A State of Mindless Languishing

We describe this state experienced by many of today’s college students as one of mindless languishing, like a dilapidated house whose façade is faded with splintered and rotting floorboards. Or we might picture instead an untended garden with wilting flowers and listless-looking shrubs, stressed by insufficient water and nutrients while weeds are allowed to grow unchecked. For a system to flourish, the Asian religious traditions mentioned above highlight the need to maintain a homeostatic balance, whether that system is Mother Earth herself, the built environment, the social body, or the mind-body-spirit of human beings—a phrase that signals the interconnected health of one’s mental clarity, physical vitality, and spiritual grounding. When the natural flow of energy is distorted through a lack of proper attention and care, negative consequences—chaos and division, illness and unhappiness—are sure to follow. As we argue below, the American system of higher education, as a reflection of the society that has created and sustains it, has become fundamentally and perilously imbalanced, creating harmful, though unintended, effects whose pain falls disproportionately on the shoulders of our struggling and stressed-out students.

To support those students, the TCU CALM Studies group offers courses and programs that teach them how to be mindfully present during the day and how to use simple breath awareness practices to manage the stresses of daily college life. In particular, we seek to provide a holistic educational experience for our students that will, in William James’s (1890) words, teach them to “voluntarily bring back a wandering attention, over and over again” (424). Our goal is to help them move individually and collectively toward that state of mindful flourishing, which is a phrase that may sound wonderfully high-minded, yet rather vague, even a bit squishy. To help students in our The Art and Science of Human Flourishing course visualize that state of being, we include a photograph at the top of the syllabus depicting a beautiful flower garden, which is thriving because it has been mindfully tended with care and metta, or loving-kindness. It has received just the right amount of water, sunlight, and nutrients while the weeds and other harmful influences have been diligently kept at bay. That vibrant garden filled with bright blues, yellows, and purples represents for us an arresting image of mindful flourishing; it is an image we attempt to bring into greater relief below.

To that end, we begin with an overview of the Buddhist roots of mindfulness and its diffusion in American society through the efforts of several well-known Asian and American dharma teachers. We then introduce key findings from scientific research suggesting the cognitive, psychological, and physiological benefits of a sustained mindfulness and meditation practice. Those studies have proven especially valuable for convincing skeptical students that mindfulness and other contemplative practices can help them better regulate negative mental states while also cultivating a feeling of calm presence and connectedness—the foundation for generating feelings of well-being and flourishing. We then examine the causes and potential solutions for the mental health crisis that has become a “red alert” (Jarvis 2023) in American higher education against the backdrop of today’s highly competitive campus environments and the strong, sometimes addictive, pull of social media. We conclude by examining how mindfulness practice is being used on college campuses like TCU’s to improve student mental health and promote a sense of well-being and flourishing. This final section includes a summary of the special issue’s other articles against the backdrop of the CALM Studies group’s vision for fostering mindful flourishing at TCU in order to help restore such a healthy balance on our campus and beyond.

Dharma Teachers from Asia

The growing popularity of mindfulness and meditation in the US can be attributed, in part, to the charisma and efforts of several well-known Buddhist teachers from Asian countries, such as the Vietnamese Zen Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh, mentioned above, who was a tireless proponent of mindfulness practice and founder of the socially engaged Buddhist movement.² Also among those teachers was S. N. Goenka (1924–2013), an Indian industrialist who was born in Burma in 1924 and returned to India in 1969, leaving behind the business world to teach Buddhist Vipassana meditation, which he had studied with the Burmese Buddhist monk Sayagyi U Ba Khin (1899–1971).³ Goenka played a key role in making Vipassana accessible to a general audience, and his ongoing influence is evident in the thriving meditation communities established by several of the American teachers mentioned below who studied directly with him or with one of his designated teachers. Goenka’s enduring influence is also evident in the opening of Vipassana meditation retreat centers throughout the world, with two of the nineteen American centers in Texas—one near Dallas-Fort Worth, where TCU is located, and the other in the outskirts of Houston.

Another major teacher is the Nobel Peace Prize-winning 14th Dalai Lama (b. 1935), whose equanimity, compassion, and joy amid the tragic brutalization of the Tibetan people by the Chinese government and military has inspired many. Moreover, the Dalai Lama’s personal interest in and promotion of the scientific study of the effects of Buddhist contemplative practice on the human mind and body have injected this movement with passion, energy, and momentum. Indeed, his fascination with this connection was instrumental in the founding of the Mind & Life Institute (n.d.), which “emerged in 1987 from a meeting of three visionaries: Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama—the spiritual leader of the Tibetan people and a global advocate for compassion; Francisco Varela, a scientist and philosopher; and Adam Engle, a lawyer and entrepreneur.”

The Dalai Lama has spread his message of compassion, happiness, and peace, as well as his interest in scientific inquiry, through teachings, programs, books, films, interviews, and relationships with American teachers, practitioners, scientists, and scholars. One of those relationships is a decades-long friendship and partnership with neuroscientist Richard Davidson, the founder and director of the Center for Healthy Minds (CHM) at the University of Wisconsin.⁴ Davidson visited TCU at the beginning of March 2023 to deliver a keynote address about the center’s research on well-being and human flourishing, which was based, in part, on his fruitful collaboration with the Dalai Lama. Davidson’s cutting-edge research, which we revisit below, represents just one of the many ways in which Buddhist and other Asian contemplative practices have entered the mainstream of American society.

Ann Gleig: American Dharma

In American Dharma: Buddhism Beyond Modernity, Ann Gleig (2019) investigates the process by which Asian Buddhist traditions have been transformed as they have been assimilated and transmitted in the United States. She addresses several topics relevant to this introductory article, including mindfulness, Vipassana meditation, and Buddhist modernism, which refers to a diverse group of Buddhists who interpret and present the tradition’s teachings and practices through the lens of rationality and scientific reason.

Gleig explains that the “science of the mind” discourse that informs Buddhist modernism can be traced back to the Parliament of the World’s Religions held in Chicago, Illinois, in 1893. Among religious studies scholars, this event is widely recognized to have served a crucial role in introducing American society to Asian religions through the influence of Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902) and other representatives of Hinduism, Buddhism, and other religions. Drawing on the scholarship of David McMahan, Gleig identifies the important roles played by Sri Lankan Theravadin Buddhist monk Anagarika Dharmapala (1864–1933) and Japanese Zen Buddhist monk Shaku Soen (1859–1919) in promoting what McMahan termed “the discourse of scientific Buddhism” (Gleig 2019, 32). Soen was accompanied by D. T. Suzuki (1870–1966), a Japanese scholar of Buddhism, who not only served as Soen’s translator but would later go on to become a major figure in introducing and interpreting Mahāyāna Buddhist traditions for the English-speaking world.

As Buddhism took root in American society, one version of this rationalist, scientific discourse focused on mindfulness and meditation practice while downplaying, or even removing, what were viewed as premodern and thus “antiquated” or “superstitious” beliefs.⁵ Indeed, some teachers have presented mindfulness and meditation as universal practices that transcend their Buddhist roots and resonate with rational, scientific, and secular thinking. They are presented as a set of techniques that anyone—regardless of religious affiliation—can feel comfortable adopting to better navigate the stresses and challenges of daily life. This approach to Buddhism thus brackets the ethical, ritual, and soteriological elements that are key aspects of its widely varied historical traditions. Drawing on McMahan, Gleig characterizes this development as one that combined modern sensibilities with “classical Buddhist doctrine to produce a new form of Buddhism that is marked by the cultural processes of detraditionalization, demythologization, and psychologization” (2019, 32). Not surprisingly, these interpretations and transformations have not been welcomed and accepted in all Buddhist circles, causing sometimes heated debate, though this is a topic beyond the scope of this introductory article.

