Personal Development Workshops

Creative Power: The Art and Science of Creativity and Innovation

Finding and Following Your Inner Guidance

Cultivating Social-Emotional Healing and Wisdom through Mindfulness 

Compassionate Communication  

Writing Your Spiritual Journey

Exploring Spiritual Experience through Modern Mystic Poetry

Healing and Uplifting the Heart through Poetry 

Experiencing Kabbalah 

Note: You can find Dr. Burack's professional development workshops at www.charlesburack.com

• Is your heart yearning to express the creative ideas, images, and intuitions locked within?
• Are you wanting to be more creative in your life, work, and relationships

We live in an immensely creative universe.  And we are all born with innumerable creative capacities.

So why aren't we as creative as we would like to be?  What holds us back?  Fears.  Insecurities.  Judgments. Perfectionism.  Harsh inner critic.  Lack of confidence. Socialization. And more.

In this workshop, you'll learn time-tested techniques for freeing up your innate creative powers.  You’ll also learn powerful insights and methods used by creative artists, scientists, mystics, sages, and entrepreneurs.

  Practices include: a 5-step method for inviting and elaborating your creative intuitions; techniques for overcoming your fears; meditations that clear and focus the mind; and approaches that activate the diverse creative energies inhering in your body, mind, and soul. 

 Creative thinking, writing and drawing will be explored.  Emphasis will be placed on enjoying your creative process and applying your creativity to all aspects of your life.   

• Do you long to live the life you are called to live?
•  Do you want to be guided moment to moment by the deepest wisdom, the highest power, within?
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When you follow your inner guidance, your life, work, and relationships are supported by inspiration and insight, purpose and passion, conviction and courage. You feel empowered to act with integrity and confidence.

The inner guide has been called intuition, presence, integrity, soul, spirit, higher self, inner voice, still small voice, divine within. However you name it or conceive it, it is the fountainhead of your personal wisdom, vision and values.

In this workshop, you will learn several practices for discovering, deepening, and sustaining your connection to your own guide.

These practices include cultivating positive psychological, ethical, and spiritual qualities; fostering optimal states of awareness and understanding; and minimizing or transforming negative qualities and states.

You’ll also learn methods for inviting, receiving, testing and actualizing authentic guidance. 

• Do you want to honor and understand your emotions?
• Do you want to learn from and integrate the wisdom of your feelings?
• Do you have emotional triggers and imbalances that need to be healed?
• Do you feel a need to meet challenges more effectively and to  manage stress?     
• Are you committed to relating to others with more empathy, compassion, and understanding?

Social-emotional intelligence is at the core of well-being, growth, maturity, and success. 

In this workshop, you'll learn how to optimize your awareness, understanding, and regulation of your own emotions.  You will also learn how to consciously and responsibly tap your emotional emotional wisdom and power to serve life.  Moreover, you will also learn proven ways to enhance how you empathize with, understand, and relate to others.  These practices will enable you to speak and act with greater personal integrity and power.

We can optimize our social-emotional intelligence with mindfulness, the vital art of paying attention.  Mindfulness not only builds mental focus, clarity and creativity but also has been shown to be a powerful approach for enhancing how we relate to ourselves, other people, and the wider world.

Mindfulness enables us to be fully present and aware of our emotions, thoughts, and behaviors and to consciously guide them.  These enhancing effects help us to attune to and respond effectively to the emotions, communications, and behaviors of others. As a result, we become wiser, more compassionate, and more joyful human beings.

• Do you want to speak with both honesty and kindness, clarity and compassion?
• Do you avoid telling others that that something they said or did was hurtful to you?
• Do you avoid addressing conflicts with family, friends, coworkers and others because you are uncertain of how to do so in an effective manner that enhances your relationships rather than makes matters worse?
• Do you find it difficult to ask others for what you need?
• Are you committed to cultivating relationships based on mutual understanding and respect, empathy and compassion, love and forgiveness, gratitude and integrity? 

