Mindful U at Naropa University

Improvisation is a wonderful contemplative practice–a mindfulness practice–a discipline that has to do with paying attention in a very precise way to what's going on in the present moment. It's about showing up–being open to whatever is happening musically, to whatever my colleagues are playing, or to the environment of the room–the acoustics, the audience, that sort of thing–and really drawing inspiration from that. Paying attention to all of that requires one hundred percent concentration. Music happens so quickly, so naturally, your intellectual mind really can't keep up with it. The brain can't be analyzing and explaining and interpreting why you're playing, you just have to play. To me, that means you show up and play who you are.Special Guest: Mark Miller.

Radical dharma and mindfulness - everybody is going to get a little taste of some meditation, and its great - whatever door you use to enter into practice is great. But - the conflation of mindfulness with a depthful practice that includes an ethic view is a problem. When mindfulness becomes yet another thing that we can modify, and we think is something that is there so that we can consume it, then it’s actually serving our ego. It's serving our ideas of who we are and who we would like to be seen as, in our performance as ourselves. In that way, it can become a factor in our incarceration rather than our liberation. Special Guest: Rev. angel Kyodo williams.

I remember it was after the first year I came back to Naropa–I was actually upset with my professors. I was like, "What did you all do? Whatever you offered me, I see the world in a new way now!" I was upset because I saw the world in its fullness. There were things I saw then–when I came to Naropa I was all sunshine and rainbows. It was all "...the world is beautiful and the world is great, and I am going to study Buddhism, and I'm going to be one!" It was an 'absolute' kind of thinking. But Naropa gave me a chance to actually stop, pause, and feel -- the suffering that is here too.Special Guest: Lauren Ciovacco.

"Dharma isn't sexy, or glamorous for me..., it’s just work. It's discipline and work, and I do it because the fruit is spaciousness; this openness. Where I can just be with my life. That spaciousness is where liberation actually happens. Over the years of practice, you realize you've become a different person. You begin to trust yourself more because you're always in tune with your experiences...and that is what I love. It just becomes very ordinary." - Lama Rod OwensSpecial Guest: Lama Rod Owens.

When people hear the words "gross national happiness," they tend to envision a sort of idealization of what's really going on in Bhutan, the country that originated the concept. I watch our students while we're in Bhutan sometimes idealize things, and then hit a sort of crash as they see the reality, and then come out with a really deep sense of excitement and amazement about what's actually happening. We'd like to take that idealization off its pedestal altogether.Special Guest: Anne Parker.

Think of the martial art behind the idea of "ninja," and the associations that pop culturally in all our heads when we hear that. Ninja art is still around, and it really is an art. Ninja literally means "persevering person;" Someone who faces life and is able to win - not just for themselves, but for everybody. As indigenous peoples, we've had to learn how to keep going in the face of enormous, overwhelming adversity. also, the spiritual lineage of ninjitsu is Buddhism, and a whole lot of that is about how to keep going.Special Guest: Ian Sanderson.

A person can look far less healthy than they actually are in moments of extraordinary stress. When we put ourselves in another person's shoes and we have some sense of the weight and the burdens and the stresses and the different directions they're being pulled in, it makes more sense, but we all seem to fall away from remembering that. When someone is fed, their kids are ok, they're housed, and they have what they need - that in itself makes a person infinitely more healthy. We teach a lot about the DSM in the clinic because it’s the language of the mental health field, but it's only a snapshot. I encourage people to remember that - that we're seeing a person at a snapshot in time. Whatever our judgement is about them–despite the fact that we're working in a system that calls for judgement and diagnosis–that it’s just a snapshot.Special Guest: Joy Redstone.

What would you see if you were looking at the world from the point of view of a person in a wheelchair? Or if you're mobility impaired, or blind, or deaf? As architects, we need to learn to look at what kind of physical environment we are creating for people. What's missing? What else could we do here, in this central courtyard, that would make the space better? Students will answer "a fountain," "a garden," "a shaded area where you could study." We could add benches, hammocks–you name it. And then they all start seeing great ideas about the built environment.Special Guest: Scott Rodwin, Faculty in Environmental Studies.

