In the last twenty years, a sharp increase in contemplative research has created the need for an academic home for interdisciplinary scholarship, community, dialogue, and collaboration. This special Think Tank grant goes to a multidisciplinary group of leading contemplative researchers to begin the development of a new professional society for the field. This is a …
Continue reading “International Society for Contemplative Research”
Space seems limited these days, limited and limiting. The places we inhabit can inhabit us, leaving our imaginations of how to live otherwise too constrained to resist the tendencies of hoarding, hunting, and fencing that define our ideals, feeding habits of homemaking that have soaked the American Dream in so much violence. Rather than letting …
Between 1986 and 2006, northern Uganda was locked in a civil conflict where the local people experienced and/or witnessed poverty, rapes, beatings, and murders. Recently, yoga has been used in therapy to treat those who have suffered trauma (Emerson, 2015). Called trauma-sensitive yoga (TSY), TSY is a form of body-based therapy where yoga movement is …
Continue reading “Mind/body awareness workshop for teachers living in post-conflict Northern Uganda”
Yoga generally involves movement sequences, breath regulation, and various techniques to improve attention. Yoga has helped adults and youth with low self-regulation (SR) and emotional regulation (ER) significantly improve in their ability to confront adversity with greater resilience. It has been postulated to exercise the neural connections involved in having children more efficiently engage in …
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Join the Mind & Life Institute online for two special free Livestream events from Dharamsala, India. On October 30th and November 1st, we will host two unique conversations between Pumla Goboda-Madikizela, David Sloan Wilson, and the Dalai Lama. Livestream video replays are available.
The Contemplative Arts Evening will feature improvisatory collaborations among artists from wide-ranging creative, disciplinary, and cultural backgrounds in celebration of the age-old connection between music, creative arts, and the interior dimensions of human consciousness. Sitarist Srinivas Reddy draws upon his virtuosic grounding in the intricate raga/tala system of Hindustani classical music and opens the evening …
The goal of this project is to attempt to create a safe “non-invasive” intervention for adolescents that counteract changes in blood flow seen in the brain that are associated with cumulative and repetitive non-concussive head impacts after participating in a year of American football. There is concern that accumulation of a lifetime of participation could …
We propose a research study that partners with community leaders to give a platform to racial/ethnic minorities to speak about their experience with contemplative and healing practices such as meditation, prayer, movement, storytelling, and others. This will be community-based participatory qualitative research and is motivated by 1) the underrepresentation of racial/ethnic minority people in existing …
This research project aims to explore the concept of Liyan, a very important concept for Nyikina people of the Kimberley region of Western Australia. Nyikina collaborators have described it as a feeling in the chest area that is linked with a sense of connection, intuition, and general well-being. They have also described contemplative practices that …
Imagine feeling intense stress: palms sweaty, heart racing, breathing shallow. Sensations of the body often come to the forefront when describing experiences of emotion or stress, yet these physiological changes are separate from the subjective ‘feeling’ of these states that we experience mentally. My previous work has shown that individuals whose subjective experience tracks strongly …
