Mindful U at Naropa University
Buddhist Talk
As the birthplace of the mindfulness movement in the United States, Naropa University has a unique perspective when it comes to higher education in the West. Founded in 1974 by renowned Tibetan Buddhist scholar and lineage holder Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, Naropa was intended to be a place where students could study Eastern and Western religions, writing, psychology, science, and the arts, while also receiving contemplative and meditation training. Forty-three years later, Naropa is a leader in ‘contemplative education’, a pedagogical approach that blends rigorous academics, contemplative practice, and experiential learning. Naropa President Chuck Lief explains, “Mindfulness here is not a class. Mindfulness is basically the underpinning of what we do in all of our classes. That said, the flavor or the color of mindfulness from class to class is really completely up to the individual faculty member to work on—on their own. So, what happens in a poetry class is going to look very different from what happens in a research psychology class. But, one way or another the contemplative practices are brought into the mix.” This podcast is for those with an interest in mindfulness and a curiosity about its place in both higher education and the world at large. Hosted by Naropa alumnus and Multimedia Manager David DeVine, episodes feature Naropa faculty, alumni, and special guests on a wide variety of topics including compassion, permaculture, social justice, herbal healing, and green architecture—to name a few. Listen to explore the transformative possibilities of mindfulness, both in the classroom and beyond!
As the birthplace of the mindfulness movement in the United States, Naropa University has a unique perspective when it comes to higher education in the West. Founded in 1974 by renowned Tibetan Buddhist scholar and lineage holder Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, Naropa was intended to be a place where students could study Eastern and Western religions, writing, psychology, science, and the arts, while also receiving contemplative and meditation training. Forty-three years later, Naropa is a leader in ‘contemplative education’, a pedagogical approach that blends rigorous academics, contemplative practice, and experiential learning. Naropa President Chuck Lief explains, “Mindfulness here is not a class. Mindfulness is basically the underpinning of what we do in all of our classes. That said, the flavor or the color of mindfulness from class to class is really completely up to the individual faculty member to work on—on their own. So, what happens in a poetry class is going to look very different from what happens in a research psychology class. But, one way or another the contemplative practices are brought into the mix.” This podcast is for those with an interest in mindfulness and a curiosity about its place in both higher education and the world at large. Hosted by Naropa alumnus and Multimedia Manager David DeVine, episodes feature Naropa faculty, alumni, and special guests on a wide variety of topics including compassion, permaculture, social justice, herbal healing, and green architecture—to name a few. Listen to explore the transformative possibilities of mindfulness, both in the classroom and beyond!
Location:
United States
Description:
As the birthplace of the mindfulness movement in the United States, Naropa University has a unique perspective when it comes to higher education in the West. Founded in 1974 by renowned Tibetan Buddhist scholar and lineage holder Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, Naropa was intended to be a place where students could study Eastern and Western religions, writing, psychology, science, and the arts, while also receiving contemplative and meditation training. Forty-three years later, Naropa is a leader in ‘contemplative education’, a pedagogical approach that blends rigorous academics, contemplative practice, and experiential learning. Naropa President Chuck Lief explains, “Mindfulness here is not a class. Mindfulness is basically the underpinning of what we do in all of our classes. That said, the flavor or the color of mindfulness from class to class is really completely up to the individual faculty member to work on—on their own. So, what happens in a poetry class is going to look very different from what happens in a research psychology class. But, one way or another the contemplative practices are brought into the mix.” This podcast is for those with an interest in mindfulness and a curiosity about its place in both higher education and the world at large. Hosted by Naropa alumnus and Multimedia Manager David DeVine, episodes feature Naropa faculty, alumni, and special guests on a wide variety of topics including compassion, permaculture, social justice, herbal healing, and green architecture—to name a few. Listen to explore the transformative possibilities of mindfulness, both in the classroom and beyond!
Twitter:
@NaropaU
Language:
English
Contact:
303-245-4857
Website:
https://www.naropa.edu/
Email:
naropamoment@gmail.com
Episodes
Travis Cox: Ecopsychology and Psychedelics
2/16/2022
Travis Cox, PhD is back after our first conversation, four years ago, this time adding on the lens of psychedelics to look at ecopsychology as a radical intervention. Explore the negative consequences of our disconnect from planet, personal, and spirituality and how it intersects and impacts ecopsychology when we introduce psychedelics to explore reconnected. Special Guest: Travis Cox, PhD.
