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In my own teaching I have increasingly sought to understand the remarkable resource that contemplative practice offers to me and to my students. When students are asked to enter silence, to center themselves and then to attend quietly to a particular content, their observations deepen and become more nuanced. They first remark on how seldom they experience silence and the calm that accompanies it. Some, unaccustomed to silence, are initially fearful but soon move past fear into the expansive presence that can accompany contemplative mind. However, I do not stop with silence, but move on to deepen meditative awareness and then turn that awareness to a content related to my class. It may be a line from a reading, an image or natural phenomenon. Students are already familiar with the content intellectually, but contemplative engagement opens new avenues of entry. They begin to see and hear with more of themselves, they learn to practice what Goethe once called a “delicate empiricism that makes itself utterly identical with the object, thereby becoming true theory.” I never tire of reminding students that the Greek root of theory is “to behold.” Contemplative beholding is a theoretical form of seeing in which “the facts themselves are the theory.” Such seeing requires a transformation of the student-beholder, but then “every object, well-contemplated, opens a new organ in us.” I have become convinced that contemplative pedagogy is an essential part of transformative education, and that the deepest insights into art, nature, society and ethics flow from contemplative engagement. We at the Center look forward to our further work together both to refine our understanding of contemplative mind and to convey its usefulness to others. Be well, |
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Operation Homecoming:
Reviewed by Mirabai Bush Contemplatives have traditionally taken refuge from the world, living in caves or monasteries, but the 21st century contemplative scholar lives in the beating heart of the world. When University of Connecticut poet and professor Marilyn Nelson was offered a Contemplative Practice Fellowship and an invitation to teach at West Point during the same semester, she combined the two invitations and taught poetry and meditation to cadets who were later deployed to Iraq. They emailed back to her about how meditation and poetry were helping them through difficult times. Now she is part of group of distinguished writers who taught 50 writing workshops to encourage more than 6,000 returning troops and their families to write about what they saw, heard, and felt while in Afghanistan and Iraq as well at home. Their stories have been edited by Andrew Carroll into this collection. How do you act in war, given permission to kill other humans? How do you resolve the mission of increasing peace with causing destruction? How do you balance personal fear and grief with the demands of leadership? Through straightforward personal accounts of being there, these soldiers engage the great questions by telling their stories, as they have been told since Thucydides described the human world and the Peloponnesian war as produced by men acting from ordinary motives, without the intervention of the gods. I read the book over the holidays. I opened it to a story of Dash, a Special Forces gunner, in a laundromat, washing the clothes of three of his crew killed a few days before in a helicopter crash. “Don’t want to send them home dirty,” he says. “Carefully, he folds his three bags of clothing, mundane socks and undershirts, some gym shorts, uncommon only because they’re forced to bear the weight of wasted potential, of the price extracted for freedom to endure.” I was hooked—I read that story to the end. Then I read another about an incident on the approach to Baghdad, taking me there through precise detail: “We move almost at a run, staying behind buildings and in vegetation as much as possible. This is easy because the whole area is overgrown. The chemical protective suits are really difficult to move in. It’s like wearing an extra-large set of pajamas over a three-piece suit and then trying to look smooth as you dance a tango.” I read that whole story also, and then spent much of the next two days reading every story in the book. It was like meeting a very famous person and realizing that she is, in so many ways, just like the rest of us. I had read and listened relentlessly to media reports about the Afghan and Iraqi wars, but not until these stories had they become as intimate as the death of a friend. This kind of vivid, mindful writing takes the reader into the moment, the place, and the precise emotion so we get to share what it is for another to be human. This book takes the rest of us into the reality of lives that are crucial for us to learn about as we try to deepen the contemplative capacities of wisdom and compassion in a time of war. These are stories we should not forget, because they are our story. Marilyn had the idea for this project at a gathering of state poet laureates (she is the laureate of Connecticut) in 2003, hosted by the National Endowment for the Arts. What a blessing! It is a great gift to the rest of us and a tribute to the power of speaking the immediate, honest, fierce, fighting and dying truth.
