June 19, 2020, 10:30pm EDT The Mind & Life Institute was honored to host this special livestream event with His Holiness the Dalai Lama. The program explored insights for individual and collective healing, integrating contemplation, science, and action, helping us to consider how crisis can be an opportunity to shift human consciousness and embrace our …
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Education of the Heart Digital Dialogue
The Education of the Heart Digital Dialogue is a multimedia site with video, presentations, and discussions from the Mind & Life Institute’s 33rd Dialogue with the Dalai Lama held in Dharamsala, India in March 2018. For five days, leading scientists, scholars, and educational practitioners gathered to explore new frontiers in education rooted in science and …
2020 Mind & Life Conversation with the Dalai Lama: Resilience, Compassion, and Science for Healing Today
The Mind & Life Institute was honored to host this special livestream event with His Holiness the Dalai Lama. The program explored insights for individual and collective healing, integrating contemplation, science, and action, helping us to consider how crisis can be an opportunity to shift human consciousness and embrace our shared humanity. For viewers in …
Contemplative practice, Hasidic modernism and contemporary psychology
This proposal is for a multi-sited ethnographic study of the engagement between contemplative practice, modern psychology and global religious networks among Chabad Hasidim. Our research documents the promotion and adaptation of traditional contemplative practices and their transformation into secularized therapeutic forms through clinical psychology and professional life coaching. In addition, our research is framed by …
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Subjective transformation and actual individual practice among at-risk populations engaged in cognitively-based compassion training
This project investigates the cultural context of contemplative practice in the West through an ethnographic study of Cognitively-Based Compassion Training (CBCT), a contemplative meditation practice derived from the Tibetan Buddhist lojong tradition. Addressing lacunae in current studies of secular meditation interventions, this study seeks to elucidate (1) how CBCT, which focuses on the cultivation of …
The roles of constitutive contexts in contemplative practice
The purpose of this proposal is to integrate the perspectives of religious studies and clinical psychology/science to address the central question of the roles of contexts in contemplative practice. There is a gulf between humanists and scientists on the issue of context, and this is a central challenge to the field of Contemplative Sciences. Our …
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Meditation, concepts and de-reification: Investigation of possible links between contemplative and neurocognitive perspectives
This project is a theoretical and experimental pilot investigation of the impact of contemplative practices on concepts — the fundamental building blocks of cognition. The exploration focuses on intentionality of concepts as their property of representing entities whilst being detached from them. Terms such as ‘metacognitive insight’ (Teasdale et al., 2002), ‘re-perceiving’ (Shapiro et al., …
Introspective reliability: Synergizing Buddhist and contemporary viewpoints
First-person reports of phenomenological states are the starting point for phenomenology (including Buddhist phenomenology) and the scientific study of consciousness. The vipassana meditation technique, including the Open Monitoring meditation and Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), both of which are secularized versions of vipassana, are reliant on the reliability of First-person reports of phenomenological states. Nonetheless, the …
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Building a new theory of contemplative interactions for healthcare
Clinicians (physicians and nurses) who care for patients with serious illness face significant challenges, both intra-personal and inter-personal, that if unaddressed result in stress, burnout, and exacerbation of patient suffering. Recent developments in contemplative neuroscience and theories of compassion indicate that the time is ripe to build a better understanding of how contemplative practice could …
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Where’s the Breath? An Interdisciplinary Investigation of Breath Awareness Placement
This will be a Scientific Pilot Study of the significance of where practitioners place their attention when they are doing breath awareness meditation. We will concentrate on two distinctive forms of Buddhist meditation, mindfulness practice as drawn from normative Pali Canon texts that emphasize placing the attention on the nostrils and zazen texts from the …
