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 …
Continue reading “Social and Emotional Learning and Education in the Classroom”
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, …
The process of observing the mind in Buddhism is called samatha and vipassanā, and involves placing attention on a certain object (or objects) with awareness. Important facets of this type of observation, also called mindfulness, are noticing objects without using language, and accepting them as they are. According to Buddhism, suffering emerges from a state …
Continue reading “Observation of the Mind in Buddhism and Mindfulness”
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 …
This keynote lecture proposes that mindfulness includes cultural practices, habits of attending, and ways of using the body in the social and material world. Current neuroscience conceptions of mindfulness as an inner mental state or trait that can be correlated with unique patterns of brain activity are therefore inadequate because they leave out the wider …
Continue reading “Closing Keynote: What is Mindfulness? An Embodied Cognitive Science Perspective”
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 …
Continue reading “Sustainable Compassion Training—Extending Care Mode of Practice”
Professor Magee explores intersecting issues of race, racism and U.S. law using mindfulness- and compassion-based practices. Discussing her work across inter-related sub-fields — transformative education, law practice and community-based work for justice — she highlights ways of enhancing collaborations across categories of real and perceived difference using contemplative techniques for teaching, learning and working together …
Political tolerance, i.e., the willingness to put up with opposing behavior of others, is the oxygen of liberal democracy. It is expected to facilitate fair, peaceful political processes. Unfortunately, tolerance is a core democratic value that is hard to learn. Political scientists have inquired since long the best practices to foster tolerance within political communities. …
