Presidential Profile: Supplemental Resources
Scenes from the vibrant Naropa community
Website Resources
The website home for all things Naropa. Specifically of note are the student testimonials and the “Naropa Now” section which highlights our most recent happenings and initiatives.
A page outlining the division responsible for mission integration at the university.
This page shows the many ways a potential donor can give to Naropa.
Showcases the many ways we are celebrating Naropa’s 50th Anniversary in 2024.
An online version of the timeline that was installed at the Nalanda Campus, highlighting key important dates and figures who have come through Naropa over its first 50 years.
Provides a way interested parties can tour Naropa’s campus without coming to Boulder.
This page is a resource for all who are concerned about the Arapahoe Campus sale.
This page serves as the home for the MA in Clinical Mental Health Counseling. Students can then seek more information about the different degree concentrations.
This page is reflective of the format all academic program pages follow.
Learn more about how Naropa University, the first accredited institution in the West to pioneer contemplative education, integrates mindfulness with rigorous academics.
The home for Naropa’s Community Counseling Center that provides affordable and transformative mental health care services to the Boulder community.
The Keating-Schachter Center ( is dedicated to bringing genuine spiritual wisdom into education, creating opportunities for university students and staff to interact with genuine wisdom holders from the world’s spiritual traditions.
Recent Advertisements / Ad Campaigns
Listen to Our Podcast!
In Naropa Institute’s inspiring opening convocation in June of 1974, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche called for “relighting the pilot light” of American higher education. Those of us present who were to become Naropa’s founding year-round faculty members had no idea how that might occur, but Rinpoche had tremendous faith that we could figure it out. He guided aspects of Naropa’s curriculum, approach, and vision, but left the implementation up to us. We knew that meditation practice was a key, as it had shaped our own artistic, psychological and academic journeys in such important ways. But when it came to designing courses and teaching our students, we were unsure exactly how to do things differently.
When Naropa’s year round program opened in January of 1978, the small circle of full-time faculty began to experiment, workshopping our courses, brainstorming our curricula and co-teaching across our respective disciplines. Rinpoche’s influence had brought a palpable excitement to learning in an atmosphere of inquiry and creative expression, and we wanted to do the same. Like ancient India’s Nalanda University, Rin-poche was clear that Naropa was not to be a Buddhist seminary. He reminded us, “We don’t want to lay our trip on anyone,” as in catechismic doctrinal learning.
Instead, he wished to create an open environment of inquiry, assuring us that when we bring East and West together “the sparks will fly”. It was true, from the very beginning, the Naropa classroom was special—alive, engaged, deeply personal. We wanted to discover the “secret sauce” that made this so and strengthen it so that it could grow over the decades.
Watch Naropa on YouTube
Transform Yourself, Transform the World
Created for social media, this one–minute video captures the essence of a Naropa education.
50th Anniversary
A panoramic view from the roots of Naropa’s founding to its prevalence in the present day.
Mission, Culture & Inclusive Community
The intersection and efforts behind the MCIC division at Naropa, which is considered the institutional guardian of Naropa’s ethos.
Naropa College: A Transformative Student Experience
Highlighting the undergraduate experience at Naropa.
Transfer to Naropa
An animated illustration of the ways that a Naropa education feels different from the traditional college experience.
🌼 Humans of Naropa: Chicago
“I’m grateful for all the people that have helped me along the way, every single person, my teachers and my students. When I got out of prison, guys that I had sponsored, and I`m still in contact, and guys that took my stress reduction class, the faculty from the University of Arizona that threw me a homecoming party, everyone who helped me get a bachelor’s degree behind bars, my kid who helped me put a GoFundME together, the warden that allowed me to do the grad interview in my oranges, which never happens, my CO3 officer who put in so much energy to help me get an interstate compact, even my parole officer approving my interstate compact to attend college without a job yet, to go back to school, its unheard of. She took a chance. But I had done the work and I know who I am and what I’m here to do. I`m a teacher. I`m a stress reduction teacher. I`m a teacher for prisoners, and it doesn`t have to be incarcerated people, it can be anyone. But I did have to go to prison to find who I am. I wouldn’t change it. And I’m grateful for all the people who have seen who I am and supported me along my path.”
