Contemplative Practices Research Articles

Understanding equanimity from a psychological perspective: implications for holistic well-being during a global pandemic

ABSTRACT The cultivation of equanimity has been emphasized in various indigenous philosophies and contemplative practices. This paper aims to develop an expansive understanding of equanimity as a distinct psychological construct. Thirty experts from various traditions such as Buddhism, Vedic studies, meditation, and yoga were interviewed on their understanding and insights into equanimity. The findings suggest equanimity as an even-mindedness towards the varied hedonic and affective experiences. The cognitive, affective, and conative mechanisms of equanimity such as increased distress tolerance, hedonic neutrality, and reduced reactivity are outlined. At the interpersonal level, equanimity entails impartiality and reduced bias towards others. The challenges one may face during the cultivation of equanimity have been suggested by the experts. The implications of cultivating equanimity have been examined in the context of adaptive coping and holistic wellbeing in the current pandemic situation, dealing with compassion fatigue, and the development of indigenous leadership practices.

Queer Contemplative Pedagogy: Challenging Gender and Sexuality Norms through Contemplation

ABSTRACT While teaching a secondary gender studies course, high school teacher “Eleanor” found that though most students identified as queer and expressed interest in disrupting normative understandings of genders and sexualities, their classroom contributions often reified problematic norms. She implemented what she termed a Queer Contemplative Pedagogy to challenge students to think more contemplatively about genders and sexualities. Based on ethnographic classroom observations and individual interviews, this paper examines Eleanor’s and the students’ efforts to use meditation and contemplative writing to challenge a range of norms and personal assumptions. This study offers a rare pairing of contemplative practice with queer research and provides an instructional approach that pushes youth and educators to continue to examine assumptions and societal constructions related to genders and sexualities.

The Relevance of Contemplative Studies and Practices for Improving Participatory Urban Governance

ABSTRACT Evidence suggests that substantial and robust community engagement is essential to local urban governance. In this paper, we reflect on the importance of a more comprehensive approach to community engagement that values both the cognitive and the affective, the technical and the relational, and the outer and inner dimensions of human experiences. The intangible and inner dimensions receive little attention in public administration and political science fields, or in governance processes themselves. The paper aims to make a start in addressing this gap by engaging ideas from the emerging field of contemplative studies. This field brings attention to the inner worlds of people, and the importance of valuing affective and embodied experiences. We explore how community engagement processes could potentially embody these insights to strengthen participatory urban governance, and reflect on some of the risks and limitations.

Reaching Out by Looking Within: The #WellnessWednesdays Initiative at Texas Tech University

Academic library outreach initiatives that focus on wellness include movement-based fitness programs such as yoga. These programs offer students, staff and faculty who participate a chance to de-stress, lessening the impacts of tension, anxiety, and depression. Academic libraries are suited for these types of programs because we already provide space for other de-stress events, and research of the academic library literature shows that yoga programs in these spaces are increasing. However, the COVID19 pandemic forced changes in outreach programming. In January 2021, Texas Tech University Libraries started offering a yin and restorative yoga program that met weekly in the evenings online via Zoom. Because the university was previously offering these sessions for free to on-campus students, there was a need for a different type of yoga programming that also included online students, as well as staff and faculty. Designated “#WellnessWednesdays”, this program allowed the Texas Tech University Libraries to facilitate yoga sessions for members of the university community by creating a therapeutic environment that is both inclusive and accessible in an online setting.

“Meeting the Medicine Halfway”: Ayahuasca Ceremony Leaders’ Perspectives on Preparation and Integration Practices for Participants

Ayahuasca is a psychotropic plant-based tea from the Amazon. Its ceremonial use for therapeutic and spiritual purposes has become increasingly common and stands to escalate based on current policy initiatives in some countries. As ceremonial ayahuasca use spreads there is a need to understand, from various perspectives, how best to improve outcomes and minimize potential harms. Clinicians and therapists encourage the use of preparation and integration practices that accompany ceremonial ayahuasca use; however, there is no research investigating the views of those conducting the ceremonies. This qualitative study explored the perspectives of 15 ayahuasca ceremony leaders regarding preparation and integration practices they consider helpful for ensuring safe and productive experiences for ceremony participants. Qualitative content analysis produced three main categories, each with relevant subcategories. The first category included factors that facilitate preparation, including participant honesty and respect; readiness and willingness; and internal and external resources. The second category encompassed several complementary modalities believed to facilitate both preparation and integration, such as psychotherapy, spiritual and contemplative practices, and other modes of creative expression. The third category included factors considered facilitative of integration, including sharing of experiences, and working with insights and lessons. Ineffective integration practices constituted a fourth subcategory. Consistent with reports from other stakeholders, the findings highlight a wide range of preparation and integration practices that may be useful for ayahuasca ceremony participants to consider when drinking ayahuasca.

