Course Description

For centuries, modern science and medicine have been straying further and further away from the healing wisdom and arts held in common by most humans throughout history. Now suddenly, two decades of breakthroughs have brought a dramatic shift in our modern views of human nature, illness, and health, sparking a revolution that is re-aligning our newest therapies with the world's timeless methods. 

As a contemplative psychiatrist, Joe Loizzo has experienced this revolution firsthand, seeing medicine and psychotherapy transformed by their confluence with the timeless contemplative methods preserved in the East. His talk recounts this sea change, mapping the new science that tracks much of what ails us to an age-old source--stress emotions and habits--and charting the rising tide of evidence that mindfulness, compassion, and embodied methods like breath-control can help us turn the primal force of our nature to drive optimal health.

Dr. Loizzo explains how radical therapies bring together new science with timeless contemplative skills to shift mind, brain, and body from stress to wellbeing. His talk frames the recent watershed of mindfulness-based therapies as the first of three waves in this confluence, and then introduces its second and third waves: the compassion-based and embodied contemplative therapies of today and tomorrow that hold even greater promise for the future of health and wellbeing worldwide.

  

Contemplative psychotherapist

Joe Loizzo

Joe Loizzo, M.D., Ph.D. is a contemplative psychotherapist, clinical researcher, and Buddhist scholar-teacher who integrates ancient contemplative science and technology with current breakthroughs in neuroscience and optimal health. After training in psychiatry at Harvard and completing a Ph.D. in Buddhist Studies at Columbia, he founded Nalanda Institute for Contemplative Science, a non-profit that helps people build sustainable happiness, compassion, and leadership through integrating science-based contemplative skills into their daily lives.On faculty at the Weill Cornell Center for Integrative Medicine and the Columbia University Center for Buddhist Studies, Dr. Loizzo lectures widely on the role of meditative learning in the future of heath, education, and leadership, and teaches regular public classes and workshops at his Nalanda Institute, and Tibet House US. In 2007, he published Nagarjuna’s Reason Sixty with Chandrakirti’s Commentary, a translation study of contemplative self-analysis in Buddhism. His second book, Sustainable Happiness: The Mind Science of Well-Being, Altruism, and Inspiration, appeared in the Routledge Behavioral Science Series in 2012. He has published dozens of chapters and articles on contemplative science in peer reviewed books and journals including The Journal of Religion, the Annual Review of Psychiatry, and the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. Dr. Loizzo has a private psychotherapy practice in Manhattan, where he lives with his wife, Gerardine, and their sons Maitreya and Ananda.

Course curriculum

  • 1

    Module 1

    • Intro

    • Training Manual

    • Reflection 1

    • Between East and West (Video)

    • Between East and West (Audio)
  • 2

    Module 2

    • Intro

    • Personal Self-healing (Video)

    • Personal Self-healing (Audio)
  • 3

    Module 3

    • Intro

    • Social Healing (Video)

    • Social Healing (Audio)
  • 4

    Module 4

    • Intro

    • Embodied Healing (Video)

    • Embodied Healing (Audio)

    • Course Quiz