Raphael Cushnir – The Emotional Liberation Program
Go beyond Emotional Intelligence and experience greater freedom, peace & wellbeing through the profound spiritual wisdom in your emotions.
Most spiritual teachings minimize or dismiss the role of your emotions in the process of transformation, focusing on simply witnessing or transcending them.
But what if there was a more sophisticated way to relate to your emotions as an actual repository of spiritual intelligence that can guide you to a life of grace and joy?
The good news is that there is such a pathway that combines the best of psychology, spirituality, and science into a more effective approach.
Your vulnerability is the gateway to your soul and the Divine…
The key to unlocking this sacred connection, is to fully experience your emotions IN your body as a way of transforming them… and YOU in the process.
And the more resistance you have toward an emotion, or the more difficult the feeling (grief, anger, fear), the more essential it is for you to embody it fully as a path to freedom — unleashing more energy, love and creativity within you.
This may seem counterintuitive to spiritual seekers who’ve been following traditions that practice moving past emotions or focusing more on the transcendent states of consciousness.
However, if you have unexpressed emotions, even if you’re not thinking about them, they’re running in the background, influencing your actions and decision making… preventing you from being fully present in each moment and ultimately cutting you off from your natural flow and your connection with Spirit.
For years, we’ve been taught how to manage our emotions, “name our feelings,” and then shift our focus to the “higher aspirations” of consciousness, including meditation, prayer and other forms of spiritual practice.
Rarely are we taught to embrace our emotions and experience them fully as THE stepping stone on our path to enlightenment.
(To add to this challenge, your brain is actually wired NOT to feel “negative” emotions completely, which we’ll say more about in a moment.)
There’s another way to experience more peace of mind, more fulfilling relationships and a life well-lived in which you’re sharing your gifts and making your greatest contribution to our world… through the portal of your emotions.
This pathway combines the best of psychology, spirituality and science and recognizes human emotions for what they truly are — a source of spiritual intelligence, and the key to embodying love, grace and joy.
Riding the Wave of Your Emotions to Real Liberation
The groundbreaking work of Emotional Intelligence has brought to the forefront the role of emotions in personal and professional growth. Yet, awareness of emotions is still more or less a mental exercise, which can trap your feelings in a perpetual loop of thought and energy.
Many psychological and spiritual approaches minimize or dismiss the role of emotions in the process of transformation, focusing most often on witnessing or transcending them.
But it’s not enough to manage your emotions…
If you’ve ever faced depression, anxiety, or other symptoms of “stuck” emotions, you know how dark and hopeless things can get, even after you’ve identified what you’re feeling…and this is true, despite years of spiritual practice under your belt.
However when you discover how to “ride the wave” of theenergy of an emotion in your body, it dissipates — opening the gateway to your higher Self.
Those usual triggering situations happens less frequently. The life force begins to flow through you. Consequently, you’re more discerning and relaxed. More loving. And more spontaneous.
This is when the real breakthroughs can happen, and you experience true vulnerability. The kind of vulnerability that opens your heart and mind to creating (and receiving!) the radiant life you’ve been yearning for, consciously or not.
By becoming aware of and following the shifting energetic terrain of your emotions in your body, you can discover profound freedom — from resistance, reactivity, the revolving door of relationships (same relationship, different person), and even addictions and compulsions.
How to Rewire the Evolutionary Glitch In Your Brain
It begins with the recognition that your brain is actually wired to block the very emotions that can liberate more energy, love and creativity within you…
Part of your brain doesn’twant you to feel…especially painful emotions that can liberate more energy, love and creativity within you.
Here’s how it works: Your limbic brain handles emotions. Its job is to feel the feeling all the way through. Meanwhile, your primitive, or reptilian brain is concerned with your survival and views difficult emotions like grief as life-threatening. So it will try to protect against feeling it. This sets up an impossible situation, as you may have guessed.
Yet, you can actually “flip this switch” in your limbic brain, so you can unfreeze stuck emotions, release them AND flow with new emotions as they arise, redirecting your awareness as the energy of that feeling moves in your body.
The Power of a Proven Process
Raphael Cushnir, bestselling author of The One Thing Holding You Back: Unleashing the Power of Your Emotions, has developed a proven process for working with emotions to free you from the debilitating aspects of fear, old traumas and attachment — leaving you more connected to your body, heart and others.
Raphael Cushnir shows you how to rewire the evolutionary glitch in your brain so you can unlock old emotions and deal with present-time emotions effectively, as well as how to release resistance to feeling — so that you can engage with life with all of your natural vitality, creativity and capacities.
