Chai Chat with Visiting Monks and Neuroscientists

I’ve been attending smaller weekly discussions with the scientists, monks, and graduate students at Northwestern, and it’s a great privilege to have this opportunity available to the wider community and to bring our youth program in for the experience.

We had 4 of our teenagers from various Chicago Public High Schools attend. They were thoroughly engaged and had interesting questions following the discussion. I’m looking forward to reflecting on it with them next week. I designed the youth Yoga & Meditation program curriculum to meet the needs of our diverse urban population, with social-emotional-ethical learning at the core of the training in mindfulness as a lifestyle practice, single-pointed meditation, and Hatha yoga as a foundation for youth development. I’ll admit, it’s really a fine art to honor the historic and cultural traditions of these practices rooted in South and Central Asian historic contexts and religious tradition, while making this vital technology for mental and physical health readily accessible and available in a purely secular way. Though I think events like this Chai Chat are successful in bridging the gap. After each of our program classes, the teens leave feeling better than when they arrived and report positive affective changes throughout their day to day life, so I think we’re doing a good job planting the seeds of peace and wellbeing, kindness and care for others. It takes a village!