I first received formal training in meditation at the Toronto Zen Centre. It was the summer of 1995 and it was exactly what I had been looking for – not an answer to life’s deeper mysteries or even a little stress reduction, but an innovative way to further my career as a jazz pianist. It’s a competitive city and I was sure this could give me an edge. “Forget all the Buddhist stuff,” I would tell my friends in bars and cafes around town, “these people know how to concentrate.”

I was not the first musician to be so enthralled with the benefits of attention training on performance, but I did not expect the positive spin offs in other aspects of my life and relationships. At the time there was a Tibetan Buddhist centre across the street from my local pub and I started to call in on my way to watch hockey games with my friends. Before long, just as the search for better opportunities for music study had led me from Brisbane to Toronto, interest in philosophy and meditation drew me to the Tibetan settlement of Dharamsala, India.

It was supposed to be a quick trip to hear some Tibetan teachers and hike in the mountains, but it turned into two years of intensive study of Tibetan language and philosophy. I missed the music and came back to North America a few times to play piano and save some money, but it soon became clear that the meditation and philosophy was more important than the music. When an opportunity arose to translate for (Khensur Rinpoche) Geshe Tashi Tsering at Chenrezig Institute arose, I took it and happily moved back to Australia after nearly fifteen years away.

“The world I’m living in is full of people wanting a meaningful and balanced life where they connect with others and feel they are of benefit.”

The Tibetan Buddhist tradition is vast, detailed and very profound, where even more than a decade of study only scratches the surface. It is also littered with practices and ideas that can be incredibly useful in a person’s every-day life whether they be Buddhist or not. In a time when modern technology exists alongside rampant depression, anxiety and so on, many of these ancient ideas and practices have remained relevant and are proving to be of benefit to people from all walks of life.

As a lay person, I am particularly interested in how to make these practices available to those who need them, but do not want to identify themselves as Buddhist (or any other religion). There are many meditation based courses and techniques being developed and tested by psychologists the world over, many of which are providing good results. However, almost none of this research is being done on practices as they are explained in the original texts. Psychologists have changed them in different ways depending on whether they were working with stressed executives, combat veterans and so on. They were also adapted to the goals that the researchers were hoping to achieve such as weight loss, stopping smoking or stress reduction to name a few.

It was through this interest in how authentic Buddhist practices would stand up to scientific rigour that I was drawn to the Cultivating Emotional Balance (CEB) project. Having read many of Alan Wallace’s books and heard him speak I was convinced enough to travel to Thailand and go through the CEB teacher training. If there is to be a clear dialogue between Buddhism and science, it is important that terminology of both approaches is clearly understood and agreed upon. With this in mind, I enrolled at Sydney University to study Sanskrit and Psychology which has served to broaden my understanding of both approaches.

CEB delivers the very best of modern and ancient approaches to wellbeing made relevant to your 21st century lifestyle.

Now I’m conducting research as part of a PhD into the mechanics of mindfulness and emotions to get a deeper understanding of why these tools are so effective and how we might make them even more powerful.

All the while, still delivering CEB courses to a growing audience around Australia and finding there are many people seeking benefit from Buddhist techniques and points of view, who don’t identify as Buddhist. It’s an attitude I carried for many years and find it is often accompanied by a healthy skepticism that wants to see certain claims investigated by science and personal experience. The CEB training fits this perfectly.

The world I’m living in is full of people wanting a meaningful and balanced life where they connect with and benefit others.

The course appeals to a broad range of people both men and women with backgrounds in psychology, Buddhism, both or neither sitting together. Each week inevitably becomes a social gathering. We spend a good deal of time discussing how the CEB material did (or should have!) influenced our emotional lives during the week and these discussions often flow into the lunch and tea breaks. Each day introduces new meditation techniques from the contemplative component and more details of emotions from the psychological point of view with a lot of time for discussion that helps bind the two together.

Of course much of the work is done between sessions, as people develop better concentration by practicing at home and build on a growing understanding of emotions to improve their social and work lives. This is the most inspiring part of the course as people share stories of ways their interactions are improving. A father saying he’s become a ‘hero’ at home for resolving issues, a teenage son who thought it better that his mother missed his football grand final rather than an afternoon of CEB, a mother whose daughter called her to express her surprise at how easily they discussed a difficult situation … and the list goes on. These stories and more are the results of people putting the CEB material into practice for themselves and experiencing the benefits of an exciting dialogue of modern science and ancient meditation techniques.

Despite my skeptical beginnings, I have identified as a Buddhist for many years, but I’m not living in an exclusively Buddhist world. The world I’m living in is full of people wanting a meaningful balanced life where they connect positively and benefit others. Cultivating Emotional Balance is an invitation to simply do that.