Home

10%

Mindfulness

The role of contemplation in higher education

By UNC Asheville

February 4^th, 2020

Making mindfulness part of classes, research and community

Written by Steve Plever; Photos by Adam Taylor

Shall we begin

with a few

minutes of

contemplation,

with eyes closed,

to allow thoughts

to pass through

and then out of

our minds, so

we can engage

and focus more

completely?

Did you just accept that invitation, or did you just keep reading? What difference does it make?

Several UNC Asheville faculty, students, staff, and alumni put that question at the center of their work, embracing mindfulness and sharing their practices and experiences as the University joins a community of educators developing and promoting the role of contemplation in higher education by welcoming neuroscientist Richard J. Davidson, Ph.D., for a talk and masterclass this February.

(UPDATE: The lecture by neuroscientist Richard Davidson at UNC Asheville scheduled for Feb. 13, 2020, has been postponed. For details, visit the events calendar.)

Across all disciplines, faculty at UNC Asheville are leading students in many varieties of mindfulness activities. But time for contemplation at the start of class is just the most surface-level manifestation of what is happening with pedagogy, with health and recreation programs, and most importantly, in the minds of individual faculty, staff, and students.

UNC Asheville is now one of a very small number of campuses who have formalized the study of meditation and related practices into an undergraduate certificate program in contemplative inquiry, which began here in the fall of 2018. The Center for Contemplative Mind in Society identifies only 15 similar programs of study at American universities.

The certificate program—a way to guide and recognize student learning and personal development—is still new and relatively unusual, but many alumni will recognize that a focus on mindfulness is not new on campus. Rather, offering the formal certificate represents a coalescing of practices and research that have been engaging a growing number of faculty and students for a decade or so.

Creating a Mindful Campus

The most public manifestation was “Creating a Mindful Campus,” a three-day institute held annually from 2013-2018 that brought visiting scholars to UNC Asheville to meet with faculty and students to exchange ideas and share experiences of mindful practices and pedagogy. A more private but also important gathering has been an annual faculty and staff contemplative retreat—a silent retreat—which attracted 19 participants last summer.

The informal roots go back much further. “It’s something that has emerged organically over 11 or 12 years starting with a few people doing things in isolation and eventually a community has grown up around this,” said Richard Chess, UNC Asheville’s Roy Carroll Distinguished Professor of English, whose discussions about meditation with Professor of Anthropology John Wood in between laps at the Justice Center pool were part of those informal roots. These and other private chats led to an ongoing series of faculty learning circles, which greatly increased faculty learning, dialog, and willingness to move forward on this path.

“This is a home-grown kind of interest that we have had, involving many different faculty,” says Keya Maitra, Thomas H. Howerton Distinguished Professor of Humanities. “Sometimes we collaborate but sometimes we do it our own ways. If you take stock of the students, maybe half have now taken a class that uses some form of contemplative exercise. That’s saying quite a bit—we’re now connecting the dots about these skills and their importance for public liberal arts. I think that it’s a no-brainer that the contemplative skills and experience—that these are part of the complete skill-set we are aiming to inculcate in our students.”

In 2017, faculty developed and team-taught the course, The Art and Science of Meditation, on top of their full teaching loads. Maitra, Chess, Patrick Foo (psychology), and Ameena Batada (health and wellness), were among the original instructors. The Art and Science of Meditation, now required as part of the new Contemplative Inquiry Certificate, has been also taught by Melissa Mahoney (economics), who wrote the proposal for the new academic certificate program, along with Sonia Marcus (sustainability).

The student Mindfulness Club, begun in 2012, has grown and stays active—if you see students walking in silent meditation some evening in the campus labyrinth, you have found the club.

The Mindfulness Club

UNC Asheville’s student Mindfulness Club was founded a student in 2013. Nathan Koerschner ’20 was still an Asheville High student when he encountered the Mindfulness Festival organized by the Mindfulness Club. What he saw there and the presence of a meditation room on campus made him passionately curious, led him to choose UNC Asheville as his college, to then join the club, and he is now its president.

