Mindful U at Naropa University

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,"...

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 b...

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 inpu...

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 imp...

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...

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 o...

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...

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 profe...

Scott Rodwin, Naropa University faculty teaching Building Design in the Environmental Department, is one of the leading green architects in the country. An architect and a builder, Rodwin owns and runs a 13-person design build firm in Boulder. Scott graduated from Cornell in 1991 with an architecture degree and moved out to Boulder shortly thereafter, and has been working as an architect for about...

Jeanine Canty is a full time and professor and chair of the Environmental Studies Department at Naropa University, which includes the MA and Resilient Leadership Program and the BA Environmental Studies major. In this episode, Canty shares on the topic, ‘Oppressions of People and Oppressions of the Earth Go Hand and Hand’. Canty explains the link between social and ecological injustice and how thr...

Acharya Judith Simmer-Brown is a Distinguished professor of Contemplative and Religious Studies at Naropa University. In this episode, Simmer-Brown discusses an undergraduate course she teaches at Naropa, Wisdom & Compassion: The Buddhist Path. Simmer-Brown discusses how much of the scientific research done in the West has focused on the negative, or what is wrong with humans/human nature. Loo...

Chuck Lief is the President of Naropa University, and a long time student of Naropa's founder Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. In this inaugural episode of MindfulU, Lief discusses his various roles at Naropa since its founding, and explains what makes Naropa University unique. Lief then gives an overview of the course he teaches at Naropa as a part of the Peace Studies undergraduate program, Social Inno...