Cogenerating insights into the dialectics of contemplative practices in educational and lifeworld settings.

Contemplative practices are used with increasing frequency across various fields of knowledge, and increasingly so within educational settings as a means of promoting wellness and wellbeing. In this paper, we draw on qualitative data derived from primary students’ experiences of meditative breathing and use them as a springboard to extrapolate meaning and cogenerate novel insights around contemplative practices. Theoretically framed within an authentic inquiry | contemplative inquiry dialectic, this approach seeks to situate the research team within the contemplative process, striving to make a difference for stakeholders. Intentionally acknowledging and drawing on our values, beliefs, and lifeworlds, this authentic inquiry | contemplative inquiry allows for the cogeneration of deep and meaningful insights. Insights coalesce around four emergent dialectics of contemplative practices: relaxed | stressed, attentive | distracted, still | energized and unbounded | constrained. Our co-constructed contemplative narrative argues that within the complex space of unbounded fields, contemplative practices have the potential to transform physical, mental, emotional, and social lifeworlds through a contagious individual and collective ripple effect.

Effect of an Intensive Mindful Practice Workshop on Patient-Centered Compassionate Care, Clinician Well-Being, Work Engagement, and Teamwork.

Mindfulness-based interventions for health professionals have been linked to improvements in burnout, well-being, empathy, communication, patient-centered care, and patient safety, but the optimal formats and intensity of training have been difficult to determine because of the paucity of studies and the heterogeneity of programs. A 4-days residential "Mindful Practice" workshop for physicians and medical educators featuring contemplative practices, personal narratives, and appreciative dialogs about challenging experiences may hold promise in improving participants' well-being while also improving compassionate care, job satisfaction, work engagement, and teamwork. We collected baseline and 2-month follow-up data during four workshops conducted in 2018 to 2019 at conference centers in the United States and Europe. Primary outcomes were burnout, work-related distress, job satisfaction, work engagement, patient-centered compassionate care, and teamwork. Eighty-five of 120 participants (71%) completed both surveys (mean age was 49.3 and 68.2% female). There were improvements (P < .01) in two of three burnout components (emotional exhaustion and depersonalization), work-related distress, job satisfaction, patient-centered compassionate care, work engagement and meaning, teamwork, well-being, positive emotion, mindfulness, somatic symptoms, and spirituality. Effect sizes (standardized mean difference of change) ranged from 0.25 to 0.61. With Bonferroni adjustments (P < .0031), teamwork, general well-being, and mindfulness became nonsignificant. An intensive, multiday, mindfulness-based workshop for physicians had clinically significant positive effects on clinician well-being, quality of interpersonal care and work satisfaction, and meaning and engagement, all important indicators of improved health and sustainability of the health care workforce. Future iterations of the program should increase the focus on teamwork.

Prayer as Seeing

Abstract This article provides a theological framework whereby the practices of silent contemplative prayer and tongues speech can be understood as mutually conditioning prayer practices that form the one who prays to perceive both beauty and the beautiful. It does so through an examination of the implicit metaphysical assumptions of the respective practices. The first section examines the implicit relationship between contemplative prayer and divine impassibility. The second section examines the relationship between glossolalia and divine relationality. The third section presents the practices of contemplation and glossolalia as mutually informative in dialogue with Gregory Palamas’ distinction between divine essence and energies. The article will therefore conclude that a comprehensive prayer practice that unites the experiences of impassibility and relationality can overcome the aesthetic divide between the mystical and the artistic by uniting the one who prays with a God who is both transcendent and relational.

Impact of Practicing Mindful Breathing in Class

Many community college students experience high levels of stress due to the demands of coursework and stressors outside of the classroom. Contemplative practices such as deep breathing can reduce stress and increase focus, but students may not be familiar with or feel that they have time to engage in these practices. We hypothesized that introducing students to mindful breathing in our accounting and biology classes would help students manage stress during the semester, reduce test anxiety, and improve student performance. &#x0D; To test this hypothesis, we introduced some sections of our courses to mindful breathing techniques such as square breathing, alternate nostril breathing, and victorious breathing and set aside time at the start of each class to allow students to engage in these practices. At the end of the semester, we surveyed students to assess their past and present experiences with contemplative practices and their perceptions of the benefits of mindful breathing. We also asked students to rate their levels of exam stress and to rate the general feelings of stress they experienced during the semester, comparing their responses with responses from students in control sections that were not introduced to mindful breathing. The survey results indicated that mindful breathing was a new practice to some students and a familiar practice to others. Most students felt that the practice of deep breathing at the start of each class helped them reduce stress, develop a sense of connectedness, and improve focus. However, there was no consistent difference in self-reported exam stress or general stress between students in sections with and without in-class contemplative breathing. There was also no difference in course performance, as reflected by overall course grade, between sections with and without in-class contemplative breathing. Although it was not the focus of this study, we observed that in-class contemplative breathing practice seemed to improve the learning environment and helped build trusting relationships with students.

