Mindful U at Naropa University

Alicia Patterson: Deep Wisdom & Healing of the Pelvic Bowl

April 22nd, 2019  |  49 mins 30 secs

alicia patterson, college, david devine, education, healing, health, higher education, meditation, mindful, mindfulness, naropa, naropa university, pelvic, pelvic bowl, pelvic floor, pelvic wisdom, psychology, somatic, somatic therapy, therapy, university, wisdom, women, womens health

"The pelvic floor muscle tissues are connected very intricately and beautifully, and I feel like it can be complex in some ways to the abdominal muscles. And I think of the pelvic floor as the foundation of a building, it's like the ground level of the body. If the foundation of a building is off or suffering or it's not right, the whole rest of the building is off. So, that's my best metaphor is that the pelvic floor is our foundation. It's so connected to our legs and our feet and the way that we walk and move and dance through the world. And it supports everything above it. So, the reproductive organs, the digestive system, all the organs, the heart, the voice, the throat, and the brain are supported by the pelvic floor. And I've had huge changes in my digestion and rewiring of my nervous system and real cognitive and mood balances from working with my pelvic floor that before, I was trying a million different things to feel better. For me, the pelvic floor is like the Holy Grail."

Rick Snyder: Decisive Intuition, Using your Gut Instincts to Make Smart Business Decisions

April 15th, 2019  |  49 mins 48 secs

buddhism, buddhist, business, college, compassion, contemplative, david devine, decisive intuition, education, higher education, intuition, mindful, mindful u, mindfulness, naropa, naropa university, rick snyder, smart business, university

"Emotional intelligence has completely revolutionized our lives and our business space. And because that's there there's now this foundation around intuitive intelligence. So, this is the next nuance that I'm really passionate to bring in, is that emotional intelligence is foundational and key. But it's not the whole story of how we discern information and how we navigate the world, even though emotions are supercritical and a big part of that. Intuitive intelligence also weaves in a greater, wider array of data information that we have to be able to learn to discern. So, it's even a little more refined in some ways. So that's what I'm really excited about is bringing this next wave to the business base and then also beyond that too. So that people give themselves more permission to trust themselves on a fundamental level. And bring their empowerment and their gifts forward without apology."

Venerable Pannavati: Hearing the Cries of the World & Responding with Compassion

April 8th, 2019  |  53 mins 48 secs

awareness, buddhism, care, compassion, david devine, devine, fierce compassion, higher education, love, meditation, mindfulness, naropa, naropa university, practice, university, venerable pannavati

"Meditation is so important—particularly training and concentration. How to steady and fix the mind until conceptual thoughts fall away. We live so much in our conceptualizing nature that we can't imagine life without that. But when you start doing this practice, you find out that you can conceptualize, and you cannot. So, learning how to drop into that stillness, as the Buddha calls it, until you come to the absolute stilling of all thought. We think well then, there's nothing. Yes, there is something beyond that, you could never see it before because you were caught in the cycle of conceptualizing. But the other side that the Buddha calls meditation—a pleasant, abiding here and now, touching kind of contentment and peace that the world didn't give you. So, the world can't take it away. But what he called practice was something entirely different. We just need to do more practice, and the practice is not to sit on the pillow. Sitting on a pillow is sitting on a pillow. But to practice is how we handle ourselves in every moment of our waking day—when one is accosting you, taking what is yours and what is criticizing you."

Nashalla Nyinda: Tibetan & Asian Medicine in Relationship with Western Biomedicine

April 1st, 2019  |  49 mins 45 secs

acu pressure, asian medicine, ayurvedic, college, herbalism, higher education, medicine, meditation, mindfulness, naropa, naropa university, nashalla nyinda, tibetan medicine, university, western medicine

"It's said in Tibetan medicine that you have to have all five elements plus karma in order to be incarnated at all. So, even to obtain the precious human body you have to have all five elements in karma. So you're going to choose certain parents and situations. They're going to give you some genetic factors which are going to influence your inner elements and then also you're going to have the diet and the behavior that your mother has during your pregnancy is going to influence it. The outer environment is going to influence it and then very early on in life -- your life situations are also going to influence it. So, family systems, psychology, all of that has an impact on the choices we make. So, somebody could be inherently one type of being and perhaps their family system either didn't recognize or support that and so they made a choice in order to compensate on a psychological level."

