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On April 3, Michael R. Sheehy, Ph.D., Research Associate Professor and Director of Research at the Contemplative Sciences Center at the University of Virginia, delivered a talk titled Towards Contemplative Fluency: Framing Tibetan Meditation Practices. Meditation is an ancient human practice. Our ability to artfully cultivate attentive, imaginal, and embodied modes of consciousness, and more so, intentionally design and apply techniques to transcend ordinary experience are deeply integral to the human contemplative heritage. Such practices have historically been innovated, tested, refined, and documented in magnificent diversity by the world’s great contemplative traditions. Yet, despite this historical record and an ever-growing popular interest, the study of meditation is gravely underdeveloped.

In this talk, Dr. Sheehy presented novel models and methods to study meditation based on a view that the underlying building-blocks and mechanisms at work in contemplative practices can be discerned, and by doing so, we can learn contemplative fluency – a practical know-how sensitive to distinct skills, contexts, and potentials. More specifically, his talk surveyed typologies of contemplative styles and contexts, discussed a generative framework, and used case examples from historical Tibetan practices to consider transdisciplinary futures of meditation research, thereby demonstrating the continued relevance of critical humanistic perspectives to scientific inquiry.

Co-sponsored by the Center for Asian Studies, the Tibet Himalaya Initiative, and the Department of Religious Studies, the talk drew 40 attendees and concluded with a robust question and answer session, with a determined group of CU undergrads remaining long afterwards to ask Dr. Sheehy about graduate programs, research, and professions emerging from the study and therapeutic application of meditation.