Using Mindfulness/Contemplative Practices to Help Students Focus in Mathematics Classrooms

Can using mindfulness/contemplative practices help students become mindful, focused, and present in the mathematics classroom? In this study, mindfulness/contemplative practices were used in the mathematics classroom to determine if students were encouraged to be mindful, focused, and present or engaged in problem solving. During class time, students engaged in the following 2 contemplative practices: a “Mindful Minute of Deep Breathing” and “Beholding the Mathematics”. The one minute of mindful Deep Breathing took place usually at the beginning of class. Then, during a regular class period, students used Beholding to look more deeply at topics, probe questions, and investigate answers to questions. The survey responses indicated that the mindfulness/contemplative practices were very useful in the mathematics classroom to help students to be mindful (both inside and outside of the classroom), focus on the mathematics taught, and be present or engaged in the problem solving.

The Effects of the Medical Pause on Physiological Stress Markers among Health Care Providers: A Pilot Randomized Controlled Trial.

Contemplative practices promote well-being, work engagement and resilience among health care providers. We examined the impact of The Pause, a brief contemplative intervention, on health care providers' physiological stress response. Participants were randomly assigned to either The Pause or the control group. They participated in a high-fidelity, stressful medical simulation. Following the simulation, intervention group practiced The Pause. Outcome measures were heart rate variability, heart rate, and blood pressure. We adjusted for baseline physiological variables, sociodemographic variables, self-care practices, and perceived stress. Participants in the intervention group had a standard deviation of the normal-to-normal RR intervals (heart rate variability indicator) that was 13.8 (95% CI 4.0, 23.5; p < .01) points higher than those in the control group. There were no significant effects of The Pause on heart rate or blood pressure. The Pause may reduce stress reactivity, increase heart rate variability, and enhance resilience in health care providers.

Contemplating Arts Education: An Interview with Lee Worley by Daniel Plá

An interview with Lee Worley, conducted in 2016, discussing the history of contemplative arts at Naropa University, and the relationship between contemplative practices and performer training.

Ecology and colour in 1m2: a contemplative, place-based study

This essay argues the importance of interdisciplinary, contemplative, place-based pedagogy. The Ecology and Colour in 1m2 study has students from the sciences and the arts observe a small quadrat in their local community over several weeks, engaging in both scientific and creative expression. The connection to Aldo Leopold’s teaching principles and its relevance during our current screen fatigue pandemic and increasing disconnection from the natural world are outlined. We review contemplative practice in relation to education, such as sit spots or “site-specific” learning. Given the interdisciplinary nature of the Ecology and Colour in 1m2 study and aligned with Leopold’s emphasis on fostering a personal connection with nature, our paper also includes three narratives and examples of student reflections and visual artwork created during this project.

Experiments with Buddhist Forms of Thought, Action and Practice to Promote Significant Learning

While scholars have considered the centrality of teaching in Buddhist traditions and the rich pedagogical resources Buddhism has to offer academic courses on the topic, less attention has been paid to the ways in which Buddhist pedagogy might be applied to the overall structure of course design. This article addresses the challenges of presenting the richness and complexity of Buddhist traditions while also encouraging students to experientially engage such traditions in ways that promote transformative learning. It proposes using Buddhist pedagogical principles, together with a model of significant learning (Fink 2013), to design a course according to the Three Trainings in Wisdom, Ethics and Meditation. Framing the course as a series of experiments in Buddhist forms of thought, action, and practice highlights the critical perspective common to both Buddhist and academic approaches and helps maintain important distinctions between Buddhist traditions and popular secular practices. This article describes specific experiments with Buddhist ways of reading and analyzing classic and contemporary texts, films and images, together with experiments in Buddhist methods of contemplative and ethical practice, in an introductory course in order to help students see how forms of suffering that concern them might arise and be stopped or prevented from a Buddhist point of view.

Digital Contemplative Community in Pandemic Times

In this collage, I reflect on my Radical Dharma community gatherings and examine how they are helping me to (re)imagine community and connection during pandemic times. Using the theoretical frameworks of Critical Race Theory (CRT) (Delgado &amp; Stefancic, 2001) and Dis/ability Critical Race Studies (DisCrit) (Annamma, Connor, &amp; Ferri, 2013), I explore through my artwork the following questions: How is COVID-19 changing the way I, as a disabled Latina mother-scholar, relate to others in person and over digital space? Is physical distancing creating more social isolation and separation? Or is it paradoxically making me more attune to the pain, needs, and wants of my fellow beings on this planet? How does this ultimately impact my scholarship? Through the use of meditation, journaling, and reflecting on our virtual meetings, I tried to express within the collage our coming to terms with change and grief within the context of the pandemic and the current Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests on police brutality. I argue that we are in the midst of creating a virtual fugitive space (Stovall, 2015), where we can (re)imagine what community can look like post-pandemic through embodied contemplative practice and collective care (Piepzna-Samarasinha, 2018). We are using computer-mediated technology (e.g., Zoom, Slack, Teamwork Projects) to not only work on community mending (Ortiz, 2018) for communities of color, but also their (and our) liberation. &#x0D;

