma Collective. Visit www.chandraeaston.com to learn more.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

The Berkeley Alembic, 2820 Seventh Street, Berkeley, United States