Cultivating Emotional Intelligence

We often feel at the whim of our emotions. Pulled every which way by unstable and unreliable forces, we end up being ruled by feelings that we don’t totally understand, and our behavior reflects this confusion. In his second online retreat for Tricycle, the Theravada Buddhist teacher Josh Korda will show us how to use Buddhist practices to develop the ability to recognize and monitor our emotions as well as to discriminate between drives that are safe to act upon and those best contained by awareness and slowly diffused. With healthy emotional intelligence, we can achieve a sublime kind of liberation: the ability to gracefully hold and express the entire range of our human experience—from positive states such as elation and excitement to negative affects such as anger, fear, and sadness.

Josh Korda has been meditating for over two decades and began his studies in Theravada Buddhism in 1996. He is the guiding teacher at New York Dharmapunx and serves as a visiting teacher at the New York Zen Center for Contemplative care. Josh received his initial teacher training with Noah Levine, and has had the honor to study with countless other spiritual practitioners, including Ajahns Geoff, Sucitto, Amaro, Brahm, Vajiro, Sharon Salzberg and Tara Brach. Josh’s dharma talks can be found at http://www.dharmapunxnyc.podbean.com. To support his teachings visit http://www.shapeways.com/shops/Joshkorda.

Filmed at Maha Rose in Brooklyn.