Duration:00:58:27
Dr. Sara Lewis - Psychedelic Assisted Therapy
9/29/2021
"But it’s also a lot of sort of ordinary people who have tried everything else, you know, veterans, first responders, sexual assault survivors, people who have already been through years and years of therapy and different kinds of medications, people with substance abuse, people who have had suicide attempts. So the fact that the FDA has given MDMA and psilocybin, it’s now been demarcated with a status called breakthrough — which basically just means that the results have been so...
Duration:00:53:34
Jamie Beachy: Psychedelic Chaplaincy
9/29/2021
"When we’re with people who are reviewing the end of their life or saying goodbye to a loved one, there’s this heightened sense of connection and awareness, a lot of times in crisis and sometimes difficulty. Psychedelic journeys can be — not always be easy and expansive, sometimes they’re challenging. And so there are a lot of — lot of our training, I think crosses over well into psychedelic therapies. And in particular, chaplains have this capacity to help assess the spiritual and religious...
Duration:00:55:33
Anne Lamott and Neal Allen: Conversation for Shapes of Truth: Discover God Inside of You
7/29/2021
"When that first object that represents the truth of the belief that I have an emotional issue dissipates or disappears from me, I fall into exactly the state of being that Buddhists call equanimity. That state of contentment and self satisfaction that needs nothing at the moment. I don’t just get respite from my emotional issue that I happen to be looking at. I got respite from everything for you know a matter of minutes or hours, or it might stretch a little longer. And the more times I do...
Duration:00:57:09
Charlotte Rotterdam: Finding Courage in Contemplative Education
2/17/2020
"Absolutely. You know we might have an idea about something, but then when you begin to express it from a creative place it's almost like you have to feel into it. If I want to write a poem about sadness it's not just about my ideas about sadness. At some point as I'm writing I need to stop and feel into what does sadness feel like? And then I might even think about a very specific situation in my life that brings up sadness. And then what arises from that place as a poem is coming from a...
Duration:00:47:38
Charles Eisenstein: The Origin of Wrongness
2/17/2020
"I read very widely and was trying to put the pieces together to understand this lifelong question that I had carried. What is the origin of the wrongness in the world, which is presented to us as a series of fragmented isolated atrocities and injustices and horrors -- without any synthesizing narrative that explains why the world is the way that it is? And I really wanted to understand so that I wouldn't be part of maintaining the status quo through pursuing insufficiently deep solutions...
Duration:00:45:53
Anthony Gallucci: Re-establishing Masculinity
2/17/2020
"There's gender identity, which isn't actually a problem. It's when it's forced into a limited paradigm or spectrum it can be an issue or when it's forced into a hierarchy. I see us eventually eliminating the hierarchy within these systems of identity and becoming more for lack of a better term, more merit based in our assessment of people's qualities. The re-establishing masculinity group believes that at Naropa to be foresighted and to support these movements we need to begin to get out of...
Duration:00:41:25
Miki Fire: Discovering the Self Through Transpersonal Wilderness Therapy
7/1/2019
"I do think here at Naropa specifically we do have a transpersonal orientation, a transpersonal lens that we then incorporate into all of our classes. So, the contemplative education piece is very much interwoven in what we do in the field. And so, we incorporate contemplative practices, we talk about how nature based experiences themselves can be forms of contemplative practice and inquiry. We also do introduce the transpersonal model. So how do we work with those kinds of experiences that...
Duration:00:46:47
Carl Anthony: The Urban Habitat Program
6/17/2019
"We need to think about a new quality in our organization where we are not only protesting against the things that are really hurting our communities and neighborhoods, but we're also really cultivating expertise on ideas and visions that we might have for the neighborhood and community. Finding ways that rather than having these issues come forth in competition, that we can actually have a big enough solutions put forth that incorporate. And one of the areas that we have been specializing...
Duration:00:35:18
Paloma Pavel: Reimagining Community Organizing & Environmental Literacy
6/3/2019
"It's been a great joy and privilege in my life to work with individuals, with communities, with groups—sometimes in traditional organizations and non-profits—sometimes at a community level. We're living in a time where I think we're being called to move from a politics of protest and saying no to one of saying yes, and of governance, and of really learning how to take charge of the basic infrastructure of our lives. Communities are taking back locally produced energy and energy grids....
Duration:00:45:11
Paloma Pavel & Carl Anthony: Breakthrough Communities, Underserved Populations, & Community Engagement
5/20/2019
"As we open and see that what we're carrying around inside ourselves, what we have created around us is kind of a fear story. When we actually step into the fierce love story that we long for, we start having a much more joyful experience and one where we're not at war with our earth community. One where we're actually welcoming growing things in our backyards and on our roofs, where we're seeing that space is imagined in a whole other way. And also, we do need to live closer together if...
