In the midst of growing global crises, including climate change, increasing polarization, inequality, and an overarching sense of disconnection from those around us and the natural world, it’s not a stretch to say that humanity needs change. Without question, the external systems and structures of our world need to be examined and adjusted. Yet a …
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neuroscience
The Nature of Self
One of the most fundamental ways that we can be changed by contemplative practice relates to our sense of self. Both the Buddhist tradition and modern cognitive science have converged on core ideas suggesting that our everyday sense of existing separately from the world around us, and consistently over time, is mistaken. And realizing the …
Embodiment
Most of us grow up thinking the body is a flesh and blood organism made up of parts and systems. It is something that is described and researched, an object to be known. Rarely do we think of the body as something that knows things. Rarely do we ask the body for answers. Does the …
What is Mind?
Roshi Joan Halifax tells a story about witnessing a conversation in the early 1970s between Jonas Salk, developer of the polio vaccine, and Gregory Bateson, an anthropologist and systems theorist, about the mind. Bateson asked, “Where is the mind?” Salk pointed to his own head. Bateson chuckled, shook his head, and pointed to the space …
Enactive Compassion
Over the years, I’ve been increasingly aware of what one could call a deficit of compassion in medical care, and have observed the effects not only on patients but also on clinicians, and even on the institutions in which clinicians serve. I felt moved to find a better way to train clinicians in compassion, and …
The Science of Compassion
Who am I to study compassion? I am a compassion scientist, which feels a little like choosing to ingest a tiny bit of poison and its antidote every workday. When I stare at a blank page to write about the science of compassion, I feel paralyzed by the presumptuousness of the endeavor and the reminder …
Breaking the Cycle of Addiction
It was spring 2005. I was sitting in a large audience at the XIII Mind and Life Dialogue in Washington, D.C., listening to different scientists converse with His Holiness the Dalai Lama, and wondering what to do. I was in the second year of my residency training in psychiatry and had recently declared to a …
Mindfulness and Depression
Yucca brevifolia. I was practicing walking meditation among them in Joshua Tree National Park in the winter of 2010 while co-leading a residential five-day retreat workshop on Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) with Zindel Segal. With the 30 clinicians attending, we shared the principles and practices of MBCT to prevent depressive relapse and invited them to …
Strengthening Attention
“The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again, is the very root of judgment, character, and will. No one is compos sui if he have it not. An education which should improve this faculty would be the education par excellence. But it is easier to define this ideal than to …
Rahil Rojiani
Dr. Rahil Rojiani (they/them) is a queer, genderfluid, South Asian Ismaili Muslim, and a fourth year psychiatry resident at Cambridge Health Alliance / Harvard Medical School. Rahil’s contemplative practices are informed by their Muslim faith, secular mindfulness traditions, and multiple Buddhist lineages, starting at Brown University where they majored in Contemplative Studies—a multi-disciplinary study of …
