September 1, 2022
A Statement on the Sunsetting of CMind
CMind Sundown Update
Today, September 1, the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society (CMind) will close its programs after nearly 30 years of operation. We offer thanks to each of you for your support over the years and for energetically and spiritually bolstering us through the sunsetting process. (You can read our initial sunset statement, here.)
The CMind Transition Committee and Board of Directors have been hard at work locating and vetting new homes for the mission critical initiatives of the organization. Under the leadership of the committee co-chairs, CMind Co-Founder Mirabai Bush and Stephanie Briggs, with the support of Lenwood Hayman, Lisa Napora, Amy Pucino, and Michelle Chatman, CMind has successfully rehomed the programmatic and intellectual property assets of the organization.
Over the past weeks, the Board and the Board Transition Committee considered numerous excellent options, and today we announce that their selection process has concluded.
We are thrilled to announce, pending the necessary institutional approvals and the penultimate approval from the Office of the Attorney General in the State of Massachusetts, the CMind assets will rehomed as follows:
CMind Archives and Physical Artifacts
We are very pleased to announce that the Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center at the W.E.B. Du Bois Library, UMass Amherst, will be adding an archive of CMind’s website, publications, recordings, and resources to its special collections, ensuring that these contemplative teaching and learning resources will continue to be accessible.
Details for accessing the archive will be available from the Special Collections website once the archive is in place, and further information on this and other aspects of the CMind closure and transition will soon be available on contemplativemind.org.
We want to publicly thank Aaron Rubinstein, Head, Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center, and Madeleine Charney, Librarian W.E.B. Du Bois Library at the University of Massachusetts Amherst for their diligence throughout the process and their dedication to upholding the vision and values of the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society.
Association for Contemplative Mind in Higher Education (ACMHE)
ACMHE, an initiative of CMind, will continue as an institutionally independent member-governed association. Lenwood Hayman is leading this effort, joined by Michael Kimball, JuPong Lin, Amy Pucino, Maria Hamilton Abegunde, and Gabrielle Cuesta as the “Friends of ACMHE” Advisory Committee.
We want to publicly thank the Friends of ACMHE and all of the current ACMHE members for your thoughtful feedback and continued support of the Association.
More information will surely follow from the Friends of ACMHE in the current weeks re: membership renewals, upcoming events, and member engagement opportunities.
The Journal of Contemplative Inquiry (JOCI)
JOCI will be published through a partnership between the University of Northern Colorado Library and the University of Northern Colorado Center for Applied Contemplative Studies (Michael Kimball, Director).
JOCI will continue to be available as an open access, peer-reviewed journal. In partnership with the Friends of ACMHE, a call for members of the Editorial Board, manuscript reviewers, and copy editors will be distributed in the months ahead.
In addition to Michael Kimball and Jane Monson, Digital Collections Librarian/Associate Professor at the University of Northern Colorado Libraries, we want to thank and publicly acknowledge the work of David and Trudy Sable, co-editors of the Journal of Contemplative Inquiry for their longstanding dedication to JOCI, contemplative scholarship, and their unseen work mentoring hundreds of manuscript authors pre-publication. You have been wonderful curators of contemplative scholarship and we are looking forward to your continued engagement in advancing the field. We also express our gratitude to each scholar, who selected JOCI as their publication of choice.
Beyond the Sundown
More information will be available as the transition commences from each of the asset holders. The CMind staff will utilize the remainder of the month to focus on the internal work of the sundown. We will close out systems and begin the process of transferring the acquiring assets to the new institutions and committee.
As of now, all of the ACMHE and JOCI systems and logins which you are accustomed to using will remain in place for the time being. However, in anticipation of the shift at ACMHE, we have temporarily paused membership enrollments and renewals (to be resumed once the transition is complete).
Deep, Deep Bows
From the center of our hearts, we thank each of you for being who you are, for loving and engaging with CMind, and for the community we have built together. Your work, our work does not end on this day. In many ways, we are just beginning, And what’s more important, just as we began all those years ago being shepherded by the tremendous energy that is Mirabai Bush and then Arthur Zajonc, we find ourselves wading once again neck deep in a reservoir of infinite possibilities.
May you be well.
May you do good.
May you and all beings be free—and know it.
‘Til we meet again.
CMind’s mission is to positively and progressively transform society through diverse contemplative practices.
Contemplative practices are about learning from our own unique, personal experiences. We call them "practices" because over time, with repetition, our learning grows as our experience changes.
Contemplative practices have many forms, including:
JOCI is an online, open access, peer-reviewed journal. JOCI advances the understanding, development, and application of contemplative and introspective methods in order to serve a vision of higher education as an opportunity for cultivating personal and social awareness and an exploration of meaning, values, and engaged action.