Mind & Life Podcast

Eve Ekman – Building Emotion Awareness

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June 13, 2024

View or download a transcript of this episode

In this episode, Wendy speaks with social scientist and meditation teacher Eve Ekman. Eve’s work integrates contemplative practice and modern psychology to help people learn about and work with their emotions. This conversation covers many topics, including:

Eve Ekman, PhD
  • her early exposure to Tibetan culture and Buddhism;
  • emotion regulation vs. awareness;
  • reappraisal and self-compassion;
  • labeling feelings & being seen;
  • handshake meditation practice;
  • mapping an emotion: trigger, experience, and response;
  • the complexity of what shapes each moment;
  • becoming more sensitive through meditation;
  • constructive vs. destructive emotions, and the complexities of anger;
  • understanding equanimity;
  • leveraging technology to help awareness and tracking of emotions;
  • helping Apple incorporate well-being practices into its platforms;
  • teaching meditation through the Cultivating Emotional Balance program;
  • the Atlas of Emotion (free online resource);
  • and life lessons from surfing.

Eve Ekman, PhD, MSW, is a contemplative social scientist designing, delivering, and evaluating tools to support emotional awareness in the fields of health care, well-being, and technology. Eve draws from interdisciplinary skills and first-person experiential knowledge from clinical social work, integrative medicine, contemplative science, and meditation. Eve is lead teacher for the Cultivating Emotional Balance program, served as the well-being lead on the health team at Apple, is a Senior Fellow at the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California Berkeley, and a fellow at the Mind & Life Institute. She is an experienced speaker, researcher, and group facilitator, with a unique background ideally suited to training individuals and organizations in the science of happiness, resilience, compassion, mindfulness, and emotional awareness. She is a regular practitioner of meditation, yoga, and cold water surfing, and brings her enthusiasm for living a rich emotional life into her teaching.

Resources

Personal website