Why do we feel emotions? Through them we experience maternal care, engage our work, lose ourselves in playfulness, feel pleasure, go shopping, get into arguments, end relationships, and experience loss. These engines of the psyche, the powers behind human motivation, can be experienced as unwelcome, non-rational disturbances from the perspective of the individual ego. Yet they serve important functions if we recognize their guiding wisdom. We can learn to be with our emotions with more awareness—thereby freeing ourselves in important ways. Each evening of this four-week lecture series will feature an in-depth examination of the power and possibilities of a different emotion: joy, shame, yearning, and anger.
The Psychology of Yearning
Jerry Ruhl, PhD
Thursday, Feb. 23 | 5:45 - 7:15 pm
Desire coupled with awareness of the inevitability of loss, yearning is among the most tender and profound of experiences within the emotional palette. It includes warmth, regret, wistful melancholy, reflection, and creative spirit. Even as we surrender attachments in our psychological and spiritual work, desire continues to pull us into life. To live with the vicissitudes of the greater Self is to know yearning. As we yearn for the divine, does not the divine yearn for incarnation? In this program we will explore yearning through lecture, music, film, and discussion.
Shame
Anna Guerra, JD, MA, LPC
Thursday, March 1 | 5:45 - 7:15 pm
Shame is the profoundly painful experience of feeling defective and unworthy of acceptance. Despite its universality, shame lurks in the shadows, a negative emotion that few will admit. In fact, the experience of the feeling itself constellates shame, and thus falls into what Jung called the shadow, making it one of the most difficult feelings to understand and manage. We will explore the significance of shame in the development of our personality, as well as the meaning and value of shame in psychic functioning through media presentation, lecture, and discussion.
Immeasurable Joy
Alejandro Chaoul, PhD
Thursday, March 8 | 5:45 - 7:15 pm
What is joy? We often think of joy as being associated with good occurrences, but joy occurs in difficult times as well. In fact, in Buddhist psychology, cultivation of sympathetic joy can help us shift our attention away from the suffering of comparing and competing to celebrating the wellbeing of ourselves and others, even in the smallest, most common pleasures of life, such as a glass of water or a smile.
Anger: A Transformative Force
Felix Scardino, LCSW, LPC
March 15 | 5:45 - 7:15 pm
What is the value of anger? While anger is a forceful emotion that can wreck our relationships and health, it can also help us clarify what we value and what we want -- and help us protect what matters to us. In this talk, we will discuss vital strategies for allowing anger to lead us in a positive direction. We will also explore some new facts from recent research that debunk old myths about dealing with anger.
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