The Mindful Researcher

A few months ago, I submitted an application for my first academic promotion. The process was new to me, and the application fairly long and involved. It took me 2-3 months to produce the required 8 page case and a detailed CV. The promotion process feels a little like reapplying for your existing job at a higher level - it calls for honest and considered reflection on where you are in your career, what you've achieved so far, and where you're headed next. It requires you to explicitly identify yourself to others, and evaluate your achievements, as a researcher, teacher, mentor, leader and citizen of the university. Like job applications, I found producing the promotion application quite hard. My primary felt experience of the writing process was one of resistance - the feeling of not wanting to work on the application. More than being simply stuck or mired, I experienced a deep aversion to the task and all that it animated, a resistance that expressed itself in my mood, bo...

For the past seven years or so, I've kept up a (mostly) daily mindfulness meditation practice. One of the things this practice shows me on a regular basis is how difficult it is to be really open. We are not used to opening to our felt experiences and sensations or to the unknown. Most of our moment to moment experience goes unnoticed in the swirl of life, as we are either too busy to stop and observe, or if space opens up we reach automatically for distractions. Both busyness and distraction are ways of avoiding or staving off the discomfort that simple or empty moments present (e.g. sitting on the bus, waiting for a coffee, eating a meal). Our daily lives are guided mostly by force of habit, and in particular, the habit of moving towards comfort and away from discomfort. Meditation offers training in openness. It challenges us to simply observe and sit with our experiences as they unfold. As a method, it asks us only to watch. In insight meditation (which is the for...

I first had the idea for this blog last September whilst teaching a new course called The Mindful Researcher . I wanted to offer research students a course that would bring the principles of mindfulness into conversation with the research process. Based on my previous experience as a PhD student and observations drawn from my current work as a Postgraduate Learning Advisor, I could see common themes and problems emerging around the experience of doing research. Doctoral research is challenging in and of itself - the sheer volume of reading and writing, designing and carrying out experiments or fieldwork, and the pressure to publish, present at conferences, gain work experience and develop networks. But an aspect of this task that often gets overlooked is the mundane, everyday experience of sitting with one's work and oneself. This can sometimes be the hardest part of a research degree. A colleague of mine recently pointed out that a 3-4 year PhD is roughly 1100-1400 days s...