“With encouragement and skillful means to interrupt the mind’s habitual patterns that contribute to challenging mood states, you can create new, beneficial pathways in the brain.”
– Dr. Lee Lipp
Upcoming Events
Transforming Depression and Anxiety is a gentle and practical path offered through San Francisco Zen Center that is open to all who believe they will benefit. Please consider enrolling in a TDA online offering to learn skills and tools to manage thought, emotional and physical habit patterns that too often lead to overwhelming lowered and agitated mood states.
You’ll be joining a supportive community of people who all experience depression and anxiety, and join together in courses and workshops to walk the gentle TDA path.
Befriending Your Pain
Self-guided online class
This course is offered for everyone, whether having difficulty with emotional and/or physical pain or simply want to understand and befriend the nature of the mind and emotions. No meditation experience is required.
This course is available to everyone regardless of their financial means.
Welcome
During these times, it feels impossible to find a place of stillness – to touch who we really are. It’s too easy to believe the stories that trigger self-criticism and shame – that this is just how we are. It’s too easy to think it’s our fault and we’re the only person in the world feeling like this. We’re caught in a reactive spiral of painful, chaotic patterns of thoughts and feelings that feed on each other, leading to dissatisfaction, distress and unhappiness.
Transforming Depression and Anxiety – TDA – offers a practical and compassionate way to create a different relationship with these states of mind and heart. The TDA path blends mindfulness and contemporary psychological practices to guide this change through gentle, effective skills and tools grounded in awareness.
Through this path, we can find that place of stillness and stability. We can learn to interrupt those painful, reactive thought and emotional patterns, literally resculpting our brains. Neuroscience has shown this is possible because our brains change throughout our lives, and we can impact how they change to:
- Deeply know that we’re not alone
- Release from the stories that we and others have told us about ourselves
- Untangle negative thoughts and self-criticism
- Develop a new kind of strength to be with emotional pain and distress
- Cultivate self-confidence and self-esteem as we practice with new skills and tools
- Offer acceptance and compassion to ourselves and others
- Feel better and more fully able to engage our lives with self-empathy and joy
This TDA resculpting is grounded in kind awareness. Mindfulness and meditation relaxes us into stillness, creating room to notice reactive habit patterns and use specific tools to disrupt them. This positive disruption opens up choices that we simply can’t see when we’re trapped in our habitual thoughts, self-criticism, and stories.
The Transforming Depression and Anxiety path consists of on-line courses, in-person workshops*, and practice groups where a supportive community comes together to learn and practice the tools and techniques. Additional resources and support are offered through this website.
Created by the late Dr. Lee Lipp, the TDA teaching team of Jisho Lisa Hoffman, Paul Irving and Tenzin David Zimmerman co-teach the sessions and carry on Dr. Lipp’s legacy and commitment to ease suffering, and support her beloved community.
*When San Francisco Zen Center reopens for live programming.