Encore Presentation: Brigitte Mars - Herbal Health and Healing

March 25th, 2019  |  27 mins 25 secs

brigitte mars, edible, education, health and healing, herbal, herbalism, higher education, medicinal, naropa, naropa university, wellness

Naropa University professor Brigitte Mars leads students and the overall community in understanding the value of herbs and plants to the body, the mind, and more. Today's episode focuses on Brigitte's work with Naropa students.

Sue Wallingford: Healing Generational Wounds Through Art Therapy

March 18th, 2019  |  42 mins 48 secs

art, art therapy, college, education, healing, higher education, khmer rouge, naropa, naropa university, psychology, sue wallingford, therapy, university

"Creativity is inherent in us as human beings. I think that we've, in some ways, lost the connection and the right to have our own creativity and our own artistry. For me, just touching into that in of itself is healing. It also takes you into a different part of your brain. It accesses different parts of your psyche and your spirituality and your soul in a way that maybe verbal therapies don't quite touch. And so, it's a deeper more integrated avenue dealing with you know whatever it is that you're working with."

Holistic Life Foundation: A Teacher's Approach to Mindfulness in Baltimore Public Schools

March 11th, 2019  |  43 mins 36 secs

baltimore, contemplative, higher education, holistic life foundation, meditation, mindfulness, naropa, naropa university, practice, public schools, teachers

"You know, we're doing this job dealing with people's problems and not necessarily giving them advice, but just allowing them to tap into their own thoughts and weigh out their own options to create decisions. The more you hold on—you attach yourself to an outcome, then that becomes stressful and then it's not genuine anymore. It's also stressful on the other end of the person that is dealing with the actual problem. So just knowing that you may not see the results—but one thing I have noticed is the maturity that came from my students that I've interacted with—the same situation, but a different outcome of the consequence whenever you're redirected."

Encore Presentation - Dr. Itai Ivtzan: The Discovery of Meaning and Purpose

December 24th, 2018  |  38 mins 8 secs

karma, naropa, psychology

Naropa presents some of the most popular and moving episodes of MindfulU from 2018, including "The Discovery of Meaning and Purpose, with Dr. Itai Ivtzan."

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 narrow our experience. When these two disciplines are married, however, we can achieve an incredible explosion of potentials to live life as fully as possible.

Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni: "One Drop of Love"

September 4th, 2018  |  36 mins 13 secs

census, mixed race, naropa, race

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 people feel uncomfortable with it, or maybe they're shy because of the stigma of being in a theater. But I got the sense after being here at Naropa for about a day that this might be a very embracing community–and that's exactly what it was. Still, something that I really appreciate about this community was its natural interaction–a kind of vocal interaction–which I don't always get. Naropa was just right there along with me, laughing out loud, saying "Hmmmmm...," and just offering both a wise and calming response."

Olivia Meikle: Gender and Women's Studies at Naropa

June 4th, 2018  |  33 mins 27 secs

gender studies, naropa, women's studies

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 teach a gender studies class effectively any way but contemplatively. All of the best practices of contemplative education are what make gender studies unique, and they also make gender studies possible. Approaching this from a lecture standpoint , or from any other standpoint than just really being very aware of your students, being invested in them - not just intellectually but emotionally - is not going to end in success. Students are doing so much hard work, so much hard emotional work. They're breaking into traumas, trying to correct ways of seeing things they've experienced their whole lives. There is going to be serious emotional labor with these students, and Naropa is a wonderful place to do this.