“Mindfulness Goes Mainstream”

However one views the evolution of American dharma, it is clear that there has been a massive wave of interest in mindfulness: we find mindfulness being taught in the healing professions (including dietetics and nutrition, medicine, nursing, psychology, and psychiatry); the military, police, and other first responders; the creative arts (dance, art, music, and others); and the athletic world, with Olympic, professional, and college athletes practicing mindfulness techniques to improve their concentration and performance. TCU student-athletes in our mindfulness courses have told us that the coaches of their teams—including tennis, baseball, and beach volleyball—have brought on consultants to teach them mindfulness and visualization practices.

Mindfulness has also permeated corporate America, with Google, Aetna, and other large multinational companies hiring mindfulness instructors to support employee well-being. While such initiatives often promote stress reduction and mental health, some critics argue that corporations use mindfulness to boost productivity without addressing deeper structural issues. In the legal world, efforts to introduce mindfulness, compassion, and ethics into an often adversarial system are being led by Rhonda Magee, a legal scholar and respected Buddhist mindfulness teacher who serves as the inaugural director of the University of San Francisco’s Center for Contemplative Law and Ethics.⁶ She visited TCU in March 2023, separately from Richard Davidson, to deliver a keynote speech on well-being and flourishing—Davidson’s and Magee’s keynotes served as bookends to the university’s “Month of March Mindfulness,”⁷ Magee and Davidson are among the most prominent American figures—teachers, scholars, scientists, journalists, activists, and so on—associated with the mindfulness movement whose efforts have helped “mindfulness go mainstream,” to borrow from the title of an excellent PBS documentary from 2017.

American Dharma Teachers

Other prominent figures include Joseph Goldstein, Jack Kornfield, Sharon Salzberg, and a number of American dharma teachers who have studied Vipassana, Zen, or other forms of Buddhist mindfulness and meditation, often with teachers in Asia. Many have maintained a clear connection with a particular Buddhist tradition in the communities they have established in the US while interpreting the dharma so to appeal to a broader audience. Those communities include the Insight Meditation Society (IMS), which was founded in 1975 in Barre, Massachusetts, by Goldstein, Kornfield, and Salzberg—all three studied with S. N. Goenka. The IMS (n.d.) “About Us” page describes the society’s Buddhist roots as follows: “Our experienced teachers offer guidance in Buddhist meditations known as vipassana (insight) and metta (lovingkindness). While the context is the Buddha’s teachings, these practices are universal. They help to develop awareness and compassion in ourselves, giving rise to greater peace and happiness in the world.”

Kornfield partnered with Buddhist meditation teacher Tara Brach, who studied with Joseph Goldstein, to create several mindfulness-based workshops and training programs, including the Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Certification Program. Both Kornfield and Brach are trained as psychologists, and the latter founded the Insight Meditation Community of Washington (IMCW) in 1998. Brach’s (n.d.) website describes her teachings as being a rich blending of contemplative practice and psychotherapy meant to introduce “meditation to her therapy clients and share western psychological insights with meditation students. This synthesis has evolved, in more recent years, into Tara’s groundbreaking work in training psychotherapists to integrate mindfulness strategies into their clinical work.” Her popular eponymous podcast takes up “the possibility of emotional healing and spiritual awakening through mindful, loving awareness as well as the alleviation of suffering in the larger world by practicing compassion in action. She has fostered efforts to bring principles and practices of mindfulness to issues of racial injustice, equity and inclusivity; peace; environmental sustainability, as well as to prisons and schools.”

Richard Davidson: Scientific American

Although neuroscientist Richard Davidson started investigating the benefits of contemplative practice at the University of Wisconsin in the mid-1980s, it has only been over the last ten to fifteen years that research findings from his and other well-funded labs have been receiving regular coverage in popular media outlets.⁹ Now it is common to find articles covering the latest research on contemplative practice in The New York Times and The Washington Post, on NPR and PBS, and in Scientific American, Psychology Today, and other widely read scientific journals and magazines.

For instance, the November 2014 issue of Scientific American, dedicated to the neuroscience of meditation, contains a feature article co-authored by Davidson that describes findings from studies conducted at CHM. The issue’s cover depicts a stylized image of a seated meditator with the text “The Neuroscience of Meditation: How it changes the brain, boosting focus and easing stress” (Ricard, Lutz, and Davidson 2014). Davidson wrote the feature article with Buddhist “monk, humanitarian, author and photographer” Matthieu Ricard¹⁰ and Antoine Lutz, a research scientist at CHM. In their article, the authors summarize the center’s findings about the cognitive, emotional, and physiological benefits of three distinct “varieties of contemplative experience”: focused attention, mindfulness, and compassion and loving-kindness (41). They note that this research suggests that meditation can be used to help treat conditions like chronic pain and depression while also cultivating a “sense of overall well-being” (40). The authors add that the discovery of these benefits has coincided with the center’s research on neuroplasticity, which is the brain’s—even an adult brain’s—ability to restructure its neural networks in response to, for instance, meditation and mindfulness practice.

One fascinating research finding has been the distinct impact that contemplative practice has on the mind and body relative to a practitioner’s experience level; Davidson and his collaborators were able to discover quite different impacts when comparing “expert Buddhist meditators” with at least 10,000 hours of practice to meditators with many fewer hours of practice, or even none at all. They write:

In our laboratory at Wisconsin, we further observed different patterns of activity depending on a practitioner’s level of experience. Veteran meditators with more than 10,000 hours of practice showed more activity in these attention-related brain regions compared with novices. Paradoxically, the most experienced meditators demonstrated less activation than the ones without as much experience. Advanced meditators appear to acquire a level of skill that enables them to achieve a focused state of mind with less effort. These effects resemble the skill of expert musicians and athletes capable of immersing themselves in the “flow” of their performances with a minimal sense of effortful control. (Ricard, Lutz, and Davidson 2014, 42)

The authors conclude: “About 15 years of research have done more than show that meditation produces significant changes in both the function and structure of the brains of experienced practitioners. These studies are now starting to demonstrate that contemplative practices may have a substantive impact on biological processes critical for physical health” (Ricard, Lutz, and Davidson 2014, 45). In addition, they discovered that those practices can even reduce inflammation and other stresses at the molecular level. These and other significant research findings about the benefits of contemplative practice are further detailed in Davidson’s 2017 book Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain, and Body, which he co-authored with psychologist and science journalist Daniel Goleman (2017).¹¹ The research they describe in the book serves as the foundation for the course The Art and Science of Human Flourishing that Davidson and his collaborators at the University of Virginia and Penn State University created in response to the adolescent mental health crisis, which we address below.

Jon Kabat-Zinn: Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR)

Jon Kabat-Zinn is another American scientist who has played a prominent role in the mindfulness movement. He is known for introducing secular forms of mindfulness and meditation practice through his teachings, programs, talks, documentaries, podcasts, and many books, including Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness (2013) as well as Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life (2010).

