Healing Attachment with Sublime Emotions
Using meditation to develop loving kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity in order to become a securer partner in relationships and to have greater access to 'uncaused joy'
- Date: 1st Mar - 29th Mar 2023
- Instructor: Cedric Reeves
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Cost: Sliding scale $120 ~ $400
- 🎓 Scholarships are available to those who need them
Join us for this course where we will systematically develop the four Sublime Emotions of Loving Kindness (Friendliness), Compassion, Sympathetic Joy, and Equanimous Love. We will do this in formal meditation and apply it to daily life.
The intended outcome is fluent access to these sublime emotions in daily life. "The measure of a meditation practice is a transformation in daily life."
This program is for people who are willing to do the work (meditation in this case) to become more loving, happier, and more secure in their attachment relationship.
Who is this for?
- People interested in developing loving kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimous love on and off the cushion.
- Suitable for anyone new to attachment-work, or is already experienced.
- People with Insecure Attachment.
- For anyone who is willing to do the work to get results.
Format
- Program: One live 90 minute class per week
- Live Online Sessions: The live sessions will be hosted on Zoom. An email with the zoom links will be sent to you after you have registered.
- Q&A: There will be opportunity to ask questions during the Q&A section.
Attendance & Recordings
- Partial attendance is fine - however you get best results if you attend all sessions.
- Late Starts: You can join even after it has started.
- Live-only: This event will not be recorded.
Event Date & Time
This Course will run twice in order to be accessible to people in different time zones. The content is exactly the same. You will get the access details for both after signing up.
There will be one live 90 minute class per week.
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Option 1 Wednesday |
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+12h
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Option 2 Wednesday |
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+12h
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☀️ Daylight Saving Time starts in Europe on March 26th, at which point they will have to log on an hour earlier than usual. On that date these times will be updated to reflect that.
What to Expect
Guided meditation will be the main focus of the program. There will be ample opportunity to ask questions and share whatever you feel comfortable with. There will be no pressure to do so; passive participation is perfectly fine.
Leading a full and happy life partially depends on your access to states of love (friendliness, compassion, joy, and unconditional love)
The goal of this course is to
- systematically develop these states in daily formal meditation practice (this is traditional in Buddhist meditation training)
- add on visualization practices to the end of each formal meditation practice where you rehearse acting out these sublime emotions with others
- integrate these states into your daily life by acting them out. That is to act from a place of friendliness, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity with others in your daily life.
Course Overview
This program is not psychotherapy or a substitute for it. It is a psycho-educational and meditation program. Additionally, it is helpful and recommended to do psychotherapy in parallel with this type of program.
What does secure attachment come down to? In a word, “LOVE”: the ability to be with another in a state of love.
This course is a systematic training and cultivation of the states of love drawing from the ancient Buddhist meditation practices of the sublime emotions.
People with secure attachment are at ease with expressing and receiving love.
People with dismissing-avoidant attachment are not at ease with giving or receiving love. They are cut off from love. This is likely because they associate rejection with their attempts to connect, an artifact of childhood deprivation.
People with anxious-preoccupied attachment anxiously fixate on love and often expect that it will be taken away (abandonment fear). This is due to care, attention, and love having been so unreliable and intermittent in their childhoods.
People with disorganized (fearful) attachment (early developmental trauma) associate love with fear and abuse due to abuse in early childhood.
So, the implication is that people with insecure attachment are, likely, cut off from accessing states of love in an uncomplicated, ‘clean’ way.
To address this directly, in this course we will systematically train ourselves in these states of love such that they are more and more accessible. This naturally moves us in the direction of earned secure attachment. I believe this is especially true when we:
- have deep, absorbed experiences of the states of love in concentrated meditation, and
- visualize/rehearse manifesting love in our daily lives while still absorbed in deep meditation, and
- intentionally enter into these states of love in daily life, practicing them repeatedly.
These three practices are the entire focus of this course.
An important counterbalance to developing love is strength (boundary setting, assertiveness, protection, and even the appropriate expression of protective anger).
Love can only be fully expressed when held in an envelope of assertiveness and the capacity to protect. We will discuss and develop assertiveness along side cultivating love such to produce a balanced development of the two.
Course Curriculum
The course is broken up into classes
Lecture Outline
- Course Overview
- Friendliness
Orientation to the course.
Review of best practices for developing and maintaining a meditation practice in order for greater positive change.
The importance of joy and bliss for developing a sustainable meditation practice.
