Reflections on Sogyal Rinpoche and circumstances that allow for abuse to arise in Buddhist teachers in general

  Introduction

A few months ago I participated in a documentary by Jaap Verhoeven that investigates the situation around Sogyal Rinpoche, my Buddhist teacher, who has been accused of physical, psychological and sexual abuse--which was later corroborated by an independent investigation--and who passed away about 1.5 years ago. Now mentioning "abuse" and "my teacher" in the same sentence may seem confusing, but in this blog I hope to show you how it is not that simple.

Participating in the documentary intense interview which lasted about 3.5 hours, but of course only a few minutes made it to the documentary. The documentary came out in the Netherlands a month ago, and very recently also internationally. Although the documentary I think does a good job at looking at the situation from several different angles, I feel like it lacks a bit of analysis of the complex circumstances that ked to this situation. Of course you can only do so much in the space of 1.5 hours. Nevertheless, in this blog I would like to share more of my reflections on this topic, because I feel like we are not done with it yet--it is a very challenging problem for Buddhism and for society at large. I do not claim I have the wisdom, but hopefully after having wrestled with these questions for a few years I would like to share my thoughts in a bit more detail than what was shown in the documentary.

The documentary starts with the interviewees discussing what brought them to Sogyal Rinpoche. In my case, I read the Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, written by Sogyal Rinpoche, and it completely swept me off my feet: this was such a clear and accessible introduction into Buddhism that gave me practical tools for handling my emotions. And it still does, even to this day. Over the years of receiving his teachings, I have also developed a strong connection several of his teachers, including Dudjom Rinpoche, Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche and Nyoshul Khen Rinpoche. This moves me even now to tears. Studying and practising in his organization Rigpa has given me tremendous meaning in my life, and a fundamental trust in the goodness of the buddha nature that underlies all of life and death. This trust has been fundamental to me developing some degree of self-confidence and fearlessness, and a sense of just being OK in myself. It should also be mentioned that over the years, Sogyal Rinpoche was able to inspire thousands of students to put in tremendous efforts in building outer and inner temples. And even though the latest scandals have been painful, they have also been a tremendous teacher for myself and many others I know. In the spirit of gratitude for all I have received I think it is important to write this piece: to investigate what I think is going on, and to also think about how we can move on so more people can benefit from the tremendous good things that Sogyal Rinpoche has brought, while preventing the bad things that have clearly happened from occurring.

I think one of the most inspiring things that Sogyal Rinpoche did is connecting his students to great teachers. Here is a wonderful example.

Analysis

The first thing that I think is very important to point out is that abuse by teachers takes place in many high-pressure situations. The intense student-teacher relationship that is crucial for Tibetan Buddhism is one such example, but similar situations have been reported in academia, ballet, as well as gymnastics, to name a few. All of these situations are characterized by a strong power imbalance and a tremendous dedication on the part of typically both student and teacher to what is being studied. A very interesting video on this topic in the domain of ballet is a talk by Theresa Ruth Howard who compares ballet to a cult. So it is too simple to blame it all on a single teacher individual--a large part of it is the culture around it that allows abuse to happen.

Another factor is that in an effort to push the student beyond their limitations, teachers sometimes resort to harsh means. I haven't quite figured out whether this is good or not. I know that in my experience a mild version of this has worked: I remember one day my ballet teacher was yelling at me for not remembering the combination properly, which occurred because I was completely exhausted. But these remarks still made me able to remember the combinations and really pay attention to an extent that I did not think possible. In an interesting film about this topic, Whiplash, the teacher says that he uses methods of physical and psychological abuse because he does not want to deprive the world of the artistic talents of the student, which needs to be cultivated through an amount of blood, sweat and tears that is almost not humanly possible. On the other hand, we never hear about the students in such systems that drop out and may be damaged for life, and never love their art/spirituality/science anymore because of these abusive experiences. Would a good teacher know what students can be pushed without serious damage? Would the student know what they get into before they enter such a relationship, as Dzongsar Khyentse suggests for Vajrayana?

Another relation consideration is that the position of a spiritual teacher in general is very challenging. A book that lays this out very eloquently is Sex and the spiritual teacher. The spiritual teacher is in a very lonely position, and has tremendous power that is not kept much in check. They often do not have equals to check in with and they are subject to many students that adore them and project all kinds of things on them. In addition, they have a tremendous opportunity to make use of their students, exactly because their students adore them. Finally, they have sexual drives, like every human, and all the people around them are typically their students. This makes it difficult to have equal sexual relationships. Of course these are not justifications for sexual misconduct and abuse, but at the same time, they make it a bit more understandable.

A further contributor to the arising of this situation is that given the same situation, different individuals can have wildly different perceptions of it. This is a fundamental principle of cognition that is also known as predictive perception. We never perceive anything as neutral, but constantly make predictions about what we will see, hear, and so on, and these color these perceptions. I think we can all see that happen in the current pandemic, where people who do not believe in COVID seem to almost be living in an alternate reality. A good article that goes into these cognitive biases is this.  Similarly, I feel that the experiences people have about Sogyal Rinpoche and Rigpa of the very same situation are wildly different, likely due to the cognitive biases with which they perceived the situation.

In the context of Rigpa, when I believed that Sogyal Rinpoche was a fantastic teacher, I was blind to his faults. Moreover, whenever I had any doubts, I felt I should not focus on those and instead give the situation a chance, because maybe these were special methods from Tibetan culture. How can I know what is the best way of teaching? And this was further reinforced by people who were humiliated publically, and then confessed that it helped them work with their minds and through their traumas. From the stories we have heard now in the investigation report and beyond, it seems like this was often a bit too optimistic. But I think we all wanted to believe it. This was further reinforced by reactions of Sogyal Rinpoche and the people around him on the scandals: they were attributed to people not understanding what a profound thing he was doing. According to this explanation, their mind was not spiritual enough and they were too much into their worldly concerns. With the knowledge I have today I think this was a very harmful tactic.

While I do not exclude the possibility that a teacher can use seemingly abusive techniques to help the student go beyond their blockages, I think that in that case it is the teacher's job to know whether it is helping or harming the student. A famous example that is often cited here is that of Marpa and Milarepa: Marpa made his student go through tremendous hardships but eventually Milarepa became one of the most amazing saints. But Milarepa was just one out of many students, and here is seems like dozens if not hundreds of students have been suffering from abuse. His Holiness the Dalai Lama has also mentioned in an assembly of Western teachers that such "crazy wisdom" only becomes relevant when the teacher him- or herself also shows tremendous obvious realization such as being able to fly or walk through walls.