Raphael Cushnir’s unique teachings have been celebrated by thousands and recognized by Oprah Winfrey and Deepak Chopra — because his methods work.
During The Emotional Liberation Program, you’ll discover a new way to relate to your emotions — with respect and curiosity, and surrender instead of resistance.
You’ll receive essential practices to help you unlock the core of grief, sadness, shame or other challenging emotions that may have plagued you for a lifetime.
You’ll begin to embrace your emotions for the gift they truly are — keys to wisdom, intimacy and a vibrant life.
Raphael Cushnir teaches how to connect with your most challenging emotions, which he compares to surfing a wave, to put yourself in an expanded energetic space, where you have access to more wisdom, power, and grace.
As Raphael Cushnir says, “Our vulnerability, in a sublime paradox, is what renders us truly invincible.”
Raphael Cushnir’ll show you how to untangle and resolve old traumas, navigate emotional triggers in the moment and develop healthy boundaries to prevent recurrent triggers.
You won’t just feel better, you’ll also unblock emotions that may be creating addictions and compulsions such as shopping, sex, and overuse of digital media.
In short, this work can free you from the many things holding you back from a truly liberated and self-expressed life!
The Importance of a Masterful Teacher
Raphael Cushnir is highly skilled at emotional connection. The process he teaches is rooted in his personal experience and work with thousands of clients and workshop participants. In his own journey, Raphael Cushnir had achieved worldly success, devising innovative campaigns for celebrities such as Madonna, Pearl Jam, Demi Moore and Michael Fox. Raphael Cushnir then entered a classic “dark night of the soul” in which his career and marriage fell apart.
This dark night eventually proved to be a great blessing, propelling him into working with emotions on their own terms, as forces that can lead to a profound spiritual awakening.
Raphael Cushnir has since shared his practical approach to millions. His writing has been featured O Magazine and Spirituality and Health and on BeliefNet. The bestselling author of The One Thing Holding You Back: Unleashing the Power of Emotional Connection, Unconditional Bliss: Finding Happiness in the Face of Hardship and other books, Raphael Cushnir is on the faculty of the Esalen Institute, Kripalu and Omega.
Raphael Cushnir’s joined the Shift Network to share the life-changing process of connecting with your emotions deeply. If you want to get past persistent triggers, wounds, and reactivity, Raphael Cushnir’s approach can help.
During Raphael Cushnir’s practical 7-week program, you’ll discover:
- The key role of the language of your body, and how this inner compass is the key to liberation
- The signs of emotional contraction and what you can do to shift into expansion
- How to recognize & release your resistance to emotion
- The evolutionary glitch in your brain that doesn’t want you to feel negative emotions
- How you can rewire this glitch for maximum healing & wellbeing
- What it means to “surf” your emotions fully and successfully, which not only rewires your brain but also helps you heal the remaining wounds from your past, stay more fully in the present, and lead the way to a truly inspiring future
- The ways that breath, posture, movement, and sound are some of your most reliable allies in staying emotionally supple, and how best to choose and combine them
- A unique approach to healthy boundaries that draws on lovingkindness rather than defensiveness
- How to overcome the limits of will power by replacing it with a new kind of self-acceptance that promotes peace and positive change
- How to break through the barrier that keeps even advanced spiritual practitioners from self-realization
What You’ll Discover in The Emotional Liberation Program
The Emotional Liberation Program sessions are on Wednesdays at 5:00pm Pacific.
In this 7-week transformational intensive, Raphael Cushnir will guide you through the fundamental skills and competencies that you’ll need to transform your relationship to emotions and turn them into a powerful catalyst for an awakened life.
Each weekly, LIVE contemplation and training session will build harmoniously upon the next so you’ll develop a complete holistic understanding of the practices, tools and principles you’ll need to sustain your emotional transformation over the long haul.
Module 1: Your Inner Compass Rediscovering the Language of the Body (December 14)
An emotion is a message from your brain, delivered to your body as a physical sensation. Receiving these messages by attuning to your body and the shifting sensations of peace and fulfillment.
In this session, you’ll explore how your body presents you with information and learn to consult it in the heat of the moment, using guided practices to track and adjust the thoughts and energies that can put you in a state of contraction — and block freedom and self-expression.
In this module, you’ll discover:
- The key role of the language of your body, and how this inner compass is the key to your ultimate liberation.