Duration:00:52:07
Joanna Macy: The Work That Reconnects Part 2 of 2
5/6/2019
"We talked about the spiral of the work that reconnects and then you talked about how once you dare to really see and speak what you've wanted to keep at arm's length, once you refuse to turn away and really suffer with your world and then you realize that the world is flowing into you and the living planet becomes alive for you. And then it generates for you. So that's we call seeing with new eyes. Everything looks different. And we use practices that are inspired by what we call deep...
Duration:00:36:29
Joanna Macy: The Work That Reconnects Part 1 of 2
4/29/2019
Special Guest: Joanna Macy.
Duration:00:53:16
Alicia Patterson: Deep Wisdom & Healing of the Pelvic Bowl
4/22/2019
"The pelvic floor muscle tissues are connected very intricately and beautifully, and I feel like it can be complex in some ways to the abdominal muscles. And I think of the pelvic floor as the foundation of a building, it's like the ground level of the body. If the foundation of a building is off or suffering or it's not right, the whole rest of the building is off. So, that's my best metaphor is that the pelvic floor is our foundation. It's so connected to our legs and our feet and the way...
Duration:00:49:30
Rick Snyder: Decisive Intuition, Using your Gut Instincts to Make Smart Business Decisions
4/15/2019
"Emotional intelligence has completely revolutionized our lives and our business space. And because that's there there's now this foundation around intuitive intelligence. So, this is the next nuance that I'm really passionate to bring in, is that emotional intelligence is foundational and key. But it's not the whole story of how we discern information and how we navigate the world. Even though emotions are supercritical and a big part of that. Intuitive intelligence also weaves in a...
Duration:00:49:47
Venerable Pannavati: Hearing the Cries of the World & Responding with Compassion
4/8/2019
"Meditation is so important—particularly training and concentration. How to steady and fix the mind until conceptual thoughts fall away. We live so much in our conceptualizing nature that we can't imagine life without that. But when you start doing this practice, you find out that you can conceptualize, and you cannot. So, learning how to drop into that stillness, as the Buddha calls it, until you come to the absolute stilling of all thought. We think well then, there's nothing. Yes, there...
Duration:00:53:47
Nashalla Nyinda: Tibetan & Asian Medicine in Relationship with Western Biomedicine
4/1/2019
"It's said in Tibetan medicine that you have to have all five elements plus karma in order to be incarnated at all. So, even to obtain the precious human body you have to have all five elements in karma. So you're going to choose certain parents and situations. They're going to give you some genetic factors which are going to influence your inner elements and then also you're going to have the diet and the behavior that your mother has during your pregnancy is going to influence it. The...
Duration:00:49:45
Encore Presentation: Brigitte Mars - Herbal Health and Healing
3/25/2019
Brigitte is an herbalist and nutritional consultant of Natural Health with almost fifty years of experience. She teaches Herbal Medicine at Naropa University and The School of Health Mastery in Iceland. She has taught at Omega Institute, Esalen, Kripalu, Sivananda Yoga Ashram, Arise, Envision and Unify Festivals, and The Mayo Clinic. She blogs for the Huffington Post and Care2. She is also a professional member of the American Herbalist Guild. Find out more about Brigitte: brigittemars.com/....
Duration:00:27:25
Sue Wallingford: Healing Generational Wounds Through Art Therapy
3/18/2019
"Creativity is inherent in us as human beings. I think that we've, in some ways, lost the connection and the right to have our own creativity and our own artistry. For me, just touching into that in of itself is healing. It also takes you into a different part of your brain. It accesses different parts of your psyche and your spirituality and your soul in a way that maybe verbal therapies don't quite touch. And so, it's a deeper more integrated avenue dealing with you know whatever it is...
Duration:00:42:47
Holistic Life Foundation: A Teacher's Approach to Mindfulness in Baltimore Public Schools
3/11/2019
"You know, we're doing this job dealing with people's problems and not necessarily giving them advice, but just allowing them to tap into their own thoughts and weigh out their own options to create decisions. The more you hold on—you attach yourself to an outcome, then that becomes stressful and then it's not genuine anymore. It's also stressful on the other end of the person that is dealing with the actual problem. So just knowing that you may not see the results—but one thing I have...
Duration:00:43:35