As Mind & Life celebrates the 20th anniversary of the Francisco J. Varela Grants, we’re pleased to share the voices and experiences of Varela grantees. Eric Garland, PhD, LCSW is a Mind & Life Varela Grantee and Fellow. He is Endowed Professor in Health Sciences at the Sanford Institute for Empathy and Compassion, Professor of …
Emiliana Simon-Thomas shares findings from a widely distributed online platform for promoting well-being (Pathway to Happiness on the Greater Good in Action website) which features several compassion-promoting practices, and discuss the opportunity for further leveraging resources like this to extend the reach of compassion strengthening resources to people with diverse backgrounds, cultural identities, beliefs, and ideological orientations.
Contemplative training promises relief from suffering. This claim lies at the heart of Buddhism’s Four Noble Truths, and it also emerges from decades of clinical intervention research. Through practices like meditation, we aspire to be liberated from restrictive patterns of mind that keep us from living more consciously. The mind, after all, is the home …
This presentation delves into the intersection of Buddhist philosophy and Western science regarding the nature of the self, exploring how our understanding of self-construction and interdependence influences our interactions with others and behavior in the world, advocating for the adoption of altruism as a means to enact both individual and societal change towards a more compassionate and sustainable existence.
In this presentation, Catherine Kerr will discuss work by her lab and others that shows how focused mental attention rapidly shapes perception of body sensations by influencing neurons in the basic somatosensory processing network in the brain.
This presentation will describe Project Prakash as a prototype of what such initiatives might look like in the confluence of a crucial humanitarian mission and a fundamental scientific quest.