Michael R. Sheehy, PhD is a meditation researcher whose work illuminates the generative, dynamic, and ever-evolving processes of contemplative practices. His scholarship and experimental studies query contemplative dynamics at the junctures of the history of religion, empirical phenomenology, and the cognitive sciences to understand the workings of consciousness and its transformations. Michael specializes in the nondual meditative traditions of Buddhism in Tibet – namely, Dzogchen, Mahāmudrā, and Zhentong.
He is a Research Associate Professor and the Director of Research at the Contemplative Sciences Center, University of Virginia. As the founding Principal at the CIRCL, Contemplative Innovation + Research Co-Lab, he directs a transdisciplinary experimental collaboratory that studies how contemplative practices work in bodies and minds, cultures and ecologies, ourselves and our worlds. The CIRCL team uses multiple methods including EEG-ECG (brain-heart physiology), microphenomenology, ecological momentary assessment (EMA), and self-report measures to understand underlying dynamics of contemplative experiences. He is cofounder and Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Contemplative Studies, a peer-reviewed open access journal that publishes original scholarship. Additionally, he holds appointments by courtesy in the Department of Religious Studies and UVA Tibet Center. At the University of Virginia Press, he is the coeditor of two monograph series: Varieties of Contemplative Experience and Traditions and Transformations in Tibetan Buddhism.
Michael has a PhD in Buddhist Studies and trained extensively in Buddhist Asia. He spent three years in a monastery studying with meditation masters and scholars in far eastern Tibet. For over twelve years, he conducted fieldwork and collaborated closely with monastic communities across the Tibetan plateau to preserve rare manuscripts. His doctoral studies focused on Nyingma Dzogchen and Kagyü Mahāmudrā while his training in Tibet focused on Kālacakra and Zhentong with scholars of the Jonang Buddhist tradition.
As the Director of Research at the Buddhist Digital Resource Center (formerly, Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center), he worked with the late E. Gene Smith (1936-2010) to architect BDRC’s digital library of Tibetan literature. At the Mind & Life Institute, where he was Director of Programs, he facilitated global interdisciplinary convenings and co-curated Buddhism and science dialogues, including Mind & Life Dialogues XXXII in Botswana and XXXIII in India.
Michael has been a Visiting Scholar at Harvard Divinity School and the Graduate School of Advanced Integrated Studies at Kyoto University. He has been a Visiting Professor at Eugene Lang College, The New School in New York City and at Boston College. He is a lifelong honorary Mind & Life Research Fellow, Co-Chair of the Contemplative Studies unit at the American Academy of Religion (AAR), and an advisor on numerous boards.
His publications include several dozen academic articles. He is coeditor of the book, The Other Emptiness: Rethinking the Zhentong Buddhist Discourse in Tibet, and a forthcoming volume, Contemplative Practices in Tibetan Contexts. His intellectual history of the little-known Jonang tradition of Tibetan Buddhism is forthcoming with the University of Virginia Press – The Jonang: History, Meditation, and Philosophy of a Tantric Buddhist Tradition in Tibet. His work has been featured in Psyche magazine, History of Ideas Blog, and National Geographic.
Michael’s current book project elaborates the idea of contemplative literacy to frame historical contemplative practices with understandings from cultural psychology, phenomenology, and neuroscience to demonstrate how diverse cognitive and embodied skills transform persons. He has a keen interest in the intersection of contemplative practices and mutlisensory transformative technologies. Areas of his scholarship in-progress include dream yoga, mind blanking in meditation, dark retreat, clear light and nondual states, remarkable meditative experiences, and how to scientifically characterize the nature of mind.
