Meet Our Featured Speakers

Thursday

Daniel Leven

Evening Welcoming Event:
Finding the Pulse: An Experience of Self and Community

Join movement teacher and group facilitator Dan Leven as he uses music, dance, and group interaction to heighten your sense of connection with other attendees and sharpen your own personal vision for the conference. Here’s your chance to bring into focus the breakthroughs that will most revitalize you personally and professionally.

Friday

Daniel Goleman

Morning Keynote:
Ecological Intelligence: A New Awareness for Our Time

Daniel Goleman, internationally known psychologist, science journalist, and author of such groundbreaking books as Emotional Intelligence, will address our need to expand our collective awareness to meet the profound social and ecological challenges we face.

Ron Taffel

Luncheon Address:
Challenge and Hope: The Paradoxes of the Post-Boomer Family

One of the country’s leading experts on the perplexing impact of popular culture and shifting social mores on children, Ron Taffel will offer a new map for navigating the landscape of the contemporary family.

Natalie Goldberg

Dinner Address:
The Practice of Creativity: Reawakening to the Mystery of Life

Poet, artist, and Zen practitioner Natalie Goldberg, celebrated for her classic book Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within, will reflect on the connection between spiritual practice and creativity, drawing on her own experiences as a writer and artist.

Saturday

Daniel Siegel

Morning Keynote:
The Neurobiology of “We”

Since publishing his landmark book The Developing Mind, Daniel Siegel has been at the forefront of integrating the latest advances in brain science with psychotherapy. His address will explore how our accumulating knowledge of our profound interconnectedness can illuminate both our personal and professional lives.

Jerome Kagan

Luncheon Address:
Human Nature and the Possibilities of Change

Jerome Kagan, widely regarded as the world’s most eminent developmental psychologist, will explore what our increasing understanding of the many hard-wired dimensions of human personality tells us about the limits and possibilities of psychotherapy.

Barbara Ehrenreich

Dinner Address:
Bright-Sided: Positive Psychology in Context

Author Barbara Ehrenreich, known for such works as Nickel and Dimed and This Land Is Their Land, is perhaps the leading progressive journalist now writing in America. Drawing on her new book, Bright-Sided, she’ll examine the cultural mindset that she thinks has led to our current economic and social woes.

Sunday

Tara Brach

Morning Keynote:
True Refuge: Three Gateways to a Fearless Heart

A leading teacher of Buddhist meditation known for her skill at bridging Western psychological knowledge and Eastern meditative traditions, Tara Brach will address how to help clients awaken from their everyday trance to embrace a larger experience of selfhood.