The latest statistics about America’s opioid epidemic are staggering. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) estimate an average of 125 deaths from opioid overdoses per day in the United States—that means each month, we’re seeing a tragedy more deadly than September 11th. Between July 2016 and September 2017, hospitalizations from opioid overdoses jumped 30 percent …
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Meditation and Science: Ten Essays Worth Reading
Meditation, Buddhism, and ScienceEdited by David L. McMahan and Erik BraunOxford University Press, 2017272 pages; $24.95 Scientific research on meditation, and as a consequence the popular discourse on contemplative research, has to-date largely focused on the individual. As a consequence, we find few studies that seriously consider the contexts of environments, social relations, and cultures …
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Sharon Salzberg: Love is a Verb
Paying attention, asserts famed meditation teacher, best-selling author, and Mind & Life Fellow Sharon Salzberg, isn’t a skill one is simply born with. Like flexibility and physical stamina, it’s developed over time: a muscle to strengthen; a practice to nurture; a series of neural pathways to establish and expand. But it takes very real work …
To Change the World, Start with How We Educate Children
Since early adolescence, I have carried a deep conviction that we all have the capacity to grow in ways that far exceed our imagination. At 22, when most of my friends had accepted high paying jobs after college, I opted for a backpack and spiritual growth, traveling from my home in Sun Valley, Idaho to …
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Preventing Racial Bias in the Classroom: What One Researcher Hopes to Learn
Racial bias exists in many domains of our society, including the classroom where teachers’ hidden biases can lead to diminished expectations for students of color. Doris Chang, Ph.D. is Director of Clinical Training and Assistant Professor of Psychology at the New School for Social Research in New York City. She leads a research team that …
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How Do We Know What’s True?
In May 2016 the Wall Street Journal published an interactive online tool called “Blue Feed, Red Feed” that allowed one to see the dueling social media feeds of liberal and conservative users during the run-up to the 2016 presidential election. This side-by-side comparison revealed not just the wildly different ways that two groups can interpret phenomena, but …
A Golden String: Mind & Life 2018
“I’m imagining a golden string that is connecting Everything but especially, beings where love has been. I’ve imagined it again and again so often, it isn’t even imagining, it is making it happen.” -Devon Sproule At the Mind & Life Institute, we greet 2018 ever more committed to our mission and its relevance to healing …
Tania Singer’s Exploration into How Meditation Training Transforms the Brain, the Individual, and Society at Large
During her recent visit to the Mind & Life offices in Charlottesville, social neuroscientist Dr. Tania Singer spoke as much about the heart as the brain. Singer is the director of the Department of Social Neuroscience at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany. She is on the board …
A Conversation with Jim Austin and Susan Bauer-Wu
It was accident and curiosity that led Dr. James H. Austin to a moment of awakening one day in 1974, in the form of a red Japanese maple leaf. He was in Japan, meditating in a centuries-old Zen temple, when he entered into a not-quite-sleeping, not-quite-waking state. Jim was relatively new to meditation, having begun …
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Diversity and Inclusion Initiatives at Mind & Life
Historically, the Mind & Life community has been dominated by a select and largely racially and ethnically homogenous group of scientists, scholars, and practitioners from a handful of academic institutions. This homogeneity reinforces societal imbalances and biases, running counter to Mind & Life’s mission to alleviate suffering and to promote human flourishing. Furthermore, it diminishes …
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