Tuesday, May 22, 2012

Presentation on Bhutan, GNH and Contemplative Practice

So I gave a seminar at GRIT (Group for Religious and Intellectual Traditions) at the Uni of Newcastle on Mayu 15 and they recorded it and loaded it up to Youtube.
It stops just before the contemplative public health evaluation data is presented - not because I wanted to withold the data as some folks thought - but because the tape ran out - the data is in the evaluation document linked to the previous post. Here is the abstract for the presentation: “Gross National Happiness in Bhutan” - Piloting Contemplative Practice in Australian Public Health
Eastern contemplative practices have gained increasing popularity in North American universities since their introduction in the 1960’s and are now being reintroduced from North America back into Bhutan’s universities and public service settings. Contemplative practice is viewed as a core foundation of the Gross National Happiness development philosophy in Bhutan. An AusAid grant to teach public health surveillance in Bhutan with a contemplative practice component was the inspiration to conduct a pilot program within Hunter New England Population Health from August to October of 2011. This presentation discusses a theory of “how contemplation works,” recent neuroscience research on contemplation, and the evaluation of a pilot program of a weekly one hour contemplative program for public health practitioners in Newcastle.

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