I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about coming up through grad school and early career and just what what your experiences were, how were you a scholar practitioner, what were you combining together, and how were you received, and how were you trying to navigate those tensions? I know there's a ton of detail, and it's probably a huge story, but maybe you could just give us some

sense of that arc.

Basically, the perspective that I was taught in religious studies is if you practice and bring elements of your practice into your research, that you cannot be objective.

that it somehow biases you to bring in a subjective perspective.

And also, the other thing that went along with that is that it's impossible to try out or to experience, to be a practitioner without accepting the entire package.

So you can't do a contemplative practice, let's say a practice of the mindfulness of breathing from the Anapanasati Sutra or the Mahasatipatthana Sutra.

If you want to try that out, you bring the whole Buddhist system along with you.

So let's fast forward to your current position as director of this contemplative studies program and just talk about, I guess we should probably define contemplative studies, but then also talk about how it's intended to kind of pull these different threads together and integrate them into one kind of approach to research research.