Mindfulness and Compassion Grand Rounds at Harvard Medical School will be held about twice monthly, live online via Zoom, and is open to those within Harvard Medical School, Cambridge Health Alliance (CHA), and members of the CMC community, for free. Our Grand Rounds series has 3 main aims:
Disseminate information about new cutting edge science and impactful clinical research findings
Highlight best practices for enhancing the efficacy, accessibility, and safety of mindfulness and compassion delivery and applications for population mental health
Provide opportunities for healthcare provider self-care and burnout prevention
Not able to attend live over Zoom? All registrants will receive a link to the recording.
2025/26 Academic Year
Subject of Lecture :
The VOICES Collective - Love as a Decolonial Praxis of Reconnection
Date: Monday, June 1, 2026
Time: 1:00pm - 2:00pm (ET)
Presenters: Richa Gawande, PhD, Dominique Malebranche, PhD, & Rahil Rojiani, MD
Richa Gawande, PhD
Dominique Malebranche, PhD
Topic Description:
The VOICES (Vocalizing Oppression and Interconnection in Contemplative and Embodiment Spaces) collective shares an exploration of love as experienced through three reconnections to body, community, and Spirit as an antidote to inner and outer colonization. The work draws on contemplative practice, dialogic practice, and community-based participatory research methods. VOICES shares the Critical Contemplative Dialogue as a possible healing intervention and invites participants to experience the three reconnections in individual, dialogic, and participatory forms.
Rahil Rojiani, MD
Presenter Bio:
Richa Gawande, PhD (she/her) is a contemplative practitioner, teacher, and community-based researcher. She identifies as first-generation Indian, Buddhist and Hindu, shaped by a lineage of devotional Hindu priest scholar-scientists and Tibetan/Theravadan Buddhist lineages. In her work she elevates community wisdom, dialogue, and participatory research as/about practice(s) that support listening through the body to our individual and collective stories. She is interested in how cultural and ancestral interoceptive practices facilitate health, social change and reclamation of story in the context of chronic illness, grief, change, and spiritual seeking. Richa is also an advocate for gently working with grief and shame individually and collectively as part of healing and liberating recognition of interdependence with the cycles of nature. Her PhD work is in public health biology and she has served as Program Manager, and then Research Scientist, at CMC for 11 years. She is Instructor at Harvard Medical School, Co-Director of the Mindful Behavior Change group leader training pathway, co-chair of the CMC Committee on Belonging, Equity, and Anti-Racism, and is also currently a clinical social work master's student. Richa is dedicated to qualities of clarity, heart-centeredness, and play in dialogue, inquiry, and contemplation across multiple ways of knowing.
Dominique A. Malebranche, PhD (she/her) is a licensed psychologist, contemplative scholar-practitioner-activist, embodied educator, and trauma-informed yoga teacher. Intersections as a first generation Haitian-American and daughter of the Diaspora, faith and contemplative spiritual practice from Christian, Buddhist and justice-oriented lineages inform her healing-centered liberatory praxis. Her work emphasizes psycho-spiritual impact of cultural stress and complex psychological trauma, embodied healing and collective liberation, and body-mind interventions. Malebranche centers awareness of the body (individual, collective, earth) as a cultural source of healing, wisdom and transformation, demonstrated through co-organizing, training and consultation, creative scholarship and movement-based practices. She is an assistant professor of psychology working at Pepperdine University on original Chumas/Tongva lands, teaching affiliate of Harvard Medical School at the Center for Mindfulness and Compassion, and former postdoctoral fellow at the internationally-known Trauma Center at JRI. She draws inspiration from somatic freediving and reclaiming ancestral wisdom and liberatory relationships with the water and land.
Rahil Rojiani, MD (they/them) is a queer, genderfluid, South Asian Ismaili Muslim, and an abolitionist psychiatrist at Cambridge Health Alliance / Harvard Medical School. They completed medical school at Yale, and psychiatry residency at CHA with specialized training in complex trauma, mindfulness, and somatics. Rahil’s contemplative practices are informed by their Muslim faith, Hindustani classical music, and Vajrayana Buddhist lineages, starting at Brown University where they majored in Contemplative Studies— a multi-disciplinary study of meditation, spirituality, neuroscience, and philosophy of mind. Rahil has conducted research on the neuroscience of meditation and drumming, and on drumming as a healing intervention for incarcerated men. They have been facilitating mindfulness and politicized healing groups since 2014, particularly for community organizers and BIPOC communities. Rahil is devoted to using contemplative practices and somatic psychotherapies for healing trauma in oppressed communities working toward collective liberation.