“The Mindfulness Club provides a sampler of different practices,” he said, and he notes the club also goes beyond meditation-related things to subjects like mindful consumption. “Overall, the club’s main thrust is the idea of intentional living and mindfulness practices obviously fit into that, because if you want to intentionally become better, these are options toward that.”

“Every organization tends to have inner and outer purposes. Outwardly, we sort of stand as a representation of the importance of attending to inner life. … Inwardly, we serve as a community where people can feel supported in that. We chat about difficulties in the practice itself, and what it means to live day-to-day in a more intentional way."

A math major already receiving job offers in his field, his enthusiasm for meditation has a basis in both analytic thought and his personal experience.

Julie Neumark ’21, is also a member of the Mindfulness Club who attends regularly and sometimes leads activities. “We try to do something different every week, with a different member leading, or a guest speaker. One thing we like to do is mindful walking—we like to use the labyrinth on campus for a silent walk—and reflect on our activities with an open circle for sharing and reflection,” she said. “I really appreciate that—it helps build community.”

Neumark is an environmental studies major who is well along in North Carolina’s arduous Environmental Educator credentialing program. She plans to become an educator of young children who uses nature-based and mindfulness practices.

Mindfulness Club members Nathan Koerschner ’20 and Sean Miller ’22 participate in a silent mindful walk.

Mindfulness in Scholarship

The Art and Science of Meditation is the class where students learn most about meditative practices, but many of the instructors also integrate mindfulness practices in their current courses to engage students more deeply with other subject matter. “I think of it as experiential learning even though it’s not leaving the classroom—it’s another kind of experiential learning,” said Chess, who applies it to teaching poetry.

In one example, he took a collection of poetry by the American poet Sharon Olds and asked students to memorize a line, then to close their eyes and repeat and then to notice when they started to actively seek meaning, and then let go of that and go back to a receptive mode and allow whatever insights that might be gained to come on their own, without actively seeking.

“Those students had more insights into the many ways in which language was working in that line than any other class of students I had ever taught on poetry,” he said. “In a class about writing poetry, it’s the craft that you’re more focused on than the thematic analysis of it. So that one little exercise of four or five minutes of repeating a line internally—just taken from basic meditation practices that I had learned and done on my own and applied it in this new context—suddenly opened students’ ears and eyes to a new way of engaging with and experiencing language and ultimately changed the way they wrote, the kind of intention they brought.”

Read Rick Chess's full interview here.

Maitra came to mindfulness as a result of her philosophy research, and she’s exploring it further through her current work—a monograph on the epistemology of mindfulness.

“If you cultivate the virtue of, say, curiosity, does that really then impact the kinds of knowledge claims and theories you’re going to make?” she asks, in explaining her view that the nature of the “knower” is an important factor in understanding the nature of knowledge.

“What I’m saying is that in order to be a responsible, curious, open-minded ‘knower,’ it might be very important for us to develop certain skill-sets where we are not aiming for the content of our knowledge, but to cultivate the tone of our consciousness. It’s not all about what it is that we know, but the kind of sensibility and the ability to anchor the mind,” said Maitra.

“The case I am making is that the ability to know our mind, not just our unconscious mind—Freud did that—but even our relationship to our conscious mind can benefit from the skills,” Maitra said, describing mindfulness skills to be “the ability to be present, to be non-judgmental, to listen with your whole being—these are abilities that are habits of mind, habits of engagement.”

Read Keya Maitra's full interview here.

Wood takes mindfulness into field anthropology, which entails studying and understanding a culture through a first-person presence. But one’s very presence as an academic observer in another culture can change what one is observing. So when Wood studied the way of life of a community of north African nomads, he didn’t just visit, he lived there (to get a sense of his experiences and learning there, read his haunting novel, The Names of Things). But he still faced the challenge of understanding people in their own context, rather than through the built-in lens of his own cultural experiences and views. So for Wood, Zen Buddhist meditation and anthropology fit well together.