Gestalt therapy is a methodology one can use for therapy or for growth. I like to call it Gestalt Awareness Practice because it’s a way of working in the here and now for healing and growth. Gestalt - from German and not truly translatable into English - essentially means "the whole." Or something ever greater than the whole. It’s the idea that we're whole with everything and that our goal is to be whole within our self - not divided - not split.Special Guest: Deborah Bowman.

People already know many things. People arrive at school with their own intelligence, and they come here to cultivate that intelligence through contact with one another - embodied contact with teachers, administrators, other students - as well as with various resources and wisdom traditions, academic traditions. Real learning and transformation both take place in that contact, not through the input or memorization of knowledge or information. They come through grounding and body-based awareness - embodied mindfulness - whole-person embodiment. When we start dealing with difficult and challenging - and eventually rewarding - situations and concepts, you already have a kind of nervous system of self-knowledge. The embodied curriculum at Naropa can help you develop and cultivate both a social and sociological self-knowledge. Special Guest: Ramon Parish.

There's a real diversity of tactics about how to integrate contemplative practices into the study of writing and the study of literature and the creation of those ways of being. This is about what it means to approach writing through a contemplative way. One of the great joys about teaching here at Naropa is the openness of students to experiment. The real readiness at which they're willing to implicate their person and their body and their spirit. That approach to the whole person in the classroom is really such a gift to work with as a - as a teacher and a peer and a colleague and a fellow and a researcher.Special Guest: Jeffrey Pethybridge.

At Naropa, the notion of contemplative education is about drawing out the full richness of the student as well as the teacher in the learning process. It's about utilizing different contemplative practices such as mindfulness, awareness, compassion, and contemplation to draw out the wisdom of the various dimensions of who we are as human beings. It’s not just about thinking. Conventional education trains us to be thinkers and doers–which is very important–but there's an emphasis in contemplative education about supplementing our thinking process with the wisdom of our emotional life–the wisdom of our sensory experience, of our bodily experience, and of the environment in which we're learning. All these factors go together to make a wholeness of learning that is all about creating a richness, one which is permeated by that space. All of these factors–how we think, how we feel–aren't just mixed together haphazardly, but with room for all of them to move and affect each other. The way we think can be enriched by our feelings. The way we move can be affected by the environment we're in, the other people that you're learning with, and the current issues in the world. It gets very, very rich, starting from the inside to untangle this web, which has been very tightly made in more conventional types of education.Special Guest: Richard C. Brown, Professor of Contemplative Education.

We're going to be imagining what this ideal city might be like. There are thousands of different aspects of a city ecosystem that we could address, but I want to address just four: community ownership, ecological sensibility, economic democracy, and people power.Special Guest: Stephen Polk.

Ecopsychology is a field whose goal is to bridge our cultures' long standing historical gulf between the psychological and the ecological to see the needs of the planet and the person as a continuum. Transpersonal ecopsychology is the evolving exploration expression and embodied practice of the inter-dependence of humans in the more than human world, which tends towards to the health balance and optimal well being of all. A change in our internal landscapes might change our relationships with the land in a way that includes extending social ethics to the land and an examination of our loyalties, affections, and convictions.Special Guest: Travis Cox, PhD.

In this episode, Dr. Stanley delves into the real differences between sensory perception and experience, and touches on how our emotions affect what we see, and which qualities we project onto our world. Once we see that our perceptions are different fro our experiences, can we learn how we're really experiencing our world, versus how our minds tell us our world exists? It's classes like this that set Naropa's curriculum apart from other universities - adding a level of contemplation to this type of understanding welcomes deep examination, and offers a clarity rarely experienced. Special Guest: Dr. Phillip Stanley, PhD.