SALON: Nature

Description: This workshop treats ‘nature’ as both a lived reference point for contemplative practice and a charged, historically overdetermined term—less a stable object “out there” than a scene of negotiation where bodies, concepts, and the more-than-human co-compose what counts as real. Holding this tension, the workshop explores practices of contemplative naturalness in the early Tibetan Dzogchen and Chinese Chan traditions—noncoercive awareness and effortless cultivation alongside the modern need to meet climate grief, guilt, anxiety, and responsibility as weather moving through the nervous system and the elements. Inspired by contemporary eco-poetics and decolonial critique, we follow the genealogies of physis, natura, rang byung, and ziran while foregrounding the claim that the modern distinction between nature and culture sits at the heart of colonial modernity and its enduring ethical, ecological, and technological consequences.

Bio

Adam Lobel, Ph.D, practices at the threshold of ecologies, Buddhist-inspired meditation and philosophy, contemplative education, and psycho-social political change. His work in the world weaves these practices together. Adam is a scholar-practitioner of philosophy and religion, focusing on Dzogchen Tibetan Buddhism and contemporary theory. A professor of Ecopsychology and a Focusing professional, he is curious about cultural therapeutics. He teaches in the Ecosattva Training, is a Guiding Teacher for One Earth Sangha, a GreenFaith fellow, and is active in ecological justice movements. He is currently working on co-editing a volume on Giorgio Agamben and Buddhism and developing what he calls Four Fields. He lives in Pittsburgh, PA with his partner and two kids where he protects lands from the petrochemical industry. For more on Adam’s practices: www.releasement.org

About Salon

Salon is a monthly open dialogue on cutting-edge research related to contemplation and flourishing with UVA and local community members in the Contemplative Commons, hosted by the Contemplative Sciences Center's CIRCL: Contemplative Innovation + Research Co-Lab. Centered on a single word, these gatherings bring together scholars, scientists, and practitioners from diverse perspectives to exchange ideas, generate knowledge, and seek solutions to global challenges.

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Host or Publisher Contemplative Sciences Center