In a recent conversation I had with Rohan Gunatillake at the Rubin Museum’s Brainwave series, we spoke about the tension between our digital lives and our pursuit of mindfulness and wellness—he from the perspective of a technologist and social entrepreneur and I from the perspective of an emotion scientist and digital health researcher. This is a dilemma with few easy…
A student of mindfulness and Buddhist practices for three decades, Mark Coleman, M.A., is a senior meditation teacher at Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Marin County, California. He has always been keen to share the fruits of meditation to wider audiences and founded The Mindfulness Institute, where he brings mindfulness trainings to Fortune 500 companies and the non-profit sector. Coleman also…
Nonduality is a concept most commonly associated with the religious traditions of Hinduism and Buddhism, but Episcopal priest Cynthia Bourgeault has written extensively about it from a Christian perspective. We spoke with her recently to discuss her approach to nonduality, the difference between belief and experience, and Christian practices that can help people cultivate an experiential understanding of nonduality. Where can we…
Back in 1965 Gordon Moore, the co-founder of Intel and the then head of research and development, made an observation that is now known as “Moore’s Law.” He stated that advances in hardware technology and engineering are such that the number of components that can be crammed onto a silicon chip would double every eighteen months, and therefore the processing…
You are likely familiar with the idea that you can feel too much of the suffering of others. This is sometimes called “burnout,” a word that was coined in the 1970s. But it’s not a new insight; the idea has many origins, including, to my surprise, in Buddhist theology. I first learned this from a discussion I had with Matthieu…
Cynthia Bourgeault is leading an upcoming retreat at the Garrison Institute entitled “Centering Prayer and Nondual Awakening” on March 24 – 29, 2017. The below is an edited excerpt from her new book, The Heart of Centering Prayer: Nondual Christianity in Theory and Practice. Learning Centering Prayer begins with unlearning most of what you think meditation is all about. Centering…
Noticing a lack of of access to yoga, mindfulness, and other holistic forms of self-care in their Baltimore neighborhood, brothers Ali and Atman Smith and Andres Gonzalez started the Holistic Life Foundation (HLF) in 2001 with a mission to bring these kinds of practices to people in underserved communities. In an upcoming retreat at the Garrison Institute, “People Who Care for…
We’re often told that mindfulness will benefit us by reducing stress and increasing focus and productivity, among other things. But what if our desire to obtain these benefits gets in the way of our discovering the deeper and more radical possibilities that the practice might reveal? In a new book, What’s Wrong With Mindfulness (And What Isn’t), Robert Rosenbaum and Barry…