Meditation-Based Clinical Interventions: Science, Practice, and Implementation Group Discussion - Mind & Life Institute

Dialogue 13|Session 5

Overview

This introductory session sets the stage for the rest of the meeting. It will establish a vocabulary and epistemology of meditative awareness stemming primarily from the teachings of the Buddha, in particular, the Four Noble Truths, and introduce well-established clinical and research programs that are exploring the interfaces between medicine and meditation for patients with chronic health conditions, and between neuroscientific approaches to mind and brain and meditative approaches stemming from the systematic cultivation of attention and awareness.

Father Keating will offer a Christian contemplative perspective to expand the conversation beyond a Buddhist meditative framework, pointing out commonalities and differences that may be of value in developing new models for meditative interventions and investigations. Matthieu Ricard and Sharon Salzberg will offer their own unique perspectives on the interface between meditation and science and the challenges of living a full and healthy/wholesome life in these times.

Dialogue 13
16 sessions
November 8, 2005
Dar Constitution Hall, Washington, DC
Transcript - Connection, Community, and Compassion with Susan Bauer-Wu, Dekila Chungyalpa, Elissa Epel, and Brother Phap Dung |pdf|
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Speakers

Ajahn Amaro is co-abbot of Abhayagiri Buddhist Monastery in northern California. He received a B.Sc. with Honours from London University in psychology & physiology. In 1977 he took up residence in a forest meditation monastery in the lineage of Ven. Ajahn Chah in Northeast Thailand. He returned to England to join Ven. Ajahn Sumedho at a newly founded forest monastery in Sussex. In 1983, he journeyed 830 miles on foot to a branch monastery in Northumberland. In 1985 he came to Amaravati Buddhist Centre and helped with teaching and administration for ten years, serving as vice-abbot for the last two years. He started coming to the USA in 1990, spending a few months each year teaching here. In 1996 Abhayagiri Monastery was opened. The main focus of his life is practicing as a forest monk, and teaching and training others in that same tradition. Since 1988 he has taken part in numerous conferences and seminars, including two in Dharamsala and one in California with the Dalai Lama and a group of Western Buddhist teachers. In 1994 in London he was also involved in a seminar, "The Good Heart", that the Dalai Lama led where he was giving commentaries on the Christian gospels.

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B. Alan Wallace is president of The Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies. He trained for many years as a monk in Buddhist monasteries in India and Switzerland. He has taught Buddhist theory and practice in Europe and America since 1976 and has served as interpreter for numerous Tibetan scholars and contemplatives, including H. H. the Dalai Lama. After graduating summa cum laude from Amherst College, where he studied physics and the ahilosophy of science, he earned his M.A. and Ph.D. in religious Studies at Stanford University. He has edited, translated, 13 authored, and contributed to more than thirty books on Tibetan Buddhism, medicine, language, and culture, and the interface between science and religion.

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Tenzin Gyatso, the14th Dalai Lama, is the leader of Tibetan Buddhism and a spiritual leader revered worldwide. He was born on July 6, 1935, in a small village called Taktser in northeastern Tibet. Born to a peasant family, he was recognized at the age of two, in accordance with Tibetan tradition, as the reincarnation of his predecessor, the 13th Dalai Lama. The Dalai Lamas are manifestations of the Buddha of Compassion, who choose to reincarnate for the purpose of serving human beings. Winner of the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1989, he is universally respected as a spokesman for the compassionate and peaceful resolution of human conflict. He has traveled extensively, speaking on subjects including universal responsibility, love, compassion and kindness. Less well known is his intense personal interest in the sciences; he has said that if he were not a monk, he would have liked to be an engineer. As a youth in Lhasa it was he who was called on to fix broken machinery in the Potala Palace, be it a clock or a car. He has a vigorous interest in learning the newest developments in science, and brings to bear both a voice for the humanistic implications of the findings, and a high degree of intuitive methodological sophistication.

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Jon Kabat-Zinn, Ph.D. did his doctoral work in molecular biology at MIT, in the laboratory of the Nobel Laureate Salvador Luria. Kabat-Zinn is Professor of Medicine emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, where he founded the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society (in 1995), and (in 1979) its world-renown Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) Clinic. He is the author of 14 books, published in over 45 languages. His work has contributed to a growing movement of mindfulness into mainstream institutions such as medicine, psychology, health care, neuroscience, schools, higher education, business, social justice, criminal justice, prisons, the law, technology, government, and professional sports. Over 700 hospitals and medical centers around the world now offer MBSR. Jon lectures and leads mindfulness workshops and retreats around the world.