A final thought that is relevant to the analysis of the situation is the idea that a genius in one domain cannot be at the same time completely dysfunctional in another domain, which was evident for example in the case of Harvey Weinstein or Michael Jackson. I think seeing that this is possible has been one of the most important lessons of the current situation for me. In my mind, Sogyal Rinpoche was able to impart some tremendous wisdom onto his students, but at the same time also had some very dysfunctional aspects to his personality, that were probably also amplified by the people surrounding him, rather than being reduced. For example, I can easily imagine that himself being brought up by a teacher who beats students, it was easy for him to think that this is a good way of teaching, even though in the context of the West at this time, it is not really (and there is a lot of scientific evidence that also supports that point). Then if those closely around him did not strongly counter that this did not work, probably made these practices going from bad to worse. This is often a mechanism at play: first a person does something somewhat questionable, such as making an inappropriate remark. The next time, they go a little further, maybe giving them a soft slap, and before you know it, it has become normal to abuse.

What can we do? (some initial ideas)

First of all, I think it is helpful to start with apologies--acknowledging things have gone wrong, so there is a space for making amends (as we also learn in the Vajrasattva teachings). I myself am sorry for believing in the system and not standing up when people were being publically humiliated, for not asking further when they said they were OK after this experience (I must emphasized here that I myself never had any bad experiences with Sogyal Rinpoche). While we can not change the past, we can learn from it to prevent such harm from occurring in the future. Maybe one idea would be to make amends by for example establishing a fund to help those who were harmed get therapy.

In terms of learning, I think various things can be changed. First of all, something that already has been happening in Rigpa and could be further strengthened is moving towards a more democratic leadership model. His Holiness the Dalai Lama has been very much supporting this movement in Tibetan society (see for example his comments in this movie). Really giving space to many different voices and debate can help prevent abusive situations because those tend to arise when no-one dares to speak up or question behaviours. There is some movement towards that in Rigpa, where the different national organizations are now a federation, rather than being governed by a single teacher at the top. Moreover, there is no single teacher anymore who decides things, but rather a group who give advice to another group of Rigpa leaders. Of course this is still not perfect because those groups can be still engaging in group-think, but it is certainly better than the more dictatorial system there was before.

On top of that, maybe it can also be helpful that in every Buddhist sangha, there are a few members from another, closely-related sangha (e.g., in the context of Rigpa, this would be members of the sanghas of Tsoknyi Rinpoche or Mingyur Rinpoche or Khandro Rinpoche). They would not be students of the main teacher and instead they would be there to observe the student-teacher dynamics and ask questions when the group dynamics go from healthy devotion to group pressure and abusive situations. I think this kind of an inside-outside voice would have enough grounding in the tradition but also not be as bound to the teacher as to be blinded. More communication between sanghas can go a long way, I think.

On top of this I think we all need to be trained in tools for intervening in questionable situations, for example through active bystander training.

We should also stop with the reasoning that "if you cannot take this, you are not spiritually advanced enough"--a storyline that has been held--often implicitly--in Rigpa. This kind of a story is not taking people seriously and undermining them, a situation referred to as "gaslighting". This prevents people from feeling safe, and also from voicing their dissent, which then means that they then cannot indicate it when a particular teaching method does not work for them. In this way, even if the teacher has the best of intentions, they cannot get proper feedback about what works for the student.

 

Finally, I think that despite everything, the practice of guru devotion is a very powerful one. I hope that it will be possible to have a very honest and heartfelt discussion about how it can be practised in a Western context without engaging in spiritual bypassing and losing our own ground. I would love for such a conversation to be really taking place from a ground of practice, not just intellectual reasoning. I imagine a retreat where we practice meditation and guru yoga, and then have open dialogues about these topics: what does the practice mean? Where are the dangers? How can we hold the authentic lineage but also create an environment that is as safe as possible? I think there are no clear-cut answers here, but I am sure we will make progress if we put our heads and hearts in it.

May these thoughts  be a little help in maintaining this precious tradition while also preventing more suffering, and may it open the dialogue on how to continue. I apologize in advance for all the hurt this writing may cause. It is my sincere attempt at making sense of the situation and thinking about how we can move forward to address this problem--because it is not new, and not unique to Rigpa, as is also mentioned in the documentary and many things that have been written about it--so now is a chance to learn.

PS. Two resources that also informed my thinking were: How did it happen blog, the book Fallout by Thalia Newland. I don't necessarily agree with everything that was written in these resources but it did help shape my thinking.

What are you longing for?

This was the main question that pervaded this past weekend, while I attended the Mind and Life Europe retreat, led by Martijn van Beek and Hanneli Agotsdatter. It was quite an amazing experience. The retreat was a contemplative way of reflecting on how we lead our lives as academics and practitioners. It was one of the most wonderful things I have done in a long time. There is nothing as joyful as pursuing something meaningful, even when it is hard. Let me share some aspects of the experience.

We started on Friday night with gentle meditation and yoga exercises, after which Martijn gave a short lecture on the idea of a "vita contemplativa", a contemplative life. This idea is about how we can bring a spiritual dimension into everything we do, not just a few minutes of meditation or mindfulness on the cushion. We ended the evening with a beautiful meditation practice in which we virtually connected our hearts to the middle of the earth and to each other.

The next morning, we continued with the meditation and yoga practices, but then deepened the contemplation into a question that was quite a bombshell: what am I really longing for? And in addition to that, what are my talents and on the other hand the things that I would like to cultivate. I realized that I had neglected this question about longing--being in a stable job for the last ten years. But also in my spiritual life, it is so easy to just get stuck with the practices you are doing, instead of thinking about why you are doing those. It is so easy to get caught up in the doing mode, rather than being aware of why you are doing those things and focus a bit more on the being mode. During the retreat we did quite a few journalling exercises to ponder these questions, and then we shared with each other in breakout rooms.

I was blown away by the wisdom in the group. I had many insights driven by these conversations. One of the things I was thinking about was that while I love ballet practice dearly, the physical feats achieved by this will never last. The only thing that is a meaningful product out of this pursuit is the mental work. But that in itself is not to be underestimated. Metaphorically, it allows me to connect with the wisdom in my body, and to dance with the open questions in my life.

In the afternoon of the second day, we had a good conversation about how to put these things into practice in our everyday work life. Stefano Poletti and myself got the precious opportunity to share our paths. It was amazing to reflect on what I have done over the years, and to realize the wealth of experiences I have had the chance to accumulate.

On the last day, we then brought back this richness of experience into the daily life. How can we continue this? For myself, I would like to really bring a few minutes of meditation practice in the middle of my day so I get the space to see what is going on, and tune in with any gaps that may be occurring (that is my personal biggest gap). I also hope I will be able to remind myself of loving kindness in the many meetings I have during the day, to make these contemplative values more of a continuum. Finally, I think I need to do this practice more often, and especially to do a short retreat to reflect on what projects I need to let go of, because I tend to overcommit myself. As Gabor Karsai wisely said: we tend to focus on the things we produce, but fail to notice the side effects of these productions--the effects on our health, the effects on our family that is ignored and so on. I ended with the reflection that when you are running too fast, you may miss the goal or the point of it all. Hopefully writing this down will help me to remember this a bit better.

