Session 2 - Presentations and Panel Q&A - Mind & Life Institute

Dialogue 16|Session 2

Overview

Linda Carlson presents research showing that mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) can help cancer patients and their families cope with the psychological, physical, and existential challenges of cancer, with studies reporting reductions in mood disturbance, stress, depression, anxiety, sleep problems, blood pressure, and inflammatory activity, alongside improvements in quality of life, spirituality, and coping. Roshi Joan Halifax then focuses on compassionate end-of-life care, emphasizing that clinicians themselves face burnout, compassion fatigue, moral distress, and the emotional burden of caring for the dying; her training program uses contemplative practices to cultivate attention, equanimity, compassion, ethical sensitivity, resilience, and the capacity to remain fully present with patients and families even when cure is impossible or resources are limited. In the discussion, the speakers stress that compassion is not simply empathic suffering but a trainable stance of benevolence, openness, and readiness to help, and that mindfulness-based approaches must be adapted to individual needs, especially for people with trauma or severe anxiety, sometimes alongside medication or alternative practices such as walking meditation or body scans. The session closes by returning to compassion as a practical resource for caregivers: through practices such as tonglen, clinicians can transform their response to suffering from distress or withdrawal into greater openness, steadiness, and service.

Dialogue 16
4 sessions
April 16, 2008
Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minnesota
ML16_Session-2.stamped_doc |docx|
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Speakers

Daniel Goleman, PhD, is a psychologist and science writer best-known for his worldwide best-seller Emotional Intelligence, published in 40 languages. He taught at Harvard University before becoming an editor and journalist, covering the brain and behavioral science for the New York Times. He is a co-founder of the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning at the University of Illinois, and co-director of the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations at Rutgers University. He received his Ph.D. in psychology from Harvard University. For two years he traveled in India studying Buddhist and other spiritual systems of psychology, the first year as a Harvard Traveling Fellow, the second as a Research Fellow of the Social Science Research Council. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and has received many awards for his writing. He is the author of numerous books, including The Meditative Mind, Destructive Emotions, Social Intelligence, and, most recently, Ecological Intelligence.

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Roshi Joan Halifax, PhD, is a Buddhist teacher, Zen priest, anthropologist, and pioneer in the field of end-of-life care. Founder, abbot, and head teacher of Upaya Institute and Zen Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico, she received her PhD in medical anthropology in1973 while teaching at the University of Miami Medical School. She has been awarded a National Science Foundation fellowship in visual anthropology and an honorary research fellowship in medical ethnobotany at Harvard University, and was named a distinguished visiting scholar at the Library of Congress. From 1972–1975, she worked with psychiatrist Stanislav Grof at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center with dying cancer patients. She has continued to work with dying people and their families, and she teaches healthcare professionals and family caregivers about the psychosocial, ethical, and spiritual aspects of caring for the dying. She is director of the Project on Being with Dying, and founder and director of the Upaya Prison Project, which has developed programs on meditation for prisoners. She studied with Zen teacher Seung Sahn, received the Lamp Transmission from Thich Nhat Hanh, and was given Inka by Roshi Bernie Glassman. A founding teacher of the Zen Peacemaker Order, her work and practice for more than four decades has focused on applied Buddhism.

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Jon Kabat-Zinn, Ph.D. did his doctoral work in molecular biology at MIT, in the laboratory of the Nobel Laureate Salvador Luria. Kabat-Zinn is Professor of Medicine emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, where he founded the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society (in 1995), and (in 1979) its world-renown Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) Clinic. He is the author of 14 books, published in over 45 languages. His work has contributed to a growing movement of mindfulness into mainstream institutions such as medicine, psychology, health care, neuroscience, schools, higher education, business, social justice, criminal justice, prisons, the law, technology, government, and professional sports. Over 700 hospitals and medical centers around the world now offer MBSR. Jon lectures and leads mindfulness workshops and retreats around the world.

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Matthieu Ricard, PhD, is a Buddhist monk at Schechen Monastery in Kathmandu, Nepal. Born in France in 1946, he received a PhD in cellular genetics at the Institut Pasteur under Nobel Laureate FrancoisJacob. As a hobby, he wrote Animal Migrations (1969).He first traveled to the Himalayas in 1967 and has lived there since 1972, studying with Kangyur Rinpoche and Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, two of the most eminent Tibetan teachers of our times. Since 1989, he has served as the French interpreter for His Holiness the Dalai Lama. He is the author of The Monk and the Philosopher (with his father, the French thinker Jean-Francois Revel); The Quantum and the Lotus (with the astrophysicist Trinh Xuan Thuan); Happiness, A Guide to Developing Life’s Most Import-ant Skill; and Why Meditate?. He has translated several books from Tibetan into English and French, including The Life of Shabkar and The Heart of Compassion.As a photographer, Matthieu has published several albums, including The Spirit of Tibet, Buddhist Himalayas, Tibet, Motionless Journey, and Bhutan. He devotes all of the proceeds from his books and much of his time to 120 humanitarian projects in Tibet, Nepal, and India—and to the preservation of the Tibetan cultural heritage—through his charitable association, Karuna-Shechen. Ricard has been deeply involved in the work of the Mind & Life Institute for many years.

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Richard J. Davidson, PhD, is the founder and chairman of the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds at the Waisman Center, and the director of the Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience and the Waisman Laboratory for Brain Imaging and Behavior, both at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He was educated at New York University and Harvard University, where he received his bachelor’s of arts and PhD degrees, respectively, in psychology. Over the course of his research career, he has focused on the relationship between brain and emotion. He is currently the William James professor and Vilas research professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin. He is co-author or editor of 13 books, including Visions of Compassion: Western Scientists and Tibetan Buddhists Examine Human Nature, The Handbook of Affective Science, and The Emotional Life of Your Brain. Davidson has published more than 300 chapters and journal articles, and is the recipient of numerous prestigious awards for his work, including the Research Scientist Award from the National Institute of Mental Health, the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the American Psychological Association, and election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has served on the board of directors for the Mind & Life Institute since 1992. In 2006, Time named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world, and he received the first Mani Bhaumik Award from UCLA for advances in the understanding of the role of the brain and the conscious mind in healing.

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