The Wellspring Institute for Neuroscience and Contemplative Wisdom is a nonprofit corporation with 501c3 (tax-exempt) status. Its mission is to offer skillful means for changing the brain to benefit the whole person - and all beings in a world too full of war. It draws on psychology, neurology, and the great contemplative traditions for tools that anyone can use in daily life for greater happiness, love, effectiveness, and wisdom.

The Institute aims to accomplish this mission through:

• Highlighting the discoveries and methods found in the intersection of psychology, neurology, and contemplative practice
• Addressing a range of needs, from psychological healing and well-being to spiritual realization
• Respecting the unique path of each person through offering a diversity of tools that you can systematically individualize
• Collecting, organizing, and distributing resources for psychological and spiritual growth; actively supporting the work of others aligned with the Institute's mission
• Maintaining an empirical, ecumenical, and pragmatic attitude; not privileging science over spiritual wisdom (or vice versa), and not privileging any particular contemplative tradition (or school within a tradition)
• Taking a particular interest in adapting methods from the monastic traditions for lay people committed to contemplative practice The major activities of the Institute include:
• Publishing the Wise Brain Bulletin twice each month
• Sponsoring focused, low-overhead research activities, such as literature reviews of the neurology of meditation, pilot studies of peak states of mind, and the first longitudinal study of the effects of long-term contemplative practice
• Maintaining and expanding the Wise Brain website, a hub of resources for psychological well-being and spiritual depth
• Supporting the dissemination of useful information and skills through lectures, classes, workshops, etc.
• Putting on conferences, often with other organizations, such as the annual interfaith conference: "This Is Your Brain on . . . God?"

Because of the leveraged nature of the Institute's work, any support you offer will make a real difference in the great undertaking of helping individuals gain greater control over their brain's reactive patterns, for the sake of their own happiness, and for the sake of a planet poised on the edge of the sword. The way our world tips will depend largely on whether a critical mass of people become more skillful with their own minds - and thus their own brains.