Experience how contemplative practices can cultivate the resilience, discernment, and wise compassion that support individual and societal health and well-being, healing, and transformation. Learn evidence-based contemplative practices from secular as well as spiritual traditions to cultivate your capacity to thrive, create, and serve. 

The 2026 Summit offers revitalizing wisdom and practical resources for your daily life to build a better future for all. Summit participants will examine how contemplative science and practices can help guide both the responsible governance and evolution of AI as well as our personal relationship with the ready access to the vast information AI provides. Delight in strengthening and broadening your reservoir of contemplative knowledge and skills that sustain meaningful and purposeful engagement with the complexity of life in ways that renew you and the people with whom you interact. Summit topics include research on contemplative practices for PEACE: Pausing, Exhaling, Attending mindfully, Connecting authentically, and Expressing wise compassion. 

In this talk, Tia Rich, PhD, will provide an overview of the Stanford 2026 Contemplation by Design® Summit’s free sessions, offered in person or online from Oct. 14 - 25. The 2026 Contemplation by Design Summit explores how contemplation can help us engage with, evolve, and govern AI in ways that strengthen rather than diminish our humanity. As artificial intelligence transforms how we work, think, and relate to information and each other, contemplative practices offer essential tools for cultivating wisdom, ethical discernment, and relational as well as emotional intelligence.

Summit speakers illuminate multiple diverse contemplative practices, including spiritual and secular, and how their benefits including cultivation of attention, mindfulness, self-awareness, embodied presence and experience of our shared humanity can be applied to effectively meet the demands presented by the Age of AI. Summit sessions include speakers who assert that true wisdom emerges when information provided by generative AI is integrated with the insights of body, mind, spirit, and compassionate connections among people and with all of the living world. Sessions also will address the topic of AI governance. Through exploration of contemplative science and practice in the Age of AI, this Summit offers a hopeful vision for fostering human flourishing, ethical innovation, and a wise, compassionate future.

Summit speakers include: Kaira Jewel Lingo, Muhammad Faruque, Vinod Menon, Shaun Gallagher, Phillip Zelazo, Adair Arbor, Sam Green, Caitlin Burke, Carmen Acevedo Butcher, Chiara Mascarello, Brandan Ozawa-de Silva, Ilia Delio, Douglas Guilbeault, Mark Graves, James Gentry, Emiliana Simon-Thomas, Diana Winston, Dr. Mao Shing Ni, Ariel Evan Mayse, Naama Sadan, and Rev. Dereca Blackmon

Guided Contemplative Practices include: Interbeing Meditation, Quaker Clearing Practice, Lectio Divina, Tibetan Buddhist Practice, Tonglen Buddhist Practice, Taoist Meditation, Mantra as Medicine, Embodying Values and Wise Compassion, Mindfulness Meditation, and more. 

Participants will enjoy experiencing how contemplative practices strengthen our capacity to effectively engage with humility in the complex and inspiring work of creating health and well-being for all individuals, communities, and the planet. Come with your wholehearted questions and curiosity—leave the Summit equipped to sustain growth in your spiritual maturity and social-emotional intelligence to meet the moment in history, now and in the future. 

“iPause to Thrive, Create, and Serve” describes the lives of people who integrate the knowledge and skills cultivated by the Stanford Contemplation by Design programs.

This is one of four sessions taught by Tia Rich in the Contemplation by Design Summit. The other sessions include two in-person interactive workshops titled The Power of the Pause offered on Sat. Oct. 17 at 8:30 am or at 10:00 am, and an online iPause Guided Practice titled Embodying Values and Expressing Wise Compassion on Thurs. Oct. 15.

Tia Rich, PhD, MA, MSW, is the founder and director of the Stanford School of Medicine’s Contemplation by Design® program. As the principal lecturer for the School of Medicine’s Applied Contemplative Science concentration in Community Health and Prevention Research, Rich teaches and mentors Stanford undergraduate and graduate students. Academic classes she teaches include: Contemplative Science, Applying Contemplative Practices, Contemplative Competence for Sustainability of Public and Planetary Health and Well-being, Contemplative Movement, and Translating Contemplative Science into Timely Community Programming. She also teaches co-curricular classes through the Stanford Healthy Living program, including the "The Power of the Pause" contemplative retreat for faculty, staff, students, and community members. She has been integrating contemplative science and practices into Stanford academic classes and professional development programs since her completion of graduate studies in Social Welfare at UC Berkeley, and in Education at Stanford, after earning her undergraduate degree in Human Biology at Stanford.

This session is part of the FREE Contemplation by Design Summit, Oct. 14-25, 2026.

The full summit schedule is posted at: https://med.stanford.edu/contemplation/summit.html.

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