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As with football or violin practice, young people could gain versatile life skills through routine contemplative training

When I was a child, I was introduced to contemplative practices that changed my life. Starting in the fourth grade, I regularly walked to my grandmother’s house after school. I vividly recall walking along the streets of that neighborhood, watching squirrels scurry up and down giant pine trees. When I arrived at her house, my grandmother greeted me at the side door and the two of us sat at her kitchen table to enjoy a snack and glass of juice. After small talk about my day, we went upstairs into the ‘blue room’, named because it was painted pale azure, where I laid down. Surrounded by walls of clear daytime sky, she guided me to close my eyes, rest my body, and enter new imaginal worlds.

Over time, drawing from her years of personal practice, she taught me how to calm my body with my breath, focus my attention on a chosen image or sensation, and mobilize my imagination. Forty years later, my appreciation for these fundamental life skills runs deep and, as a researcher, I seek to understand how contemplative practices such as these work so that others can derive their rewards too.

Contemplation, in this sense, refers to a diverse suite of practices and emergent experiences born from the capacity of the human mind to know itself – a feature shared with a few animals, including chimpanzees, bottlenose dolphins, and magpies – but, more so, from the mind’s ability to transform itself. Contemplative practices harness this capacity to transform and enhance individuals, communities, and lived worlds (including social, cultural, and ecological worlds). Across times and cultures, humans have devised a capacious repertoire of practices used to free the self from its felt confines, improve wellbeing, and access new knowledge about being human.

Contemplation is popularly associated with mindfulness and yoga, but it’s a big umbrella that covers many other practices, including techniques to cultivate prosocial emotions (such as compassion), to use the imagination to shape perceptions, to appraise and analyze critical topics, to contextualize the self within broader contexts, and to push the body and mind to total exaltation. By refining skills such as attentional balance, emotional regulation, empathic response, perspective-taking, and bodily awareness, practices of contemplation help us navigate and modulate the human experience.

Historically, practices of contemplation were inextricable from the rest of life, including its cultural, philosophical, cosmological, and religious dimensions. But since at least the 16th century in the West, due to the systematic rupture with traditions of contemplation, cultural attitudes towards contemplation have gotten skewed. It has consequently been marginalized in many societies, and people have grown estranged from it. To be estranged from contemplation means to no longer recognize your ability to apply specific practices designed to transform and enhance your life – the ability to which my grandmother opened my eyes.

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George Washington Middle School in Alexandria, Virginia, February 2020. Photo by Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post/Getty

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