By Paul Shippee Shambhala Mountain Center hosts Emotional Enlightenment: Direct Path To Compassionate Communication with Paul Shippee, December 5-7, 2014 Peeling away the protective layers of our habitual patterns of thinking and reacting we come to vulnerability, soft spot, the inner sanctuary of the heart. Things are no longer black and white, either-or, but we enter the tender areas of felt experience and glimpse previously unknown realms of our being. Compassion and empathy can now come alive as felt experience. For emotional healing to take place we move from exclusively head-thinking to the open fields of heart-thinking. As Rumi said, “Somewhere out there beyond ideas of right and wrong there is a meadow; I’ll meet you there.” We discover unexpected aspects of ourselves that feel strange but good. We would like to claim these aspects because we sense the power of truth in them. As we let go of automatic and familiar judgment and blame reactions we discover hidden adversaries that are termed shadow and shame and blame. Those names point to all the conditioned ways …