Lessons From Classical Yoga Traditions on the Cultivation of the Heart-Mind: the future of Higher Education

Based on a book chapter written for the edited collection titled Developing and Supporting Pedagogies of Compassion in Higher Education: A Practice First Approach (published by Springer, 2024), this presentation begins by critiquing the current focus of higher education reform, which tends towards creating more stringent and limiting outward criteria for competition that alienate students from their authentic selves. This in turn creates later problems for human relationships. For higher education to be reoriented towards the cultivation of the heart-mind instead of neglecting the real business in life, a transformative awareness and an enlightened understanding of the meaning of life’s relationships must be nurtured. For the world’s healing and wellbeing, higher education should focus on what really matters in life by aiming at cultivating compassion, loving-kindness, empathic joy, equanimity and respect as fundamental qualities in all personal and professional endeavours.

 

Compassion education stresses the need to enable students to see what their souls yearn for and to experience the interconnectedness of all that exists. Drawing upon the spiritual teachings mostly from classical yoga traditions, I argue that to live fully as a compassionate being requires transcending the ‘individual self/consciousness’ (jīvaātman) to embrace the ‘transcendent self/consciousness’ (paramātman), resting ultimately in simultaneous awareness. This presentation is contemplative in nature and discusses the uses of a simple three-fold relationship model of interconnectedness (with the self, the other/others, and the world/beyond) in compassion-based curriculum development. It presents a model that I have developed and explored in practice to privilege students’ educational, relational and spiritual growth through the cultivation of the heart-mind.

 

This presentation draws, in part, on my doctoral research into university students’ phenomenological experiences of meditation when integrated fully into the curriculum and took place in China. This gives the presentation an important cross-cultural dimension and international context.