“Part of why I think it makes people better anthropologists is that it trains people to forget themselves. In doing anthropology, you’re trying to understand people on their terms and one has to be very conscious of and in tune with one’s own baggage in order to do that. … You become a better anthropologist by being more aware of where one’s ego is and where one’s ego ends. The Zen practice as I understand it is not about erasing ego because we can’t do that, but we can learn to check it and be aware of it and learn to still it in some ways so we can be truly present in the moment, instead of being with our ego, our baggage, our concepts.”

However, he acknowledges the inherent paradox about this approach, particularly when teaching Zen Anthropology and even in the certificate program. “Part of the practice is to be less concerned about adding to one’s distinction. The credentialing, and I participate in it—Zen Anthropology is part of it—runs a little counter to what ‘sitting’ [seated meditation] is about. … I’m kind of a black sheep in some ways about some of this activity on campus. I’m all for it but with caveats.”

Read John Wood's full interview here.

Mindfulness and Health

Health Promotion Coordinator Kenda Mullert talks with a student at UNC Asheville's Health and Counseling Center.

As a public health professional, Associate Professor of Health and Wellness Ameena Batada feels it is important to incorporate mindfulness practices into her teaching.

“Giving my students experience with mindfulness helps them understand themselves and what they are going through, and that in turn will help them understand the people they’re going to try to reach as health promoters,” Batada said.

She cites a survey study involving interviews of UNC Asheville faculty about their most effective teaching practices. “A lot of what the faculty identified were opportunities for students to engage in contemplative practices and have them reflect,” she recalled. She now, as part of preparation for oral presentations, has students quietly meditate and experience what she calls the “monkey mind chatter” of stray thoughts, while practicing bringing attention back to the moment—a mindfulness training that can prevent losing one’s train of thought while presenting.

Read Ameena Batada's full interview here.

The mindfulness practices can serve students in other settings as well.

“Students can feel like the world is about to cave in at this very moment,” said Kenda Mullert, health promotion coordinator at UNC Asheville’s Health and Counseling Center, where mindfulness practices are part of some students’ treatment. “They might feel overwhelmed and that’s all that they have room for. But when your offer up an opportunity to feel something else using mindfulness practices, it can squeeze the ‘overwhelm’ out of the room and allow them to feel something different like acceptance, or calm, or feeling that it’s going to be OK.”

What techniques are used? “It could be writing down the things that are going on in your life—the big things, the big feelings,” said Mullert. “It could also be practicing gratitude, all the things you’re grateful for. It could be emptying your brain and imagining yourself in a room that’s white and letting go of every thought as if they were boats passing through your mind. That’s the beauty of mindfulness, that it can be adaptable to so many personalities.”

Assistant Professor of Psychology Keith Cox also advocates using mindfulness practice as part of therapy. He is trained in an approach called Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, or DBT, that combines two antithetical things, mindfulness and behaviorism.

“You use the mindfulness to identify what’s happening, and then you decide, ‘well, do I want to go with this or go in a different direction?’ If I want to go in a different direction, I can apply the behavioral skills to try to achieve that,” said Cox.

Thought Leaders in Mindfulness

Associate Professor Patrick Foo attaches electrodes to Julie Newmark '21. The 64-channel electroencephalogram (EEG) cap monitors brain activity.

Patrick Foo, associate professor of psychology and former head of UNC Asheville’s neuroscience program, looks at mindfulness in terms of “dosages”—how much meditation, and what kinds of mindfulness techniques does it take to produce certain effects. Whether that produces significant scientifically observable results in brains now, or 10 years down the road, or maybe never, is still an active area of research. Nevertheless, he remains enthusiastic about supporting mindfulness practices on campus even in dosages that may not produce measurable changes in brain scans.

“Students experience much stress and anxiety in the last part of the semester. If mindfulness allows a practitioner to have better control over their emotions, over the distractible ‘monkey mind’ before final exams, then it is in line with what the Dalai Lama says about relieving suffering any way that one can.” -Patrick Foo

Foo, who joined the faculty in 2004, recalls when the Dalai Lama first entered the academic conversation.

