Mindful U at Naropa University
Thoughts and Instruction on Mindfulness in Higher Education
Displaying Episode 1 - 10 of 27 in total of Mindful U at Naropa University with the tag “naropa”.
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109. The Journey of a Poet
May 22nd, 2025 | 56 mins 51 secs
ecopoetics, naropa, naropa university, poet, poetry, summer writing program, writing
Born in California on Walt Whitman’s birthday, Eleni Sikelianos is a poet, writer, and "a master of mixing genres." She grew up in earshot of the ocean, in small coastal towns near Santa Barbara, and has since lived in San Francisco, New York, Paris, Athens (Greece), Boulder (Colorado), and Providence. Deeply engaged with ecopoetics, her work takes up urgent concerns of environmental precarity and ancestral lineages.
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108. The Path and Craft of Fiction Writing
May 1st, 2025 | 53 mins 2 secs
author, brown university, fiction, naropa, poetry, storytelling, summer writing program
Laird Hunt—author, professor at Brown University, alumnx of Naropa’s MFA Creative Writing program, Naropa Summer Writing Program faculty—takes us on the journey of finding his writing voice, the experiences that allowed him to become a published author and teacher, and what he believes about what it takes to make it as a writer.
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96. Barbara Bash: Heaven, Earth and Humanity—What Calligraphy Can Teach Us About Each Moment
May 10th, 2023 | 58 mins 40 secs
art, big brush stroke, buddhist studies, calligraphy, contemplative art, integration, meditation, naropa, naropa university
We are happy to have Spring 2023 Lenz Distinguished Lecturer Barbara Bash join us to discuss her creative journey as a calligraphic artist. In this episode, she discusses everything from Western calligraphy's precision to Big Brushstroke calligraphy's spontaneity and what unites them. She also discusses the three primary principles of contemplative art: Heaven, Earth, and Humanity and how these become gateways that attune you to the aliveness of the moment. After the episode, find more on BarbaraBash.com.
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95. Valeria McCarroll, PhD: Somadelics, Pursuing Life with Psychedelic Support & Intentional Integration
February 27th, 2023 | 49 mins 5 secs
buddhist studies, integration, meditation, naropa, naropa university, phenomena, psychedelic assisted therapy, psychedelic medicine, psychedelics, somatic psychology, therapy, transpersonal psychology, trauma healing
Valeria McCarroll, PhD, joins us to discuss Somadelics, Pursuing Life with Psychedelic Support & Intentional Integration in this thought-provoking episode. Also discussed is being in 'right relationship' with the medicine, trauma responses, honoring the medicine's lineage, and transformational justice. After the episode, find more on ValeriaMcCarroll.com and Somadelics.com.
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94. Dr. Jennifer Bacon: Sacred Activism and Educating the Whole Child
February 13th, 2023 | 45 mins 3 secs
activism, anti-racism, equality, mindful, naropa
Dr. Jennifer Bacon is a strong proponent of taking action in activism. That is why she created the course "Sacred Activism" at Naropa - to empower a community to make strides in equality, anti-racism, and social justice. Her children's book, I Am an Antiracist Superhero! will be published by Bala Kids in 2023.
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89. Jordan Quaglia: The Science of Mindfulness Training
August 29th, 2022 | 58 mins 25 secs
cognitive, mind, mindfulness, naropa, psychology
How do you really know if mindfulness is improving your mind? Jordan Quaglia, PhD, Director of Naropa’s Cognitive and Affective Science Lab, answers this and more on the science of the human psyche in this episode.
