Conference Media

A Symposium on Contemplative Technologies was held by the Contemplative Sciences Center and its Contemplative Innovation + Research Co-Lab (CIRCL) on October 9 and 10. The symposium was a public event exploring meditative, artistic, and interactive tools — including historical practices, immersive installations, sonic environments, and Virtual Reality — designed to guide attention, deepen perception, and evoke embodied insight. View video of all of the symposium panels and more. Learn more

The Contemplative Sciences Center commemorated the opening of the Contemplative Commons with a two-day event featuring talks from dynamic speakers and panelists including Tony Bennett (former UVA Men’s Basketball Coach), Roshi Joan Halifax (Abbott, Upaya Zen Center), Jerry Colonna (CEO, Reboot), Paul Tudor Jones II (Founder, Tudor Investment Corporation), and others, as well as an incredible benefit concert starring Zac Brown Band with special guest Maggie Rogers. Panels covered an array of topics, including mental health and wellbeing, athletic performance and the mind/body connection, compassionate leadership, and much more. Experiences in meditation, yoga, sound therapy. See photos and videos of the event here. Learn more

Across the multi-millennial discourse on contemplative practices within Indian and Tibetan Buddhism, there is a pervasive tension that persists between practices that apply effort and those that are effortless. Recently this has emerged as an important framework for interdisciplinary engagement about enhanced cognitive performance. While presented as a binary in classical accounts—as if effort is a fixed and static quantity that is present or absent—it is better understood as a descriptive framework for a spectrum of contemplative dynamics that unfold during meditative experiences, and which can be intentionally enacted, or fostered, by different contemplative techniques. These practices are performed in ongoing and dynamic shifts across a spectrum of intensities of effort. This symposium furthered transdisciplinary research collaborations to advance a collective understanding of the underlying dynamics of contemplative practices by bringing together leading specialists for an exploration of these practices in light of contemporary philosophical inquiry and psychological research on effort and effortless, self-emergent experiences. Learn more