Drawing on his training in Zen, Vipassana meditation, and yoga, Kabat-Zinn developed the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program in the late 1970s at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center, where he also founded the Stress Reduction Clinic. Originally designed as an eight-week course to help healthcare patients cope with stress, anxiety, pain,¹² disordered sleep, and other symptoms associated with chronic illness, MBSR has been widely used with a variety of populations, including women undergoing treatment for breast cancer.¹³ MBSR is now taught throughout the world to a wide range of groups attracted by its secular approach, short time frame, and evidence-based benefits.¹⁴ It is also widely regarded as a forerunner of other mindfulness-based interventions, including Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) and Mindful Self-Compassion (MSC).¹⁵

Holly Rogers and Libby Webb: Koru Mindfulness

Koru¹⁶ is another well-established and distinctly American mindfulness program that was created expressly for college students. The Center for Koru Mindfulness was founded in 2013 by Holly Rogers, who was a psychiatrist in Duke University’s Counseling and Psychological Services, and Libby Webb, a licensed clinical social worker who also worked in the same center until her retirement in 2016. Like MBSR, Koru is grounded in science, and it was developed in response to the mental health crisis in higher education that Rogers and Webb witnessed in their practice.¹⁷ We return below to the Koru Mindfulness Program in a section devoted to models for promoting mindful flourishing in higher education. First, however, we examine the causes of and potential solutions to the mental health crisis among American adolescents.

“Red Alert”: The Mental Health Crisis Among America’s Youth

In the last few years, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the US surgeon general, and other major American health institutions have issued a series of studies and public advisories about the rapidly deteriorating state of adolescent mental health. Their increasingly dire warnings have served as a “red alert” (Jarvis 2023), occasioning wide-ranging responses by US governmental agencies, private enterprise, and higher education. Indeed, it has become painfully obvious to those of us who teach at colleges and universities that many of our students are experiencing significant—sometimes debilitating, occasionally life threatening—mental health problems. Just as Holly Rogers and Libby Webb had seen a significant increase in the emotional struggles of Duke University students, we regularly witness at TCU the same set of problems: unremitting stress, anxiety, depression, substance abuse, and suicidal ideation. Students in our mindfulness classes will share with us in their weekly mindfulness reflections, and sometimes in our classroom discussions, their experiences of bouts of depression and anxiety, panic attacks, and other quite serious and disruptive mental and emotional states.

According to San Diego State University psychologist Jean Twenge (2017a), such mental health problems among adolescents began rising in the early 2010s and have continued to rise sharply. The spread of these mental health problems is being driven, in part, by factors mentioned above: hyper-competitive college campuses, the frequently negative psychological effects of social media, and the chaos and dislocations of the COVID-19 pandemic. Indeed, data from the early 2020s, which capture at least some of the pandemic’s effects, seem to confirm Twenge’s observations about the mental health and well-being of America’s youth. A February 2023 study published by the CDC found that 60% of the teen girls surveyed experienced “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness” in the previous year while 30% had “seriously considered suicide.”¹⁸ Teens who self-identified as members of LGBTQIA+ communities experienced similarly distressing declines in their mental health. Bloomberg opinion columnist Lisa Jarvis (2023) concludes, “Numbers like these are a code-red emergency—not only for parents, but for educators and policymakers.” She adds, “Teens today are growing up under an umbrella of anxiety that would have been unfathomable during their parents’ adolescence. They live with the very real fear of someone barging into their classroom with a gun. They live with intense body-image pressures exacerbated by Instagram scrolling and worry about the fallout from a momentary lapse of judgment on social media. Many are struggling with the existential threat of climate change.”

Several months after the CDC advisory was released, the May 9, 2023, issue of JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association published a report (Bommersbach et al. 2023) with data from the National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Survey showing that the number of mental health-related visits by teens to emergency rooms increased from about 5 to 7.5 million per year from 2011 to 2020. The authors calculated that visits for mental health concerns almost doubled during that ten-year period. In a breakdown of this trend, the JAMA report notes that the “the increase in suicide-related issues was most pronounced, increasing to 4.2 percent of all pediatric emergency room visits in 2020 from 0.9 percent in 2011” (Richtel 2023).

Although the mental health crisis is clear, its causes and potential solutions are not. Rather than identifying a single cause, experts frequently point to a confluence of possible factors, including those noted above: increasingly competitive college environments, the addictive power of social media, the constant threat of gun violence, body-image pressures, and the existential threat of climate change. In addition, observers of adolescent mental health point to deep political divisions, systemic racism, anti-immigrant sentiment, poverty, food insecurity, cyberbullying, epic levels of distraction, and other potential causes. From this lengthy list, we consider below those factors most directly related to the material in the following section, which address mindful flourishing on college campuses: the rapidly shifting landscape of higher education, the negative mental health effects on adolescents from daily and prolonged use of social media, and a simultaneous reduction in their capacity to focus on their studies and be present in their daily lives.

American Higher Education: The Corporatized University

Many students today struggle to make the transition from high school to college, experiencing a sort of academic whiplash in which they feel like they have been thrust into super-charged classes and campuses that can seem competitive, impersonal, and unwelcoming, especially to students from the BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, and other communities who have often felt marginalized in American higher education and society. That hyper-competitive environment reflects, in part, the so-called “corporatization” of higher education wherein many, though certainly not all, American colleges and universities have embraced the assumptions and logic of the data-driven and profit-oriented world of business. To succeed in such an environment, students often feel compelled to ignore basic self-care practices—physical exercise, restorative sleep, healthy eating, self-reflection, and so on—that can seem like unaffordable luxuries. Instead, many feel the pressure to jump on the hamster wheel of busyness and productivity, often becoming consumed in their first year by the competitive, individualistic, and zero-sum thinking that dominates this corporatized worldview.

Students in our mindfulness courses tell us that despite having read about the significant mental health benefits they can derive from a mindfulness practice, they still struggle to free themselves from their socialization and educational conditioning, which drives them to be constantly active, moving, and achieving lest they fall behind. In these classes, students often find it all but impossible at first to sit in silence for even a single minute while following the breath,¹⁹ or to engage in a short compassion and gratitude practice wishing happiness, peace, and wellness to all living beings.

This sort of thinking reflects, of course, deeply ingrained norms in contemporary American culture that exalt activity, productivity, and individual success. College students who have grown up in the US have likely been bombarded from a young age by messages about the value of time, having been told by parents, teachers, and other adults, “Time is money,” or perhaps, “Don’t just sit there, do something!” These and related messages often operate unseen in the cultural background, like a computer’s operating system, influencing our thinking, behavior, and relationships. Or we could imagine that such adages about the need to use time “productively” function like the “invisible hand” described by Adam Smith and well known to those who have taken a macroeconomics course. That “hand,” which undergirds the commercial ethos, is seen to guide and propel economic activity based on the assumption that individuals, acting in their own self-interest, will naturally produce significant social and economic benefits for a nation. Such maxims liken time to a limited and thus precious resource, with the obvious implication that we should not “waste” it sitting around doing nothing. It is thus perfectly natural for students to believe that our request that they sit in silence in their dorm room for just a few short minutes while following the breath will seem like a “waste of time”—time that could be better spent studying for class, padding their resume, doing something, anything except remaining idle and “unproductive.”

In our mindfulness courses, we discuss with students the implications of these deeply embedded ways of thinking, focusing on the negative effects on their mental health, ability to focus, and relationships. We share with them Thich Nhat Hanh’s well-known reversal of the second maxim that equates sitting around and being “unproductive”: In Being Peace, one of the books we assign, Nhat Hanh (2005) explains that mindfulness leads to insight, which “means you have a vision, an insight into reality. Stopping is also to see, and seeing helps to stop… . So you should say, ‘Don’t just do something, sit there.’ Sit there, stop, be yourself first, and begin from there. That is the meaning of meditation” (112–13).