Chicago is a first year master’s student of Naropa’s Mindfulness-Based Transpersonal Counseling program. This summer, he got out of prison after 25 years for an armed robbery in 1999. Now, he has a joy for life that is infectious to everyone who meets him and lives his life as he says, “like an open book.” While in prison he learned mindfulness and Buddhist meditation and became an avid practitioner with a daily practice and has led workshops and classes for other inmates since 2012. Through his education he plans to go back to work with inmates teaching stress-reduction, mindfulness, and compassion. He has written a series of stress-reduction books for prisoners that will be published, is getting his facilitator certificate in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, and just started a non-profit that will house all his stress-reduction work which he hopes will impact many to come.
🌼 Humans of Naropa: Chicago
“I’m grateful for all the people that have helped me along the way, every single person, my teachers and my students. When I got out of prison, guys that I had sponsored, and I`m still in contact, and guys that took my stress reduction class, the faculty from the University of Arizona that threw me a homecoming party, everyone who helped me get a bachelor’s degree behind bars, my kid who helped me put a GoFundME together, the warden that allowed me to do the grad interview in my oranges, which never happens, my CO3 officer who put in so much energy to help me get an interstate compact, even my parole officer approving my interstate compact to attend college without a job yet, to go back to school, its unheard of. She took a chance. But I had done the work and I know who I am and what I’m here to do. I`m a teacher. I`m a stress reduction teacher. I`m a teacher for prisoners, and it doesn`t have to be incarcerated people, it can be anyone. But I did have to go to prison to find who I am. I wouldn’t change it. And I’m grateful for all the people who have seen who I am and supported me along my path.”
Chicago is a first year master’s student of Naropa’s Mindfulness-Based Transpersonal Counseling program. This summer, he got out of prison after 25 years for an armed robbery in 1999. Now, he has a joy for life that is infectious to everyone who meets him and lives his life as he says, “like an open book.” While in prison he learned mindfulness and Buddhist meditation and became an avid practitioner with a daily practice and has led workshops and classes for other inmates since 2012. Through his education he plans to go back to work with inmates teaching stress-reduction, mindfulness, and compassion. He has written a series of stress-reduction books for prisoners that will be published, is getting his facilitator certificate in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, and just started a non-profit that will house all his stress-reduction work which he hopes will impact many to come.
🌼 Humans of Naropa: Giovannina Jobson
“My favorite thing to teach is Buddhist Studies, the Dharma, because it just makes a huge difference in people`s lives when someone starts to really ‘get’ how you create the world that you live in and that the choices you make reflect who you are at any given time. The Dharma is so down to Earth. In Buddhism there is no salvation that you can seek out there, so you have to stop looking at the sky to be saved. You, of course, have resources and people you trust and friends and family, but on a basic, ultimate level there`s just you—your mental stream, your consciousness and your emotions and you have to do the work yourself. There`s just no other way. The Buddha said the Earth is my witness when he was asked to prove that he had attained liberation. When you are down to Earth you are also more in harmony with yourself, and being in harmony with yourself is another way of being in harmony and connected with all of existence. If you can just sit and feel the earth breathing, feel the trees breathing and connect with that rhythm, you belong to this world. You don`t need somebody to say, you`re okay, or it`s okay that you were born. You just belong.”
Giovannina has been a professor in Naropa’s Wisdom Traditions department for over 23 years. She teaches in the Masters of Divinity (Mdiv) program as well as undergraduate courses on meditation, ritual arts, Maitri Space Awareness, and compassion. She was instrumental in helping to establish the Mdiv program at Naropa with a group of faculty decades ago. She is also an alumnx of Naropa’s former MA in Indo-Tibetan Buddhism and Contemplative Religion program. Outside of Naropa, she teaches meditation for non-profits, corporate retreats, and with domestic abuse survivors as well as in prisons and senior citizen centers. She loves spending time with her partner, Phil Stanley, another Naropa professor of Wisdom Traditions, and her three grandchildren. She`s a lover of mystical spiritual traditions of all kinds, and especially the Buddhadharma. Her work at Naropa and in the community is offered with devotion and gratitude to her teacher Trungpa Rinpoche.
