Beloved Community, Healing, and Technology

with Sará King & Eve Ekman

Our ever-increasing intimacy with technology means we live more of our lives with, through, and mediated by it. This carries both opportunities and risks to our social, emotional, cognitive, and spiritual dimensions. Many are experiencing a sense of soul loss — a contracted disconnection caused by distraction, social comparison, loneliness, and lack of true connection, both inner and outer.

The conscious cultivation of awareness through practices that teach us how to pay attention to our own experience as a witness — to see ourselves as a subject of life rather than an object life is happening to — can be incredibly empowering. Dr(s). Sará King and Eve Ekman, are contemplative scientists collaborating on mapping the intricacies of human emotion and awareness using research, embodied practice and artificial intelligence. Together, they will offer a space of transformation which combines the powerful art of story-telling with relational exercises they have designed for the cultivation of beloved community - an alchemical opportunity to meet, map, and transform how we relate to technology and reveal its liberatory potential for enhancing embodied awareness and social justice.  
 
Suggested donation $25 - $50. All are welcome. No one is ever turned away for lack of funds. 

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Sará King, MA, PhD is a neuroscientist, artist, political and learning scientist, education philosopher, social impact entrepreneur, public speaker, and meditation teacher. She is passionate about catalyzing humanity’s capacity to heal from intergenerational trauma and dedicated to creating accessible contemplative practices at the nexus of art, music, and meditation. She is currently a Post-Doctoral Fellow in Public Health at the T. Denny Sanford Institute for Empathy and Compassion in Human Health and Social Justice at UCSD and the CEO and Founder of MindHeart AI, an AI start-up dedicated to creating platforms and tools to support collective healing and well-being. She is also the author of “The Science of Social Justice” framework for research and facilitation and the inventor of the “Systems Based Awareness Map” (SBAM) - the world’s first theoretical map of human awareness - both of which she developed to explore our capacity to heal intergenerational trauma and promote the well-being of what she has termed "collective nervous systems”. In 2021, she was named “One-To-Watch” by Mindful Magazine, as well as she made the November cover of Yoga Journal Magazine as a “Game Changer” for her work bridging neuroscience, social justice, and contemplative practices. In 2022, she was also named one of the "10 Most Powerful Women in Mindfulness" by Mindful Magazine.

Eve Ekman, MSW, PhD, is a senior fellow at the Greater Good Science Center. She is also a UC Berkeley- and UCSF-trained social scientist and teacher in the field of emotional awareness and burnout prevention. Eve is a second-generation emotion researcher and has had meaningful collaborations with her father, renowned emotion researcher Dr. Paul Ekman. Their most recent project, The Atlas of Emotions, is an online visual tool to teach a language for improving our emotional awareness that was commissioned and supported by the Dalai Lama. Eve is the co-lead instructor for Cultivating Emotional Balance, an evidence-based meditation and emotion regulation training developed by Dr. Paul Ekman and Buddhist scholar Alan Wallace.