In The Mindful Twenty-Something: Life Skills to Handle Stress … and Everything Else, another book we assign in our mindfulness courses, Holly Rogers (2016) acknowledges the pervasiveness of this view of time in American culture and our almost monomaniacal fixation on productivity. In a section titled “Achieving Instead of Being,” she observes, “In our culture we prize doing and achieving over just being. Now, achievement is a good thing. You could justly label me a hypocrite if I said otherwise” (137–38). But in the subsequent section, titled “Being Instead of Achieving,” she reminds readers, “You are not a human doing. You are a human being. Your life has value because you exist, no matter how long your list of achievements. Life is absolutely remarkable, but because our day-to-day happenings are so commonplace, we experience it as mundane” (138).

The culture of contemporary American colleges and universities has strongly reinforced the former message and has thus contributed to the mental health crisis by pushing our students to their physical, emotional, and psychological limits, which is also true of many faculty, staff, and administrators working in the corporatized university.²⁰ As such, many of today’s college students, including our own, would be hard-pressed to describe their daily lives as being filled with a sense of happiness, well-being, and flourishing. The garden needs tending.

Nicholas Carr: “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”

In the July/August 2008 issue of The Atlantic, Nicholas Carr (2008), a former executive editor of Harvard Business Review, contributed a provocative essay titled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.” Carr’s essay, which caused heated public debate, argues that the internet has, as a medium of communication, fundamentally altered how we read, think, and connect to each other, possibly even rewiring the neural circuitry of our brains. Since websites are generally chock full of hyperlinks, they naturally promote a shallow sort of reading where we skim along the surface, often moving hurriedly from one page to another, rarely stopping on a single page to read in any depth. Carr (2008) writes:

As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

Carr further developed his article’s argument in The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (2010), which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2011 and was selected for TCU’s 2012 Common Reading Program. Each academic year, in the week before the fall semester begins, groups of fifteen or so first-year students meet on campus with a faculty or staff mentor to discuss that year’s selection. The Shallows was chosen by a TCU faculty-staff committee because it had become clear by 2012 that many of our students were finding it difficult to make the transition to college life and succeed amid the fast pace of college courses, often struggling to focus on and understand complex materials. Carr, who spoke about the book while visiting TCU, told a reporter for the school newspaper that we are “losing an essential part of our humanity—the ability to think deeply. Activities like self-reflection and critical thinking are becoming less common, and Facebook and Twitter have taken their place” (quoted in TCU 360 2012).

In the fifteen or so years since Carr asked whether Google was, in fact, making us “stoopid,” there has been an explosion of materials published by scholars, journalists, and others seeking to understand what is causing the academic struggles of American adolescents, often examining the intersection of technology, distraction, and mental health. An obvious culprit is the ever-present smartphone—and particularly the social media accessed through it—that functions for many of today’s youth like an extension of their bodies, as Twenge (2017a) observes. The introduction of the smartphone (the first iPhone went on sale in 2007), as Carr argued, into daily life occasioned a sea change in how we communicate and connect with other human beings at least as disruptive and transformational as the rise of the internet itself.

Jean Twenge: “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?”

About a decade after Carr’s article appeared in The Atlantic, psychologist Jean Twenge (2017a) contributed a thought-provoking article to the September 2017 issue of The Atlantic titled “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?” Twenge’s article investigates the potentially serious effects that daily and prolonged social media use can have on the mental health of American adolescents, describing “skyrocketing” rates of depression and suicide among teens that she traces back to 2011. She observes, “Teens who spend three hours a day or more on electronic devices are 35 percent more likely to have a risk factor for suicide, such as making a suicide plan.” She notes that some teen respondents to national surveys spoke to interviewers in “the language of addiction” when portraying their relationship with their phones, while others described their phones as an “extension of their body” or “even like a lover,” offering them comfort while they slept. Twenge recounts the story of Athena, a thirteen-year-old girl, who mused about her generation’s seemingly addicted behavior toward their phones, technology, and social media, telling the author, “I think we like our phones more than we like actual people.” Based on this evidence, Twenge concludes, “It’s not an exaggeration to describe iGen as being on the brink of the worst mental-health crisis in decades. Much of this deterioration can be traced to their phones.”

Jonathan Haidt and Jean Twenge: “This Is Our Chance to Pull Teenagers Out of the Smartphone Trap”

All young mammals play, especially those that live in groups like dogs, chimpanzees and humans. All such mammals need tens of thousands of social interactions to become socially competent adults. In 2012 it was possible to believe that teens would get those interactions via their smartphones—far more of them, perhaps. But as data accumulates that teenage mental health has changed for the worse since 2012, it now appears that electronically mediated social interactions are like empty calories. Just imagine what teenagers’ health would be like today if we had taken 50 percent of the most nutritious food out of their diets in 2012 and replaced those calories with sugar. (Haidt and Twenge 2021)

Since writing her Atlantic article, Twenge has appeared regularly in popular media outlets weighing in about her concerns over the state of adolescent mental health, which are shared by many other experts, including social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. Twenge and Haidt co-wrote the 2021 opinion essay quoted above for The New York Times titled “This Is Our Chance to Pull Teenagers Out of the Smartphone Trap,”²¹ which focuses on the mental health struggles of Gen Z—those born after 1996—who now make up a substantial proportion of today’s college students. They mention the striking disconnect between the relentless marketing of social media companies seeking to convince us their products will provide greater human connections and the data revealing that heavy users of their products actually experience greater levels of isolation, loneliness, and unhappiness.²² As an example, Haidt and Twenge cite a report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development covering the five-year period from 2013 to 2018 that shows levels of perceived loneliness among fifteen-year-old students had increased rapidly, doubling in Latin American, European, and English-speaking countries while showing a fifty-percent increase in East Asian countries (PISA, n.d.; Twenge et al. 2021). They also observe that by 2019, not long before the pandemic began, the rates of depression found among adolescents had almost doubled, supporting the conclusions published in the CDC and JAMA reports mentioned above.

The authors also point to several important changes made by the tech companies that have transformed the experience of social media users, including Facebook’s rollout of the “like” button in 2009 and Twitter’s release of the “retweet” button that same year. Some three years later, several social media companies recalibrated their algorithms in response to internal data showing users remained on their platforms longer when fed a steady stream of inflammatory news that generated anger and other powerful emotions, creating what the authors call an “outrage machine.” By revving up the outrage machine, tech companies can keep users in thrall and thus increase profits, ignoring the data demonstrating the mental health risks of their products. Haidt and Twenge (2021) note that such data shows that heavy social media use was especially harmful for adolescents and that those harms were more pronounced among girls and young women who could, while scrolling through their Instagram accounts, easily fall into the trap of “compare and despair.”

As the picture of these harmful effects of social media on the mental health of adolescents has come into greater relief, the public will to actually address the mental health crisis has increased, even bringing about rare bipartisan support for congressional action in the US. Alarmed by tech executives’ willful and callous disregard of that data, several congressional committees have convened hearings at which they have grilled social media executives about the negative effects of their products on adolescent mental health. Those hearings have included expert testimony from Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen and other tech insiders. Bobby Allen (2021) of NPR offered a summary of key findings from Haugen’s October 5, 2021, testimony given to the Senate Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety, and Data Security, writing:

Of particular concern to lawmakers on Tuesday was the impact on children by Instagram, which is owned by Facebook.

