Entangled emotions often feel like a house on fire. We can only run in panic.
Fortunately, there is another way.

Modern life moves quickly.

Every day we are confronted with situations which evoke powerful emotions of grief, fear, and anger within us. Yet our society—focused on productivity beyond all else—constantly pushes us to deny and suppress these feelings. Those feared, unresolved, and disrespected emotions can become violent and damaging due to our reactivity and our inability to be present.

We do the worst things when we are overcome by emotion–and we cannot switch them off through logic. Yet, the emotions themselves do not possess such power. Rather, it is how we understand and meet them as they arise that determines their influence.

Take heart–we do not have to remain bound by emotions we fear or do not understand. Zen Buddhism has contemplated this predicament for thousands of years, facing off with the conundrums of being human with unflinching directness.

Geoffrey Shugen Arnold, Roshi is the Head of the Mountains and Rivers Order, abbot and resident teacher of Zen Mountain Monastery in the Catskill Mountains of New York. Shugen entered full-time residential training in 1986, and received dharma transmission from John Daido Loori, Roshi in 1997. His teachings on Zen, social justice and environmental stewardship have appeared in various Buddhist journals.

Let Shugen introduce you to the first steps of a journey to a different way to face your emotions and meet their discomfort with bravery and kindness.

In this 90-minute session, Shugen will teach the Buddhist view of relating to emotions. We will experience the brave yet gentle practice of facing reality as it is, without judgment. He will focus on grief as an example of an emotion that can bind or heal depending on how we meet this universal experience of loss within a world of life and death.

Participants in the program will:

• Gain tools for mastery in relating to emotions, for the benefit of all life.
• Build your heart and mind’s capacities to experience and witness the energy of powerful emotions
• Open yourself to new intimacy, the natural expression of our interactions with the world
• Gain and integrate the wisdom and compassion that comes from new wisdom about yourself and others

After our time together, you will have a better understanding of how to meet your emotional discomfort so that you neither deny or suppress, nor become distracted or entangled. This is the basic Zen practice of facing the reality before your eyes, free of ideas of good or bad.