Performing funerals is one of the duties of a Zen Buddhist priest, and so they normally must confront death several times each year. Although in today’s world, at least among developed nations, death and aging are isolated from most people’s daily lives, sensing our own aging and death and thus embracing the concept of non-permanency …
Continue reading “Modern Interpretations of Zen Buddhist Teachings”
Christian contemplative-practice traditions offer a number of ways to address our many (often difficult) “inner movements” that include thoughts, emotions, physical sensations, imaginings, desires, fantasies and mental chatter. Some practices may highlight processes of “clearing.” Others ask that we deeply explore whatever emerges. Still others lead us to soak without word or thought in what …
Continue reading “Practicing the Presence of Compassion: Contemplative Christian Traditions”
John Makransky will enter participants into two contemplative practices from his Sustainable Compassion Training (SCT) approach for developing stable care and compassion. In this contemplative session, we will do a meditation of receiving care as a kind of empowerment. We are empowered to participate in the perspective and flow of care and compassion first by …
Continue reading “Sustainable Compassion Training—Receiving-Care Mode of Practice”
Educators and philosophers have pointed to the importance of quality education for building a peaceful world. This requires the intentional cultivation of wholesome school environments where students feel supported and encouraged to thrive. However, increasing demands on teachers have resulted in high levels of stress and burnout, which can hinder their sustained commitment to teach …
At the heart of contemplative pedagogy is the cultivation of what psychologist DeWit (1991) and neurobiologist Varela (1996) have called “first–person inquiry,” a method that valorizes critical subjectivity in science and social science endeavors. This lecture briefly surveys diverse theoretical foundations of this method, with emphasis on application to higher education teaching and learning in …
Digital didactics, such as MOOCS and browser-based online programs have opened up realms of content to thousands who for reasons of geography, expense or convenience would otherwise not have had access to these materials. Allowing anyone around the world to take a course at Stanford or learn Geometry on Khan Academy has helped address educational …
Continue reading “Keynote Panel “Contemplative Practice Enters the Digital Age””
Compassion has been taught and practiced since the earliest period of Buddhism, yet the role of compassion and its centrality on the path to enlightenment, as well the methods for cultivating it, have varied across diverse Buddhist traditions. The different purposes, motivations, and practices for compassion articulated in these Buddhist traditions have shaped the development …
In the last decades, plasticity research has suggested that training of mental capacities such as attention, mindfulness and compassion is effective and leads to positive changes in socio-affective and cognitive functions. Tania Singer will show first results of the ReSource Project, a large-scale multi-methodological one-year secular mental training program in which participants were trained in …
It is well known that human beings are both profoundly interdependent and profoundly unconscious—a dangerous mix. In our conscious and unconscious desires to protect ourselves, we “need” an enemy whom to fight against, control, or withdraw from. In Polly Young-Eisendrath’s decades-long professional experience as a Jungian psychoanalyst and a couples therapist, as well as her …
In this session, Rob Roeser will present selected developmental science research on social cognition and person-perception—defined in relation to how individuals’ perceptions and understandings of other people/groups develop from infancy through adolescence, and moral and self-development—defined in relation to how individuals’ capacities for self-regulation, compassion, and fairness in social interactions, and their related moral identities …