Saying goodbye to 2020

I am writing this on January 1st, 2021. Who would have thought how our lives have changed over the past year! In the beginning of 2020, I still had a whole lot of travel lined up, going back to India to work with my Tibetan monk colleagues from Sera Jey monastic university, giving a ballet performance in India, and more. And here we are: I have never been as long home as in the past year. I am giving talks, lessons and even ballet performances from my living room, attending conferences and summer schools virtually, and also organizing quite a few of them.

Picture by Anna van der Meijden (https://www.instagram.com/annamaypine/?hl=en) 

The year started with a wonderful trip to Vienna, to attend a Mind & Life Europe vision meeting, at which time the first news about a virus from China started to emerge, which was also starting to wreak havoc in Italy. Now my brother lived in Italy at the time, not far from Milan, and I had planned to visit him at the beginning of March. Until the last moment I was debating whether I should visit him, because I was afraid they would close of the area and I would get stuck. In a leap of faith, I ended up still going, and it was the weirdest journey in my life. I have never seen airports that quiet. I have never been as careful about hygiene as then, wearing gloves in public places and washing my hands properly for the first time in my life. I made it out successfully, and then entered a very stressful phase of my life, because I suddenly was shunned by people for being a virus risk. I was surprised at how much this affected me--I think maybe because it brought back painful childhood memories in which I used to be shunned by my classmaters and always be an outsider.

By the time my possibly infectioous time had finished, the country entered lockdown and life changed again. Everything suddenly was online, and because I live alone, this meant that most of the time my only contact with "real people" would be my grocery shopping and my weekly runs with Stefani Nellen (who is the best storyteller ever!). Yet, at the same time, this also brought me a lot: I realized how interconnected we all are by the internet. Because now all the ballet classes were online, I started to reconnect with dear teachers in India and the USA. This was incredibly inspiring. Also, seeing the amount of creativity in the arts sector, which immediately started to offer ballet classes online on instagram and youtube, was stunning. I have also watched live-streamed performances, which were surprisingly wonderful. I even watched while live-commenting on it through WhatsApp conversations with a friend.

I also felt very much connected to my friends and family in other countries (despite the fact that for the first time in my life borders became a thing). I never really felt alone, maybe because I was talking to my computer all day ;-) For the first time in years I started calling my parents regularly, and that renewed connection has been gratifying. On top of that, the covid situation has made my awareness of impermanence much more embodied. Never yet has life changed so quickly. One day you can be giving a ballet performance, the next day you can enter a lockdown. I am grateful for how daily reflections on impermanence in the context of my Buddhist practice have already prepared me for that a little, but still, the understanding has significantly deepened in the past year.

Another treasure given to me by 2020 is learning many new skills. I love learning things (which is why I enjoy being an academic). Pivoting teaching online means that you have to completely reorganize your teaching, which is at once exciting and time-consuming. On top of that, student supervision has become more time-consuming, because understandably each of them was struggling with a whole life placed upside-down, so I felt like a counsellor at times. Nevertheless, this was also rewarding, because I felt like I could actually do something. 

I felt tremendously grateful for my Buddhist practice, which had already prepared me for dealing with change, and encouraged me to look for meaning within, rather than outside. As my Tibetan monk colleagues said at the beginning of the pandemic: now is not the time to travel outside, now is the time to travel inside. Wise words indeed. Now of course this is easy for me to say, because I still have a job, and I am already fairly introverted, so staying at home was not too difficult. This is a nice moment to bring to mind the next slogan in the #lojongchallenge: slogan 37 says "don't make gods into demons." It is really important to ensure that your Buddhist practice does not make you more proud. So, I am not writing this to show off. Just like everyone else, I am muddling around, but i do find that reconnecting with the fundamental goodness of my buddha nature, and the buddha nature of all beings helps me to maintain meaning in the midst of the change and chaos that 2020 created.

So, I would like to end this blog by remembering that while 2020 brought many challenges and completely changed everyone's life, it also brought new opportunities: I learnt a lot, I developed a solid ballet practice at home, I connected with people across the globe in my work, Buddhist practice and ballet, and went back to the essence of life. I hope that in the new year, I will be able to continue learning, remember to take moments to remember gratitude, and continue to connect to people across the globe, online and hopefully also in-person. All my best wishes for the new year!

Step-by-step tips on how to transform your course for online teaching

Like the rest of the world, I am teaching online these days. While my first online teaching back in April was mostly just a repeat of the normal courses in an online format, I decided to completely restructure my course Data Analytics & Communication for the current quarter, to make it more amenable to online teaching. Thanks to a wonderful course by our Education Support and Innovation (shoutout to Tracy Poelzer!), it was actually much less intimidating than expected.

The first thing I did to transform the course to an online format was to divide it up into online folders corresponding to the course weeks, and within every week a series of steps. To make this insightful, I plotted all the steps into a jamboard. This allowed me to quickly keep track of the different components of my course. Every week starts with a short welcome video in which I explain the students what the week is about. I make these videos in loom, a very easy to use video recording program.

Sample screen shot from my course environment with the folders belonging to the weeks on the left bottom and some of the first steps in the centre.

Because this covid time is very hard for everyone, I decided to provide my students with maximal flexibility by only having a single lecture every week. All the other lecture material consists of pre-recorded mini-lectures on loom. So every week I go through my original course lectures, extract the main topics, and make a 5-10 minute video on each topic (see for example this video on reproducibility versus replicability). I can reuse most of my slides because loom allows you to present the slides while you talk. I then link all these videos to Blackboard, which hosts the course. The added benefit of this is that loom records the number of views of each video, so I get a sense of how many students are following the lectures.

I have transformed the live lecture substantially to centre around student interaction. Again, I use the topics I identified from my original lectures to come up with classroom activities. These activities can include a poll. Typically I start the class off with a fun icebreaker poll, for example asking the students to pin a needle on a map indicating where they are listening in from. Another popular activity is putting students into breakout rooms of 4 or 5 and discussing a question or having a debate. I then ask about the outcomes of this debate using a fun website called Wheel of Names, in which I insert the group numbers to randomly choose a group to report. Another popular tool is to ask students to brainstorm together on a jamboard, for example, "what is your advice for producing good graphics?", which requires the students to mobilise all their knowledge from the lectures, the course readings and their own experience. A final fun lecture activity is to invite an expert on a topic (e.g., who has written a paper the students have read) and hold a kind of talkshow in which I as a lecturer moderate the discussion (in this case a good source of questions were the comments made by the students on the social reading platform Perusall that I use in my course).