- Guided practices for tracking and adjusting your access to your body’s compass
- How you can tap into a more expanded energy state, a portal for optimal well-being and peak performance
- The signs of emotional contraction and what you can do to shift into expansion
- The negative impact of emotions in a prolonged state of contraction — and what happens to your health, career, and relationships when you know how to work with your brain’s resistance to difficult and challenging emotions
- The renewal available when you can fully accept “what is” and enter into a flowing “Yes” to all of life
Module 2: Retraining Your Evolutionary Brain (December 21)
Evolution is messy. It moves forward in roundabout ways and in fits and starts. The human brain, therefore, is often at odds with itself. Nowhere is this more apparent, or damaging, than in the realm of the emotions.
Left to its own devices, your brain generates emotions you need to feel, and then blocks them.
Fortunately, your brain also has the ability to rewire itself…
In this session, you’ll become intimate with and start to rewire this “evolutionary glitch,” especially in situations in which you previously felt trapped and powerless.
In this module, you’ll discover:
- The surprising relationship between the evolutionary glitch in your brain and the negative patterns that have kept you stuck — even after lots of therapy and spiritual work
- How to combat the narcissism of the neo cortex so that your thinking brain no longer competes with your feeling brain, leaving you freer and more effective than ever before
- What it means to “surf” your emotions successfully, which not only rewires your brain but also helps you heal the remaining wounds from your past, stay more fully in the present, and lead the way to a truly inspiring future
- Specific ways of working with emotions and thoughts that allow you to untangle the feedback loop between them that has, till now, created debilitating pain and blocks to fulfillment
- Key practices for your internal “verdicts,” both conscious and unconscious, that otherwise keep you from surfing with ease and success.
Module 3: The Practice of a Lifetime (December 28)
Understanding how to connect with emotions is one thing applying the process in the rush of everyday life is another. Once you start practicing emotional connection, you’ll undoubtedly encounter unintentional blocks. In this session, we’ll work with these reactions directly, so that you can recognize and neutralize them.
Yet, some emotions may resist your attempts to feel them so you’ll learn advanced practices for creating and maintaining flow.
In this module, you’ll discover:
- How to notice quickly when you’re “triggered” — and a core practice to relax and reconnect you to your joy
- The ways that analyzing, judging and bargaining interfere with this practice and exactly how to keep this from happening
- Breath, Posture, Movement, and Sound techniques to keep you emotionally supple
- A reservoir of unfelt emotion under each lingering life issue, and how to break through the dam once and for all, in a way that is safe, gentle, and exhilarating
Module 4: Relief from Addictions & Compulsions (January 4)
Addictions and compulsions are part of the brain’s defense against difficult emotions, which it erroneously sees as life-threatening. We all have these defenses to varying degrees. And for the purpose of emotional liberation, they require a very specific kind of attention.
This session, you’ll work with any addictions or compulsions, and not from the usual “disease model” and or limited insights of “cognitive behavioral therapy.” Instead, with just a little tweaking, the practices you’ve learned so far can provide you with relief from addictions and compulsions.
In this module, you’ll discover:
- How to overcome the limits of willpower, replacing it with self-acceptance that promotes positive, peaceful change
- A practice called “Done Deal Delay” that can unhook you from addictions and compulsions
- The No Fail Zone — a technique for finding the hidden victory in every “slip”
- A way to heal the root cause of addiction and compulsion, by befriending the parts of yourself you’ve spent a lifetime trying to get rid of
Module 5: Vulnerability as the Source of True Power (January 11)
The relationship you have with yourself is the greatest determinant of your relationship with others. This includes how you relate to “the voice in your head,” and to the hurt and fragile parts of you. In this session, you’ll learn how to stay supportive and connected with yourself at all times, especially when trauma surfaces.
Raphael Cushnir will also share powerful best practices for dealing with the people you care about most. They’re not always open. They often don’t share your commitment to emotional liberation so it’s important to be discerning . You’ll learn how to be intimate, and protect yourself as possible while also remaining as safe as possible.This template for relating to others will make intimacy easier and more fulfilling.
