Mindful U at Naropa University

It is important to cultivate discernment in the sense of a historical awareness: the ability to discern many different streams in yogic traditions, and understand their fundamental orientations, outlooks, and practices. This means not letting these different streams all get mixed up into a very vague notion of yoga, but actually appreciating the depth and integrity of each. And thus when we draw f...

Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni on performing her wildly popular one-woman piece, "One Drop of Love," for the Naropa community as part of the Bayard and John Cobb Peace Lecture last Spring: "I have been doing this performance for 5 years, and have been in a lot of different communities–some certainly more receptive to the themes around race and racism and class and gender than others. Sometimes I think peo...

Traditionally, Judaism is practiced by way of rituals. This includes actual ritualistic practices that involve ritual objects, but it also includes ritualistic prayer, as well as ritualistic forms of study, such as studying Torah in a certain way. My personal practice has shifted from one that is centered around ritual to one that is more about integrating the direct experience of presence, or of...

There should be free movement. There's something about the monarch butterflies having freedom of flight and freedom of mobility that many humans don't have. We found out that in Mexican folklore the monarch butterflies arrive in Mexico at the very beginning of November–right around the Day of the Dead. The day after the Day of the Dead is the Day of the Children, and the mythology is that the mona...

Sometimes, especially in mid-career, we get a little stale. It’s nice to refresh by deeply and authentically getting in touch with what matters to us within our core purpose, within our values, and within why we're doing what we are doing. Part of the training that we provide is helping people who are already in leadership roles bring more of who they authentically are to their role. In the authen...

Sometimes we take for granted that text is an image–the letters are images–and there are some writers who are very conscious of that. When we're reading a book we take for granted that the text on the page is an image, and the focus of the book is what the text is communicating. Spend some time thinking about text as an image, like Rachel Blau DuPlessis's work. Rachel is a poet and a critic who al...

The disciplines of psychology and spirituality both offer us humans a gift. Psychology, being the mind-oriented discipline, seems to offer us a chance to envision ourselves within our surroundings. At the same time, spirituality invites us to move beyond the mind, and even beyond the definitions of a self. Most of us tend to focus on one or the other over our lives. But, in doing so, we often narr...

Join us as we talk about blending the spiritual with the practical, busting some myths, and providing some tips on what it means to run a business from a spiritual vantage point. When it comes to the term "life coach," or any other spirituality-based profession, some of the myths are that you can use the law of attraction to just manifest clients or money into your life and into your business. Whi...

Many people are unaware of the interspiritual dimensions of what we offer here at Naropa - the multiple dimensions that we have here. And the fact that a lot of what we've been researching and studying in the last few years is how millennials and Gen Z in particular approach spirituality. This term talked a lot about: "spiritual but not religious," is only the tip of the iceberg - it actually beco...

It's our mission to grow more awareness of women's issues, women's voices, women's history, women's studies worldwide. We're still so far behind in knowing what we should know about the history of women in the world and their contributions, as well as the lived experiences of women, and the way it informs everything about the way our country operates, the way the world runs now. One can't really t...

The work of Carl Jung and of Stanislav Grof - as well as many others - have been under an umbrella of "transpersonal psychology," a field that was developed in the '50s as an extension of humanistic psychology. Abraham Maslow first developed humanistic psychology - a framework around many other professionals who were developing that branch of psychology, such as Fritz Perls and Carl Rogers, but Ma...

There is more to bipolar than just pathology. People are familiar with bipolar as a disorder that used to be called manic-depressive disorder, or maniac depression. Bipolar Order is a declaration of that, and a necessary bridge for people meeting the criteria for bipolar disorder, and particularly bipolar disorder in remission, to be empowered. Chris Cole is trying to activate and inspire people t...

"I think of bricolage as an approach to interdisciplinary inquiry and to meaning-making. It comes from a French word meaning to tinker, and it's sometimes associated with improvisation, and sometimes associated with "do-it-yourself." I don't like that term as much because it's missing the collaborative aspect of interdisciplinary studies. Think about Levy Strauss observing craftspeople, noticing h...

"Da Vinci said "...motion is life." What better way to move than to some music cranking and to lift the spirit? There is something coded in our DNA - something really ancient about our need to be tribal, our need as humans to come together with other humans, and music calls us all. Music is that beat, that rhythm that we feel in our hearts when our hearts are beating together in that same groove....

How does teaching with a contemplative focus help teachers in a crazy world? When we have practiced how to love ourselves enough to stand in our own business, then we can be more empathetic to the context from which our students come. If I'm in a class with 27 students and one of them is having a particularly hard day or hard week–or life–then it makes it possible for me to resource my patience an...

The Holistic Life Foundation is a Baltimore-based 501(c) (3) nonprofit organization committed to nurturing the wellness of children and adults in underserved communities. Through a comprehensive approach which helps children develop their inner lives through yoga, mindfulness, and self-care HLF demonstrates a deep commitment to learning, community, and stewardship of the environment. HLF is also c...

How do we blend contemplative practice with service in the world? How can we extend ourselves, offer ourselves to that world in an authentic way? One where we're not burning out at the same time? How can we support people both at the peak of tragedy, getting over the most difficult parts, as well as the lasting repercussions? We meet people there, with them, where they are, with an open heart, ack...

T.I.P.I., the French acronym for “Technique d’Identification des Peurs Inconscientes,” or "Technique for the Sensory Identification of Unconscious Fears" in English, resets our emotional response to trauma naturally, using the body’s sensory memory to reconnect with the trauma's origin. Joey Marti discusses TiPi and how he uses it, and how Naropa's MA programs in transpersonal psychology helped hi...

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 in...

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, th...

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...

"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...a...

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 happe...

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, o...

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 t...