Read ‘The Fruit of Silence,’ a talk delivered by Marilyn at the 2005 conference “Contemplative Practices and Education: Making Peace in Ourselves and the World.” This presentation explores how she integrates contemplative practices into her creative writing courses; she also shares stories of her time teaching at West Point and her correspondence with her former students who are in military service in Iraq. |
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How is contemplative pedagogy reflected in your work and what do you hope to achieve by incorporating contemplative practices in the classroom? I have taught courses that incorporate contemplative practice in the undergraduate and graduate performance program of the Department of Theatre and Dance, the Freshman Seminar Program, and for the staff of the Chancellor’s office. The primary focus in the performance program is a deeper understanding of the performer’s somatic system as an extension of the earthly forces; the basic paradigm is that we, as individuals, are the result of earthly processes from those of evolution to our integration with environment. From a spiritual standpoint, my approach does not advocate any particular tradition, as I use ideas and physical techniques from yoga, t'ai chi, qi gong, zen, insight meditation, lectio divina, and others. These practices provide a 'way' to cultivate a deep appreciation and understanding of the individual for their unique body/mind. |
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The following is excerpted from the report of the Center’s “Contemplative Practice in Arts Education” meeting, written by Piper Murray. For more on these practices and those presented from Contemplative Practice Fellows in other disciplines, read the full report. Certainly it is true that any artist’s ability to work productively and creatively within her discipline depends on her ability to work with her most essential tools—the mind, body, and spirit. But if this is true of all the arts, then it is especially so in the embodied arts, where the artist’s presence is literally everything. Historically, cross-culturally, dance has been nothing if not an expression of spirit—human, natural, divine. Indeed, it would be difficult to find a culture in which dance has not been a part of religion and ritual, or has not functioned as a means of connecting self and sacred, individual and community. And yet, this spiritual dimension of dance seems to find little place in academic dance programs. It was in an attempt to recover this lost dimension that Cheryl Banks-Smith (2000 Contemplative Practice Fellow) worked with two colleagues at Virginia State University to develop an interdisciplinary course called “The Path of Inner Experience.” Aimed at exploring “the esoteric and exoteric within some of the world’s wisdom traditions,” the course included a dance component which gave students the opportunity to experience the esoteric and exoteric on a somatic and spiritual level. For Banks-Smith, this experience begins with exercises designed to help students get to know their own bodies as sacred instruments of artistry. Like Banks-Smith, Barbara Dilley (1997 Contemplative Practice Fellow) is similarly interested in this question of how body and mind work together as “not one but not two.” “Training to synchronize our thinking, feeling, and moving invites us into the deeper layers of heart-mind,” says Dilley. “It is from these layers filled with perceptions of the inner/outer experiences that our creative inspiration arises.” Dilley describes how this wisdom is woven into the improvisational dance class she teaches at Naropa University, where students use the four postures of mindfulness—lying down, sitting, standing, walking—as a map for investigating “spontaneous dance gestures arising from impulses, imagination, and kinesthetic awareness – the complex embodied experience of ‘nowness.’” Yin Mei (1999 Contemplative Practice Fellow) brings this discussion of body, mind, spirit, and expression full circle, with a practice she uses to introduce students to not just using body language but to embodying language. Yin Mei begins by asking students to “write” in “Chinese characters,” or what they imagine Chinese characters to look and feel like, in order to get a feeling for the sweep of the brush across the page. As they do so, Yin Mei guides their attention to the motion of the brush, to the line along the page, and finally to the ink itself, as it leaves the brush and soaks into the page. With this experience in both body and mind, students then perform a dance inspired by this activity, in which the dancer’s own body moves across the floor as a brush is moved—dragged, turned, lifted, pressed—across a page. For Barbara Sellers-Young (2000 Contemplative Practice Fellow), authentic acting is embodied acting. How, after all, can one truly inhabit a character or make one’s presence felt on stage if one leaves one’s body behind? Yet, for most actors, maintaining a body-mind connection is one of the greatest challenges they face. To help actors meet this challenge, Sellers-Young has developed a method which she calls “somatic contemplation.” Essentially, somatic contemplation entails a series of exercises, referred to as Feel-Fuse-Act, aimed at “deepening and cultivating embodiment and integrating it with psycho-physical action through focus on body states.” As Sellers-Young describes it, the objective of this approach is to increase embodied performance through an experience of the relationship between breathing, exploration, and action or what wu chi master James Kapp refers to as conscious action. Specifically, the method unites breath, thought, and action through a conception of being that moves from ordinary experience to a refinement of consciousness that includes open awareness (inclusive and expansive), interest (wonderment), attention (committed contact), absorption (relevance and cognition), and understanding (integration and knowledge). The exercise takes place in three phases. In the first phase, actors develop a somatic memory of what feeling, fusing, and acting feel like. It begins with the breath. to read more, see pages 11-13 of the report Do you have a classroom practice you’d like to share? | |||||||||||||
