What is Contemplative Education?

Contemplative education is a journey of self-discovery in which learners cultivate optimal mental health and authentic well-being based on developing conative, ethical, cognitive, and attentional balance and a consequent capacity for emotional regulation and spiritual equilibrium in daily life.

Contemplative Pedagogy

Contemplative pedagogy involves teaching methods and curricula designed to cultivate awareness, insight, and compassion for oneself and others. Through meditation practices and various contemplative disciplines, learners hone their abilities toward personal growth and social transformation. Teaching methods incorporate rigorous academic theoretical engagement, experiential learning, and various contemplative practices. Experiential learning is centered around mindfulness, introspection, discernment, and volition in an ethical-relational context.

Equipping Minds for the Future

Contemplative education equips the mind to process information in new and effective ways. By delving deep into personal inquiry, sages of both Eastern and Western traditions—from ancient to modern—offer learners an immeasurable wealth of guidance. Such guidance, taught through carefully crafted and transmitted curricula, impart the confidence and courage essential for becoming intrepid mind explorers interested in gaining intimate knowledge and understanding of ourselves and the world surrounding us. This transformative process of contemplative education fosters exceptional professional skills, psychological flexibility, and resilience, leading to a profound, compassionate evolution that benefits everyone involved.

The Sixfold Matrix of Mental Balance

The Sixfold Matrix of Mental Balance is a conceptual framework that guides the CCR’s education initiatives. This framework posits that our minds can be in or out of balance along six dimensions: conative, ethical, attentional, cognitive, emotional, and spiritual. The CCR’s educational curricula address hyperactivity, deficit, and dysfunction in those six dimensions by teaching methods for cultivating genuine well-being based on contemplative insight.

A trained mind is balanced along six dimensions:

Intentions, desires, aspirations, volition: what we consider worth striving for

Knowing how to act in ways that contribute to social and environmental well-being

Composure, clarity, and a sustained, voluntary flow of relaxed attention

The ability to know accurately the world of experience without omission, projection, or distortion

Awareness of our own and others’ behaviors, experiences, and triggers, avoiding extremes of hypersensitivity and apathy

A quality of well-being that carries one through all the vicissitudes of life and death—knowing ourselves and our relation to reality as it is

Related Resources

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The Sixfold Matrix of Mental Balance

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