Nurturing compassionate responding towards oneself and others through the caregiver-child relationship: A response to the youth mental health crisis

Youth are experiencing unprecedented levels of anxiety, depression and suicidality. The caregiver-child relationship provides an opportune context for modeling and encouraging self-compassionate responses to distress, an approach that could mitigate these trends. However, caregivers themselves are facing pandemic-exacerbated mental health challenges that can impact their ability to provide support. To address these issues, this study …

Cultivating Compassion in Healthcare: One Researcher’s Journey

In the midst of the COVID pandemic, health care is in the news daily. But there’s an often-overlooked element in many hospital systems: the role of chaplains. For patients experiencing loneliness, isolation, fear, and physical pain, chaplains offer much needed emotional support, spiritual guidance, and hope. But could chaplains and the patients they support also …

2020 President’s Call

Earlier this year Mind & Life completed a strategic visioning and planning process, to guide our expanding work through a lens of interconnection. We also began developing our digital efforts to have wider reach and greater impact on pressing contemporary issues. As such, Mind & Life is primed and eager to show up fully and …

Sustainable Compassion Training—Receiving-Care Mode of Practice

John Makransky will enter participants into two contemplative practices from his Sustainable Compassion Training (SCT) approach for developing stable care and compassion. In this contemplative session, we will do a meditation of receiving care as a kind of empowerment. We are empowered to participate in the perspective and flow of care and compassion first by …

Careers at Mind & Life

The Mind & Life Institute offers unique career opportunities to join a vibrant organizational culture that embraces our shared humanity. In our continued work to equity, diversity, and inclusion, and following best practices to support a thriving organization, Mind & Life is committed to increasing participation of individuals from culturally diverse and historically underrepresented backgrounds. …

Developing Measures of Compassion, Empathy, Care, and Kindness

As contemplative approaches are being applied in educational settings with increasing frequency, early studies using self-report and academic outcomes suggest that these programs hold promise for the well-being of both teachers and students. However, the field currently lacks empirically rigorous measures to evaluate important real-world behavior and psychological change due to the cultivation of compassion, …

Embodying Care

Three practices that help us receive, develop, and extend care