A wellbeing skill: moving attentively in hospital yoga practice

Yoga is sometimes interpreted as medical therapy and the evidence from biomedical research indicates that it can be useful in a broad range of health conditions. Yoga, however, can also be pursued as a process-oriented contemplative practice. This article draws on participant observation-based research with yoga practitioners at two hospitals, one in Pondicherry, India, and one in Fukui, Japan. It explores how patients and their families at these healthcare institutions are invited to move without anticipating an outcome and to cultivate attitudes such as contentment and non-violence. Taking cues from research participants’ approaches to yoga as a skill and from anthropological understandings of skill, yoga is considered here as a capacity of moving with awareness. A skill-based approach allows practitioners to try out yogic techniques according to their personal abilities and needs. The analysis suggests that, in the contexts discussed, yoga practitioners pursue wellbeing not as an individual therapeutic goal but as mutual explorative learning.

What Is the State of Compassion Education? A Systematic Review of Compassion Training in Health Care.

To investigate the current state and quality of compassion education interventions offered to health care providers during training or practice, determine how the components of each education intervention map onto the domains of an empirically based clinical model of compassion, and identify the most common approaches to compassion education. The MEDLINE, Embase, CINAHL Plus with Full Text, Sociological Abstracts, Web of Science, ERIC, and Education Research Complete databases were searched from inception to March 2020 in this systematic review. Studies that evaluated a compassion education intervention for health care providers or those in training to enhance compassion toward patients and/or families were included. A narrative synthesis of the included studies was performed. The components of each intervention were mapped onto the domains of compassion described in the Patient Compassion Model. One hundred eight peer-reviewed publications describing 103 interventions were included. Modalities ranged from establishing curricula and interventions in clinical settings to programs that used humanities-based reflective practices, clinical simulation, role modeling, and contemplative practices, with many education interventions adopting a multimodal approach. Most interventions mapped to the virtuous response domain of the Patient Compassion Model; very few mapped to the other domains of this model. Most interventions were limited as they focused on a single domain of compassion; did not adequately define compassion; were assessed exclusively by self-report; were devoid of a comparator/control group; and did not evaluate retention, sustainability, and translation to clinical practice over time. The authors suggest that compassion education interventions be grounded in an empirically based definition of compassion; use a competency-based approach; employ multimodal teaching methods that address the requisite attitudes, skills, behaviors, and knowledge within the multiple domains of compassion; evaluate learning over time; and incorporate patient, preceptor, and peer evaluations.

Contemplative Psychology: History, Key Assumptions, and Future Directions

Contemplative psychology is concerned with the psychological study of contemplative processes and practices, such as meditation, mindfulness, yoga, introspection, reflection, metacognition, self-regulation, self-awareness, and self-consciousness. Although contemplative psychology borders with other psychological and nonpsychological disciplines, some of its underlying assumptions distinguish it from other remits of psychological and scholarly inquiry, as do its component areas of empirical focus, conceptual nuances, and challenges. Furthermore, the discipline has tended to be somewhat disparate in its approach to investigating the core techniques and principles of which it is composed, resulting in a need for greater intradisciplinary and interdisciplinary awareness of the commonalities and differences of core contemplative psychology attributes. As a remedy to these issues, in this article, we adopt a whole-discipline perspective and aim to explicate contemplative psychology’s history, breadth, key assumptions, challenges, and future directions.

"Made Known in the Breaking of the Bread: Accompaniment and the Practice of Medicine".

Accompaniment is a term drawn from Catholic social teaching that is used by secular organizations, such as Partners in Health and Health for Palestine, to frame their work for health justice in solidarity with the world's poor. Through an exploration of the Emmaus story from Luke's Gospel, this article seeks to frame medicine itself as a practice of accompaniment of the sick and, in particular, the sick poor. Medicine as accompaniment requires healers to draw near to, walk alongside, and break bread with the sick. This way of practicing medicine has implications for which communities' clinicians preferentially accompany, where clinicians live, how they spend their time and money, and what rewards they seek from the practice of medicine. Medicine as accompaniment is a contemplative practice, a journey on which one comes to experience authentic communion with both God and neighbor.

Beyond deliberation—radical reflexivity, contemplative practices and teacher change

Beyond deliberation—radical reflexivity, contemplative practices and teacher change