Objectives:
At the conclusion of this session, participants will be able to:
1) Participants will be able to describe the three disconnections from body, community, and Spirit.
2) Participants will be able to compare the embodied experience of the three reconnections in individual and dialogue forms.
3) Participants will be able to apply the three reconnections through community participatory methods to a clinical or research case.
Further Reading -
1) Malebranche DA, Rojiani R, Chevannes R, Gawande R. Love as decolonial praxis: Co-creation of a community-based critical contemplative dialogue intervention. Am Psychol. 2025 May-Jun;80(4):461-475. doi: 10.1037/amp0001510. PMID: 40549604.
2) Santana, M., T., G., Bryant, T., Comas-Díaz, L., Zerbe Enns, C., Harrell, S. P., Hita, L., GreyWolf, I., Kia-Keating, M., Lee, B. A., Neville, H. A., & Suyemoto, K. L. (2025). Reclaiming love, wisdom, and healing through decolonial and liberation psychologies: A call to action. American Psychologist, 80(4), 447–460.
3) Duran, E. (2019). Healing the soul wound: Trauma-informed counseling for Indigenous communities. Teachers College Press
4) Harrell, S. P. (2018). Soulfulness as an orientation to contemplative practice: Culture, liberation, and mindful awareness. Journal of Contemplative Inquiry, 5(1), Article 6. https://digscholarship.unco.edu/joci/vol5/iss1/6
5) Wallerstein, N., & Duran, B. (2017). The theoretical, historical and practice roots of CBPR. In N. Wallerstein, B. Duran, J. G. Oetzel, & M. Minkler (Eds.), Community-based participatory research for health: Advancing social and health equity (pp. 17–29). Wiley.
6) Neville, H. A., Lee, B. A., & Maghsoodi, A. H. (2024). Decolonizing and building liberatory psychological sciences. In L. Comas-Díaz, H. Y. Adames, & N. Y. Chavez-Dueñas (Eds.), Decolonial psychology: Toward anticolonial theories, research, training, and practice (pp. 89–118). American Psychological Association. https://doi.org/10.1037/0000376-005
Previous Speakers
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Life in Suspension with Death: Investigating Mind, Body and Consciousness in Tibetan Tukdam Meditation
Date: Monday, January 12, 2026
Time: 1-2pm (ET)
Presenter: Tawni Tidwell, PhD, TMD
Impact of Mindfulness on Adult Psychosocial Development
Date: Monday, December 12, 2025
Time: 1-2pm (ET)
Presenter: Sara Lazar, PhD
Aging Gracefully: Cultivating Acceptance
Date: Monday, December 1, 2025
Time: 1-2pm (ET)
Presenter: Elana Rosenbaum, MS, MSW, LICSW
Grounding Psychotherapy in Self-Compassion
Date: Monday, October 20, 2025
Time: 1-2pm (ET)
Presenter: Chris Germer, PhD, Susan Pollak, MTS, Ed.D, and Ronald Siegel, PsyD
Ways of Knowing Compassion in Healthcare: A Comprehensive Examination of Compassion-Centered Spiritual Health
Date: Monday, October 6, 2025
Time: 1-2pm (ET)
Presenter: Jennifer Mascaro, PhD
Living in Perilous Times: Bridging Inner and Outer Divides
Date: Monday, September 15, 2025
Time: 1-2pm (ET)
Presenter: Tara Brach, PhD
The Power of Daily Practice: Reflections on Five Years of a Shared Morning Contemplation
Date: Monday, June 2, 2025
Time: 1-2pm (ET)
Presenter: Narayan Helen Liebenson
What Have We Learned From Two Decades of Randomized Trials Testing Meditation-Based Interventions?