Understanding insecure attachment in terms of an ‘impaired access to the mental and physical state of love’ and how to repair this through systematic cultivation of the states of love
The importance of coupling love with the capacity to set healthy boundaries to avoid “idiot compassion”, enmeshment, and even danger: guided visualization meditation on Boundary-Setting
Introduction to cultivating Friendliness
- what
- why/benefits
- how
- when
- who
- what to watch out for
The importance of generosity. Generosity is the first step on the path.
The importance of joy and bliss for developing a sustainable practice.
Meditation
- Loving Kindness (friendliness) Meditation with visualization of real world application of kindness with others
Homework Assignment
- 30 mins daily practice of Metta
- six acts of generosity
- Apply the practice of friendliness systematically in your daily life (micro-hits) (the mantra: "How can I help?")
What is Compassion
How do I systematically train compassion?
What are the benefits?
How does this support my path to earned secure attachment.
What do I need to watch out for? Are there any pit-falls?
Compassion as a means of doing emotional self regulation (mastery)
Practicing compassion as a means for becoming more comfortable with the suffering of others and your own suffering
How to do Tong Len meditation (taking and sending)
Meditation
- Tong Len Meditation (taking and sending) plus visualization of application in daily life
Deeper dive on compassion towards self.
Meditation
- Tong Leng meditation with visualization of application of compassion in daily life
What is Sympathetic joy?
How do I systematically train it?
What are the benefits?
How does this support my path to earned secure attachment.
What do I need to watch out for? Are there any pit-falls?
Meditation
- Sympathetic Joy meditation with visualization of application in daily life
Equanimity (unconditional peace)
What is equanimity (unconditional peace)
How do I systematically train equanimity?
What are the benefits?
How does this support my path to earned secure attachment.
What do I need to watch out for? Are there any pit-falls?
Equanimity as a means for developing humility, and as counterbalance to enmeshment, grandiosity, excessive self sacrifice.
Equanimous love (Unconditional Love)
What is equanimous love (unconditional love)
How do I systematically train unconditional love?
What are the benefits?
How does this support my path to earned secure attachment.
What do I need to watch out for? Are there any pit-falls?
What are the conditions and limitations of unconditional love (naturally there are some!)
Meditation
- Unconditional Peace (equanimity) meditation with visualization of application in daily life
- Unconditional Love (equanimous love) meditation with visualization of application in daily life
Miscellaneous Notes
There will be time for Q&A and spot coaching during the live event. The Q&A recording will not be made available thereafter. If you do not attend live, you will not have access to the Q&A.
We will be doing deep work. For that reason please feel free to take a break at any point.
Measure your Progress With Before/After Assessments
Attachment Repair is offering this course that not only is entirely focused on healing the root of your attachment issues but also provides objective tools to measure and track your progress.
Emotional Attachment Assessment
Participation in this course will give you the option to enrol into our Emotional Attachment Assessment. This Assessment is designed to measure some of the most relevant markers of your attachment style and emotional health.
It includes 4 assessments drawn from the established peer-reviewed literature:
- Experience in Close Relationships Scale (ECR-S)
- The Experience in Close Relationship Scale (ECR-S) is a 12 item self-report adult attachment style questionnaire focussed on close relationships. Based on Ainsworth’s infant attachment styles literature, this scale measures maladaptive attachment in adulthoods who are in a romantic relationship.
- Social Pleasure and Safeness Scale (SSPS)
- This scale was developed to measure the extent to which people experience their social worlds as safe, warm and soothing.
- Types of Positive Affect Scale
- The scale was developed to measure the degree to which people experience different positive emotions. We are only using the items related to safeness. A high score is associated with a likelihood to have secure attachment.
- Patient Health Questionnaire for Depression and Anxiety (PHQ-4)
- The PHQ-4 is a brief self-report screening tool used in psychology to assess symptoms of depression and anxiety. The PHQ-4 consists of four items, two assessing symptoms of depression and two assessing symptoms of anxiety.
Before, After, and 3-month Follow-up
The Assessments are a valuable tool for measuring and tracking your progress in the course. By taking a Before measurement at the start of the course and an After measurement when the course ends, you will be able to see the effects of the course and the meditations on your attachment style and emotional health.
Additionally, there will be a Follow-up Assessment 3 months after the course ends to see if any changes have persisted or increased. These objective measures can increase confidence in your ability to direct your healing process and deepen the habit of doing inner work.
These assessments give you a ‘handle’ on your current psychology. This augments the capacity to self-reflect (conceptualize where you stand relative to the measure), and to measure progress which equips you with more self-agency around your self-driven pursuit of greater mental health.
Seeing real change with an objective measure helps build up a real and palpable self-agency about knowing that you can change. Doing Before/After helps fortify this primary objective of self-agency around your own healing.
PDF Report
The results of your assessment will be delivered to you in a PDF report that gives you your scores for each of the measures as well as an explanation of what they mean.
