As I teach, I encounter a great deal of anxiety about the pandemic, racial injustice, and political polarization. But the pervasive sense of separateness, divisiveness, and fear are not totally new, they have been present long before this year. To respond we first need to hold these struggles and collective fears with compassion. And then …
Continue reading “What Contemplative Wisdom Can Teach Us About Navigating Challenging Times”
Join Mind & Life for our monthly online series that brings together thought leaders and contemplatives to engage with one another and the audience in exploring the role of the mind in human flourishing. At a time of profound global crises, we’ll be looking at how science and contemplative wisdom can inform efforts to build a more just, compassionate, and inclusive world.
In the last twenty years, a sharp increase in contemplative research has created the need for an academic home for interdisciplinary scholarship, community, dialogue, and collaboration. This special Think Tank grant goes to a multidisciplinary group of leading contemplative researchers to begin the development of a new professional society for the field. This is a …
Continue reading “International Society for Contemplative Research”
A trauma & context-sensitive mindfulness program for peacebuilding and reconciliation (of TS-MBSR category) will gather 16 young peacebuilders, from India, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh, working with communities affected by diverse forms of violence such as victims of war or armed conflict, refugees, internally displaced persons, or migrants; with the aim to discuss, reflect, share, …
What is a Land and Peoples Acknowledgement, and Why is it Important A Land and Peoples Acknowledgement is a formal statement rooted in Indigenous protocol that recognizes the peoples who traditionally inhabited the land where you live or work and the relationship that continues to exist between Indigenous Peoples and their traditional territories. It’s a …
At the heart of the Mind & Life Institute’s work is nurturing understanding and action toward a world that embraces our shared humanity. We recognize that barriers to realizing our fundamental interconnectedness exist not only in the human mind, but are deeply embedded within institutions and structures. Our commitment to dismantling institutional racism begins at …
Continue reading “Our Commitment to Racial Equity and Inclusion”
Harnessing the power of the 400th anniversary of the arrival of enslaved Africans to the U.S. in 1619, scholars have designed a mindfulness-based learning experience that supports communities with taking a contemplative walk through history to process our collective past. This presentation explores the use of a 4ft x 20ft timeline as a contemplative learning …
Indigenous scholars have called for theoretical and methodological research approaches that center on Indigenous knowledge, culture, and history. As such, I adopt a historical trauma theoretical lens in this presentation to explore health issues in Native and Indigenous communities in which the continued impacts of colonial violence is central. In addition, by highlighting the ongoing …
In this presentation, the concept of trust and fairness is discussed from a developmental perspective. Trust and fairness have deep roots in development with early implicit signs expressed from the first weeks of life. Their development is considered here in parallel with the development of a conceptual and explicit sense of self emerging by the …
This project will investigate the effect of nonattachment on social inclusion operationalized as (1) enhanced self-reported valuing of racial/ethnic diversity; (2) reduced linguistic intergroup bias – a tendency to describe outgroup behaviors more negatively and concretely than ingroup behaviors; and (3) reduced ingroup favoritism at the expense of the outgroup while allocating rewards to ingroup …
