Thu August 16th: 7:00 PM - 9:00 PM Price: $10.00 Program
In Room(s): Meditation Hall
What are the communication blind spots that undermine relationships at work and at home? In this talk we'll illuminate familiar conversation barriers and discuss how to apply the antidotes of mindful listening and gentle speech.
Please join us for this public talk and book signing by Susan Chapman, family therapist and author of The Five Keys To Mindful Communication. Susan will be presenting a weekend workshop in Berkeley August 17-18. For information on that program, click here.
Susan Chapman M.A. is a retired Marital and Family therapist who has been practicing in the sangha for over 35 years. Susan is the author of The Five Keys To Mindful Communication (2012 Shambhala Publications), and has an essay called Stop, Go and Wait in the recently published book, The Mindfulness Revolution (edited by Barry Boyce). Susan's background combines expertise in western relationship psychology with spiritual practice. After receiving an MA from Naropa University in Contemplative Psychology, she spent ten years working with victims and perpetrators of domestic violence. During that time she worked as the program director for a battered women’s shelter and as the clinical director for a counseling center that offered both prison and community based treatment programs for men who abused women and children.
“Going into the shadows of our society I realized that our unrealistic expectations about love end up causing us to punish ourselves and each other. I could see this pattern in my own mind and heart. But meditation also showed me the opposite: how friendship towards ourselves can open us to others in a new way. Creating these models enabled me to bring what I was learning in my mindfulness practice back into my work with others”.
During those years, Susan began developing educational models for healthy relationship that were based on her training in mindfulness and the teachings she received from Shambhala Buddhist masters. More recently Susan’s focus has been intentional community building. When their children reached adulthood, she and her husband Jerry did the traditional three year retreat at Gampo Abbey. From 2002 until 2008 she and her husband lived at the Abbey, under the mentorship of Pema Chodron. Susan became the druppon, or director of the next three year retreat. At the Abbey, the models that were born working with domestic violence took their final form in a vision for the creation of intentional community, providing crucial support for Building Enlightened Society in the dark ages.
Susan became a Shastri in 2010, and was recently named an Acharya by Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche.
For more information on Green Light Institute, click here.
Berkeley Shambhala Meditation Center 2288 Fulton St. Ste 202, Berkeley, CA 94704 Tel. (510) 841-3242 shambhalaberkeley@gmail.com
Shambhala, Shambhala Meditation Center, Shambhala Training, Shambhala Center and Way of Shambhala are registered service marks of Shambhala International (Vajradhatu).Website by Blue Mandala
The Keys to Mindful Communication ~ A Public Talk
