About the CCE
The Center for Contemplative Enrichment was founded in the summer of 2021 and was designated as a nonprofit in early 2022. As the founders’ own contemplative practices grew, they came to see that, while the mainstream mindfulness movement in the West has become firmly established and is making tremendous progress in supporting millions of regular practitioners, it focuses primarily on the secular benefits of meditation such as physical health, mental health, and cognitive and affective outcomes. It is not, generally speaking, focused on the more traditional aims of meditation.
Yet there are many who are interested, or who develop an interest in the course of regularly practicing meditation, in some kind of spiritual development. Furthermore, as the number of people who have been practicing regularly for months and years grows, so does the number who have experienced transcendental and/or unanticipated states of one kind or another. Often such practitioners find that they need support in order to understand and integrate these experiences into their practices and daily life as well as build on them to further their growth. In our experience, such support tends to be difficult to find and assess within mainstream mindfulness and other meditation organizations.
Historically, those pursuing contemplative techniques for their non-secular benefits were residents in monasteries that were home to individuals who had the training and personal experience needed to support earnest practitioners who were seeking an initial breakthrough or looking to integrate and build on breakthroughs in their practice. Only a tiny fraction of practitioners in the West are interested in or have the opportunity to become full-time monastics with regular access to spiritually mature teachers steeped in long-standing traditions. Nor are such teachers or institutions generally available to lay practitioners in the West. The Center for Contemplative Enrichment was founded to help fill this gap and meet the needs of earnest practitioners.
The secular aspects of the CCE address what we see as another gap, one that arises in attempts to bring the kinds of benefits of contemplative practices experienced by earnest practitioners to non-practitioners. We hold that many of the skills underlying the benefits of contemplative practices experienced by earnest practitioners can be identified and that others, including non-practitioners, can be trained in those skills. Our initial application of that perspective is an approach to mindfulness implementation first brought to educational institutions called Embodied Teaching™. However, the principles of Embodied Teaching™ are transferable to any organization or relationship where there is a person interested in taking the initiative to bring the benefits of mindful awareness more fully into that relationship or environment. Embodied Teaching is discussed in greater detail elsewhere on this web site.
About Us
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