Day Five brings the Dialogue to its crescendo with a discussion about implementation and evaluation of learning in the classroom. The session begins with a presentation on the biological stress response in brains that produce stress hormones that influence memory and emotion regulation. Studies are cited to demonstrate how perceiving a situation to be threatening …
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The program continues with the scientific research on education and discussion of the psychology of ethical development, including moral reasoning, compassion, moral motivation, and issues of community and culture. Moving from these theories, there will be examples of how they can be translated into educational experiences. Widening the frame, Buddhist understandings of compassion are presented …
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On Day Three, having discussed topics relevant to education practitioners, the Dialogue brings recent scientific findings into conversation with Buddhist understandings of the mind. The first presentation in this session surveys the current scientific research on meta-awareness and attention. References are made to the influence of mindfulness and compassion training in a broad range of …
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Continuing our discussion of social and emotional learning, Day Two begins by illustrating how social and emotional learning (SEL) has expanded over the past decade around the world and is being integrated into the very fabric of educational policy and practice. Education practitioners will explore the important question of how His Holiness’ vision of educating …
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The “Reimagining Human Flourishing” Dialogue has a central focus on education, especially in light of His Holiness’ longstanding prioritization of secular ethics education initiatives. It includes a mixture of both scientific and practice-oriented discussions to catalyze the synthetic and integrative opportunity provided by the meeting, taking up crucial questions on how to gain better scientific understanding of key constructs like “attention,” “meta-awareness,” and “emotion regulation,” as well as the practical issue of how to expand the Social Emotional Learning framework to incorporate the teaching of compassion and secular ethics more fully.
Naikan is a Japanese contemplative practice that was derived and secularized from a Buddhist self-cultivation method. Naikan means “inner-looking” or “introspection.” The practice focuses on recalling the kindness that one has received from others, what one has given in return, and the trouble one has caused others. Unlike some other approaches, such as mainstream psychotherapies, …
Contemplative Studies is an emerging academic field that examines a distinctive subset of significant human experiences through a multi- disciplinary perspective that utilizes the sciences, humanities, and the arts. This field takes as its principal task the study of a continuum of human experiences that involve focusing the attention in a sustained fashion leading to …
This presentation will examine the relevance of recent work in cognitive science, psychological anthropology, and cultural psychiatry for thinking about context in contemplative science. Theories of embodiment and enactment provide ways to elaborate an ecosocial view of mind that integrates neurobiology and sociocultural contexts. In this view, mental phenomena are produced by looping effects within …
Sharon Salzberg and Roshi Joan Halifax will lead a guided practice on kindness and compassion. This practice session will be directed toward cultivating prosocial mental qualities.
In this session, we connect with the experience of receiving love and being seen in our deep worth beyond limiting thoughts of ourselves. Then we let that experience evoke our capacity to extend love similarly to others around us, to see them in their deep worth beyond limiting thoughts of them. We thereby extend loving …
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