I’m a psychologist and neuroscientist by training and I was really lucky in the very early part of my career to have been around a number of people whose presence and demeanor were really infectious to me. I wanted more of what they seemed to have. And they all were united in having a spiritual practice of one sort or another. I know that some of you know some of the people that were around me at that time. One of them was my dear friend who I’ve known for more than 40 years, Dan Goldman. And actually, Dan and I have just written a new book together, which is coming out in the fall, which is very much a joint personal autobiography about our collective work together. Another person in that time, this was in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the mid-1970’s, was Jon Kabat-Zinn. Actually Jon, before he started his work, before he went to UMass Medical School where he developed Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, he was the one that first taught me meditation on my living room floor in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
So that’s where it sort of began and after my second year of graduate school I had the aspiration to learn more about this stuff and so I went off to India, much to the consternation of the Harvard Psychology faculty, who mostly thought I was going off the deep end and many of whom thought I would never return. But I did have a pretty unswerving commitment to science as well as to my practice, but I got a taste spending three months in Asia of what these traditions may have to offer. And I came back with a fervent aspiration to pursue this work and I was told in no uncertain terms that if I wanted a successful career in science this was a terrible way to begin and I better find something that was more mainstream. And that was an important sort of bit of calibration in many different ways. One is that for whatever reason I kept paying attention to a kind of inner guide and continued my own personal practice. And as I often say, I became a closet meditator for many years and talked very little about it in professional circles. And then I began to pursue this work on the brain and emotion, which in many ways still frames what we do today because one of the key attributes of virtually every of the virtues that you all named just a few moments ago in one way or another has something to do with our emotional lives. And when we think about well-being we’re thinking about certain kinds of emotional qualities which we know can be strengthened and cultivated, and so this is, provides a very important scientific framework for this work.
And in the early part of my career I studied adversity, and stress, and anxiety, all this stuff on the negative end of the continuum, and then something momentous happened to me in 1992. That was the time I had my first one-on-one meeting with His Holiness, the Dalai Lama. And at that meeting in Darussalam, India, he challenged me and he said, “You’ve been using tools of modern neuroscience to study stress, and anxiety, and depression. Why can’t you use those same tools to study kindness and compassion?” And he put it to me bluntly. And I don’t know if any of you have ever seen His Holiness be stern but he was quite stern with me and it was kind of a kick-in-the-butt act of compassion on his part. And it was a wake-up call for me and we began to turn toward the positive end of the spectrum.
And this eventually led to the founding of the Center for Healthy Minds and this has been really an extraordinary unfolding that has happened quite organically. The mission of our center, put very simply, is to cultivate wellbeing and relieve suffering through a scientific understanding of the mind. And in 2010 His Holiness came to Madison to help us inaugurate our center and actually two folks who are part of our center are here, Barb Mathison and Casey Supple, and it’s been an amazing journey since.
Biography
Richard J. Davidson is best known for his groundbreaking work studying emotion and the brain. A friend and confidante of the Dalai Lama, he is a highly sought after expert and speaker, leading conversations on well-being on international stages such as the World Economic Forum, where he serves on the Global Council on Mental Health. Time Magazine named Davidson one of “The 100 Most Influential People in the World” in 2006. In 1992, His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama challenged Dr. Davidson, as a pioneer in effective neuroscience, to apply the rigors of science to study positive qualities of the mind. Subsequently, Davidson founded the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin-Madison with the mission to cultivate well-being and relieve suffering through a scientific understanding of the mind. His research, rooted in neuroscience, comes down to one basic questions: What constitutes a healthy mind? Davidson has spent his career trying to unlock this question through research focused on the neural bases of emotion and emotional style as well as methods to promote human flourishing, including meditation and related contemplative practices. His studies have centered on people across the lifespan, from birth through old age. In addition, he’s conducted studies with individuals with emotional disorders such as mood and anxiety disorders and autism, as well as expert meditation practitioners with tens of thousands of hours of experience. Davidson has published hundreds of scientific papers and is the author, with Sharon Begley, of The New York Times bestseller "The Emotional Life of Your Brain" published by Penguin in 2012. He has been featured widely in popular media including the Today Show, ABC’s Nightline, National Public Radio, National Geographic Magazine, Time Magazine, Newsweek, O: the Oprah Magazine, PBS’s The Charlie Rose Show, Harvard Business Review, and additional national and international news outlets. In 2017 Davidson’s team will launch the Healthy Minds program, a novel undertaking that will bring together leading experts in the fields of science and contemplative practice to create a comprehensive program to support individuals in the cultivation of well-being over the course of their lifespan. Healthy Minds is the first program of its kind to incorporate rigorous scientific assessments into the very fabric of the training. It is designed to further our understanding of the nature of well-being, how it can be cultivated, and the relationship between well-being and a variety of real-world outcomes. Participants will have the unique opportunity to contribute to this innovative body of research through participation in the program.
His research has earned him the recipient of numerous awards including the William James Fellow Award from the American Psychological Society. In 2000, he was the recipient of the most distinguished award for science given by the American Psychological Association - the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award. In 2011, he was given the Paul D. MacLean Award for Outstanding Neuroscience Research in Psychosomatic Medicine. He serves on the Scientific Advisory Board at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences from 2011-2017, member of the World Economic Forum's Global Agenda Council on Mental Health for 2014-2016, and has contributed to the 2015 United Nation’s World Happiness Report.