This panel draws on forward-looking methodologies for understanding contemplative praxis. Drawing from a range of traditions, from Indigenous traditions, to Judaism, to Buddhism to Jazz, these papers propose new models for furthering our understanding of contemplative practices and their impacts.
Growing interest in contemplative sciences and their related well-being interventions has underscored the limitations of approaches rooted in individualistic, Western-centric frameworks and highlighted the need for models grounded in relational, nature-based perspectives. Indigenous contemplative sciences are knowledge systems that offer a rich repertoire of spiritual exercises and contemplative practices centered on kin relations, ecological belonging, place-based interconnectedness, reverence for the natural world, and planetary flourishing—principles that align with contemporary movements toward sustainable and inclusive well-being (Celidwen & Keltner, 2023). Despite this relevance, Indigenous contemplative traditions remain underrepresented and mischaracterized in current well-being research, obscuring their transformative potential. The present work introduces the Ethics of Belonging Scale (EofB Scale), designed to assess collective belonging, personality, lifestyle patterns, and relational dispositions aligned with eight dimensions of planetary flourishing derived from Indigenous contemplative principles. The EofB scale serves as a tool to evaluate how practices informed by Indigenous values contribute to enhanced collective self-identity, strengthened communal bonds, and greater environmental concern, while also upholding cultural integrity, ethical disposition, and spiritual acumen.
Meditation research has entered a third wave focused on contemplative states, stages, and endpoints that arise with mastery, including across traditions, yet existing empirical research is grounded primarily in Buddhist-derived practices. This paper introduces devekut, or cleaving to the Divine in the Jewish mystical tradition, as a case study for developing and refining emerging trans-traditional scientific models in advanced meditation research. Drawing on Kabbalistic and Hasidic scholarship alongside neurophenomenological meditation research, we argue that devekut offers an opportunity to enrich current frameworks in advanced meditation research in three ways: its entry points, including prayer and wordless melody, are not classically contemplative; its pathway to advanced absorption states is relational rather than detachment-based; and devekut is sometimes understood as pervading ordinary life rather than being confined to formal practice. These challenges and our proposed solutions point toward a contemplative science that can address cultural, religious, and cosmological complexity without flattening it.
Miles Davis advised his musicians, “don’t play what’s there, play what’s not there.” Herbie Hancock said, “Jazz is about being in the moment.” Sonny Rollins said, “you can’t think and play at the same time.” That they sound like musicians and meditation teachers is typical. Jazz musicians frequently embrace the transformational capacity of music within a markedly contemplative approach to creativity. Engaging this in a scholarly capacity points toward research methods supportive of the academic impulse to understand and put into words these depths of experience. This paper explores how the intentional, inspired musical creativity of Jazz musicians also describes the transformational processes of contemplative scholarship, suggesting that understanding music as a contemplative practice deepens the processes by which we understand both while expanding our capacity to think critically about expressive culture and contemplative spirituality as points of personal and collective transformation, for musicians and scholars alike.
A fundamental epistemological asymmetry shapes contemplative studies: Western academic frameworks treat the practitioner’s interior development as methodologically irrelevant, while Buddhist traditions treat it as the precondition of valid knowledge. This paper takes that asymmetry seriously as an invitation rather than a problem. Drawing on the Uttaratantra’s distinction between naturally abiding and transforming buddha nature, and on the lamrim tradition of Atiśa and Tsongkhapa, it argues that the lamrim functions as a rigorous developmental epistemology — one that shares structural features with Western developmental frameworks (Piaget, Erikson, Fowler) while asking a fundamentally different question: not how humans develop, but toward what highest possibility. The paper invites contemplative studies to engage this framework as a genuine epistemological resource, and suggests that doing so is essential if the field is to maintain its depth in a cultural moment that risks reducing contemplative practice to wellness commodity.
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