What is CALM Studies?

For more than a decade, TCU's CALM Studies initiative has been helping members of the TCU community and beyond reduce stress and anxiety, foster belonging, and work to create a world that enables all beings to flourish.

We offer innovative courses, weekly meditations, lectures open to the community, as well as one-on-one meetings through our thriving CALM Convos and CALM Buddies programs.

CALM stands for “Compassionate Awareness and Living Mindfully.” Our four pillars are:

  • belonging

  • wisdom

  • compassion

  • flourishing

Contemplative Studies is a thriving interdisciplinary inquiry into, and critical reflection on, the nature and significance of contemplative theory and practice. It ranges from enduring spiritual traditions to modern neuroscience, and from ancient to contemporary practices.

PROGRAMS

  • As part of its efforts at TCU, CALM offers weekly opportunities to engage in one-on-one contemplative conversation. Combining empathic dialogue with other contemplative methods, such as mindfulness, breathwork, and various forms of meditation, the aim of CALM Convos is to help individuals deeply explore and actualize their potentials for belonging, wisdom, compassion, and flourishing. The CALM Convos program is a free service open to the general public.

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  • CALM Buddies is a meditation program sponsored by TCU’s CALM group. The program is meant to give you an opportunity to develop a regular meditation practice while getting to know a small group of peers who are also interested in exploring the benefits of meditation and mindfulness practices.

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COURSES

  • This course will explore perspectives from both the humanities and sciences in ways that are directly relevant to university life, and will also engage in contemplative practices drawn from various traditions that help develop the qualities and skills—such as the capacity to manage distraction—that are key elements of flourishing.

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  • The course will consider how practice and reflection influence one another, and how we engage in personal relationships, society, and the natural world.

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  • This course offers an introduction to Buddhism: its history, texts, doctrines, and practices, as well as some of its major schools and teachers.

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  • This course will examine effective leadership through the lens of mindfulness.

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  • A philosophical and experiential exploration of various conceptions of mind, consciousness, and self.

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  • "Transformation education - understood as education the whole person by integrating the inner life and the outer life, by actualizing individual and global awakening, and by participating in compassionate communities - has become a quiet but sturdy movement that encourages the recovery and development of the academy as a liberating and capacity-building environment.


    - Parker J. Palmer, The Heart of Higher Education: A Call to Renew

  • "The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again, is the very root of judgement, character and will.


    -William James

  • “If we can deeply understand the power of our minds to both injure and benefit this world, we see that (contemplative) practice is not a luxury but an imperative. It returns us to ourselves, to our sanity, our true capacity.


    -Geoffrey Shugen Arnold

  • “If the universal addiction is to our own pattern of thinking - which is invariably dualistic - the primary spiritual path must be some form of contemplative practice.


    - Richard Rohr

  • “Contemplative approach is one of inquiry into the nature of things, a scientific suspension of disbelief (and belief) in an attempt to "know" reality through direct observation by being fully present in the moment.


    -Barbezat and Bush, 2014