Lectures & Events
Wednesday, July 29th - 11am EST
Letters to My Former Self: Sue S.
Sue S. resides on the beautiful Gulf Coast of Florida with her husband of 30 years. She is a painter, sculptor, interior designer, house-flipper, amateur yogi and writer. Throughout her life she has also been a spiritual seeker, mostly through her involvement in 12th step recovery fellowships. When her meditation crisis blew up her sense of herself and of her world view, she relied on her faith in the ineffable Divine to help her navigate a path toward healing and, ultimately, to finding Cheetah House. Throughout this journey, Sue has uncovered and discovered, with delight, resources within herself she didn’t know she could possess. She has tapped into a new faith unencumbered by the negative religious conditioning she was exposed to as a child; opened up a new vein of expressive creativity and found solace and validation in her exploration of mysticism and consciousness science. She remains an active participant in the Cheetah House support groups as she continues to integrate this whole strange story into the rest of her day-to-day life.
Cost is $30, sliding scale available. Use code LTMFS726 for 50% off before July 11th.
Thursday, August 6th - 12pm EST
The Teacher Matters: The Role of Meditation Teachers in Meditation-Related Challenges
Abstract: Although meditation is often treated as an individual practice, meditation teachers can play an important role. Drawing on the mixed-methods dataset of the Varieties of Contemplative Experience project, this paper examines the role of meditation teachers and their impacts on Western practitioners who are navigating meditation-related challenges. Quantitative and qualitative results from 68 meditation practitioners and 33 experts (teachers and clinicians) from a range of Buddhist lineages indicate that the impact of teachers on practitioners navigating challenges ranged from highly beneficial to highly detrimental. Key characteristics in beneficial student-teacher relationships included having access to and receiving appropriate guidance from a well-qualified teacher, as well as having a teacher whose approach to working with challenges was informed by training in psychology or mental health. Other factors described as unhelpful or leading to additional distress included a lack of availability or teacher access; limited student tracking or disclosure; invalidating, unsupportive, victim-blaming, or scripted teacher responses; a lack of perceived teacher expertise; or mismatched interpersonal or cultural dynamics. These findings also illustrate various ways in which the psychologization of Buddhist meditation in the West influences student-teacher relationships and establishes certain expectations that are made particularly apparent in the context of meditation-related challenges.
Click here to read the full article
Cost is $40, sliding scale available. Use code EBTEACHER for 60% off before July 19th.
This lecture has been approved for 1 APA CE credit
Learning Objectives:
Participants will be able to describe ways that teachers are helpful to meditators experiencing challenges.
Participants will be able to describe ways that teachers are unhelpful or harmful to meditators experiencing challenges.
Participants will be able to list several characteristics of Buddhist modernism and how they might contribute to problems in the teacher-student relationship.
Nicholas Canby, Ph.D. is a visiting assistant professor of Contemplative Studies at Brown University and a licensed clinical psychologist. He earned his Ph.D. in clinical psychology from Clark University in 2022 and completed a two-year post-doctoral fellowship at the Warren Alpert Medical School at Brown University under the mentorship of Willoughby Britton, Ph.D. and Jared Lindahl, Ph.D. Nicholas also completed his predoctoral and postdoctoral clinical training at Veteran’s hospitals in Tucson, AZ and Providence, RI, focusing on the treatment of PTSD and a wide range of evidence-based therapies.
As part of the Clinical and Affective Neuroscience Lab at Brown University, Nicholas has conducted research on mechanisms and moderators of mindfulness-based interventions, influencing factors for the occurrence of meditation-related challenges, and the phenomenology of non-ordinary states of mind in meditation and psychedelics. His dissertation investigated changes in senses of self, specifically dissolution of self-world and self-other boundaries from multiple causes, including meditation, religious practice, psychedelics, trauma, and then assessed what factors predict life enhancing vs destabilizing trajectories. He was lead author on a study that found that social factors, specifically group cohesion and relationship with the teacher, were better predictors of therapeutic success than type or amount of meditation practice. He has also authored papers on the impact of childhood trauma, meditation teacher relationships, and dietary changes on meditation-related challenges and adverse effects.
Dr. Britton earned a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the University of Arizona. She completed her clinical residency in behavioral medicine and neuropsychology, along with a 2 year NIH-sponsored post-doctoral fellowship in adult mood disorders treatment research at Brown University Medical School. She has received multiple grants from the National Institutes of Health to study the effects of meditation.
Her clinical neuroscience research investigates the effects of contemplative practices on the brain and body in the treatment of mood disorders, trauma, and other emotional disturbances. She is especially interested in practice-specific effects and moderators of treatment outcome, or, in other words— “Which practices are best or worst suited for which types of people or conditions and why.” She recently completed “The Varieties of Contemplative Experience” study which investigates the full range of experiences that can arise in the context of contemplative practices, including experiences that could be considered difficult, challenging, or adverse.
As a clinician, she has been trained as an instructor in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) and Mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT), and has taught mindfulness to both clinical and non-clinical populations. She has also completed three years of training for treating trauma and destabilized nervous systems. She now specializes in helping meditators who are experiencing meditation-related difficulties and providing meditation safety trainings to providers and organizations.
Cheetah House is approved by the American Psychological Association to sponsor continuing education for psychologists. Cheetah House maintains responsibility for this program and its content.
