Mind & Life Summer Research Institute

This week something incredible happened. A space was created that I have never experienced before. A place where over the course of one day the conversation and practice spanned the worlds of physics, meditation, neuroscience, identity-based violence, structural racism and collective liberation.

The Mind & Life Institute is doing something truly groundbreaking and pushing all the boundaries and having all the hard conversations. With the help of amazingly heartfelt and courageous facilitators, mentors and a community that was willing to go-in, the portal opened and we went in. I think for many of us we experienced a dis-orientation, even those of us familiar with this kind of emotional unpacking. The layers and complexity hit new levels even for me. But something kept us rooted, kept us swimming, helped us emerge with a new sense of self, community and commitment.

Often, we return home from these sorts of spaces with a heavy heart of drudgery but instead I return with a new practice, a new opportunity to put myself to work in more resilient and mindful ways. I'm still finding where I fit in this community. How to share, amplify and be nourished and seen. But there is a new place of clarity within me. Not a clarity of all knowing, or insight necessarily. But a steady place from which to start again. Every day is a starting again, sometimes every moment. Now I have a place to go when I ask, where do i even begin.

​Thank you Mind and Life! Next year lets do it again and more art, more joy, more ancestral wisdomkeepers and more people from non-traditional science spaces. Looking forward to what we will all build together in the coming years.