In this module, you’ll discover:
- A technique called Zoom Lens that allows you to honor and heal trauma without getting trapped in it
- How an artful balance of the 3 keys of awareness – vipassana (noticing), metta(lovingkindness) and tantra (full engagement) – ensures your greatest possible healing and growth
- The Anatomy of Reactivity – how to defuse conflict with others quickly, and how to avoid the unnecessary harm that otherwise follows
- The Language of Requests – this is a life-altering practice that allows you to replace the pain of inappropriate expectations with the skill of “loving negotiation”
Module 6: From Emotional Liberation to Joyful Co-creation (January 18)
Once you’re able to open fully to emotions, you’re also ready to open fully to Spirit. The great wisdom traditions often describe this as moving from self to Self. In this course we refer to it as ‘practical nonduality,” a way to live your experience of Oneness in this world, in the here and now. Doing so makes everyday life become radiant, infused with magic. Paradoxically, you end up accomplishing more while trying less.
This session also helps you plug into your ultimate Source, which enables you to fully hear and heed the deepest calling of your heart.
In this module, you’ll discover:
- How to refine your intuition by keeping current with your emotional flow. It’s this process that makes your “gut feelings” the most reliable
- A unique approach to healthy boundaries that draws on lovingkindness rather than defensiveness
- Doing from Being – this is the way you access a universal power far greater than yourself, and then join with that power to co-create your best possible life
- The rare skill of Energy Matching, which enables you to stay in consistent harmony with your ever-shifting internal states and in the process become more productive, powerful and joyful
Module 7: Coming Home to Your Spiritual Genius (January 25)
What does it mean to be “in this world but not of it”? How do we reveal and revel in the vastness of our being while also still walking the earth? Is it possible that this liberating dance of wholeness is what’s necessary for we humans, finally, to bridge ancient and contemporary wisdom and become true peacemakers?
In our final session we answer these questions with a passionate “Yes!” We turn to everyday practices that make this lofty dream a living, breathing reality. As a result, you will emerge from the course with a renewed clarity about your True Nature, as well as a roadmap for staying in alignment with it at all times.
In this module, you’ll discover:
- How to live in the dynamic tension between your individual self and the Oneness from which it’s born, which helps you avoid both “spiritual bypassing” and the sense of not fully belonging here on earth
- The importance of surrendering the timing and the outcome in relation to any of your aspirations, so that your need for things to happen in a certain way doesn’t unintentionally prevent the greatest possible outcome
- What it looks and feels like when there is no “problem” to be found, so that real, lasting change is possible without any resistance left to block it.
- A revolutionary shift in perspective so that, going forward, whatever happens to you also happens for you
- The awesome power of “turning the light around” — a pivotal practice that re-activates and synthesizes all the benefits of this course instantly, even in the most challenging situation.
About Raphael Cushnir
Raphael Cushnir is a leading voice in the world of emotional connection and present moment awareness. Raphael Cushnir has shared his unique approach to personal and professional development with millions of readers in O, The Oprah Magazine, Beliefnet, Spirituality and Health and The Huffington Post. Raphael Cushnir is the author of several books including The One Thing Holding You Back: Unleashing The Power of Emotional Connection, Unconditional Bliss: Finding Happiness in the Face of Hardship, Setting Your Heart on Fire and How Now: 100 Ways to Celebrate the Present Moment. Raphael Cushnir lectures worldwide and is a faculty member of the Esalen Institute, the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health, and the Omega Institute for Holistic Studies. In addition, Raphael Cushnir coaches individuals and teams at Fortune 100 companies, governments, religious organizations and leading nonprofits.
After working his way through school as a teacher and a storyteller, Raphael Cushnir redirected his energies as an activist for the environment and human rights. Raphael Cushnir devised innovative media campaigns that included such celebrities as Madonna, Pearl Jam, Demi Moore and Michael J. Fox. His passion for filmmaking led to a decade-long stint in Hollywood. Raphael Cushnir wrote, directed and produced a Showtime movie, Sexual Healing, starring Helen Hunt, Anthony Edwards and Jason Alexander. The film was nominated for two Cable Ace awards and won Grand Prize at the Houston Film Festival. Designed by Cushnir as a not-for-profit venture, it raised over $30,000 for the Minority AIDS Project.
In 1996, both his career and his marriage fell apart. “It was a classic dark night of the soul,” he remembers. “Many people experience something similar in their own lives. The particulars are always different but the essential experience is the same — a deep, depressing, gut-wrenching pain. In my case, everything I thought I knew about life went completely out the window.”
Then, luckily, one of Raphael Cushnir’s mentors convinced him to embrace the pain instead of turn away from it. Raphael Cushnir suggested that, in fact, this was a perfect opportunity to “wake up.”
Raphael Cushnir took his mentor’s advice and ran with it. Over a decade later Raphael Cushnir’s waking up still, one moment at a time. Helping others do the same has become his new life mission.
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