A final change I made to the online course is to make the tutorials more explicitly social. Rather than them being just an education activity, I also invite students to come to the tutorials to have a chat with each other or with the teaching assistants. Rather than having the tutorials within the Blackboard environment, we moved them to gather.town, a fun online environment that kind of looks like an old computer game. In this environment, you only see and hear individuals when you are sufficiently close to them, kind of like in the real world. This would allow students to naturally work together on assignments, and walk up to the teaching assistant if they have questions. There are even some games to play in this environment created by my awesome colleague Martijn Wieling!

Screenshot from the gather.town environment

Of course a big challenge is the final exam. When students do final exams online you have to assume that they have all information available and communicate with each other through the class WhatsApp. Consequently, I decided to make my exam, which usually involves knowledge questions about the material and interpretation of data analyses, to be about the actual analysis of real-life datasets. Different students get assigned different datasets and answer different questions about these datasets. Hopefully this will make the exam fair and also a good reflection of the students' knowledge and skills. And most importantly, prepare them well to do data analysis and interpretation in the real world. 

My working-from-home strategies

It's been 7 months since the start of the pandemic and working from home. I thought it would be nice to share how I have been holding up with that. For me there are several tricks that I learnt:

- start the day with a little dance. I have several choreographies that I like to practise for upcoming (we hope!) performances. These are nice little dances, but everything can work. I think this helps to nicely demarcate your working day. Also, remember how we used to write in our poetry friend albums: "begin the day with a little dance, begin the day with a smile, whoever is happy in the morning, smiles the whole day"

- sit on a slightly unstable cushion that requires you to make micro-movements all the time and thereby keeps your spine mobile. I am using a balance cushion to sit on, which also has little spiky things that serve as a great "butt-massage" to calm these overworked ballet turnout muscles ;-)

- insert a short mindfulness break. Just practise for a few minutes, either with an app such as ==InsightTimer or ==Headspace, or just by yourself. It is a great tool to let whatever you are working on settle and also sometimes this brings to mind things you have almost forgotten.

notice spiky cushion on the chair

- sometimes when I am attending a meeting where no camera is required, I like to do some stretches during the meeting so I can keep moving. See the short video clip as an example

- finally, I like to take little dance breaks. Sometimes I just put on some music I like and dance for a few minutes. Sometimes I use a bit more structure and follow a short 5-minute workout. My favourite is this one from Lazy Dancer Tips.

I hope this helps. How are you doing with #workingfromhome?

Risky mindfulness business

Lojong slogan 36 is "Don't act with a twist." This slogan refers to misusing the practices that are intended to transform your mind. In today's world, there is quite some discussion about this point. Is meditation practice only used to feel less stressed, or even worse, to feel you are a good human being because you are meditating. Sometimes meditation is used to signal virtue, especially on social media. But, to put it in the words of John Dunne, the real signal of the meditation practices working is not how much you practise or what special experiences you have, but rather, whether you are less of a jerk.

I think that it is very easy when you are meditating, to think that that is the solution to everything, and that you are better than everyone else because you practise. Of course that runs completely counter to the idea of the meditation practice, which is to cultivate an open mind and humility. The challenge is to stay curious and open, and able to be with whatever arises. I think there are plenty opportunities for this in this time of COVID (not to mention the upcoming US elections!), during which there are so many strong opinions that often cause rifts in relationships. Is it possible to step away from your feeling that you know better and instead practise true curiosity into the thoughts and feelings of others, without being swept away by those. I find that when I manage to do that, there is often a lot more commonality with the other person, and often they then can become more open to solid arguments (and maybe you yourself change your views as well).

In addition, it is also very easy to get caught up in the idea that rather than being on your cushion, you should just help people. There is merit in sitting on your cushion and observing your mind, or practising these patterns of loving kindness and compassion, because otherwise your mind may be too disturbed when you meet difficult people or difficult emotions. I find one important case where this is very obvious that meditation (which I practise way too little) helps me to inhibit my immediate impulse to always do something and constantly look for new input. Instead it allows me to practise staying with what is, and repeatedly contemplating different courses of action. I often find that in the space afforded by the practice, new ideas or courses of action appear spontaneously. This not only makes me feel less stressed but also these responses may be a bit more thought-through and adaptive.

Finally, what are we to do to prevent ourselves from going off in meditation? Probably the most important to do is to not take yourself too seriously. So I am curious: how are you trying to make sure your mindfulness or meditation practice succeeds in making you less of a jerk, instead of going off the rails in self-absorption?

Why is it so difficult to turn off? Investigating competitiveness

Logan slogan 35 is "don't be so competitive" (the next iteration in the #lojongchallenge). There is hardly a slogan that is more apt in today's competitive world. In the academic world I am part of, competition is part and parcel, because we constantly have to compete with colleagues to win grants and get our research published in the top journals. Of course there is also a lot of collaboration within science, especially in my department, in the end the evaluation and reward system is highly skewed towards recognising only individuals. A particularly powerful example of this are the Nobel prizes, which were awarded last week. These almost assume that science is done by individuals, rather than by a team, as it is in reality. Pretty much all universities require you to be in the top-whatever to survive as an academic (which obviously is impossible, because by definition not everyone can be the top). This is slightly problematic because science really thrives when you combine many different viewpoints and ideas.

Somehow I internalized the competition to such an extent that I find it difficult to turn off: there is always something more to do, and I find it very hard to give myself permission to rest. Of course it's easy to blame that only on the external world. Probably I myself am at fault at least just as much. But nevertheless, the external world really facilitates that. I think taking the time to be still and rest is almost a revolutionary act.

For me, working against this innate and external competitiveness is a constant struggle that requires a lot of vigilance to recognize these patterns creeping up, and to drop them. I found two things really helpful here: first, practising joy when someone else gets ahead or does something good. When you look at it, seeing someone else succeed and seeing them happy is actually really nice and pleasant, and it improves your relationship with them as well. In one of the ballet schools I take class at the students tend to applaud for each other when they do something well. A very nice gesture, I think. I also try to remember to tell other people what I like about them, and especially to appreciate my students. A little positivity goes a long way!

The other trick I use is to investigate again and again the effects of suspending competitiveness for a moment and just letting be. When I take a few minutes to just rest, I find that actually my performance improves, because I often recognize things that I had overlooked until that moment, and thereby make fewer mistakes. Moreover, it also really feels good. But somehow it's still so hard to do--to overcome the ingrained 'doing' habit. With this blog, I try to commit again to taking more moments of silence and being. Just another reminder...

How are you doing? Do you notice these kinds of tendencies as well? How do you work with competitiveness?

Connecting mindfulness (research) to societal action: a report from the Dutch Mindfulness Symposium

A few weeks ago, I attended the National Mindfulness Symposium organized by the Radboud Centre for Mindfulness. This is a yearly event in which researchers and mindfulness practitioners (mostly the latter) get together to discuss current topics in mindfulness interventions and research. Obviously this year's meeting was online.

