Learning at Dharmalaya Institute

Experiential education for compassionate changemakers

We endeavour to awaken deeper curiosity and wonder in all our participants, nurturing the joy of learning and the drive to make the best of every opportunity for deeper understanding, personal growth, professional development, and service to the greater good — often all at once.

Our approach to experiential education is highly personalized and self-directed yet strongly community-oriented. Rather than spoon-feeding information to our participants, we focus on creating a supportive environment for discovery so that motivated learners can make connections for themselves in the context of a caring and creative community culture.

Distinguishing features of our approach to learning

Holism & systems thinking

We consider the whole person and the whole context to find whole solutions. Our programmes are fractal, exploring both the macro and micro while observing patterns and connections at every level.

Empowering changemakers

The entire Dharmalaya experience is designed to help our participants make positive impacts in the world, fostering insight into how change happens and how we can make a difference, and cultivating the wisdom and skill to become sensitive and effective agents of change.

Learning by serving

Our focus on experiential learning (learning by doing and reflecting) and service-learning in particular (learning through altruistic service) engages the heart and provides the joy and satisfaction of learning by doing meaningful work in support of a greater good.

Collaborative community

Everything here happens in community, supporting participants to develop skills for living and working harmoniously and productively. Our culture of constructive communication offers useful feedback that increases self-awareness and self-confidence.

Contemplative practices

Meditation, yoga, philosophical explorations, and reflection — especially when practiced together regularly over time — deepen the integration of heart and mind, and of inner life and outer work. This deepens insight and helps ensure that the best intentions lead to the best results.

Residential immersions

It’s good to study ideas and its even better to live them . Our residential programmes offer immersive opportunities where compassionate concepts and practices become the whole of our experience, transforming us through our living of them.

Global awareness + local action

Our big-picture view helps participants understand our world, its urgent challenges, and promising solutions, while our local-scale projects provide training in contextually sensitive application of world-changing ideas on a human scale.

Emphasis on well-being

Our programmes promote holistic health and ‘inner sustainability’ through balanced lifestyle, healthy diet, conscious movement, and contemplative practice. Over time, participants gain insight and tools for crafting and maintaining a lifestyle of well-being.

Earthville Education

Dharmalaya Institute implements the core principles of Earthville Education, including: responsible planetary citizenship; global awareness with local action, individualized self-directed learning plans, comprehensive self-evaluation with supportive feedback, and more.

Contemplative service learning: what & why?

Educational research shows that experiential learning — and service learning in particular — are much more effective methods of learning than typical classroom study.

Service learning

A type of experiential learning where the focus is on learning by doing work that benefits others or the planet

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Contemplative practice

Clearing a space to reflect on our experience with a calm, lucid, meditative quality of mind

Dharmalaya Institute’s programmes unite the benefits of service learning and contemplative practice to synthesize the ultimate win-win educational experience. We take the work of positive changemaking itself as the ‘coursework’, with the real world as the ‘classroom’. And we bring contemplative awareness to the task at every stage, from conception to execution and reflection. In this way, engaging in meaningful and challenging work for the benefit of something greater than ourselves and then taking time to reflect, we gain all the benefits of experience followed by inquiry and contemplation, plus we feel great about both the process and the beneficial results.

The importance of compassion

At Dharmalaya Institute, everything we do is rooted in the aspiration to live more compassionately and support others to do the same in their own ways. Considering our global climate crisis and the injustices and inequities in our world, there is no societal priority more urgent than activating the innate compassion of every human and channeling that caring into insightful and well-engineered solutions. We embrace this as our principal educational objective.

Dharmalaya Institute’s educational philosophy draws on both the contemplative wisdom traditions of India and the Himalayas and the compassionate principles of Earthville Education. It seeks to make a well-examined exploration of traditional wisdom and infuse that with our best fresh creativity.

› Read Dharmalaya cofounder Mark Moore’s article on education for compassion.

The importance of holism

Nothing exists in isolation. Everything depends on complex causes and conditions. A holistic approach to learning takes a systems view, recognizing that a part can’t be understood without reference to the whole. Accordingly, we examine the intimate interdependence of all the elements that make up a person, a context, a solution.

The whole person: understanding ourselves and one another as complex beings
The whole context: recognizing the many factors that influence a situation
The whole solution: a way of responding to a situation that takes into account the various interdependent factors at play and addresses the whole picture

A holistic approach to learning is interdisciplinary, experiential, and investigative. And at Dharmalaya Institute we add the contemplative element as well, emphasizing the value of cultivating calm and clear states of mind that are conducive to recognition of connections, patterns, and nuance.