Haugen has leaked one Facebook study that found that 13.5% of U.K. teen girls in one survey say their suicidal thoughts became more frequent after starting on Instagram.

Another leaked study found 17% of teen girls say their eating disorders got worse after using Instagram.

About 32% of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse, Facebook’s researchers found, which was first reported by the Journal.

Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., accused Facebook of intentionally targeting children under age 13 with an “addictive” product—despite the app requiring users be 13 years or older.

“It is clear that Facebook prioritizes profit over the well-being of children and all users,” she said.

It was based on those hearings and the growing body of evidence cited by Twenge, Haidt, and others that led US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy to issue an extraordinary public advisory on May 23, 2023, about the “‘profound risk of harm’ to adolescent mental health” from social media (Richtel, Pearson, and Leveson 2023).²³

Sherry Turkle: “We Are Forever Elsewhere”

Haidt and Twenge (2021) argue that social media can negatively impact not only individuals but also groups by depersonalizing shared spaces such as offices, restaurants, sporting events, concerts, and our college classrooms, where students are often glued to their phones. Their phones seem like an extension of their body, a container and transmitter of the self as indispensable as the heart, lungs, and other crucial organs. The authors share a comment they received from a disheartened Canadian college student who describes having “shallow friendships” with other students and struggles to talk to his peers when he enters a classroom. The student wrote, “There is hardly a sense of community on campus and it’s not hard to see why. Often I’ll arrive early to a lecture to find a room of 30+ students sitting together in complete silence, absorbed in their smartphones, afraid to speak and be heard by their peers. This leads to further isolation and a weakening of self-identity and confidence, something I know because I’ve experienced it” (Haidt and Twenge 2021).

In Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age, MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle (2015) describes the impact of constant digital distraction, noting that with smartphones, “we are forever elsewhere” (4). In mindfulness terms, we are constantly deferring presence, always wanting to be somewhere else—should we arrive, however, there is another place that seems even more enticing—and so on and so on. This lack of presence—a state of mindlessness—that Turkle illustrates with the perspectives of a college student and a professor accords with our own teaching experience, as most students enter the classroom space and immediately become immersed in their phones, oblivious to the other human beings around them.

And by being mindlessly absent while engaged in “phubbing”—a combination of phone and snubbing—students miss out on the substantial psycho-social benefits that research shows come from those direct face-to-face and embodied conversations; such conversations require, of course, responding to the facial expressions and perceived emotions of other human beings—students, instructors, or others in their social circles. If we imagine each class as the opportunity to share a delicious and healthy meal, then we might liken phubbing to some sort of unhealthy ingredient—a dollop of transfat, perhaps—that another diner at our communal table has, uninvited, tossed into the soup we are about to share. Indeed, if we pursue this nutritional metaphor, as Haidt and Twenge do in a quotation above, we might then say that our students are missing out on the chance to consume a nutritious, calorie-dense meal with the pure and unadulterated “ingredients” of actual face-to-face human interaction, getting instead the artery-clogging effects of the transfat or “empty calories” of social media interactions.²⁴

Jeff Orlowski-Yang: The Social Dilemma

The appeal and potential benefits of Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and other social media platforms and apps are obvious: they can quickly connect us to other human beings outside our immediate area, whether to friends and family members or those who may share an interest or life experience—a particular illness, political view, hobby, and so on. Undoubtedly, social media has helped connect people in these beneficial ways. Jeff Orlowski-Yang’s 2020 docudrama The Social Dilemma features interviews with former social media company employees—programmers, engineers, marketers, executives, and others—who were inspired by and believed in a vision that their products would promote genuine human connection, although each eventually came to recognize how heavy use of their products could harm mental health, especially that of adolescents. The concerns of these former tech employees have been bolstered by a growing body of studies, some of them produced internally by the tech companies themselves, showing not only adverse psychological and emotional effects with frequent and prolonged use but also how social media can steal our focus, inhibiting our capacity to simply pay attention and be present, which is especially damaging for younger users who are developing physically, cognitively, and emotionally and seeking to forge their own identity and sense of self.

Johann Hari: Stolen Focus

A small study investigated how often an average American college student actually pays attention to anything, so the scientists involved put tracking software on their computers and monitored what they did in a typical day. They discovered that, on average, a student would switch tasks once every sixty-five seconds. The median amount of time they focused on any one thing was just nineteen seconds. If you’re an adult and tempted to feel superior, hold off. A different study by Gloria Mark, professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine—who I interviewed—observed how long on average an adult working in an office stays on one task. It was three minutes. (Hari 2022, 10–11)

In Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again, UK journalist Johann Hari (2022) offers another valuable perspective on what we described above using the metaphor of an “unhealthy meal.” Hari examines how smartphones and social media have stolen our ability to simply pay attention. He was motivated to investigate this topic because of a heartbreaking story he tells about his godson Adam, whose addiction to technology had caused him to drop out of school at fifteen and become isolated from the outside world. Adam, we learn, spent most of his time “at home alternating blankly between screens—his phone, an infinite scroll of WhatsApp and Facebook messages, and his iPad, on which he watched a blur of YouTube and porn” (4). He struggled to maintain a simple conversation since he was always somewhere else, to use Sherry Turkle’s phrase, bringing Adam to the point where it seemed to his godfather as if had been broken into “smaller, disconnected fragments” (4). Hari adds that although adolescents like Adam—and, we might add, Athena—seem to bear the brunt of the short-term pain and long-term harm from heavy social media use and addiction, adults are also susceptible to a similar fracturing of attention. He writes:

During the decade in which Adam had become a man, this fracturing seemed to be happening—to some degree—to many of us. The sensation of being alive in the early twenty-first century consisted of the sense that our ability to pay attention—to focus—was cracking and breaking. I could feel it happen to me—I would buy piles of books, and I would glimpse them guiltily from the corner of my eye as I sent, I told myself, just one more tweet. I still read a lot, but with each year that passed, it felt more and more like running up a down escalator. (Hari 2022, 5)

To better understand Adam’s struggles, Hari spent three years researching the book, talking with experts working on some aspect of the relationship between technological innovation, human behavior, and mental health. Based on those conversations, he identifies twelve “deep forces” that often work together to “steal” our capacity to focus on our daily activities, including physical and mental exhaustion caused by the fast pace of modern life and constant multitasking, which have all sorts of knock-on effects, including greater difficulty engaging in deep and sustained reading, just as Carr had suggested over a decade earlier. In the book’s fourth chapter, titled “Cause Four: The Collapse of Sustained Reading,” Hari writes:

The opinion-poll company Gallup found that the proportion of Americans who never read a book in any given year tripled between 1978 and 2014. Some 57 percent of Americans now do not read a single book in a typical year. This has escalated to the point that by 2017, the average American spent seventeen minutes a day reading books and 5.4 hours on their phone. Complex literary fiction is particularly suffering. For the first time in modern history, less than half of Americans read literature for pleasure. (Hari 2022, 80)

Hari adds that when these factors operate together, they can block us from entering the so-called flow state, which was mentioned above in a passage from Ricard, Lutz, and Davidson’s (2014) Scientific American article in reference to “expert musicians and athletes” who can, “with a minimal sense of effortful control” (42) focus completely on the activity at hand as time seems to just melt away. Many of us have likely experienced such a flow state when fully immersed in an activity we find deeply pleasurable and meaningful, whether reading a book, playing a sport or musical instrument, painting, cooking, or gardening.

