The Mindfulness-Based Emotional Balance Workbook ─ An Eight-Week Program for Improved Emotion Regulation and Resilience

Are you letting your emotions get the better of you? This book offers a breakthrough, eight-week program that combines emotion theory with the powers of mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) to help you manage overwhelming emotions before they take a toll on your health and relationships.

Experiencing emotions is part of being human. But when emotions become too intense, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. As a result, many of us try to suppress strong emotions such as fear, anger, and resentmentwhich can end up causing a host of health problems, from a weakened immune system to heart disease. On the flipside, overreacting in the heat of the moment can be detrimental to relationships.

Mindfulness-Based Emotional Balance offers a unique program using emotion theory and MBSR to help you approach your emotions without judgment, understand the source of your emotions, and foster forgiveness and kindness toward both yourself and others. Instead of trying to bury emotions or lashing out and hurting relationships, you'll learn how to achieve true, lasting emotional balance using this powerful, evidence-based therapy.

If you're tired of being caught in a cycle of emotional upheaval that is taking its toll on your health, your relationships, and your quality of life, this workbook will guide the way to emotional balance.

Margaret Cullen, MA, MFT, is a licensed marriage and family therapist and a certified mindfulness-based stress reduction teacher. She has also trained with Zindel Segal in mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT). For twenty years she has been teaching and pioneering mindfulness programs in a variety of settings, including cancer support, HIV support, physician groups, executive groups, and obesity support. For ten years she has been involved in teaching and writing curricula for several research programs at University of California, San Francisco, including "Cultivating Emotional Balance," designed for teachers, and "Craving and Lifestyle Management with Meditation," for overweight women. In 2008 she launched a mindfulness-based emotional balance program for teachers and school administrators in Denver, CO; Boulder, CO; Ann Arbor, MI; and Vancouver, BC. She has also been a facilitator of support groups for cancer patients and their loved ones for twenty years at the Cancer Support Community, and is currently a senior teacher at the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education at Stanford University, where she coauthored theCompassion Cultivation training manual.

Gonzalo Brito Pons, PhD, is a clinical psychologist from the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, who has worked with diverse populations in Chile and Peru integrating Western psychological approaches with local traditional medicine, mindfulness, and yoga. As a certified yoga teacher and mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) instructor, he has included these practices in his clinical work and workshops for mental health care professionals and educators over the last decade. Brito Pons is a certified teacher of Stanford’s Compassion Cultivation Training Program, and obtained his PhD doing experimental research on the individual and relational effects of compassion training in Santiago de Chile. He has led mindfulness and compassion cultivation workshops in English and Spanish in the San Francisco Bay Area, Chile, Argentina, and Spain. He is s also founder of Red Mindfulness (www.redmindfulness.org), a large Spanish-speaking online community that focuses on bringing contemplative practices and insights into education, work, and society at large.

Foreword writer Jon Kabat-Zinn, PhD, is internationally known for his work as a scientist, writer, and meditation teacher engaged in bringing mindfulness into the mainstream of medicine and society. He is professor of medicine emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, and author of numerous books, including Full Catastrophe Living,Arriving at Your Own Door, and Coming to Our Senses.