JCS: Thanks for joining us for this series called Contemplation Plus. What we’re interested in is contemplation and its myriad of expressions. It’s about contemplation and whatever that means to you at the intersection of an area that is the focus of your work. Let’s call that leadership, if we may. To get started and…
JCS: What does contemplation look like in Confucianism? BS: First, it’s important to note that the term Confucianism was popularized by nineteenth-century Christian missionaries during Western colonial expansion. In its original language, this tradition has long been called the Ru (儒) tradition. Naming it after Confucius was similar to labeling Islam Muhammadism—a way of categorizing non-Christian…
JCS: You work at this very interesting intersection between a variety of things: pain management, health, neuroscience, psychedelics research, phantom limb syndrome, but also, contemplation. How did you get to this point? Either in your training, in the research that you do, or just in your personal life—how did you get into this kind of…
JCS: How do you bring yogic traditions and psychedelic science together? What brought you to this point? SS: There are a number of different factors. Part of it came out of my own experiments with contemplative practices and with psychedelics, which, among other things, had played a part in my interest in the study of…
JCS: I’m really curious how you came to this intersection of Contemplative Studies and Health. You’ve largely been studying Buddhist medicine, is that right? What brought you here? Either professionally, personally, or all of the above. PS: I never felt like I fit into any discipline, from my college years up until the present, because…
Donata Schoeller is the co-founder and academic director of the European Erasmus training program Embodied Critical Thinking and Understanding (TECTU), and the principal investigator and conceptual director of the international research project “Freedom to make sense: embodied, experiential and mindful research.” She is the author of Close Talking and co-editor of Embodied Thinking in Research and Learning, Saying What We Mean, and Thinking Thinking.
Agnieszka Olszewska-Guizzo is the president and founder of NeuroLandscape and editor in chief of the Journal of Urban Design and Mental Health. She is the author of Neuroscience for Designing Green Spaces: Contemplative Landscapes (2023).
Michael Sheehy is Research Associate Professor and Director of Research at the Contemplative Sciences Center at University of Virginia where he is Principal at CIRCL Contemplative Innovation + Research Co-Lab and Editor in Chief of the Journal of Contemplative Studies.
Oludamini Ogunnaike is an Associate Professor of African Religious Thought and Democracy at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Deep Knowledge: Ways of Knowing in Sufism and Ifa, Two West African Intellectual Traditions (2020) and Poetry in Praise of Prophetic Perfection: West African Madīḥ Poetry and its Precedents (2020).
Conducted by Devin Zuckerman, a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Contemplative Sciences Center. JCS: So, let’s begin with the first question: What is contemplation? YC: I come from a village called El Paraíso Coelhá, which translates to “the wonderlands of flowing waters” or “the flowing spring,” in the highlands of the cloud forests of Chiapas,…
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