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80. Anne Lamott and Neal Allen: Conversation for Shapes of Truth: Discover God Inside of You
July 29th, 2021 | 57 mins 9 secs
buddhism, buddhism lessons, contemplative, contemplative literature, divine connection, divinity, education, gender, healing journey, higher education, illusion, naropa, naropa university, patriarchy, schoalrs, self-help books, spiritual authors, spiritual literation, understanding truth
In this special evening event, hosted on June 3, 2021, by Naropa Extended Campus, spiritual coach and writer Neal Allen is joined in conversation by his wife, best-selling author Anne Lamott. Allen’s new book, Shapes of Truth: Discover God Inside You, provides a contemplative method for discovering one’s inner nature that is influenced by Eastern traditions, especially Sufism and Buddhism, as well as contemporary psychodynamics. Lamott’s best-selling spirituality books often explore a personal Christianity that is removed from the currently popular doctrinal evangelism. Together they discuss their collaborative writing life, practical approaches to spiritual practice, freedom from suffering, and much more.
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78. Charles Eisenstein: The Origin of Wrongness
February 17th, 2020 | 45 mins 53 secs
buddhism, buddhist inspired, charles eisenstein, david devine, education, good intention, higher education, inner self, inner work, inspiration, intention, meditation, mindfulness, naropa, naropa university, origin of wrongness, reflection, self development, university, war, wrongness
"I read very widely and was trying to put the pieces together to understand this lifelong question that I had carried. What is the origin of the wrongness in the world, which is presented to us as a series of fragmented isolated atrocities and injustices and horrors -- without any synthesizing narrative that explains why the world is the way that it is? And I really wanted to understand so that I wouldn't be part of maintaining the status quo through pursuing insufficiently deep solutions that may be actually part of the problem. I think a lot of our solutions are part of the problem -- or you could even say our solution templates -- I mean one of them is the war on evil. So, I wanted to -- to get really deep and eventually I came to understand that all of the crises and horrors that we see in the world are an outgrowth of the mythology of civilization. The story of separation is what I call it, which basically says it answers the most fundamental questions that human beings ask. Who are you? Who am I? What is important? How is life to be lived? What is real? What is possible? How does the world work? And our culture answers that in a certain way. And other cultures have answered it different ways."
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79. Anthony Gallucci: Re-establishing Masculinity
February 17th, 2020 | 41 mins 25 secs
cisgender, contemplative, education, gender, higher education, masculine, masculinity, mindfulness, misogynistic, misogyny, naropa, naropa university, patriarchy, toxic masculinity, university
"There's gender identity, which isn't actually a problem. It's when it's forced into a limited paradigm or spectrum it can be an issue or when it's forced into a hierarchy. I see us eventually eliminating the hierarchy within these systems of identity and becoming more for lack of a better term, more merit based in our assessment of people's qualities. The re-establishing masculinity group believes that at Naropa to be foresighted and to support these movements we need to begin to get out of the way sort of speak and actually become allies to the anti-misogynistic movements that are occurring in our world. And to do that we ought to be -- we being people whom identify as masculine ought to be not disempowered to engage in that work. We ought to be empowered in our opinion to engage in that work. And the offering that's available of how masculinity is defined and actualized too often is non virtuous and not empowering."
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77. Charlotte Rotterdam: Finding Courage in Contemplative Education
February 17th, 2020 | 47 mins 38 secs
charlotte rotterdam, college, contemplative, contemplative education, courage, david devine, education, higher education, meditation, mindful, mindfulness, naropa, naropa university, university
"Absolutely. You know we might have an idea about something, but then when you begin to express it from a creative place it's almost like you have to feel into it. If I want to write a poem about sadness it's not just about my ideas about sadness. At some point as I'm writing I need to stop and feel into what does sadness feel like? And then I might even think about a very specific situation in my life that brings up sadness. And then what arises from that place as a poem is coming from a non-conceptual place. Non-conceptual knowing and yet I've expressed something and I might even express it in words like with a poem. So, what we're trying to do in contemplative education is to bring both of those together. So, it's not in spite of conceptual knowing -- concepts are great, thinking is great -- but that there are other ways of knowing that are equally important and maybe if we bring them all together then there's a richness of knowing that begins to emerge."