B. Alan Wallace and Shauna Shapiro (’05 Contemplative Practice Fellow, Santa Clara University), “Mental Balance and Well-Being: Building Bridges Between Buddhism and Western Psychology.” American Psychologist, October 2006, Vol. 61, No. 7, 690–701. Clinical psychology has focused primarily on the diagnosis and treatment of mental disease, and only recently has scientific attention turned to understanding and cultivating positive mental health. The Buddhist tradition, on the other hand, has focused for over 2,500 years on cultivating exceptional states of mental well-being as well as identifying and treating psychological problems. This article attempts to draw on centuries of Buddhist experiential and theoretical inquiry as well as current Western experimental research to highlight specific themes that are particularly relevant to exploring the nature of mental health. Specifically, the authors discuss the nature of mental well-being and then present an innovative model of how to attain such well-being through the cultivation of four types of mental balance: conative, attentional, cognitive, and affective. Roger Walsh (’98 Contemplative Practice Fellow, University of California College), Shauna L. Shapiro (’05 Contemplative Practice Fellow, Santa Clara University). "The Meeting of Meditative Disciplines and Western Psychology: A Mutually Enriching Dialogue." American Psychologist, April 2006. Meditation is now one of the most enduring, widespread, and researched of all psychotherapeutic methods. However, to date the meeting of the meditative disciplines and Western psychology has been marred by significant misunderstandings and by an assimilative integration in which much of the richness and uniqueness of meditation and its psychologies and philosophies have been overlooked. Also overlooked have been their major implications for an understanding of such central psychological issues as cognition and attention, mental training and development, health and pathology, and psychological capacities and potentials. Investigating meditative traditions with greater cultural and conceptual sensitivity opens the possibility of a mutual enrichment of both the meditative traditions and Western psychology, with far-reaching benefits for both. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved) Shauna L. Shapiro (’05 Contemplative Practice Fellow, Santa Clara University), Linda E. Carlson, John A. Astin, Benedict Freedman. "Mechanisms of Mindfulness". Recently, the psychological construct mindfulness has received a great deal of attention. The majority of research has focused on clinical studies to evaluate the efficacy of mindfulness-based interventions. This line of research has led to promising data suggesting mindfulness-based interventions are effective for treatment of both psychological and physical symptoms. However, an equally important direction for future research is to investigate questions concerning mechanisms of action underlying mindfulness-based interventions. This theoretical paper proposes a model of mindfulness, in an effort to elucidate potential mechanisms to explain how mindfulness affects positive change. Potential implications and future directions for the empirical study of mechanisms involved in mindfulness are addressed. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Clin Psychol 62: 373-386, 2006. Brown, K. W., & Ryan, R. M. "The benefits of being present: Mindfulness and its role in psychological well-being". Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84, 822-848. Mindfulness is an attribute of consciousness long believed to promote well-being. This research provides a theoretical and empirical examination of the role of mindfulness in psychological well-being. The development and psychometric properties of the dispositional Mindful Attention Awareness Scale (MAAS) are described. Correlational, quasi-experimental, and laboratory studies then show that the MAAS measures a unique quality of consciousness that is related to a variety of well-being constructs, that differentiates mindfulness practitioners from others, and that is associated with enhanced self-awareness. An experience-sampling study shows that both dispositional and state mindfulness predict self-regulated behavior and positive emotional states. Finally, a clinical intervention study with cancer patients demonstrates that increases in mindfulness over time relate to declines in mood disturbance and stress. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved) Davidson, R. J., Kabat-Zinn, J., (members of the Center's Advisory Board) et al. "Alterations in brain and immune function produced by mindfulness meditation". Psychosomatic Medicine, 65, 564-570. Davidson and Kabat-Zinn report significant increases in left-sided anterior activation, a pattern previously associated with positive affect, in the meditators compared with the nonmeditators. We also found significant increases in antibody titers to influenza vaccine among subjects in the meditation compared with those in the wait-list control group. Finally, the magnitude of increase in left-sided activation predicted the magnitude of antibody titer rise to the vaccine. These findings demonstrate that a short program in mindfulness meditation produces demonstrable effects on brain and immune function. These findings suggest that meditation may change brain and immune function in positive ways and underscore the need for additional research. Carson, J. W., Carson, K. M., Gil, K. M., & Baucom, D. H. (in press). "Mindfulness-Based Relationship Enhancement" [full text]. Behavior Therapy, 35, 471-494, 2004. Using a randomized wait-list controlled design, this study evaluated the effects of a novel intervention, mindfulness-based relationship enhancement, designed to enrich the relationships of relatively happy, nondistressed couples. Results suggested the intervention was efficacious in (a) favorably impacting couples’ levels of relationship satisfaction, autonomy, relatedness, closeness, acceptance of one another, and relationship distress; (b) beneficially affecting individuals’ optimism, spirituality, relaxation, and psychological distress; and (c) maintaining benefits at 3-month follow-up. Those who practiced mindfulness more had better outcomes, and within-person analyses of diary measures showed greater mindfulness practice on a given day was associated on several consecutive days with improved levels of relationship happiness, relationship stress, stress coping efficacy, and overall stress. Teasdale, J. D., Segal, Z. V., Williams, J. M. G., Ridgeway, V. A., Soulsby, J. M., Lau, M. A. (2000). Prevention of relapse/recurrence in major depression by mindfulness-based cognitive therapy. Journal of Consulting & Clinical Psychology, 68, 615-623. Abstract: This study evaluated mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT), a group intervention designed to train recovered recurrently depressed patients to disengage from dysphoria-activated depressogenic thinking that may mediate relapse/recurrence. Recovered recurrently depressed patients (n = 145) were randomized to continue with treatment as usual or, in addition, to receive MBCT. Relapse/recurrence to major depression was assessed over a 60-week study period. For patients with 3 or more previous episodes of depression (77% of the sample), MBCT significantly reduced risk of relapse/recurrence. For patients with only 2 previous episodes, MBCT did not reduce relapse/recurrence. MBCT offers a promising cost-efficient psychological approach to preventing relapse/recurrence in recovered recurrently depressed patients. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved) return to top |
