Psychology Prof. Marcia Grabowecky has taught Northwestern’s Buddhist Psychology class since 1999. Rather than just once, the popular class will now be offered biannually in the fall and spring.
The class examines essential principles of Buddhism, like the interdependence of all living beings and their environment, and its relationship to psychological systems. Last Winter Quarter, 370 NU students originally enrolled for the class.
The Daily spoke to Grabowecky about the class, why the course is needed now more than ever and the importance of learning how to pay attention.
This interview has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.
The Daily: Why do you think Buddhist Psychology attracts such a large population of students?
Grabowecky: The class is big partly because it fulfills the distro requirement. I also think so many Northwestern students have anxiety issues and put a lot of pressure on themselves. They don’t have good relationships with themselves quite often — they’re fun with other people, but they don’t like themselves very much. That’s a pretty common human thing, and they’re curious. There’s a lot of stuff about meditation and mindfulness in the popular press, so people have ideas about what that might be, (especially) that it can fix everything. So, they want to check it out through this class.
The Daily: Do you ever get nervous talking in front of so many people at one time?
Grabowecky: Always. I learned early on in teaching that if I didn’t have a little bit of anxiety at the beginning of a class, the lecture was terrible. You don’t want stage fright to be overwhelming so that you’re incapacitated, but if you’re completely flat about doing a performance, then you’re unfocused. This is learning how to make friends with your anxiety and recognize that those little twinges of anxiety are actually very helpful.
The Daily: What do you want Northwestern students to take away from this class?
Grabowecky: There’s a couple of things. I gave a talk at this meeting in Chile called Congreso Futuro. At the opening gathering, the current President of Chile stood up for his talk, and the politicians that were in the front row were on their phones and he called them out. He said “I understand that we’re busy, but when you’re making this choice, you’re choosing to be absent.”
At that point, I flipped my talk to talk about mindfulness and how (it) lets us intentionally choose what we consume. I don’t just mean food, I mean media and other sources. What are you taking into your mind? Are you actually making conscious choices about how you want to shape your mental continuum? That’s kind of a big part of what I’m talking about for the class.
We meditate in my class to try to understand our minds, not to de-stress, even though that could be a simple effect. But we’re trying to generate more positive emotions and positive actions in the world and minimize the negative ones. When you’ve cultivated that, you’re aware of what you’re doing while you’re doing it.
The Daily: Why do you think it is important for this class to be taught right now?
Grabowecky: I think one of the roots of the social media crisis, broadly construed, is that most people, when they’re consuming social media, turn off the questioning, rational, slow system in your mind that’s checking things. Without that system, you’re just going to believe any random crap that people direct to you, which feeds into our distress.
I would say, one of the reasons people are coming to this class is because the world’s really scary right now. There’s so many things for us to be worried about, and it’s kind of overwhelming. So we’re trying to find how we can manage that a little bit and keep some balance in all this chaos.
The Daily: Is there a key to reaching that state of mindfulness?
Grabowecky: It’s just paying attention — learning to do that. One of the things I’ve done since the beginning in this class is have people write little reports on their meditation experience. Always, some of the most interesting ones are the ones where people talk about their experiments with mindfulness. People write how they decided to have a mindful meal and just that was really transformative. So whether the key is this or that, I think it’s practice. Mindfulness is a mental skill like any other kind of skill, and it takes time to acquire the skill. Once you become skilled, your mind can be fully present in recognizing the layered variability of the natural world.
Email: nataliekim2027@u.northwestern.edu
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