Date: Monday, May 19, 2025
Time: 1-2pm (ET)
Presenter: Simon Goldberg, PhD
I Move Therefore I Am: Cultivating Whole Person Health Through Mind-Body Movement in Chronic Disease
Date: Monday, May 5, 2025
Time: 1-2pm (ET)
Presenter: Gloria Yeh, MD, MPH
Living with Fire: Finding Calm in a Time of Uncertainty
Date: Monday, April 21, 2025
Time: 1-2pm (ET)
Presenter: Pico Iyer
Mindfulness and Compassion in the Anthropocene: Reframing Meditation Practice as Fuel for Metabolizing the Difficult
Date: Monday, March 17, 2025
Time: 1-2pm (ET)
Presenter: Willa B. Baker, PhD
Collective Flourishing: Reverence In A Complex World
Date: Monday, February 3, 2025
Time: 1-2pm (ET)
Presenter: Yuria Celidwen, PhD
Inner Refuge: Mindfulness Practices for Sustaining Strength in Crisis
Date: Monday, January 6, 2025
Time: 1-2pm (ET)
Presenter: Sharon Salzberg
The Cart Track: Two Approaches to Suffering
Date: Monday, December 16, 2024
Time: 1-2pm (ET)
Presenter: Henry Shukman, Zen teacher, author, poet
Measuring Mindfulness and Related Concepts with New PROMIS Tools
Date: Monday, December 2, 2024
Time: 1-2pm (ET)
Presenter: David Victorson, Ph.D.
Finding Our True Home in the Journey
Date: Monday, November 18, 2024
Time: 1-2pm (ET)
Presenter: Marisela B Gomez, MS MPH PHD MD
The Hidden Conversation: Interoception's Role in Mind-Body Health and Healing
Date: Monday, November 4, 2024
Time: 1-2pm (ET)
Presenters: Sahib Khalsa MD, PhD
Cultural Considerations when Addressing Stress & Anxiety in Black Perinatal People: A Mindfulness Approach
Date: Monday, October 21, 2024
Time: 1-2pm (ET)
Presenters: Karen Sheffield-Abdullah, PhD, RN, CNM, FACNM
Undoing Aloneness & Healing Attachment Wounds with AEDP
Date: Monday, September 30, 2024
Time: 1-2pm (ET)
Presenters: Diana Fosha, PhD
The Evolution of Self-Compassion in Healthcare: A Decade of Progress and Its Role in Combating Burnout
Date: Monday, September 16, 2024
Time: 1-2pm (ET)
Presenters: Paula Gardiner, MD, MPH and Christopher Germer, PhD
Mindful-OBOT Study- A First Look: Insights from a National Study of Live-Online Mindfulness Groups During Opioid Use Disorder Treatment
Date: Monday, June 3, 2024
Time: 1-2pm (ET)
Presenters: Zev Schuman-Olivier, MD and Joseph Rosansky, Ph.D
The PARTS Study- A First Look: Insights from Group-Based Internal Family Systems Research
Date: Monday, May 20, 2024
Time: 1-2pm (ET)
Presenter: Zev Schuman-Olivier, MD and additional members of the CMC team including Lexie Comeau, MA; Hanna Soumerai, LICSW; Mary Catherine Ward, LICSW; Brian Orr, LICSW, MSW; Dilara Ally PhD, LCSW; and Fiona Kate Rice, LMHC.
Biopsychosocial Approaches to Improving Cardiometabolic Conditions in African American Women through Mindfulness and Self-Compassion
Date: Monday, May 6, 2024
Time: 1-2pm (ET)
Presenter: Cheryl Giscombe, PhD, MA, MSN, PMHNP-BC
The Myth of Self-Improvement: Returning to the Heart of Who We Are
Date: Monday, April 22, 2024
Time: 1-2pm (ET)
Presenter: Caverly Morgan
Is Mindfulness Self-Help Helpful for Depression?