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Yin Mei, ’99 Contemplative Practice Fellow, performs improvisational work at the James Cohan Gallery. January 2007 Art Review. |
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What’s on your bookshelf? |
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The Center for Contemplative Mind in Society's Contemplative Practice FellowshipsThe application period will open summer 2007. Further details to be announced at that time. Amount: up to $10,000 This program is sponsored by the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society and made possible by funding from the Fetzer Institute. These fellowships seek to restore and renew the critical contribution that contemplative practices can make to the life of teaching and scholarship. At the heart of the program is the belief that pedagogical and intellectual benefits might be discovered by bringing contemplative practice into the academy. Contemplative practices are part of all major religious and spiritual traditions, and have long had a place in intellectual and ethical inquiry. Depending upon the tradition from which they come, contemplative practices are defined in a variety of ways. They can be broadly understood as methods to develop concentration, deepen understanding and insight, and cultivate awareness and compassion. Approximately ten fellowships will be offered to support individual or collaborative research leading to the development of courses and teaching materials that integrate contemplative practices into courses. These fellowships are designed to advance scholarship in the field, to encourage a recognition of the role of contemplation in the intellectual life, and to inform educational practice and enhance course design. We invite proposals from the full range of disciplinary and inter-disciplinary perspectives in the arts, humanities, and humanities-related sciences and social sciences. Methodologies that include practical and experiential approaches to the subject matter are especially welcome. The selection committee especially welcomes proposals in which course content and contemplative practices are related to the consideration of social conflict and injustice, the amelioration of suffering, and the promotion of peace. Such contemplative practices can lead to genuine insights and deeper appreciation of the material under study. These fellowships are intended to support scholars for developing curricula during a summer or an academic-year semester. Individual scholars, partnerships, or groups of scholars may apply, but the maximum fellowship stipend of $10,000 may not be exceeded for any one project. Prior experience with contemplative practice is encouraged. Assurance from the appropriate department head, attesting that the applicant will be permitted to teach the course resulting from his/her research within the academic year following the tenure of the fellowship, will be required. Eligibility Guidelines Regular full-time faculty members at accredited academic institutions in the United States are eligible to apply for these fellowships. There are no citizenship restrictions. For more information, please visit http://www.acls.org/conprac.htm and http://www.contemplativemind.org/programs/academic/fellowships.html. |
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This is our first newsletter dedicated to academics and is a work in process: we’d like to hear your opinions! How can we support you? What would you like to see here? Please contact Carrie Bergman, Creative Director, at carrie@contemplativemind.org. |
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We Need Your Support |
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The Center has led the way in introducing contemplative practices and perspectives to American life. Please join us in this important work by making a tax-deductible donation. |
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The Center for Contemplative Mind in Society banner photo by René Théberge |
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During the last ten years contemplative practice has made remarkable inroads into higher education. Increasingly our students’ capacities for sustained attention and emotional balance have been strengthened through contemplative exercises, and their critical faculties have been deepened and complemented by contemplative forms of inquiry. In addition, a community of academics has gradually developed that values such practices and who share their experience with contemplative pedagogy with one another. We at the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society have been pleased to serve these important developments within the academy, and we hope that this newsletter will assist you further. Below you will find a wide range of information concerning conferences and retreats, books and resources. Let us know about news you think others might value. 
Andrew Carroll, editor
Marilyn Nelson was raised on military bases, and as a poet developed a unique perspective on the U.S. Armed Services as the daughter of one of the last of the Tuskegee Airmen. She is a Professor Emeritus at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, and has taught most recently at the University of Delaware. In 2004 Marilyn opened her home as a writers' colony, 
Barbara Sellers-Young has a BS in Sociology, MS in Dance and a Ph.D. in Theatre from the University of Oregon. She is the author of three books, with a fourth underway. Her current projects in the area of contemplative practice include presentations on Contemplative Practice and the Academy at the 2nd International Conference on Consciousness, Theatre, Literature and the Arts in Wales and the IFTR conference in South Africa. She was awarded a Contemplative Practice Fellowship in 2000 and is Professor of Theater and Dance at the University of California-Davis.
