President's Message

Contemplative Education and Education
for Environmental Sustainability
By Naropa University President Thomas B. Coburn
October 28, 2007

"What ties Naropa University's signature activity of 'contemplative education' to education for environmental sustainability is our underlying commitment to deep listening. Virtually all colleges and universities commit to cultivating in their students the liberal arts skills of reading, writing, speaking and researching. Naropa shares this commitment, but we add what we believe is the often ignored liberal arts skill of listening. This means, on the one hand, learning to listen to oneself—
not just to one's head, which already gets plenty of attention in education, but to one's heart, which doesn't.

Contemplative education is about both intellect and emotion. Developing listening skills also means learning to listen to others—not in order to straighten them out, but in order to take their words to heart, respectfully and with a willingness to change one's own views as a result. There is no more important task for educators today than to help students learn to engage constructively with those who are not like themselves. The deep listening that is central to contemplative education therefore holds high promise for addressing the diversity issues that today provide both challenge and opportunity in the world of education and beyond.

But it is not just between people, in all their diversity, that contemplative education offers the promise of healing through deep listening. It also offers this for our relationship with the environment, with the natural world. Here, as with interpersonal reconciliation, it is recognition of our underlying interconnectedness that is the key. For centuries the predominant way that the West has sought to know the world is through objectification—distancing oneself from the 'other,' whether that be a person or the natural world. 'Be objective,' we have been told. The limitations of that way of knowing are now apparent everywhere, in the fractiousness of interpersonal relationships and in the destruction we have inflicted on the environment.

The promise of sustainability in human relationships and in our relationship to the natural world depends on recognizing our reciprocal relationship and interdependence. It is easy to recognize what it might mean to listen deeply to another human, and we are coming to realize that this also pertains to the natural environment in which we live. The great invitation that is extended to all of us today is to listen deeply to the natural world as it calls out in its pain and its beauty, so that we might craft a sustainable future with both our fellow humans and the environment."