Date: Monday, April 1, 2024
Time: 1-2pm (ET)
Presenter: Professor Clara Strauss BA (Hons) PhD DClinPsy
Living Wide Awake: Turning Fear into Compassionate Action
Date: Monday, March 18, 2024
Time: 1-2pm (ET)
Presenter: Koshin Paley Ellison Sensei, MFA, LMSW, DMIN and Chodo Robert Campbell Sensei, GC-C, Co-Founders and Co-Guiding Teachers of the New York Zen Center
Breathing and the Brain: Rhythm and Emotion
Date: Monday, March 4, 2024
Time: 1-2pm (ET)
Presenter: Jack L. Feldman, Distinguished Professor and David Geffen School of Medicine Chair in Neuroscience, Department of Neurobiology, UCLA
Integrating Mindfulness Into Healthcare
Date: February 12, 2024
Time: 1-2pm (ET)
Presenter: Paula Gardiner, MD, MPH
Liberation Ecotherapy: A Healing Justice Framework for Nature-based Social Prescribing for Mental Health
Date: January 29, 2024
Time: 1-2pm (ET)
Presenter: J. Phoenix Smith, MSW
The Role of Mindfulness in Reversing High Blood Pressure: Clinical Trial Discoveries
Date: Monday, December 18, 2023
Time: 1-2pm (ET)
Presenter: Eric B. Loucks, MD
Truth and Repair: How Trauma Survivors Envision Justice
Date: Monday, December 4, 2023
Time: 1-2pm (ET)
Presenter: Judith L. Herman, MD
The Power of Ceremony: Indigenous Contemplative Practices, Neurodecolonization, and Indigenous Mindfulness
Date: Monday, November 6, 2023
Time: 1-2pm (ET)
Presenter: Michael Yellow Bird, MSW, PhD, Dean and Professor
Mindfulness Based Real-Time fMRI Neurofeedback, Cathy Kerr Annual Memorial Lecture
Date: Monday, October 16, 2023
Time: 1-2pm (ET)
Presenter: Susan Whitfield-Gabrieli, PhD
Connecting Our Inner Work to the Outer World
Date: Monday, October 2, 2023
Time: 1-2pm (ET)
Presenter: Shelly Tygielski
What Actually Makes Us Happy?: Lessons from the Longest Study of Human Thriving
Date: Monday, September 18, 2023
Time: 1-2pm (ET)
Presenter: Robert J. Waldinger, MD
Mindfulness-Based Childbirth and Parenting: Preparing a New Generation for Birthing and Beyond
Date: Monday, June 5, 2023
Time: 1-2pm (ET)
Presenters: Nancy Bardacke, CNM, MA and Larissa Duncan, Ph.D.
The Buddha Arrives on Turtle Island: Decolonizing the Dharma
Date: Monday, May 15, 2023
Time: 1-2pm (ET)
Presenter: Dr. Eduardo Duran
Building Bridges, Not Walls: Applying Lessons from Contemplative Science to Enhance Equity and Inclusion in the Classroom, Clinic & Beyond
Date: Monday, May 1, 2023
Time: 1-2pm (ET)
Presenter: Doris F. Chang, PhD
Mindful Medicine: Healing Burnout and Replenishing Your Energy
Date: Monday, April 3, 2023
Time: 1-2pm (ET)
Presenter: Jan Chozen-Bays, MD
Contemplative Practices for Inclusive, Anti-Racist Clinical Engagement and Healthcare
Date: Monday, March 20, 2023
Time: 1-2pm (ET)
Presenter: Kamilah Majied, LMSW, PhD
The Minds and Mentors Program: Promoting Peer Support in Recovery Research
Date: Monday, March 6, 2023
Time: 1-2pm (ET)
Presenter: Mercy Ngosa Mumba, PhD, RN, FAAN
Mindful Resilience And Post Traumatic Post Pandemic Growth
Date: Monday, February 6, 2023
Time: 1-2pm (ET)
Presenter: Christopher Willard, PsyD
Mindfulness, Advanced Meditation, and Future Directions for Research
Date: Monday, December 19, 2022
Time: 1-2pm (ET)
Presenter: Matthew D. Sacchet, Ph.D.
Finding Balance in Difficult Situations: Awareness and Wisdom as a Practice
Date: Monday, December 5, 2022
Time: 1-2pm (ET)
Presenter: Alexis Santos
From Beast Machines to Dream Machines
Date: Monday, November 21, 2022
Time: 1-2pm (ET)
Presenter: Professor Anil Seth, D.Phil, MA, MSc
How To Be Your Best: Insights From Neuroimaging To Optimize Performance
Annual Cathy Kerr Memorial Lecture
Date: Monday, November 7, 2022
Time: 1-2pm (ET)
Presenter: Martin Paulus, MD
Radical Friendship in the Workplace: A Mindfulness Practice for Stressful Times
Date: Monday, October 17, 2022
Time: 1-2pm (ET)
Presenter: Kate Johnson
Mindfulness-Oriented Recovery Enhancement: Clinical Outcomes and Biobehavioral Mechanisms of an Evidence-Based Therapy for Chronic Pain, Opioid Misuse, and Opioid Use Disorder
Date: Monday, October 3, 2022
Time: 1-2pm (ET)
Presenter: Dr. Eric Garland
Befriending Eco-Anxiety: Mindful Practices for Moving Through Grief, Loss, and Change
Date: Monday, September 19, 2022
Time: 1-2pm (ET)
Presenter: Kaira Jewel Lingo
