The 2014 International Symposium for Contemplative Studies (ISCS) drew a diverse, talented and enthusiastic group of attendees, and brought together distinct, though overlapping, fields of research and scholarship across the sciences, humanities, arts and other domains. ISCS 2014 focused on advancing our understanding of the human mind, and how training through contemplative practices can lead …
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Trayvon Martin. Eric Garner. Michael Brown. Freddie Gray. Sandra Bland. Ferguson. Baltimore. Charleston. Alton Sterling. Philando Castile. In the wake of so many recent tragedies involving racial discrimination, Americans are taking a hard look at this systemic and divisive issue in our culture, and asking what can be done to change it.
There is a growing consensus among psychologists, educators, and the public at large that a more comprehensive vision of education is needed—one that includes an explicit focus on “educating the heart” and intentionally cultivates children’s social and emotional competencies and positive human qualities, including self-regulation, self-awareness, empathy, compassion, and altruism. This explicit and intentional focus …
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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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 …
The purpose of this pilot study is to examine the effects of a mindfulness intervention on emerging self-regulation and compassion/empathy among low-income preschoolers. The study will be conducted with children enrolled in Project GROW, an Americorps program at UW-Madison that pairs college students with low-income preschoolers over the course of a school year. Project GROW …
This is a study of the role that social and cultural context play in Buddhist meditation techniques, especially those that fall under the category of vipassana and related practices. It argues that such contexts inform not only practitioners’ explicit understandings of their practice of these techniques, but also their pretheoretical, tacit, implicit orientations, and even …
Recent years have seen a proliferation of mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) in K-12 educational settings. Scientific inquiry of MBIs in adults suggests beneficial effects on a wide range of cognitive and socio-emotional processes. In line with these findings, MBIs studies in K-12 settings have reported a reduction in behavioral difficulties, psychopathological symptoms, executive function (EF) and …
The proposed study investigates the role that teacher characteristics play in teachers’ experience delivering a mindfulness-based health and wellness curriculum. Specifically, teachers’ embodiment of mindfulness (through practice) and professional knowledge will be examined to provide insight into factors that may influence their experience and fidelity delivering the curriculum. A maximum variation sample of ten elementary …
Mindfulness meditation (MM) is the process of purposefully regulating attention, bringing awareness to one’s current experience, and relating to that experience in an open and accepting way (Semple, Lee, Rosa, & Miller, 2009). Previous studies have demonstrated benefits of MM training across many domains (cognitive, physiological, socio-emotional) that support children’s academic achievement; but these effects …
