Contemplative education is under pressure from two directions at once. From one side, institutions want proof that it works — lower stress, better focus, improved emotional regulation. From the other, the traditions that gave rise to these practices were never primarily about wellness. They were about transformation: about what it means to live well, to face suffering honestly, and to become the kind of person capable of genuine care for others. Squeezed between the demands of the measurable and the depth of the sacred, contemplative education risks losing the very thing that makes it worth doing.

This talk proposes a way forward. Drawing on the Dalai Lama’s vision of secular ethics — an approach grounded not in any religion but in our shared human experience, our common desire for happiness, and our fundamental dependence on one another — I argue that contemplative education’s most important contribution is neither therapeutic nor religious. It is the cultivation of a capacity that is harder to measure but more important than either: the ability to ask, and to sit with, the question of what really matters.

Medical anthropologist Arthur Kleinman calls this “what matters most” — the deeply personal sense of what gives a life meaning and direction. To illustrate what this looks like in practice, I will share contemplative education efforts at Emory University that take seriously not just the “what” and “why” of education, but the “who.” Who are you? What do you care about, and why? What kind of person are you becoming? These are questions that rely on intrinsic motivation rather than external reward, and that treat each student’s identity and inner life as educationally serious — not incidental to learning, but central to it.