Hari also identifies other well-known causes, including poor diet and lack of exercise, as well as the physical and psychological “confinement” of children, echoing Haidt and Twenge’s observations about the benefits of play for the social development of mammals. Hari notes that many parents today, often with good intentions, strictly control and monitor their children’s daily activities, reducing or even eliminating the time allotted to playing freely with other kids—to run around outside, make up games, and explore their local environment—without the direct supervision of adults. There has been a simultaneous reduction in the time most children spend doing nothing and simply being bored. Those activities are at odds, of course, with the deeply ingrained American belief that time is a precious commodity that should not be “wasted,” a mindset we seem to be pounding into the minds and lives of ever-younger children.

Consequently, children today are given far fewer opportunities as they grow up and develop to play freely, explore, and daydream, or to make up stories, music, and games, compared to many of us who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s. In this way, American society has unwittingly built a formal and informal sort of monitoring system wherein children must feel like they are constantly being watched and surveilled, making it more difficult for them to become independent, socially competent adults.

Hari cites research showing the substantial benefits to children’s mental health and social development, as well as their focus and creativity, of giving them ample opportunity to engage regularly in unsupervised activities. He mentions Let Grow and several other promising grassroots programs seeking to teach children to become independent by giving them the time, space, and freedom to spend unstructured time with peers—playing, imagining, inventing, and problem-solving together without adult direction. This will, it is believed, enable them to develop a healthy sense of self and social competence so that they can thrive and flourish as they move into adulthood and one day enter, perhaps, our college classrooms.²⁵

Michael Moss: Virtual Salt, Sugar, and Fat

Hari (2022, 126–28) reminds us that because social media companies provide users with accounts at no cost, it is the users themselves who are, in fact, the actual product. Their profitability thus depends on keeping users glued to their phones, scrolling mindlessly through Facebook updates, Instagram posts, TikTok and YouTube videos, Twitter feeds, and so on, seeking out the dopamine rewards of “likes” or whatever reward system has been built into a particular social media platform or app. To increase their profits, companies have hired psychologists, engineers, computer programmers, and others tasked with manipulating our very human needs and potential vulnerabilities—the need to belong, the power of outrage and other negative emotions, and the fear of missing out.

These deceptive and exploitative methods are reminiscent of those deployed by “Big Food,” whose own products, similarly unhealthy when consumed in large quantities, are the subject of Michael Moss’s (2013b) investigative reporting in Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us.²⁶ Big Food companies—Coca-Cola, Kraft, Nestlé, and others—have constantly adjusted their products’ formulations of salt, sugar, and fat to create the so-called “bliss point,” making it seem all but impossible for many of us to limit ourselves to just one or two cookies or a few potato chips, or not to purchase a bucket-sized soft drink (Moss 2013a). Moss (2013b) explains that the “confidential industry records that came my way in the course of reporting this book show exactly how deliberate and calculating a matter this is. To make a new soda guaranteed to create a craving requires the high math of regression analysis and intricate charts to plot what industry insiders call the ‘bliss point,’ or the precise amount of sugar or fat or salt that will send consumers over the moon” (20).

Jhumpa Lahiri: A “Hyphenated Identity”

In his discouraged reflection on the lack of community in the college classroom, the student mentioned above told Haidt and Twenge that it “leads to further isolation and a weakening of self-identity and confidence,” which is a valuable insight. That is, as the time our students spend each day in a virtual world increases, there is not only a “fracturing of attention,” in Johann Hari’s words, but an equally important fracturing of self, creating what we might call a hyphenated identity. We have borrowed the phrase “hyphenated identity” from an essay by Indian-American novelist Jhumpa Lahiri (2006), who describes her childhood identity growing up in the US to immigrant parents from India as one forged amid the need to frequently move back and forth between the cultural registers on either side of the hyphen.

Although Lahiri’s reflection seeks to understand her experience as an adolescent trying to skillfully navigate the distinct cultural assumptions and sensibilities of the South Asian and American parts of her identity, it is a useful image for understanding how students now experience a divided, or fractured self, not in terms of a pull between two cultures but rather the distinct demands of navigating the divide between embodied presence and virtual absence. That is, today’s adolescents are moving constantly back and forth between an identity forged in the material world—the one that appears in our mindfulness classes as an embodied, albeit oft-distracted, human being—and a second that has been fashioned and curated, often painstakingly so, online. Crossing back and forth across the two sides of this divide naturally presents our students with challenges unknown to those of us whose formative years were spent in an analog world with radios, face-to-face interactions, and so on. Toward the end of her reflection, Lahiri (2006) writes, “Like many immigrant offspring I felt intense pressure to be two things, loyal to the old world and fluent in the new, approved of on either side of the hyphen.” We do not know exactly how “the intense pressure to be two things” at once will transform our students, but the research we cite above suggests that the long hours that many are spending each day on the virtual side of the hyphen is exacting very high costs on their well-being and mental health.

Duke University: The Koru Mindfulness Model

Cultivating happiness takes thoughtfulness and care, just like cultivating a lush garden. Your mindfulness meditation practice is an essential ingredient. It prepares and nourishes the soil, keeping it healthy. Your mindfulness practice also offers up the insights about your values and views that direct your choice of seeds to plant. Generally the seeds of happiness are positive mind states, such as gratitude, generosity, kindness, humility, and compassion. (Rogers 2016, 148)

One example of such innovation is the Koru Mindfulness Program pioneered at Duke University by Holly Rogers and Libby Webb, both of whom were mentioned above. Rogers and Webb were motivated to create Koru to help the students they were seeing at Duke University’s counseling center who were struggling with substance abuse and serious mental health problems.

We offer here an extended discussion of the program because of its focus on undergraduates, the fact that we have both taken Koru teacher training, and we have incorporated its basic four-week mindfulness course called “Koru Basic” into our TCU mindfulness courses and CALM Studies programming.²⁷ And since Koru Basic is a four-week, non-credit-bearing course, it provides an instructive comparison to the course The Art and Science of Human Flourishing—the subject of the second article in this issue—which is a full-semester, three-credit humanities course cross-listed with TCU’s religion and philosophy departments.

The Koru website describes how the program was fashioned to resonate with college students:

The idea, says Rogers, is to take age-old techniques—from breathing techniques to visualization exercises and guided meditations—and apply them to the specific context and challenges of the college environment: “We stripped away anything that felt too vague or wishy washy. We set all of our teaching within the context of student life. We gave the students homework. And we emphasized daily practice in short, manageable doses.” (MIEA, n.d.-a)

As students progress through the four-week sequence, they discuss selections from The Mindful Twenty-Something, written by Rogers (2016), which offers an excellent introduction to mindfulness. The title of the book’s first chapter expresses its central message: “This is Your Life. Don’t Miss It” (10). This simple statement is meant to suggest how many of us—not just twenty-somethings—often miss out on what is right in front of us as we flail away in our daily lives in a habitual state of mindlessness, rarely settling into the current moment while we ruminate about the past or worry about the future. As such, we often fail to be fully present when spending time with friends, family, and colleagues, or engaging in work, study, or rest.

To help students learn to be fully present, the book offers an accessible mix of basic mindfulness and meditation practices, scientific notes summarizing the benefits of particular practices (gratitude and smiling, for example), and short, easily digestible chapters on stress and suffering, resilience and wisdom, happiness and gratitude, and so on. Several students have told us that the book “spoke to” them, which is a comment we have heard only rarely about assigned readings in decades of teaching humanities courses to undergraduates. Such comments reflect the book’s disarmingly simple words of practical wisdom that college students can easily incorporate into their daily lives. It also offers easy-to-follow instructions for practicing mindfulness and meditation outside class although students can also listen to Rogers’s narration on the Koru website—those recordings are, like the class itself, offered free of charge (MIEA, n.d.-b).