You will get a new report for each stage of the Before/After/Follow-up, to easily compare the results and see how your measure changes over time.
Practice Pods
As an option, we will set people up into practice pods of three to five people.
The suggestion is that the pods meet up once a week to first do 30 minutes of meditation practice together and then to discuss practice.
Who is this for?
This program is for those of us who...
- Want to become more joyous
- Want to enjoy meditation more
- Are looking to improve our psychological health, especially those who have tried other healing modalities with disappointing results.
- Have problems with exploration and self development, relationships and emotional regulation
- Want to optimise our psychological health
- Want to understand the early foundations of our psychological development
Healing Together
Shared interest and social support can make meditation practice, study, and healing much easier. Make friends in the course on the slack channel and invite friends who you think could benefit to participate in the course.
Benefits
These are some of the benefits you will have by the end of the program
Theoretical Understanding
- Understanding and compassion for your own psychological difficulties and how to improve many of them through systematic mind training (meditation).
- Where insecure attachment comes from
- How to treat insecure attachment by practicing the sublime emotions in formal seated meditation and also in informal daily life practice
Psychological
- Better able to do emotional regulation on the spot in your daily life with ‘micro-hits’ of meditation.
- Less blame of self or others.
- More understanding and compassion towards your parts/modes and needs.
For your relationships
- Better appreciation for the importance and value of interpersonal collaboration
Support Structure
- Opportunities to find accountability partners to meditate with
- A sense of camaraderie as a result of seeing how our psychological difficulties are rooted in common experiences that affect us all.
- Slack group with which to discuss and share experiences and consolidate what you are learning
Frequently Asked Questions
About Participation
Payment Questions
Technical Questions
If you are experiencing any technical issues relating to accessing the material or live sessions, please get in touch with us. We will get back to you as soon as possible.
We can be reached with our online contact form.
Testimonials
This is what participants of prior Courses have to say:
Allison
I am enjoying the Healing Anxious-Preoccupied Attachment course so much! It's blowing my mind, and that's after decades of amazing therapy, EMDR, attachment couples therapy, neurofeedback, inner child nurturing, self-compassion, and many other profound growth experiences. I’m so delighted by how much I'm getting out of the course. Feels like it's a missing piece for me that is so healing. Thank you !
Allyson
THANK YOU!! this is powerful for me, so thank you thank you for sharing your insight. I like how you really balance the “just do the work” attitude with sooo much compassion and empathy for how hard it is. Now I know how to use the immense power of my imagination to heal my most fundamental body-mind-soul mechanisms and have a more joyful, loving life.
Chelsea
I gained an ability to self soothe, meet my needs for validation and feeling seen/heard (which were often unmet in childhood), an overall feeling like I am less alone in my work of healing my attachment. I realize I benefit greatly from an 8 week course with a weekly meeting, I am able to do daily meditations on my own and feel supported in this routine with the weekly meetings. I feel I am actively and consistently working on my attachment repair by being part of a longer course (as opposed to a weekend workshop).
Christine
Cedric is an amazing meditation teacher, and this course really changed a lot for me. I really liked his authentic, refreshing approach and the way he combines scientific research with A LOT of practical exercises to reprogram the mind. Over the time of the course, I could literally watch my self esteem and my motivation to get things done grow. The course really motivated me to get going with my business and get things done, because I started to believe that I can actually do it.
Dani
Thank you for continuing to make these classes. When I am able to attend, they make a really positive contribution to my mental health :)
Anon
I’m sure this will seem out of the blue to you, but I was just thinking of things I am thankful for and thought of you and the two Attachment Repair courses of yours I had the pleasure to participate in. I just wanted to say a very heartfelt thank you. I want you to know I really appreciated the kindness and effort you put into that work, and into responding to all of our questions. My exposure to your teaching has been immensely helpful for me.
Johnny
I love your offerings. Keep them coming. You have a good capacity to make people feel seen – and also show great respect for us as individuals – in itself that is an healing factor in being in courses of yours! Your humbleness and humour – make every call a killer. Rock on. I like learning about these subjects! Feels very helpful in understanding my problems/reason to part of my suffering. I feel I have grown during the course so far – and or moving in a better direction.
Antoine
I’m very happy about the Embodying Secure Attachment Course. It’s good to have a course for people who are well on the way of healing their wounds. Comes at the perfect time for me.
N.P.
Loved the course and loved this kind of emotional work. Look forward to doing more that you offer. Content was excellent. Meditation around Schema modes went quite deep and uncovered difficult emotions. Doing micro hits has improved some situations that would have gone worse.
Registration
Please note: What is on offer here is meditation coaching, not psychotherapy or counseling.