“In 2005, the Society for Neuroscience, the preeminent professional society in the field, decided to invite the Dalai Lama to give a talk on different states of consciousness and the traditions he is familiar with,” said Foo. “There was unbelievable debate and rancor within the world of neuroscience. It basically broke down to question whether the scientific community should require objective results before embracing the world of meditation or mindfulness. And at that point there was very little hard data to back it up.”

One of the leading research scholars responsible for filling in that data gap over the past 15 years is Richard J. Davidson, who as a graduate student at Harvard decades earlier, had traveled to India and other places to learn more about meditation with fellow grad student and current co-author Daniel Goleman. As a result of his contacts with the Dalai Lama, Davidson has been able to work with and study a group of Buddhist monks with more than 30,000 hours apiece of meditation practice.

One of Davidson’s findings is the monks’ brains' unusual generation of gamma frequency waves. “Gamma frequency activity is usually associated with that ‘aha!’ moment when you figure out a puzzle, but you only have it for fractions of a second,” said Foo. “But these monks … are exhibiting this activity for minutes at a time. Think back to that feeling you get when you solve a difficult puzzle, what if you could experience that for minutes, and what if you could do it on command?”

Read Patrick Foo's full interview here.

Science and Buddhist Monks

The brains of Buddhist Monks, with their thousands of hours of meditation, show different patterns than the brains of people without that contemplative experience. And while they engage in deep and spirited metaphysical debates as part of their training, the monks have very little knowledge of physics or other branches of science. Paula Willis, UNC Asheville adjunct assistant professor of physics, has spent parts of the last three summers in India, teaching monks in a Tibetan Buddhist monastery as part of a program developed by the Dalai Lama and Emory University.

“The Dalai Lama pointed out that Buddhism and Western science both have the same goal, which is happier humanity,” said Willis, who spoke with the Dalai Lama while in India. “To him, it makes obvious sense to combine the strengths of both—the compassion and ethics of Buddhism and the Western analytic, mathematical approach.”

Willis was joined in that teaching effort this summer by UNC Asheville Senior Physics Lecturer Judy Beck, and Chair and Distinguished Professor of Engineering Mahmut Reyhanoglu. They had to reach deep into their didactic bag of tricks because the monks not only had no calculus background, but very little math knowledge. “Paula and I did co-teach a conceptual physics class— physics with almost no calculus. … It was quite an experience,” recalled Reyhanoglu. “Einstein said, ‘If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well.’”

The experience of working at the monastery also has impacted Willis. “Over the course of the three years, I went from not having any contemplative practices, to now, at the start of every class, we have a minute of silence to just sit quietly. My experience with the Tibetan monks in India has gradually changed my thoughts about how to bring mindfulness in the Physics classroom. And when I saw Professor Beck sitting quietly for two minutes with her students at the beginning of her Physics 131 class, I was all in!”

Button Label

Finding Her Place in the Big Cheese

How UNC Asheville helped Shannon Herlihy transform a passion for food systems, health, and justice into a career supporting small-scale cheesemakers around the world

Read

MAHEC Internship Prepares UNC Asheville Students for Careers in Medicine

Mindfulness

The role of contemplation in higher education

How UNC Asheville helped Shannon Herlihy transform a passion for food systems, health, and justice into a career supporting small-scale cheesemakers around the world

January 26^th, 2026

Senior Chemistry Student Adam Wold Powers Meaningful Change in Sustainability Research

December 2^nd, 2025

An epic journey from UNC Asheville to the prestigious Harvard/MIT MD-PhD Program

2025 Alumni-Owned Holiday Gift Guide

How UNC Asheville helped Shannon Herlihy transform a passion for food systems, health, and justice into a career supporting small-scale cheesemakers around the world

January 26th, 2026

Senior Chemistry Student Adam Wold Powers Meaningful Change in Sustainability Research

December 2nd, 2025

An epic journey from UNC Asheville to the prestigious Harvard/MIT MD-PhD Program

2025 Alumni-Owned Holiday Gift Guide

January 26^th, 2026

December 2^nd, 2025