I’m joined today by David Collins, who some of you may recognize as a contributor to The Side View essay series. He’s contributed two articles, one on Western mysticism and contemplative practice and another on the history of mindfulness in the United States.

You’ll notice at the top of the show that I took a different approach in this episode in that I asked David to lead us through two short meditation exercises—one at the beginning of the episode and another one towards the end. As you’ll hear in a moment, David is an experienced and excellent guide in these areas, so I encourage you all to follow along and participate with us.

Dave began meditating when he was fifteen, adapting instructions he’d read in a Reader’s Digest summary of the book The Relaxation Response. In addition to his meditative practice, David is also quite the scholar. He undertook a double-major in religion and psychology at Dartmouth, a masters in contemplative theology at the Graduate Theological Union, another masters in world religion at Harvard, and he has a PhD in clinical psychology.

Over the years his contemplative practice has included Transcendental Meditation; zazen, in the Soto style taught by the San Francisco Zen Center; and vipassana and jhāna practices as taught by the Insight Meditation Society.

In addition to actual meditative practice, David is interested in cross-cultural parallels in meditation and contemplative techniques, and he’s working on a book, tentatively titled, To Know Like Love: The Nature of Contemplative Experience, where he compares the meditation instructions in The Cloud of Unknowing with the Zen teacher Dōgen.

The book is written in the form of a letter of love to his daughter, and draft copies of its opening chapter are available on ResearchGate, http://Academia.edu, or by contacting Dave on Twitter, @bodhidave3.

He currently works as a clinic manager in the psychology department at the University of Texas in Austin.

After leading us through a short meditation, Dave and I talked about the increased scientific interest in mindfulness practice, the history of mindfulness in the United States, and Jon Kabat-Zinn’s mindfulness-based stress reduction techniques. We also talked about the importance of context and history when engaging in contemplative practice, what’s missing in today’s empirical study of mindfulness, as well as what Eastern contemplative practices share in common with those found in the West.