Emotional Surfing: Using the Emotions of Daily Life as Fuel for Liberation with Brian Basham

Name: Emotional Surfing: Using the Emotions of Daily Life as Fuel for Liberation with Brian Basham
Start: 2026-01-17T10:00:00-08:00
End: 2026-01-17T17:00:00-08:00
Location: The Alembic

Schedule

Sat Jan 17 2026 at 10:00 am to 05:00 pm

UTC-08:00

Location

The Alembic | Berkeley, CA

A strong meditation practice helps us become intimate with awareness itself and its natural qualities—fundamental okayness, compassion, clarity, and nonseparateness. As we learn to recognize these qualities in practice, we begin to recognize them in daily life. Our experience shifts, our behavior shifts, and we find ourselves treating others — and ourselves — with increasing kindness.
Emotional Surfing has three pillars that support this integration. The first is a powerful micromeditation for real-time use: whether we’re avoiding, ruminating, or reacting to someone else, this tool helps us reconnect with the fundamental okayness already present and respond with greater skill. The second pillar is a seated meditation practice that deepens our familiarity with awareness. The third is a pair practice that helps us bring these transformative capacities into emotionally charged situations, supported by another person.
This daylong will explore all three pillars, with an emphasis on deepening the seated meditation practice. We’ll work directly with the challenges each person encounters on the path, so that resting in awareness becomes more accessible and reliable. All levels are welcome — no prior meditation or Emotional Surfing experience needed.
BIO
I’m Brian Basham. I enjoy improv singing, Neal Stephenson novels and a good math olympiad problem. I’m passionate about meditation, emotional wellbeing, and sharing with others the freedom that comes from a deep acceptance of our emotions and reality.
My first dedicated practice of working with my emotions in a nonconceptual meditative way came through meeting Cedric Bertelli and his practice of Emotional Resolution in 2018. Later I started studying Realization Process and Tibetan Buddhism, and I’ve been grateful to have amazing meditations teachers such as Jennifer Welwood, Dustin DiPerna and Roma Hammel. I’m also inspired by the work I’ve done with Joe Hudson and the way he uses dyadic practices for emotional healing and relational work.
Those streams started weaving together in me and became Emotional Surfing, which I started offering in early 2022 and has been evolving ever since. I know the immense positive impact that a deep meditation practice can have on wellbeing and on the ability to act compassionately and skillfully in even the most challenging life situations. Accessibility is important to me, and I aim to lower the barrier of entry (in terms of time and financial investment) to experiencing the tangible results these practices have in daily life. I also aim to create peer-based structures that make it easy and enjoyable to practice.