Skip to main content

About the Contemplative Sciences Center

A group of CSC staff at one of the first events held at the Contemplative Commons. View the entire CSC staff here. (Photo: Sanjay Suchak)

Mission & Overview

MISSION
The University of Virginia’s Contemplative Sciences Center (CSC) fuses contemplation, connection, and research to enhance flourishing. Situated within the Contemplative Commons, the center creates opportunities that center mind-body practices for well-being, insight, and compassion in all aspects of life—social, emotional, physical, and professional. An innovator in multidisciplinary collaboration, the center's CIRCL: Contemplative Innovation + Research Co-Lab, conducts research on initiatives that combine contemplative and experiential learning to generate novel solutions to a wide range of personal and global challenges.

Additionally, CSC works toward systems change to transform educational institutions and the policies, processes, and mindsets that support them to better prioritize, promote, and enable student well-being. The Contemplative Sciences Center believes that contemplation, connection, research, and system change are the keys to realize well-being on a personal, community-wide, and global scale.

Contemplative Commons

The Contemplative Commons is a multipurpose building located in the heart of UVA Grounds between Bavaro Hall and the Dell Pond. The 57,000-square-foot Contemplative Commons incorporates outdoor spaces, including contemplative gardens, a tree-lined courtyard, and a new green pedestrian bridge across Emmet Street. This new indoor-outdoor complex allows for immersive, experiential, and participatory forms of deep learning, and is dedicated to helping students flourish in all aspects of their lives at school and beyond. LEARN MORE

Contemplation

Contemplation is critical for fostering wellbeing and flourishing. We understand contemplation to be a diverse suite of practices that can be learned, as well as experiences that can be intentionally curated, to transform and enhance persons, communities, and the worlds in which we live. This includes, but is not limited to, practices that cultivate skillsets of greater attention, imagination, emotional balance, bodily awareness, and perspective taking, as well as experiences that shift our ordinary ways of living, such as awe, wonder, flow, and transcendence. LEARN MORE

Connection

Feeling socially connected to the people in our lives, as well as the non-human others, is important for both mental and physical health. We understand connection to be central to relationships and the cultivation of prosocial skills – empathy, compassion, emotional resilience, etc. – to be critical for personal and communal growth. More so, the importance of human connection grounds us in the irreplaceable value of genuine, face-to-face interactions in nurturing our wellbeing with others. 

In a world often characterized by rapid technological advancements and increasing isolation, interactions with others, empathy, and mutual support foster emotional resilience, personal growth, and a deeper understanding of ourselves and others. 

Research

The Contemplative Sciences Center pursues interdisciplinary contemplative research through its in-house lab, CIRCL: Contemplative Innovation + Research Co-Lab. CIRCL is a dynamic, experimental collaboratory at UVA's Contemplative Commons, and an interdisciplinary network of research faculty both within UVA and beyond, dedicated to investigating practices and experiences of human transformation. The lab brings in-house expertise on contemplation and research methods to initiate and catalyze
critical research from pilots to multi-year projects with collaborators to generate new knowledge and know-how. CIRCL supports stakeholders as partner-consultants in the generation of solutions that enhance flourishing in their target applications. CIRCL also provides space and services to host innovative interdisciplinary research for faculty collaborators at UVA and beyond. CSC also publishes the Journal of Contemplative Studies. 

The mission of the journal is to provide an academic forum for specialists to publish rigorous, innovative, humanities-based scholarship in Contemplative Studies and to promote interconnections across disciplines, perspectives, and traditions. The journal publishes original research and scholarship on topics related to the world’s contemplative practice traditions—historical and contemporary, religious, and secular. LEARN MORE