The meeting started with a talk by Stephen Batchelor. He emphasized the need to not focus so much on mindfulness as a way to temporarily relax, but instead developing the tools to lead more flourishing, wise and compassionate lives. While I do not agree with him that Buddhism gets in the way of this, and needs to go back to its secular roots to do this, I still found he made some helpful points. He summarized the way to flourishing in terms of four tasks: (1) saying yes to whatever is going on ("embrace life"), (2) letting go of habitual reactive patterns, (3) stopping of reactivity so you can respond more wisely and (4) actualize a way of life. So the main point is to act without aweareness, and with "fearless engagement" as he put it. Those are definitely sensible points in my book, and critical to face the disasters of today's world, ranging from covid-19 to climate change. A good document summarising this can be found here.

Next up was Jamie Bristow, who also emphasised skilful action. According to him, the main reason mindfulness works is that it allows us to engage in intentional action. This is beautifully written up in a document by the Mindfulness Initiative. According to this document, mindfulness helps to develop three dimensions of agency: perception, understanding, and doing. This helps to face the crisis of this world, which is our collective inability to act in accord with the complexity of the world. This includes the ability to face uncomfortable truths, and deal with information overload. Our attention is so easily distracted by the big corporations that we just act habitually without thinking. Mindfulness helps us to reduce this doing mode and engage more in a reflective being mode in which we can perform more intentional action.

The last keynote was by Femke Merkx, a Buddhist teacher who has been engaging a lot with climate change. She reminded us that the compassion cultivated in Buddhism is not as much a difficult moral imperative but rather through the practice is an effortless gesture. So we have to start by cultivating our minds in order for compassionate action to become effortless, like the image of green tara. As Joanna Macy puts it: start by honouring your pain, then letting compassion arise, which allows you to see with new eyes, such that you can go forth, and finally engage with joy, which allows you to have more courage to feel the pain, and the cycle starts again. She finally mentioned being part of the Climate Tables, a series of conversations in which the pain of climate change is deeply faced, and from a space of compassion these issues are thought about to allow people to start to act from their intrinsic values.

In the afternoon, there were contributed symposia. I attended a symposium about the effect of mindfulness interventions. There was a lot of discussion about mindfulness for parents of children with ADHD. Corina Greven presented work in which the interpersonal mindfulness in parenting scale showed improvements after such an intervention. Eva Potharst showed how this scale correlated with several other self-report scales, including acceptance and emotional communication. Importantly, it also correlates with objective behaviour such as the amount of mother's gaze towards the child. Mira Cladder-Micus investigated MBCT for very chronic and treatment-resistant depression. The good news was that even in this group, depression was reduced after the intervention, although it did not completely go away. A final study that was presented was an analysis of the cost-effectiveness of MBCT interventions, by Annelieke van Velthoven. Sadly, the MBCT was not cost-effective compared to continuing anti-depressant medication.

In the last session of the afternoon, I organized a panel on the ethics of being a mindfulness researcher. How can we use the principles we learn in our mindfulness practice to deal with the ethical challenges and the competitiveness of the academic world? The panel started off with very personal stories by Anne Speckens and Katleen van der Gucht, who shared how it was challenging to follow their own path instead of going for the route of perceived success. We then went into small groups and discussed how it is sometimes challenging to practise generosity and kindness when faced with a pressure to compete and excel. One issue we discussed is how peer review can sometimes be a brutal exchange, rather than a process of constructive criticism. We can all do our parts to be a kind reviewer (instead of being =="reviewer 2"). Another thing that came up is the importance of reducing your own sense of self-importance and practise humilty: both as a person and about your scientific findings. This all requires a slow change of culture, but hopefully we can all do our part and make this world a better place.

Some tips and tricks for hybrid teaching

As most people, I have been engaging in hybrid teaching in the last months. This is surely challenging, but thankfully our university has quite some support from education professionals to help us rethink our courses. Teaching online is not simply a matter of delivering your lectures through the internet, but rather requires you to rethink the way you teach. And this doesn't have to be bad, and I must say I really enjoy learning new teaching tricks. I am currently participating in a course on Teaching Online taught by Tracy Poeltzer, which is a lot of fun. In this blog I share some of the things I have learnt in the course and in webinars.

Image from the days of giving in-person talks

One of the most important things to think about in teaching online is building connections with the students, because successful learning does not only depend on transferring information successfully, but also requires a human connection. A very simple way to start building connections is before class: being present in the chat about 5-10 minutes before the class starts and welcoming students and asking how they are doing or chatting about the weather is a good start. You can then gauge how students are feeling in the class itself by asking them to respond with an emoji or respond to a question using polling software such as mentimeter or polleverywhere. Another fun icebreaker is to ask students to pin themselves on a map in one of these polling software tools. This is especially useful now students may not be following your course from the same continent as where you are. Then during the class, it's always nice to tell stories. A powerful way ti tell a story is using the word "imagine...". Also analogies can be very powerful, for example teaching during the pandemic is like building a plane while it's flying in the air. This evokes a vivid imagine in the student's mind. Another way of humanizing the course is to use video introductions to get to know each other. A perfect and easy tool for this is flipgrid, in which you can easily make videos and comment on other's videos. Also video or spoken comments can be a nice way to humanize things. Googledocs for example allows you to record comments with google voice, but you can also record video comments with screencastify and loom. These comments have the added advantage that you can share more of your thinking process with the students, which can sometimes be a hekpful learning tool. A final nice tool to humanize the course is to hold an informal coffee shop in which students can drop by to ask questions but also to simply chat or wave to each other. Teaching online also requires you to be much clearer for the students about what is expected of them, and ideally the course has many asynchronous components that students can do at a time that works for them. One model that students seem to like is to make folders for every week of the course, and in those folders to make a series of steps. In that way, students find it easy to keep track of where they are and what they need to do when (someone should build calendar plugins for those!). Then when you get to the lecture, it's good to minimize the amount of frontal talking. You can actually pre-record your lectures in short chunks (or use existing lectures from e.g., TED, coursera etc), and then use class time to discuss these in breakout groups. Breakout groups are great because students really get to know each other. One nice model for breakout groups is to ask students to discuss about questions they want to ask the lecturer in the next plenary session. In that way, students practise asking questions. A very practical tip for the lecture time is to insert a slide that reminds you to press the record button (if you're anything like me and tend to forget to record). As regards discussion, it is helpful to explicitly discuss group norms for interaction, that mention things like kindness, respect etc. The same can also be useful to put in discussion fora, which are very helpful to get students to interact on an asynchronous basis. Finally, it's really important to remember that we are all working from covid brains, so be gentle with yourself as well as with the students. How are you doing with covid teaching? Any tips or tricks?

It's so easy to blame others, especially in the time of COVID-19...

