From November 3rd to the 6th, 2025, the International Society for Contemplative Research (ISCR) held its third academic conference. The Friday Conference Center offered a pleasant venue for a week’s worth of professional networking, stimulating lectures, and intermittent contemplative exercises. Walking through the front doors on the first day, one was met by booths advertising breakthrough technologies in brainwave research and virtual reality, illustrious prizes from the inaugural silent auction, and ornate art pieces designed by the contemplative community. An impressive number of eager attendees engaged in the pre-conference workshops, which proposed burgeoning advances in Mindfulness-based Interventions, commentaries on practices in Eastern medicine and Western psychotherapy, and critical issues that speak to the humanity of the researchers, giving name and corporeality to the diverse, embodied experiences that would be present among the incoming audience. 

After the Opening Session and anticipatory reveal of the conference’s 2027 location—Kyoto, Japan—Tawni Tidwell commenced the first evening with a flawless talk on tukdam meditation, seamlessly elaborating on her death-defying ethnographic research on lifelong meditators at their moment of passing and displaying a dexterity in knowledge systems that could only be afforded by her comprehensive training in biocultural anthropology and Tibetan medicine. Her casework with over 60 monastics invokes such ethically and intellectually imperative questions as, “When do we pronounce someone deceased and according to which biological signatures?” And “If someone is showing physiological traces of life but not awareness, can consciousness be considered epiphenomenal?” 

Anne Vallely widened the horizons of the religious traditions brought to the table, as well as the boundaries of who we consider worth mourning. An anthropologist and scholar of religion, Dr. Vallely introduced her Jaina Contemplative Practices project, which unearths the death practices (e.g. sallekhana) of this South Asian tradition and exhumes the integral culture of lamenting the losses of our non-human relatives, a practice that is vibrant in the tradition she studies. Offering repeated gratitude to her academic forerunners and instructors in the practice, she left us with a useful framing that hung over the rest of the conference, noting that the phenomena we study tend not to present a linear arc from life to death but a cyclical co-emergence of decomposition and re-emergence. 

[…] the phenomena we study tend not to present a linear arc from life to death but a cyclical co-emergence of decomposition and re-emergence. 

Recently recruited to the formidable team of contemplative researchers at Emory University, Rob Roeser bared both his heart and mind on stage. Speaking from decades of experience in erecting educational programs domestically as well as abroad, Dr. Roeser displayed parental pride when describing the emerging, transdisciplinary field of Developmental Contemplative Science. In this field, enactive wisdom and mind-body practices are brought into the classroom and reciprocally informed by the developmental approach of specifying the reciprocal factors that shape every individual’s development of contemplative skills. He advocates for a two-generational approach to embedding social-emotional learning—that is, compassion—and attention regulation practices, better known at this stage as reflection and curiosity, first in the caretakers and then in youth, with implementation being inclusive of fit, feasibility, and community acceptance. As joint pioneers in a multi-university initiative to center the ethic of cultivating flourishing in formal education settings, this keynote session—sponsored by the Contemplative Sciences Center—recognized the legacy of transformative pedagogy taking place at universities like our very own UVA. 

Cheryl L. Woods Giscombé, ISCR’s Planning Committee co-chair and UNC Chapel Hill’s Distinguished Professor of Quality of Life, Health Promotion, and Wellness, was an ideal candidate to close out the keynote speaker series. Her scholarly background in examining tension, coping, and culturally-rooted frameworks of wellbeing enables brave confrontation of hard truths related to illness, caregiving, grief, and transitions. Dr. Giscombé’s address conveyed a sympathetic understanding of our humanity at all levels of our biopsychosocial ecology and the pragmatics necessary for grieving individualistically and in community, inferring self-care practices that build on those for individuals at the nexus of marginalized identities, namely Black women. (These themes structure her recent book, The Black Woman’s Guide to Coping with Stress.) One of her latest research studies, the HARMONY study, investigates the relationship of different forms of stress management psychology and the practical infusion of mindfulness into our other health routines, including those reflective moments in which we consider the loved ones and passions that nourishes us and give us life. 

Dr. Giscombé’s address conveyed a sympathetic understanding of our humanity at all levels of our biopsychosocial ecology and the pragmatics necessary for grieving individualistically and in community,

The evening’s closing session allowed attendees to draw in the final breaths of what had been a lively week. Final remarks of gratitude were a special and spontaneous surprise; in what other research society does a mic get passed around for people to share their most wholesome experiences? In the wake of reflecting on my own experience, I am amused by our perennial incapacity to anticipate those transitions from the lives that we have known to the life that awaits us beyond our most recent enclosure. Such insight about the human condition emerged as a continual and cyclical theme that we each took with us in our lives beyond Chapel Hill. 

Such insight about the human condition emerged as a continual and cyclical theme that we each took with us in our lives beyond Chapel Hill. 

Like the good scientists, humanists, and artists that we are, we are left only to predict our own trajectories, ponder the complexity and precarity of present circumstances, and gracefully re-present our pasts in order to reimagine where we are headed. As for our friends and colleagues, they have departed from immediacy and returned to their own worlds, seemingly distant though closer to us than ever before. Thus, we know that through our inevitable breaking apart, we reconnect with where we belong in a more fortified fashion. Here, we regenerate new worlds, each one the better because of the lessons that we picked up during our time at the 3rd Annual ISCR Conference.