Held against the backdrop of a global pandemic and worldwide protests against police brutality and systemic racism, Mind & Life’s 17th annual Summer Research Institute (SRI) offered participants in 22 countries a unique opportunity to reflect on recent events and their roles in contributing to individual and societal healing. “This is a critical moment in …
Continue reading “Cultivating Pro-Sociality at a Time of Unprecedented Change”
In a world besieged by the COVID-19 pandemic and rocked by anti-racism protests, more than 1.3 million people tuned-in to a livestream event, simultaneously translated into 14 languages, to hear the Dalai Lama offer insights on the way forward. Hosted by the Mind & Life Institute, the June 19 “Conversation with the Dalai Lama on …
June 19, 2020, 10:30pm EDT The Mind & Life Institute was honored to host this special livestream event with His Holiness the Dalai Lama. The program explored insights for individual and collective healing, integrating contemplation, science, and action, helping us to consider how crisis can be an opportunity to shift human consciousness and embrace our …
Although hospital chaplains play a vital role in delivering emotional and spiritual care to a broad range of both religious and non-religious patients, there is remarkably little research on the best practices of chaplaincy training or “active ingredients” of chaplain spiritual consults. The need for rigorous research in this area is highlighted by the demands …
The aim of this talk is to provide a brief introduction to Developmental Contemplative Science (DCS), a theoretical framework that leverages insights from recent research on brain and behavioral development and examines how contemplative practices can facilitate the emergence of essential human functions such as reflection, agency, well being, and empathy. On this view, development …
The Mind & Life Institute was honored to host this special livestream event with His Holiness the Dalai Lama. The program explored insights for individual and collective healing, integrating contemplation, science, and action, helping us to consider how crisis can be an opportunity to shift human consciousness and embrace our shared humanity. For viewers in …
The experience of acute moral distress has become a pervasive and serious problem among health care clinicians. Clinical care, especially of patients with serious and life threatening illness, requires clinicians on the front lines to discern ethically justifiable courses of action in exceedingly complex circumstances, riddled with conflict and uncertainty. Although complex moral decision-making is …
This project is a theoretical and experimental pilot investigation of the impact of contemplative practices on concepts — the fundamental building blocks of cognition. The exploration focuses on intentionality of concepts as their property of representing entities whilst being detached from them. Terms such as ‘metacognitive insight’ (Teasdale et al., 2002), ‘re-perceiving’ (Shapiro et al., …
This will be a Scientific Pilot Study of the significance of where practitioners place their attention when they are doing breath awareness meditation. We will concentrate on two distinctive forms of Buddhist meditation, mindfulness practice as drawn from normative Pali Canon texts that emphasize placing the attention on the nostrils and zazen texts from the …
Although human spirituality has long been considered impenetrable to empirical investigation, recent cognitive and affective neuroscience studies have started the neuroscientific exploration of the mental processes and the neural underpinnings underlying spiritual and religious experiences. The scientific investigation of such complex phenomena, however, cannot proceed in the absence of a deep philosophical conceptualization of human …
