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 …
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Transforming Minds
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 …
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 …
Buddhism Meets Science
It was a clear October day in Dharamsala, India, when the first Mind & Life Dialogue took place at His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s residence some 35 years ago. I was there in my role as translator, and wasn’t quite sure what to expect. I remember the sense of anticipation as we gathered around the …