In her book, Rogers seeks to persuade oft-distracted and skeptical college students that adopting a regular mindfulness practice can help them flourish amid the busyness of their day-to-day lives by reducing their stress and anxiety while increasing their ability to concentrate and connect more deeply and authentically with others. In so doing, they will naturally develop a calm and expansive, joyful and integrated sense of mindful presence amid their moment-to-moment experience. But she is quick to point out that the process is slow and so advises students to be especially wary of the frequent hype touting the seemingly miraculous benefits of mindfulness. Rogers (2016) observes that while some teachers give the “exaggerated impression that mindfulness will solve whatever problems you have and end all suffering in your life,” it cannot eliminate the inevitable ups and downs of life; instead, a regular mindfulness practice will help diminish their disruptive force and staying power (18).

Students can use the simple practices the course teaches to begin slowly cultivating a sense of happiness and other positive mental health states. These mental states, to return to a metaphor that both we and Rogers deploy regularly to explain the benefits of mindfulness, can be considered each student’s own flower garden. That is, these practices can help students prepare and nourish the soil, plant the proper seeds, and diligently remove the “weeds” of negative mind states. Indeed, Rogers (2016) advises her readers, “For your garden to flourish, you have to stay on top of the weeds. The weeds are negative mind states, such as greed, jealousy, intolerance, and hatred” (150). By practicing mindfulness, students can slowly—which can be frustrating in a culture so awash in instant gratification—begin recalibrating their mind states and emotions, tilting the balance progressively away from the harmful self-talk that reflects, in part, our innate negativity bias. As human beings, we are predisposed to being constantly alert to external threats, making us susceptible to having our emotions manipulated by, for instance, the outrage machine of social media companies. Moreover, such vigilance is understandable living in a polarized society and toxic political environment filled with anger, vitriol, and violence. But with a sustained mindfulness practice, students will often find themselves dwelling more regularly in positive mind states, experiencing moments of happiness, joy, and connection, which help cultivate, in turn, a sense of well-being and flourishing.

Although The Mindful-Twenty-Something focuses on secular mindfulness practices, its pages are sprinkled here and there with insights from Buddhist contemplative practices and wisdom drawn from well-known Buddhist teachers from Asia, including Thich Nhat Hanh and Shunryu Suzuki. For instance, Rogers adapts for her college readers the “five hindrances” of Buddhism, which obstruct our ability to develop one-pointed meditative concentration: greed, aversion, sloth, restlessness, and doubt. To make those hindrances more relevant to twenty-somethings, she substitutes sleepiness, restlessness, skepticism, procrastination, and time pressure, respectively. As we have been teaching mindfulness courses with the book for several years, Rogers’s list of hindrances continues to ring true to us. Indeed, early in the semester, students will often share with us their skepticism about the benefits of contemplative practice and difficulties they experience sitting still because time seems to be constantly pressing down on them. Some will tell us that just sitting silently and following the breath is quite frustrating, seeming like “a complete waste of time,” which could be better spent studying or devoted to some other “productive” activity, although we also realize that much of that time is likely spent on social media.

In response, we reassure them that if they will simply keep an open mind about the practices and make a sincere effort—we ask them to start with just one or two minutes per day—they will gradually begin to notice those benefits, which naturally vary from student to student. In our experience, if they can just stick with it for five or six weeks, they will come to realize that they are, in fact, feeling a bit less anxious and stressed out. They will also notice that they are sleeping better, have greater focus, and feel more gratitude and happiness. Some have even told us that their family and friends have noticed these differences. A few even seem to experience dramatic transformations that can seem a bit far-fetched, even magical, though there is, of course, no magic. Rather, the research we have cited by Davidson and others demonstrates the scientific basis of these practices while also observing wide variation in how each of us will respond to mindfulness.

Even so, we appreciate Kiran Bedi’s description of the ten-day silent Vipassana meditation program that she, as superintendent of New Delhi’s maximum-security Tihar Jail, introduced in a toxic and violent environment. At the recommendation of one of the guards, she invited S. N. Goenka to teach a ten-day course to help prisoners learn to deal more effectively with their anger, violence, thoughts of revenge, and so on. Appearing in the documentary Doing Time, Doing Vipassana (Ariel and Menahemi 1997),²⁸ Bedi tells the filmmakers that she had been “looking for a magic” to help prisoners deal with their “sufferings,” and that she ultimately found that magic in Goenka’s Vipassana course. The film, which we show in our mindfulness classes, follows the deep personal journeys of four prisoners, serving as a moving testament to the transformative power of contemplative practice. And we tell the students that even though the class is clearly not locked up behind metal bars like the Tihar prisoners, we agree with the film’s narrator who says that we are all imprisoned in some way by our own minds. With practice, our students catch glimpses of their captivity; glimpses of how they are, in fact, imprisoned by their own minds. As they slowly begin experiencing shifts in their consciousnesses away from negativity and toward positive mental states like happiness, they begin to rebalance and thus rejuvenate their mind-body-spirit.

This is the initial stage of cultivating their own metaphorical garden, which they can fill with the flowers, shrubs, and other natural elements that resonate with their own aesthetic sensibilities. In “The Skill of Happiness” (chapter 16), Rogers (2016) writes, “Rather than simply luck of the draw, happiness is a skill that can be learned. That’s the position of Matthieu Ricard, a French scientist and Buddhist monk who has studied the topic extensively. Ricard defines happiness as ‘a deep sense of flourishing that arises from an exceptionally healthy mind. This is not a mere pleasurable feeling, a fleeting emotion, or a mood, but an optimal state of being’” (147). Ricard’s observations about the connection between “an exceptionally healthy mind” and “a deep sense of human flourishing” was the subject of Richard Davidson’s March 2023 keynote address at TCU. Davidson’s keynote kicked off the university’s March Month of Mindfulness, which was organized by the CALM Studies group as part of the university’s Moore Symposium.

TCU: The CALM Studies Model

This ancient land, for all our relations

We respectfully acknowledge all Native American peoples who have lived on this land since time immemorial. TCU especially acknowledges and pays respects to the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes, upon whose historical homeland our university is located. (TCU 2021)

Like Duke and other American colleges and universities, TCU is trying to create conditions in which our students can thrive and flourish during their undergraduate studies and post-graduation careers. To this end, the university has been devoting substantial resources to programming that can help students deal more effectively with the academic and mental health struggles we have investigated above. For example, Eric Wood, director of TCU’s Counseling & Mental Health Center, has developed innovative mental health programming that includes the Comprehensive Collaborative Care Model, in which the counseling center staff collaborates with community groups, faculty, and other campus partners (TCU News 2023). Indeed, the CALM Studies group has been working with counselors at the center to create mindfulness-based mental health programs. One example is a pilot called CALM Student Ambassadors program, which will train students from across the university, including the TCU medical school, to work with small cohorts of other students in their academic areas and social spheres, leading them in basic breathwork, meditation practice, and community-building conversation.

The university has also created courses to help students make the transition from high school to college, including the elective, one-credit Introduction to University Life (UNLF), which was first offered to incoming students in fall 2014 and now enrolls about half of every incoming class of over 2,000 students. Although UNLF is open to all first-year students, the university’s colleges and schools have designed similar courses that target specific student cohorts, including the College of Science & Engineering’s one-credit Introduction to Pre-Health for students going into fields such as dentistry, medicine, optometry, and pharmacy.

