Emory University, Drs. Sahdra and Bauer-Wu and our colleague Rachel Whitworth have coded 33
interviews and arrived at a set of 151 thematic codes that reflect the collective set of responses to
questions regarding broad areas of lived experience ranging from worldview to living
conditions
. These data will allow us to relate changes we see in cognitive performance, brain
activations, emotional responding and neuroendocrine and immune system regulators to what
participants found personally most meaningful. This integration of first-person and third-person
experimental data was a central core of the program of research in contemplative science
envisioned by Francisco Varela
In sum, we have described a general approach that can capture two important aspects of
contemplative training that bear directly on the emergence of compassion (see
:
establishing a more stable attention and achieving greater emotional balance. We have much more
work to do and are excited at the chance to continue to mine this unprecedented dataset, with new
support from a large grant from the John Templeton Foundation
helping to uncover ways in
which contemplative practices can transform themind and foster a deep compassionate regard for
self and others.
Acknowledgements
We are deeply indebted to our participants and their families. The project would not have been
possible without the effort of many UC Davis Center for Mind and Brain staff, undergraduate,
graduate and postdoctoral research trainees, full-time research staff and numerous consulting
scientists. The Shamatha project has been funded by Fetzer Institute grant 2191, and by gifts from
the Hershey Family, Tan Teo, Yoga Research and Education, Mental Insight and Baumann
Foundations, the Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies, Grant Couch, and Louise
Pearson, Caroline Zecca-Ferris, as well as generous anonymous and other individual donors.
Future work and follow-up data collection on the project will be supported by grant 39970 from the
Sir John Templeton Foundation. The Project was additionally supported by a F. J. Varela research
award from the Mind and Life Institute to Manish Saggar, a postdoctoral fellowship from the Social
Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada to Baljinder K. Sahdra, and National
Science Foundation pre-doctoral fellowships to Katherine A. MacLean and Anahita B. Hamidi.
Sponsorship in the form of publicity for participant recruitment and discount services were provided
by the Shambhala Mountain Center and in the form of an equipment loan by the Mind and Life
Institute. We thank Anahita Hamidi for generous assistance in writing and editing this chapter.
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