Conducted by Ame Wren, a doctoral candidate at the University of Virginia and a Research Assistant at the Journal of Contemplative Studies (JCS).
JCS: Welcome! Thank you for making the time for this conversation. Would you first tell us a little bit about yourself?
EE: I’m Eve Ekman and I am a second-generation emotion researcher. My dad, Paul Ekman, was one of the founders of the field of emotion, especially looking at the universality of facial expressions. I never imagined I would end up in this field, mostly because I’ve always had a strong sense of wanting to help people immediately, and laboratory-based work seemed so removed from that. I’ve been really fortunate, though, to have had a series of interests—starting with medical and social work. Around the time I finished undergrad, I was a level one emergency room medical-social worker doing crisis counseling; this work brought me to my PhD for which I studied how to prevent, mitigate, and understand burnout for frontline care providers. It was then that my worlds overlapped with my dad who, at the time had formed a beautiful collaboration with another contemplative practitioner at the Mind and Life Institute, named Alan Wallace. Through a dialogue with the Dalai Lama, the two of them created a training called cultivating emotional balance, and this has been my life’s work for the last 16 years or so—conjoining contemplative and modern psychological practices of identifying emotions and be able to transform them.
My dissertation at UC Berkeley looked at the relative levels of burnout in a juvenile jail. I then did a postdoc at UCSF’s Osher Center for integrative medicine, where I worked with junior health care professionals, looking at their emotions in a daily experience mediated by technology: How do you, on a day-to-day basis, record and assess your emotions, and what is the difference between that and something like a burnout survey? I discovered that the mere reflection upon our emotions was an intervention towards well-being. I’m not the only one in the field who has discovered this, but with the severe level of burnout around us today, it was very inspiring to study how we can facilitate an awareness of our emotions to help us overcome or meet these emotions, or, at the very least, understand them. I was loving this work in my postdoc, but was feeling very limited by the available grant funding for that work. I was very fortunate to join the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley to support teaching and developing curriculum on the science of meaningful life—the science of altruism, the science of emotion and compassion. I took this literally all over the world, which was pretty fun—lots of plane trips to give talks at hospitals, jails, schools, businesses, even at Apple back in 2019. Then, the very next day, Apple called me and asked, “What is it going to take for us to keep you here? We want to create products for well-being and you’re our person.” So, I spent four years at Apple shaping five products: their first products in mental health and well-being. In that time, I continued teaching as well as keeping at least a pinky in my research. And, just in the last year, I now have all fingers involved, and maybe all in different domains. I feel really lucky to be supporting work to help mitigate climate distress for undergrads at the UC campuses—as one of the instructors, but also as one of the folks working on our research studies there. I also still get to teach and cultivate emotional balance, CEB, though that training, which, now, has fortunately spread across the world. I feel like a happy grandparent of it, as opposed to raising it myself. I’ve been collaborating with Jesse Fleming, both of us are ex-Apple and interested in the intersection of how technology can facilitate or create a spiritual technology. So, I’m kind of a bit everywhere.
I discovered that the mere reflection upon our emotions was an intervention towards well-being.
JCS: I’m astounded by that bio. Thank you for sharing. What brought you to be interested in contemplation and sense-making, whether as a kid, young adult, or early academic?
EE: I was a very sensitive kid. I delighted greatly, but I felt the suffering of the world greatly, too. I grew up in the city of San Francisco, and it was very confusing to me that certain people didn’t have a home or someone to care about them, and that we weren’t all working all the time to do something about it. As soon as I could, when I was an early teenager, I became an activist—I started attending protests and working in soup kitchens. And, while that is beautiful, it wasn’t giving me anything to mitigate the distress of living in samsara, living in this world of suffering. When I first learned about Buddhist practice, I thought: Wow, there’s a whole curriculum here for becoming a warrior of compassion—it was such a homecoming. It took me a while to begin practicing; I liked the philosophy of Buddhism, but I didn’t think I needed to practice the meditations because I could just go surf or make art or go dance. It wasn’t until I had more catastrophic life experiences—back injury, breakup, family illness—that I was like, oh, right: practice. When you can’t go in the waves, or see friends, you realize that the skills and tools for deeper resilience can’t depend on outer circumstances, they must be found right in our own minds and hearts.
JCS: You have such a rich story. How does the combination of your work, personal practices, experiences of contemplation, and engagement with technology affect the way you make sense of the world. Could you shed some light on that?
EE: Technology is newer for me. I started my postdoc doing an ecological momentary assessment using phones, and even though it was through technology, it was really inviting in, or instigating, awareness. I’m not sensing an emotion for someone, I am giving them an opportunity to sense for themselves. I think that’s more at the core of contemplative science, which is being a first-person investigator of your own experience. I loved what Andrew Holecek said earlier when he called our phones these weapons of mass distraction. How do we balance out, or mitigate, this potential to use the phone as an escape hatch, as a window out of the world, and using it more as a mirror for reflection? With technology as a support, we may be able to better recognize habits and behaviors and build awareness of our emotional patterns, which are key to our well-being. I don’t know if I think technology has any business in helping us be connected to the world, so there’s a tension there. Even at Apple, I felt that tension: How do we create technologies that also help us know when to put them away? I’ve observed in the contemplative space that, often, the idea is that you need to put away technology to be contemplative, so it’s fascinating to think of this in a new way.
With technology as a support, we may be able to better recognize habits and behaviors and build awareness of our emotional patterns, which are key to our well-being.
JCS: Yes, these are very pertinent questions to our world today. Can you perhaps say a bit more about how you see your work at this intersection affecting individuals, communities, and the world on a larger scale?
EE: I did a project with my dad 10 years ago that was supported by the Dalai Lama, called the Atlas of Emotion. This was my first foray in creating something online that is accessible to everyone—it sought to give people a language for understanding and expressing emotions. It’s so simple yet powerful, and I still see a deficit of this in our everyday culture and our understanding of each other. So, I think that something simple such as creating these online tools and providing opportunities to understand ourselves through shared language can be of enormous help. Some of this is just because of identification, really useful identification—but at some point you need more than that, you also need a common world view. I don’t know if we can or should enforce a world view. I think a world view is something like the fruition of closely seeing and knowing one another, something like kindness or generosity. These are behavioral manifestations of paying attention, and not just paying attention with criticism towards ourselves and others. It’s an interesting question: How do you help people at a macro level understand their own emotions in a way that occasions empathy and compassion. In the end, I think it’s a design question: How do you design a tool in a way that, instead of asking for a process of self-optimization, it encourages the question of how can I understand others better? How do I create a kind of softness and gentleness in understanding myself which is also relational? Even though emotions happen to us as individuals, my guess is that 99% of them involve other people, right? So, really, when people are motivated to learn about how they can feel more happy, part of this is about how we can feel more connected. I think emotions can help improve our relationships and then, hopefully, also help us with those bigger, more transformative world views, with things like interconnection and impermanence.
JCS: Thank you so much for this conversation, Eve, and for your work.
