On Friday, April 4, before a lively crowd at Temple University in Philadelphia, Dzogchen Ponlop kicked off the 2016 Emotional Rescue North American Tour for his newly released book, Emotional Rescue: How to Work with Your Emotions to Transform Hurt and Confusion into Energy that Empowers You.

The widely celebrated teacher and author of Rebel Buddha: A Guide to a Revolution of Mind recounted a personal story about the early, untimely death of his father and how it set off his own quest as a teenager to find a way to relieve the powerful feelings of grief and discontent. With the help of his teacher, Khenpo Tsultrim Gyamtso Rinpoche, Dzogchen Ponlop learned how to work with racing emotions and thoughts. When he saw the “big role the emotions played in the drama of this life,” he began to delve deeper into his mind to understand all that he could about the energy of emotions.

“I realized that whatever approach I took to deal with my emotions,” he writes in Emotional Rescue, “I needed ways that would work with my whole life – methods that would actually make a difference. I needed to be able to see myself clearly and to feel the emotions that touched me and colored my world every day.”

Rooted in his experience of the Buddhist path, which teaches that the key to understanding your emotions is to get to know your mind, Dzogchen Ponlop created the 3 Step Emotional Rescue Plan to help familiarize us with the inner workings of our emotions. Using the steps Mindful Gap, Clear Seeing, and Letting Go, we move from being victims to partners to creative collaborators with these profound energies. “When we bring awareness to our emotions, something truly amazing happens,” he writes. “They lose their power to make us miserable.”

Following the inaugural Emotional Rescue Tour presentation in Philadelphia, Dzogchen Ponlop gave a talk and two-day workshop on how to use the three steps of Emotional Rescue delineated in his book in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and in Washington D.C. One workshop participant likened the event to the experience of eating a Snickers Bar. “You get a taste of realization at the talk, like the taste of a Snickers Bar,” she said. “And like a Snickers Bar, you’ll want more, which is what you get in the workshop.”

Next stop on the Emotional Rescue book tour is New York City on May 6 – 8.

Register for the talk and the weekend workshop here.

Dzogchen Ponlop Rinpoche is a renowned Buddhist teacher known for his warmth and wit. A lover of music, art and urban culture, Rinpoche is a poet, photographer, accomplished calligrapher and visual artist, as well as a prolific author. Rinpoche is founder and president of Nalandabodhi, an international network of Buddhist centers.