Chapter 6: The Embodied Researcher: Meditation’s Role in Spirituality Research

Harry Lewis (2007), former dean of Harvard College, has written about how the university has become “soulless” and the student is seen as “a brain on a stick” (p. 100). He argues that the university has forgotten how to “help students understand what it means to be human” (p. 3). Edmundson (2013) has also written about how universities focus only on the head. He writes: “schools now educate the mind and not the heart. The curriculum has become arid and abstract. What Keats memorably called ‘soul-making’ is absent from current education. It needs to be restored” (p. xiii). Many forms of research within academia also suffer from this same problem; it too has become disconnected from the body, and soul of the researcher. Morris Berman (1990) has written about an embodied approach to historical research. “[W]e do not have methodologies of feeling, only of analyzing” and he calls for “a visceral approach to history,” which would “create bodily and emotional echoes in the person who reads historical studies” (pp. 131, 134).