Picture from an epic bicycle ride from Delhi to Taj Mahal with Delhi by Cycle (picture Himanshu Shekhar https://www.instagram.com/hr.the.traveler/ )

The current slogan in the #lojongchallenge is number 34: "don't transfer an ox's load to the cow." Obviously this refers to not pushing our own problems onto others. Blaming others is such an easy and automatic thing to do. But as Elizabeth Mattis-Namgyel also points out in her recent talks on agency, this really also is a way to disempower yourself. Of course other people and influences are part of the cause of your problems, but you yourself typically also have a part to play. A traditional example that is given is when someone hits you, they can only hurt you when you are in the way of the hitting. But of course that's a bit of a lame example in some ways and clearly shouldn't be used to justify hitting someone.

But on a more minor level, I think one case where a lot of blaming is going on these days is in COVID-19, where people blame each other for either being "corona-nazis" or for being too lax in following the rules. Last week I found myself to be also guilty of that when I was complaining about the students not taking the rules seriously. She retorted that complaining about the students only makes youangry and is not going to change anything. So true! Complaining usually doesn't make you feel better. It's better to focus on your own contribution to the problem and situation.

A village in the area of Vrindavan, India, with cows

One of those classic Indian cow pictures where cow sits in the middle of an intersection, here in Allahabad/Prayagraj

A very liberating example of a more healthy way to go about things is given by Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche in his book "The intelligent heart" in which he writes "The Japanese culture is very strong in this way. Even the emperors take pride in apologizing when they are at fault. They bow down low and say "I'm very sorry. It was my mistake." Having this quality gives people tremendous freedom and dignity." An example to aspire to.

Having said that, I do also find in myself a pitfall with this slogan--which encourages us to not shift responsibilities onto others. What is a tricky pitfall is the tendency to take all the work upon myself, sort of being overly optimistic of the work I can accomplish. This is obviously a recipe for exhaustion and eventually burnout. So while it is important to not overly burden others, it is also important to reflect on your own boundaries and stick to those. Because in the end, if you get a burnout, you are shifting even more responsibilities on others...

Speaking and writing inspired by the thermal baths

I was reflecting on the next #lojongchallenge slogan while relaxing in the thermal baths. This slogan is number 33, "don't bring things to a painful point." It's kind of an interesting thing to reflect on in an environment dedicated to promoting wellness and the absence of pain and suffering!

So what is meant by this slogan? It is about avoiding blaming others for your pain and suffering. Maybe it is especially easy to understand in a wellness centre, because the owners have thought for a long time on how to create an environment in which it is pleasant to hang out. This slogan asks us to create such an environment for the people around us. One way you can do this is to think before you speak or write something about the following:

Is it truthful? 

Is it helpful? 

Is it inspiring? 

Is it necessary?  

Is it kind?

The slogan is asking us to speak in a way so that we don't harm others. More importantly, it is asking us to see whether we can avoid blaming our own misery on others. This is typically a bit more challenging because it is so attractive to blame others for things. For example, in COVID-19, to complain about others' reckless behaviour, or alternatively, their fearful behaviour which makes us uncomfortable. But of course that is not really going to help much if you think about it--in fact, it probably only creates feelings of unrest and annoyance. Khandro Rinpoche also says that many obstacles are created because of our own stupidity or ambitions. And then we try to cover that up by blaming others for it. Of course that eventually creates painful situations. If on the other hand you are able to just be honestly who you are, with all your defects, not blaming anyone else for it, then there is less to protect and eventually also less to worry about.

Image from the wellness centre (captured by Stefani Nellen)

Amazing food at the thermal baths

Hotelfie at the thermal baths

It all seems so logical and simple. Then why is this so difficult? I think it is due to the heavy emphasis of our society on success, and the constant feeling that we do not measure up. Counteracting that takes a lot of reflection--again and again--until it becomes natural. That's why I do the #lojongchallenge!

Reconsidering "I told you so"

The next slogan in the #lojongchallenge series is "don't wait in ambush". This slogan talks about how we can brood on "getting someone back" if they've said or done something nasty to us. A more noble response would be to instead return their unkindness with kindness.

Now of course being kind to someone who has treated you poorly is not always that easy. My personal response is usually to simply avoid this person. Then at least you know you won't cause them harm, and they also cannot cause you harm. For example, today I was on the train to Amsterdam, and when I see people who do not wear masks, one response is to be nasty to them, but another response is to simply go outside their way (which may either way be a smart thing to do in either case...).

A more subtle tendency that this can refer to is put forward by Khandro Rinpoche. She says that it also refers to cases in which we may allow situations to worsen so we can say in the end: "I told you so", rather than preventing the mistakes to happen. I personally don't think this always works, because sometimes you just need to give people the space to make their own mistakes. Nevertheless, at that time it is still not very compassionate to respond with "I told you so", rather than helping that person to clean up the mess, which would be a bit more supportive. There is sometimes quite some satisfaction in the smugness of saying "I told you so", but it's a good reminder to self that it is pretty much never helpful when you think about it.

Ballerina waiting in ambush? Picture by Anna van der Meijden https://www.instagram.com/annamaypine/?hl=en

On the whole I must confess that i am lucky that I never enjoy seeing people suffer, not even when they have hurt me. What I am trying to cultivate more of is to enjoy it when people do well. This morning I was in a ballet class in Amsterdam and I was able to really enjoy some of the beautiful dancing of the other dancers in my class, instead of being jealous of them, which can also happen sometimes. That was my little win of the day. And in the end, it makes your own life so much better as well (but of course it requires changing of habits, which is always a challenge...).

Seeing the buddha in your chance encounters

Today my retreat finished and I am easing back into daily life. I already had my first interaction with a friend I randomly ran into in the marketplace. But in the end, the whole purpose of retreat is not to run from life, but rather to prepare to engage in life in a more productive way. This is why I felt it was quite a good idea to write these blogs while I was on retreat so I could think about how to interact with the world once I got back into it.

The 31st slogan of Lojong is "don't malign others." This is quite an obvious slogan: don't speak ill of people. As I mentioned quite a few times before on this blog, sometimes it feels good to take others down, so we can feel better about ourselves. But apart from the fact that this feeling good is only short-lived, in the end, it also does your relationship with the person you are talking with no good. After all, who likes to talk to someone who only complains about others?

Khandro Rinpoche also says that it's very easy to judge--it doesn't give the other space to make mistakes, to work with themselves. it may sound naive, but giving others the benefit of the doubt usually improves the quality of your interactions. If you assume others have good intentions then I find that often people feel that and proceed to interact with you in a more positive way than when you assume others' bad intentions. I find this relatively easy now but when I was bullied as a little kid, I always had the feeling that other kids were speaking bad about me, and this made me very anxious. So this habit is definitely shaped a lot by your experiences with other people. Now most people approach me positively I find it quite easy to do.

