Miriam Greenspan

"Healing Through the Dark Emotions in an Age of Global Threat"

October 16-18, 2009
Saugerties
Seminar fee: $ 295 ($ 250)
Details on price, food and lodging

Healing Through the Dark Emotions in an Age of Global Threat:

Grief, fear, and despair are messengers of our vulnerability and humanity. In an age of global threat, these dark emotions have become widespread and overwhelming. In contrast to our culture's dire warnings about the dangers of “negative” emotions, this workshop's more hopeful teaching is that there is a redemptive power in the emotions we most dread--gifts that come to us when we know how to listen to the wisdom of the broken heart. Whether grief, fear, and despair are rooted in personal losses or the traumatic emotional ecology of the 21st century, the dark emotions can be our greatest teachers. When we approach them with mindful openness, we discover the heart's native intelligence; and we are initiated into a transformational process: the alchemy of the dark emotions.

Sorrow is a signal of our interconnectedness. Fear alerts us to protect life. And despair calls us to cut through illusion, nourish our souls, and find a sense of meaning that will sustain us in dark times. In this weekend workshop we will learn and practice the alchemy by which grief becomes a gateway to gratitude, fear opens into joy, and despair becomes the ground of a more resilient faith in life. The workshop will include didactic presentation, story, discussion, meditation, guided visualization, cognitive re-framing, transformational energy-work, non-theistic prayer, and other emotional/spiritual practices. It is designed for participants who have some familiarity with inner work and want to increase their capacity to use the transformational power of emotional energy for the healing of self and world.

Sign up early! This workshop will fill up quickly.
Limited number of beds available on-site.

About Miriam Greenspan:

Miriam Greenspan, M.Ed., LMHC, is a psychotherapist in private practice, consultant, writer, and internationally-known workshop leader who has been a practitioner of Insight Meditation for almost 30 years. A pioneer in women's psychology and psychotherapy, her first book, A New Approach to Women and Therapy, helped define the field.

For the past two decades, her work has focused on a holistic mind/body/spirit approach to emotional healing. Challenging current clinical and cultural trends which pathologize "negative" emotions, she teaches how honoring our grief, fear, and despair can lead to profound healing and transformation on the personal, social, and global levels. Ms. Greenspan's latest book, Healing Through the Dark Emotions: the Wisdom of Grief, Fear, and Despair (Shambhala, 2003), is a Boston Globe bestseller. It won the 2004 Nautilus Award in the category of psychology for "books that make a contribution to conscious living and positive social change" and was also chosen as one of the best spiritual books of 2003 by Spirituality and Health Magazine. Ms. Greenspan's work has been featured in numerous magazines, including Psychology Today, Body and Soul, Self, Shambhala Sun, Ms., New Woman, Utne Reader, Tikkun, Psychotherapy Networker, Spirituality & Health, and The Sun.

Miriam has a private practice in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, where she lives with her husband, and has two grown daughters.