Have you ever woken up one morning and felt a void in your life? Like something was missing, yet you couldn’t put your finger on it? Maybe it’s a lack of religion or maybe you need therapy. man. Or maybe, just maybe, you need a course in ‘Cultivating Emotional
Balance.’ (CEB)

If its the latter, then the Phuket International Academy might be the place to go. The PIA will be running a six-week CEB Teachers’ Training course from July 18– August 24 2010.

The Phuket Post met with one of the founders of the programme and also chairman of the PIA
Mind Center in Thailand, American-born Buddhist scholar Alan Wallace to ask him some questions regarding the philosophies and teachings behind the ‘alternative’ theory.

“The CEB course itself is split in two with two instructors. There is one psychology professor who teaches 40% of the course and one meditation teacher who teaches 60% of the course. What we are offering in Phuket is a six-week intensive program to teach
trainers of CEB,” Dr Wallace explained.

Dr Wallace worked with psychologist Dr Paul Ekman to devise this original 42-hour training programme in 2000. “It draws from meditative practices in the Buddhist tradition, focusing on the cultivation of attention, metacognition, mindfulness, empathy and compassion, combined with evidence-based methods drawn from modern psychology focusing on the cultivation of emotional regulation and mindfulness.”

In 2004 the theory was ready to be tested. They took 25 stressed out and unhappy
female teachers and over an eight-week period gave them eight 4-hour sessions and four 2.5-hour lessons in the evening.

After the course, which incorporates meditation sessions as well as psychological theories to better understand the workings of the mind, the majority of the women were found to have improved mental states. Indeed there are few sectors and groupings that Mr Wallace believes would not benefit from the teachings of CEB and in fact members of the
police, business men and medical personnel were all considered as vocational groups for testing before teachers were decided on.

Dr Wallace remembers one particular teacher who attended a course. “One of the women
used to wake up at 1am every night from stress and go to watch soap operas. After the training she slept soundly.”

Attendees of the course at the PIA will receive a qualification and be certified CEB teachers, able to utilize the teachings in the classroom and beyond. All of the
teachers at the PIA will be completing the course and ultimately bringing with them into the 2010 Autumn curriculum a better understanding of themselves and their students.

For the duration of the six-week course, the attendees will be living on the PIA’s campus and the course will be full-on: starting in the morning and continuing until the early evening.

The first two weeks’ mornings will be reserved for Dr Ekman’s lectures on his teachings and theories including his extensive work on facial expressions. In the afternoons, there will be open discussions between Drs Wallace and Ekman on some of the issues that will have been raised earlier. This will be followed by a Q&A session with the audience.

Short sessions of meditation (24 mins) will be allocated in the first few weeks, moving on
to longer durations as the course proceeds. In the evening there will be opportunities for the students to study the teachings of Buddha and other writings from psychology including from any of Dr Wallace's thirty books.

Dr Wallace speaks with a high level of inner calm, perhaps this has come from one of his many meetings with the Dalai Lama, who asked during a 2000 meeting, “Can you do anything for the people in the Western world by adapting aspects of Buddhism and integrating them with the methods of modern psychology?”

His numerous trips to Phuket and other parts of Asia have shown Dr Wallace that it is not just western people that need help drawing and understanding more from the teachings of Buddhism. “Thailand is a modern, 21st-century society. The education system is coming from a modern perspective, but the monks and the teachings are traditional, basing their teachings on ancient texts written down hundreds of years ago. There’s a lot of work to do in order to adapt ancient Buddhism to modern day life.”

It is Dr Wallace's desire to not only make Buddhism adaptable to contemporary society, but also enable monks and modern Thais to better understand and interact with one another.

Spirituality can be said to fill an abstract void and to give purpose, instruction and guidance to those who seek it. Science could also help offer some consolation and comfort by objectively measuring the benefical effects of traditional Buddhist practices. However it is very rare that followers of science and spirituality share a passion for both, for it seems to many that being a believer in one is mutually exclusive to the other. In fact throughout history, numerous scientists such as Galileo and Descartes had to denounce their scientific views if it was deemed to be in opposition with Christian doctrines.

Dr Wallace is still aware of this dichotomy, albeit to a lesser extent than figures from the past, “Some purists want to keep both schools of thought separate instead of bringing
East and West together. Some scientists think that because I’m not a materialist that I don’t think scientifically, while some Buddhists say, “Why are you getting involved with all that? Science and Spirituality shouldn’t be mixed.”

But Dr Wallace believes mixing both worlds and philosophies makes a lot of sense, “There’s a big piece missing from psychology. It’s got strengths when it comes to investigating the brain and behaviour, but shouldn’t the psychologists who conduct such
experiments be collaborating with people who can actually observe their own mental state?”