Compassion Festival & Conference

Telluride, Colorado, Wednesday July 18 through Sunday July 22, 2012

A collaboration between Telluride Institute and Stanford University's Center for Compassion & Altruism Research & Education  (CCARE)

 

For a third year, Stanford University's CCARE Center and Telluride Institute join forces to investigate the science,  the cultural practices, and the educational potential of compassion. This year CCARE has convened the highest level conference ever held on the subject in the arena of the sciences.  And Telluride Institute's concurrent Compassion Festival will focus on how compassion can be nurtured and extended in the local and regional community.

The Science of Compassion:

Origins, Measures & Interventions

 

Focusing on the basic science of compassion, approaches to enhancing compassion, and the benefits compassion can afford to health, well-being and psychosocial function, top researchers and clinicians meet to exchange ideas and information, to test conceptual consensus and to forge collaborative alliances.

 

The conference will also survey existing compassion-focused interventions structured after mindfulness-based interventions for stress-reduction or loving-kindness.  The conference will work to catalyze more powerful multisite research on the nature of compassion as well as the translational utility of compassion science to public health.

The Telluride Compassion Festival:

No Place like Home

 

Since 1985, Telluride Institute's Ideas Festivals have explored major local, regional, national and international topics that have seemed particularly relevant to the moment.

 

This is the first time that we have carried a single idea theme through three years. We believe that the combination of the new science of compassion that is emerging from the neurosciences with the understandings we have inherited  from  Buddhism, Native American tribes, and other spritual traditions, is of great importance as we face up to the tsunami of globalization.

 

His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, is encouraging scientists and educators to create secular teaching of compassion in the world's schools.  We endorse this.  In this year's Ideas Festival we will explore how we can increase compassionate interaction in our  regional communities.

 

No Place

Like Home

The Science of Compassion

"I truly believe compassion provides the basis of human survival, the real value of life, without that there is a basic piece missing. We cannot be happy ourselves without thinking about the happiness of others."       

 

His Holiness, the Dalai Lama