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Matthieu Ricard, PhD, is a Buddhist monk at Schechen Monastery in Kathmandu, Nepal. Born in France in 1946, he received a PhD in cellular genetics at the Institut Pasteur under Nobel Laureate FrancoisJacob. As a hobby, he wrote Animal Migrations (1969).He first traveled to the Himalayas in 1967 and has lived there since 1972, studying with Kangyur Rinpoche and Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, two of the most eminent Tibetan teachers of our times. Since 1989, he has served as the French interpreter for His Holiness the Dalai Lama. He is the author of The Monk and the Philosopher (with his father, the French thinker Jean-Francois Revel); The Quantum and the Lotus (with the astrophysicist Trinh Xuan Thuan); Happiness, A Guide to Developing Life’s Most Import-ant Skill; and Why Meditate?. He has translated several books from Tibetan into English and French, including The Life of Shabkar and The Heart of Compassion.As a photographer, Matthieu has published several albums, including The Spirit of Tibet, Buddhist Himalayas, Tibet, Motionless Journey, and Bhutan. He devotes all of the proceeds from his books and much of his time to 120 humanitarian projects in Tibet, Nepal, and India—and to the preservation of the Tibetan cultural heritage—through his charitable association, Karuna-Shechen. Ricard has been deeply involved in the work of the Mind & Life Institute for many years.

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Richard J. Davidson, PhD, is the founder and chairman of the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds at the Waisman Center, and the director of the Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience and the Waisman Laboratory for Brain Imaging and Behavior, both at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He was educated at New York University and Harvard University, where he received his bachelor’s of arts and PhD degrees, respectively, in psychology. Over the course of his research career, he has focused on the relationship between brain and emotion. He is currently the William James professor and Vilas research professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin. He is co-author or editor of 13 books, including Visions of Compassion: Western Scientists and Tibetan Buddhists Examine Human Nature, The Handbook of Affective Science, and The Emotional Life of Your Brain. Davidson has published more than 300 chapters and journal articles, and is the recipient of numerous prestigious awards for his work, including the Research Scientist Award from the National Institute of Mental Health, the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the American Psychological Association, and election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has served on the board of directors for the Mind & Life Institute since 1992. In 2006, Time named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world, and he received the first Mani Bhaumik Award from UCLA for advances in the understanding of the role of the brain and the conscious mind in healing.

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Sharon Salzberg has been teaching meditation retreats worldwide for over 30 years. She is a co-founder of the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts, The Barre Center for Buddhist Studies and The Forest Refuge, a new center for long term meditation practice.

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Thomas Keating received his B.A. from Fordham University, and entered the Cistercian Order in Valley Falls, Rhode Island in January 1944. He was appointed Superior of St. Benedict's Monastery, Snowmass, Colorado in 1958, and was elected abbot ofSt.Joseph'sAbbey,Spencer, Massachusetts in 1961. He returned to Snowmass after retiring as abbot of Spencer in 1981, where he established a program of ten-day intensive retreats in the practice of Centering Prayer, a contemporary form of the Christian contemplative tradition. He is one of the architects of the Centering Prayer movement begun in Spencer Abbey in 1975 and founder in 1984 of Contemplative Outreach, Ltd., now an international, ecumenical organization that teaches Centering Prayer, Lectio Divina, and the Christian contemplative tradition and provides a support system for those on the contemplative path through a wide variety of resources, workshops, and retreats. He helped to found the Snowmass Interreligious Conference in 1982 and is a past president of the Temple of Understanding and of the Monastic Interreligious Dialogue among other interreligious activities.

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Thupten Jinpa, PhD, was trained as a monk at the Shartse College of Ganden Monastic University, South India, where he received the Geshe Lharam degree. In addition, Jinpa holds a bachelor’s honors degree in philosophy and a PhD in religious studies, both from Cambridge University. He taught at Ganden monastery and worked as a research fellow in Eastern religions at Girton College, Cambridge University. Jinpa has been the principal English translator to His Holiness the Dalai Lama since 1985 and has translated and edited numerous books by the Dalai Lama, including the New York Times best-sellers Ethics for the New Millennium and The Art of Happiness, as well as Beyond Religion, Universe in a Single Atom, and Transforming the Mind. His own publications include, in addition to numerous Tibetan works, Essential Mind Training; Wisdom of the Kadam Masters; Self, Reality, and Reason in Tibetan Philosophy: Tsongkhapa’s Quest for the Middle View; as well as translations of major Tibetan works featured in The Library of Tibetan Classics series. He is the main author of Compassion Cultivation Training (CCT), an eight-week formal program developed at the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education (CCARE) at Stanford University. Jinpa is an adjunct professor on the faculty of religious studies at McGill University, Montreal; the founder and president of the Institute of Tibetan Classics, Montreal; and the general series editor of The Library of Tibetan Classics series. He has been a core member of the Mind & Life Institute from its inception. Jinpa lives in Montreal and is married with two daughters.

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