Saying hello to the door. Picture by Anna van der Meijden https://www.instagram.com/annamaypine/?hl=en

Yet, I don't think this means you can never criticize people. I actually sometimes have that tendency because I don't want to make other people angry. But that in itself doesn't help either because tensions are built and never spoken off. Or even worse, people who behave poorly and harm others get never any headwind and therefore step by step make their behaviour even worse because they think they can get away with it. So, just like all these slogans, I think they should be applied with care. Nevertheless, seeing things from the perspective that all people are inherently buddhas-to-be, and therefore inherently good, definitely makes the world a better place.

Playing the unpredictable in an uncertain post-COVID world

We are halfway in the #lojongchallenge! The 30th slogan is "don't be so predictable." This refers to our tendency to respond very habitually whenever we are challenged, mostly by feeling sorry for ourselves. Do you recognize this? I certainly do! In these days of COVID-19, this tends to happen for example when the internet breaks down just at a moment that an important meeting or teaching is happening (like yesterday). My natural reaction is to make a big drama out of that, which obviously won't make anyone feel better, not even myself.

More specifically it also refers to the case where someone causes you trouble. Our natural reaction is to respond nastily in response. In a way, this is also what society expects from us. But what if we don't follow that pattern? In a way, when someone causes you trouble, they hope you get annoyed, and if you don't, that not only surprises you but them as well, thereby breaking the chains of action and reaction that we call karma.

Picture by Anna van der Meijden https://www.instagram.com/annamaypine/?hl=en

Breaking this chain of karma is very significant because it helps us to break our habitual patterns of reactions. If you are able to do so, it feels so good because you have gained freedom! However, it is not so easy, so you have to start with small actions. Khandro Rinpoche for example suggests surprising yourself by being generous, or maybe try being patient. For example, right now it is quite hot. A natural reaction is to feel very sorry for myself it is so hot, and then to slump down in tiredness. But maybe I can also just feel the heat and enjoy it while it lasts (I mean, next week I am going to a sauna: even more heat, and then voluntarily ;-) ). 

The practice of meditation is also very much about not being predictable. Our predictable patterns are to indulge in thoughts, especially self-related thoughts, and forget about everything else. Meditation is instead an invitation to be curious: to watch your mind, to see where your awareness comes from, to explore just being, and just doing nothing, taking space. In our busy society that is almost a revolutionary act.

And maybe, when we are less predictable in how we respond to things, we can also respond better to an unpredictable world, which very much characterizes this COVID-19 situation, and which is probably one of the biggest challenges of it for most people. Maybe the attitude of playfulness towards our own reactions can also translate into a playfulness towards the daily surprises that COVID throws at us.

Dropping the self from the meditation

We're moving along quite nicely in the #LojongChallenge! Today I want to discuss slogan 29: "give up poisoned food." Of course it is never good to eat food with poison, but obviously here this is meant more metaphorically. The idea here is that when you practice, you do it not so that other people think you are an amazing person, but rather, for the benefit of others. This is not surprising, since the whole Lojong is pretty much about that. Nevertheless, it is important to keep examining your motivation in whatever you do.

Here I would like to focus a little more on the case of meditation, since I am currently doing a meditation retreat. In meditation too, it is attractive to want it to be a kind of quiet and peaceful state in which we feel good and feel like we are a great meditator. But of course, meditation isn't always like that! Often meditation is just like a big mess of turbulent thoughts that go all over the place. And many of these thoughts--in fact--are self-related. We know this from neuroscientific research: whenever people are left to their own devices, a brain network known as the default mode network turns on, which consists of a set of mostly midline areas such as the medial prefrontal cortex and posterior cingulate cortex that are thought to be strongly involved in self-referential processes. And in my lab I have demonstrated that the moment people are prompted to think about themselves, they get distracted and do worse on cognitive tasks such as a memory task.

So what to do? One strategy I am playing around with right now is to focus on the process rather than the result. Just the fact that you sit down to practise is awesome. Sometimes the practice will feel good, sometimes it won't, but slowly you will make progress anyway. It is also said that it is better to leave your analysis and judgment of how the meditation went until afterwards, and to during the practice mostly focus on being relaxed and spacious. One quote of Sogyal Rinpoche that illustrates this well is "meditation is becoming naturally assimilated in it." It says that instead of working hard to do something, it is more about un-doing, and trusting that you will land in your buddha nature. What a beautiful and soothing idea in this stressful world!

Can we be without a goal?

An intriguing slogan in the Lojong text is number 28: "abandon any hope of fruition." Here in the West, we are strongly conditioned in being very goal-directed, having specific, measurable, achievable and time-bound goals. This contributes to getting things done. So why are we to let go of a hope of fruition, or in other words, "achievement"?

Sometimes the tendency to try to achieve things can be in the way of accomplishment. This is particularly true with these Lojong teachings, because achieving something tends to often be associated with a feeling of self-cherishing. It's not bad to feel good a bout yourself, but feeling superior is a problem.

Moreover, the tendency to always be goal-directed also gets in the way of taking time to just rest and being present with what is. A large part of Buddhist practice is about sitting there and doing nothing--and through that, through observing what happens, becoming familiar with the nature of reality that is to be found within, rather than in busy activity.

Approaching the goal. Picture by Anna van der Meijden, https://www.instagram.com/annamaypine/?hl=en

But yet, how can we then still motivate ourselves if we shouldn't hope for fruition? Maybe it is the case that we will never reach fruition, but we will still make some progress along the way, and we can still celebrate those little moments in which we were able to transform an emotion or approach a situation in a different way. And at the same time realize that that is only a tiny step along the way. Then it is key to go back to your motivation and use that as your major impetus: whatever you do, be it action or inaction, can be with a motivation to help beings and eventually to becoming a truly healthy and happy person (something which Buddhists call enlightenment).

Looking for focus: a case for just being

The next slogan in the #lojongchallenge is number 27: "Work with the greatest defilements first." Of course the whole Lojong programme is about working with our emotions. A wonderful thing of this programme is that is has a fantastic array of methods. This is at the same time a challenge, because we can get lost in it and not end up making substantial progress in any of them. I notice this tendency most strongly in ballet classes I take: when I strongly focus on fixing one bad habit (such as forgetting to suck in my tummy or not stretching my legs fully) then I make much more progress than when I focus on whatever is that day's teacher's particular focus. The same applies of course to working with your negative emotions.

Just being happy with flowers. Picture by Anna van der Meijden https://www.instagram.com/annamaypine/ 

How do you know what is your most insistent emotion or habit? One clue is to look at what you tend to put off, because that is often where the strongest obstacle is located. The good news, according to Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche, is also that all the different emotions are in some way related to self-cherishing. If you deal with one of them, then the others will automatically be improved as well.

For myself, I definitely recognize this tendency to try out many different things and not persist on one path until the end. It is just too easy to get lost in doing, instead of spending time in being--doing nothing in particular but just being with what is and seeing what emerges. Sometimes just being can be the most productive because, as Khandro Rinpoche says, it allows the natural compassion to shine out. It is also where we can drop our competitiveness and instead just connect.

