Ep. 8: Rob Roeser — The Teacher Is the Curriculum (How contemplative science meets the human heart)

In this episode of Living Dharma, co-hosts Tsunma Kunsang Palmo and Justin Kelley sit down with Rob Roeser, a developmental psychologist who has spent his life with a foot in two worlds that do not always speak to one another: the rigorous world of science and the quiet world of contemplative practice. Director of Research at Emory University's Center for Contemplative Science and Compassion-Based Ethics, and a longtime contributor to the Mind and Life Institute, Rob is a leading figure in what has come to be called developmental contemplative science, the study of how practices like mindfulness and compassion shape the heart and mind across the whole arc of a human life.

The conversation traces his own origin story, from a childhood curiosity about the life of Jesus, through the burnout that cracked him open in graduate school, to his slow arrival in the contemplative traditions of India and Tibet. Along the way he reflects on struggle as the seedbed of transformation, his honest and ongoing wrestling with the first noble truth, and why he believes a teacher's inner life is, in a very real sense, the curriculum.

Rob also turns toward the harder questions of our time. How do we educate young people for an unstable world? What do gratitude, interdependence, and wonder have to do with it? And what might an education look like that draws on pre-modern wisdom to meet a post-modern age. Warm and wide-ranging, this is a conversation about waking up the wonder in ourselves and in those we teach.