 In this integrative and experiential workshop, you learn powerful principles and practices that will dramatically improve your communication skills in all of your relationships.  

 These proven approaches help you to listen and speak more effectively.  The workshop integrates methods from psychology, communications, ancient wisdom, and mindfulness meditation.  You will learn to: 

• listen with empathy,  presence, understanding, and appreciation
• speak with authenticity, clarity, conviction, respect, and persuasive power
• mindfully attend to and honor your own perceptions, thoughts, feelings, needs, values, and aspirations
•  express vital needs, communicate difficult feelings, and offer useful feedback with honesty and kindness
• make requests that address your needs and values
• calm the mental chatter that distracts you from listening and speaking well
• clear and focus your mind

     Do you feel the need to explore, express, and deepen your spiritual life?

Do you want to express yourself more creatively, truly, powerfully?

 In this workshop, you'll reflect on and write about your sacred journey.

   We'll begin each session by reading inspirational quotes, poems or brief stories by Rumi, Rilke, Dickinson, Oliver and others that illuminate the spiritual life.  Then, we'll use meditation to contemplate our own life experiences.  These may be peak experiences of love and insight, painful periods of despair and loneliness, or ordinary moments of kindness and humor.

 After the meditation, you'll write about our experiences in any form you choose--story, poem, freewriting, prayer, essay.  Then you'll  have an opportunity to share your writings in a safe, support, confidential space.  All sharings are voluntary.  If you choose to share, you can decide whether or not you want to receive responses or questions from other workshop members.  A group covenant will ensure that all responses and interactions are made in a positive, caring, and sensitive manner.

A major aim is to enhance our spiritual/creative growth, overcome obstacles/blocks, and offer our gifts to the world.  No writing expertise is needed. 

• What makes an experience sacred?
• How do we describe the indescribable?
• How does personality and religious tradition shape our perception and (de)valuing of sacred experiences? 
• How do these supreme moments affect everyday life, self-transformation, social-political action?
• How can we invite and integrate them into our lives?
• How can we powerfully express our own spiritual experiences? 

In this workshop, we’ll explore modern poetic masterpieces that depict the varieties of spiritual experience. We will not only savor these gems but also use them as springboards for exploring and writing about our own spiritual life.

Some of the poets we will study are: Maya Angelou, Wendell Berry, William Blake, Mahmoud Darwish, Emily Dickinson, T.S. Eliot, Marcia Falk, Allen Ginsberg, Louise Gluck, Susan Griffin, Jane Hirshfield, June Jordan, D. H. Lawrence, Antonio Machado, Thomas Merton, Pablo Neruda, Naomi Shihab Nye, Mary Oliver, Marge Piercy, Adrienne Rich, Rainer Rilke, Leopold Senghor, Rabindranath Tagore, Walt Whitman, and others.

Meditations and writing exercises will help us connect with and write about our own spiritual journeys.

      We will immerse ourselves in classic spiritual poems that have the power to heal, uplift and transform our hearts.  We will explore the light they shed on our lives.  Poets include David, Rumi, Hafiz, Hildegaard of Bingen, Mechtild of Magdeburg, Kabir, Mirabai, Shikibu, and Yunus Emre.  Together these poets from around the world offer a wealth of wisdom and inspiration about how to connect with the depths of the soul, how to compassionately face suffering, how to balance solitude and society, how to find the courage to pursue our passions and missions, how to heal our emotional wounds, as well as how to live with joy, vitality, love and creativity.  Poems will be distributed in class.  Contemplative and writing exercises will help us to gain personal insights and healings.  

      Kabbalah is the heart of Jewish mysticism.  It offers profound teachings and practices that have influenced and been influenced by Christian and Islamic mystics.

In this workshop, we examine the Jewish mystical experience of an androgynous divinity and soul.  We explore our own ability to embody sacred creative powers (symbolized by the Tree of Life) in service of the Source and all beings.  We also explore how to discover light in darkness and to transform suffering into life-affirming.  We will experience some transformative prayers, blessings, chants, and meditations.  No background in Judaism is needed.