Another example is the course The Art and Science of Human Flourishing (ASHF), which was created in response to the adolescent mental health crisis. The course reflects a hopeful vision for student flourishing forged through a partnership between CHM, the Contemplative Sciences Center at the University of Virginia, and the Edna Bennett Pierce Prevention Center at Pennsylvania State University. The leaders of that partnership include Richard Davidson and CHM’s Distinguished Chair in Contemplative Humanities, John Dunne, PhD (Buddhist studies),²⁹ as well as founding executive director of the Virginia center David Germano, PhD (Buddhist studies), and Rob Roeser, PhD (education and psychology), the Bennett Pierce Professor of Caring and Compassion and Professor of Human Development and Family Studies at Penn State. All four have traveled extensively in Asia and have long-standing connections to Asian religious traditions and their rich contemplative practices.

As we describe in the second article in this issue, we taught the pilot version of the ASHF course on the TCU campus in spring 2022 and will offer it each spring semester as the gateway course for the CALM Studies minor. We envision ASHF, CALM Ambassadors, and other CALM Studies programming as our group’s contribution to fostering a greater sense of balance and belonging on our campus—a campus shaped by a complex and difficult history, including patterns of exclusion that have marginalized many groups, among them the Native American peoples mentioned above. This history has left lasting imprints that continue to negatively affect the fabric of our community.

The CALM vision seeks to create a balanced, integrated, and mindfulness-infused educational environment of the sort imagined by William James. Or, to play on the journal’s Asia focus, we might describe it as a kind of educational feng shui—literally “wind and water”—that seeks to reconfigure our physical and virtual, intellectual and emotional spaces so that positive, healing energy can flow unimpeded, helping to harmonize the system and cultivate the conditions that promote mindful flourishing.

Mindful Flourishing at TCU

Each of the six articles that follow illustrates some aspect of the CALM Studies group’s efforts to help restore balance to our campus, educational system, and society through an integrative vision rooted in mindfulness, compassion, and connection.

The first, by founder Andy Fort, traces the group’s evolution from its 2012 start as the TCU Contemplative Studies group to its 2020 transition to CALM Studies. Trained in Sanskrit, Andy specialized in Advaita Vedānta, a school of Hindu religious thought, and he traveled regularly throughout his career to India and other parts of Asia. He taught courses on Hinduism, Buddhism, and other topics related to South Asian religions in the university’s Department of Religion for more than three decades until his retirement in December 2016. Like Richard Davidson and the other scholars mentioned above, he has a long-standing contemplative practice that started with Transcendental Meditation at Amherst College in the 1970s. Some five decades later, he continues to practice meditation rooted in Asian contemplative traditions.

Drawing on both his personal practice and a leadership role in the American Academy of Religion’s Contemplative Studies unit, Andy started the university’s Contemplative Studies group to make meditation and mindfulness accessible on the TCU campus to help community members manage stress, anxiety, and so on. But he also envisioned a group that could, with proper support, become a contemplative studies hub for colleges and universities in the Southwest region. And his tireless efforts to cultivate our CALM garden reflect a broader vision for integrating contemplative practices into a traditional liberal arts education—the focus, of course, of ASIANetwork Exchange.

The second article, by humanities professors Chad Pevateaux (Religion), Blake Hestir (Philosophy), and Mark Dennis (Religion), explores CALM Studies through the lens of the ASHF course, addressing its history, nuts-and-bolts, and the central role it will play in helping us realize our vision for remaking our campus in the model of mindful flourishing. The two articles that follow were written by Max Sklansky, a former TCU student, and Wendy Williams, a TCU professor. The authors describe their introductions to mindfulness while living and traveling in Asia—China, India, and Japan—and how those practices were personally and professionally transformative. Max had richly rewarding experiences in China and India that introduced him to mindfulness, meditation, and yoga, offering a holistic and interdependent path for being in and moving through the world at odds with his experience working in the management training program of a large pharmaceutical company. For Wendy, experience with the tea ceremony while living in Japan exposed her to the wonders of presence, a quality of being that has guided her in teaching mindfulness to honors students with the goal of helping them better navigate the stresses and anxieties of college life while searching for their own authentic path.

The last two articles, also written by a former TCU student, Lexi Cole, and a current professor, Monica Jenschke, focus on mindful flourishing in the context of the health and healing professions: dietetics and nursing, respectively. The former addresses the topic of mindful eating against the backdrop of American society’s obesity epidemic, which, much like the mental health crisis, is causing immense human suffering. In the latter, Monica describes teaching students in the School of Nurse Anesthesia basic breathing and other yogic practices to help them deal with the stresses of a graduate program while increasing their sense of well-being and flourishing.

The State of CALM

As noted above, the TCU Contemplative Studies group, founded in 2012, became the CALM Studies group in 2020. That change was made after substantial discussion among the group’s leaders, each of whom views meditation and mindfulness not only as techniques to help our students manage stress and anxiety but also as powerful tools that can be deployed to help alleviate social and planetary suffering. As such, the name CALM gestures first toward the state of calm and mindful presence that emerge with regular contemplative practice. But CALM is also an acronym meaning “compassionate awareness and living mindfully,” a phrase pointing us toward a way of being in the world that is peaceful, inclusive, and integrated; it serves as the foundation for a path of healing and connection, a sort of contemplative GPS by which we can orient our activities and purpose—our North Star. We explain to all who consider joining the community that our name is meant to be an invitation to look, with the eyes of compassion, at the many faces of suffering we can readily find in our shared world if we just take the time to pay attention. That invitation also comes with a request—a request for each of us not to turn away from those faces, no matter how painful and raw their pain may appear. Grounded in this awareness, we try then to live mindfully—the second half of the acronym—by working to reduce the suffering we have witnessed in whatever way we can.

As the first article following this introduction outlines, this is our vision for cultivating a campus community that can flourish mindfully, much like the beautiful garden that appears in the ASHF course syllabus. It conceives of flourishing not as a static thing open to a prescriptive definition; rather, it is a dynamic way of being that is integrative and holistic, interdependent and communal. It will look different for each of us just as a jasmine flower differs from a rose. Both are beautiful and fragrant flowers that flourish in their own ways. And while we often think of flourishing in connection with human beings, our vision includes all sentient life, resonating with the Asian religious and philosophical traditions mentioned above. Drawing again on the garden metaphor, we seek to create a community garden that will thrive and flourish with diligent care and loving-kindness; indeed, it is a garden that already has a variety of plants, shrubs, and beautiful, multi-hued flowers—roses, jasmine, and others—each with its own needs for water, sunshine, and nutrients, and each with its own unique and valued contribution to the balance and beauty of the whole. We delight in the thought of welcoming others into our community as we try, in our own CALM way, to heal the brokenness we see on our campus and beyond. We welcome all without exception in a spirit of deep and radical hospitality: “Come just as you are and share your story! We will listen deeply and compassionately,” we say.

We are a group of socially engaged humanists and scientists, travelers and seekers, activists and healers. We are writers and poets, musicians and dancers; we are gardeners and chefs, actors and storytellers. Indeed, you will read in the articles that follow a few stories relating the transformative power of mindfulness and meditation some of us have discovered during travels in Asia. We are sustained and energized by the healing power of these practices that can lead us back, as individuals and a community, to a harmonious balance, which brings about feelings of well-being and flourishing—to a state of CALM. We would be delighted to welcome you into the state of CALM—no visa required.