Maybe this is for me the greatest obstacle or habit: to get lost in the doing. Getting lost in doing is an easy way to avoid facing things, and at the same time it is also often driven by the need for recognition--recognition by others for all the amazing things you are doing. This is just one manifestation of what Buddhists call "attachment"--in this case attachment to praise. But when you think about it from the Dzogchen perspective: you are already totally fine. Your nature is the Buddha, and if you only let it out, it will shine all by itself with brilliant wisdom and compassion. If only it weren't so hard to trust that... 

More thoughts on self-criticism and other-criticism in life and ballet

The next slogan in Lojong is number 26: "Don’t ponder others’ flaws." This is quite similar to the previous slogan, but whereas the previous one is about acting out your criticism in terms of speech, this one is about merely thinking about the flaws of others. For me that is a much stronger temptation than speaking of other's flaws. You may think "thoughts don't harm, right?" And indeed, they don't do so directly. But they are not particularly pleasant either.

The moment you start criticising others, first of all, doesn't really feel that good in the long term. In the short term, it may make you feel better about yourself, but to maintain this feeling better, you have to keep comparing yourself to others and that is pretty exhausting. One domain in which I am quite prone to mentally comparing myself to others is ballet. This is completely unnecessary because I am way too old for a career, so I am just doing it for fun. And yet, this is my mental habit. A few weeks ago I did a kind of home-made ballet intensive during which I stayed in Amsterdam for a few days and took many classes. This was my chance to play with these feelings! I found out that when I was doing a tough conditioning class, one strategy is to handle the challenge by comparing myself to others. As I just indicated, this is a quite a stressful strategy. Alternatively, I could just try to stay with the moment--with the unpleasant feelings of a tough exercise but not thinking about how long it's still going to last (long!) and not thinking about how well it's going--just staying there non-judgmentally. When I was able to do that, the whole experience became like a meditation, and quite relaxed (at least from a mental perspective). Moreover, practising in such a mind state feels so much more satisfying.

Picture by Anna van der Meijden https://www.instagram.com/annamaypine/?hl=en

I will end with one more tip that I found in Dzigar Kongtrul Rinpoche's book "Intelligent heart", which I found quite helpful. He said that if you are dealing with a very difficult person for whom criticism almost naturally arises, then try to realize that it's just your perception. Everyone perceives people differently, and there may well be people who see this person as amazing. The same is true about yourself by the way: the way you see yourself is probably quite different from the way others see you.

Exploring together-apart mind and reality in times of COVID-19

Last week I attended the European Mind and Life Summer Research Institute. I have been lucky enough to attend many such events over the course of my career, and it is safe to say they have shaped my career as a contemplative scientist. During these Summer Research Institutes, scientists and contemplatives get together to discuss about issues in the field of contemplative science, but also do a lot of contemplation themselves. Unsurprisingly, this year's edition took place online.

I was not sure how an online version of this event would work out, but I was pleasantly surprised at the amount of connection that I felt with the other attendees. This was achieved by some quite inventive meeting formats. Before the meeting itself, the faculty had recorded brief (20-30 min) lectures that you could watch and ask questions about. These questions were collected on a board that allowed for upvoting of your favorite questions. Participants who presented posters had submitted PDFs and 2-minute video presentations of their posters and all gotten a Slack channel to discuss these posters during the meeting. Every day of the meeting started with contemplative practices: a choice of meditation, and a choice between chi gong, yoga and juggling. I ended up mostly not following those but taking a ballet class instead. After that, the first session was a plenary meeting with the faculty in which they briefly recapped the essence of their talks, followed by a panel discussion, partly driven by the submitted questions. There was also a brief period in which we were put in breakout rooms to discuss possible questions to ask. I must confess that during most of these sessions I ended up instead just talking to the others about their fascinating work! In the afternoons, we then had breakout groups with the day's speakers in which we discussed a bit more deeply. Before that, we would often have a fun activity, for example answering a question with one word on mentimeter that then transformed into a word cloud. The afternoon ended by bringing everyone back together with reports from the breakout groups and more general discussion. As the week progressed, there were also more and more self-organized zoom meetings for discussions and chats. As usual, there was a much-needed silent meditation day in the middle of the week which also featured a teaching by Mingyur Rinpoche, who talked about his wandering retreat and meditation in general.

Now the contents of the meeting. We started the first day by talking about perception: how do we derive knowledge from the world? This questions was approached from neuroscientific, philosophical and contemplative directions. Michel Bitbol for example argued that our experience of the world is just the part we need, which is an optimal way to perceive the world, but we should remember that that is not reality. There were many discussions about how we continuously make up stories about the world, and then confuse them for reality. Yet even if science is just another story, Michel Bitbol argued that it is a very efficient way towards knowledge, for example in the case of a search for a COVID-19 vaccine.

The second day was dedicated to interoception and emotions. Holger Yeshe talked about how the Buddhist teachings give us tools to investigate where our suffering, and our negative emotions (which are the source of this suffering) come from. Micah Allen talked about interoception--the feeling of our body from the inside, and argued that many psychiatric disorders are accompanied by problems in interoception. There have been claims that meditation improves interoception, but the evidence for this is not unequivocal. He also argued that we need more replication in the field of meditation reserarch and called for a Many Labs experiment in this field. I fully agree, and I am working on a project to work towards that! On a more poetic note, Giovanna Colombetti argued that emotions are not a feeling of the body but a feeling through the body. A lot to think about!

Thursday was dedicated to embodying knowledge. All too often, we think that knowledge is just in our heads, but dancers will know that you can also know and investigate through the body--a perspective that was also shown by Asaf Bachrach and Hsuan-Hsiu Hung. Asaf Bachrach showed an intriguing experiment in which people were moving in virtual reality, where he found that people felt very calm, and he noticed that when people moved slowly, they felt more together than when moving quickly. Despite the wisdom there is to be found in movement, Guiseppe Pagnoni argued that by keeping body and mind still during meditation practice, you can detect changes in the body-mind complex with much greater precision, which affords you to be less enslaved in your habits.

The last day was dedicated to artificial intelligence. Luisa Damiano argued that in addition to the empirical cycle of scientific research, we need the synthetic cycle in which we simulate the world and explore the world in-silico. Father Tiso discussed how artificial intelligence allows us to appreciate the sphere of interconnected minds through the internet (as was indeed happening there and then during the summer research institute!). Venerable Aileen Barry summed up the Ai day very beautifully by arguing that behind every AI there is a human, and a motivation, and we should watch this motivation.

Altogether, the ESRI was a very rich and beautiful exploration of what it means to know, and what it means to connect as humans--through technology. My head was spinning by the end, and there was as always too little time to explore this richness in ideas, but it was definitely a beautiful experience. And now it is time to take that wonder into my own retreat.