Dharma Lab · Born to Flourish Series

Flourishing Is Contagious

Richie Davidson & Cortland Dahl

The Stories

The Dalai Lama at NIH

In 2014 or 2015, Richie Davidson arranged for the Dalai Lama to visit the National Institutes of Health — the largest biomedical funding agency in the world — through a new director, Francis Collins, who met Richie at Davos and asked for data before saying yes. Collins, a renowned molecular geneticist and evangelical Christian, reviewed videos of the Dalai Lama's Harvard talks and Richie's meditation research before committing — and when political complications arose, simply said: "I'd rather ask for forgiveness than permission."

On the day of the visit, Richie's recommendation was unusual: skip the scanners and the labs. Take him to the patients. Collins was incredulous. They compromised — thirty minutes in the hospital ward, thirty minutes in a lab.

In the hospital, patients — many terminally ill — were brought to the doorways of their rooms. Some in wheelchairs. Some with beds wheeled halfway into the hallway. The corridor would normally take ninety seconds to walk. The Dalai Lama stopped at every single person. He held them. He touched them. He asked how they were doing. It took forty-five minutes. Walking alongside him: an entourage that included Anthony Fauci, Nobel laureate David Baltimore, and some of the most prominent scientists in the world.

Half the patients knew who he was. The other half had no idea. It didn't matter at all. What mattered was the quality of presence — and it spread through the corridor like something airborne.

Cortland's Encounter

Cortland shares his own version of this same quality — the time he met the Dalai Lama at a Mind and Life Institute gathering in Dharamsala. Richie introduced him during a break, as a Dzogchen translator. What he expected: a quick handshake from one of the most famous figures on earth, who had every reason to move on.

What happened: the Dalai Lama took his hand, sat with him, and gave him an unprompted ten-to-fifteen minute teaching on the exact subject Cortland had dedicated years to. Then — at the end — waved over an attendant and sent him back to fetch a book from his personal library. "This is my favorite book on this topic. You've got to read it."

Richie's reflection on this: these qualities are in all of us — but they need to be nurtured. The Dalai Lama devotes four or five hours a day to practice. What they witnessed wasn't supernatural. It was the further reaches of human plasticity — what becomes possible when a human being puts in the time.

The Hotel Worker's Mantra

Cortland shares a more ordinary but equally striking example. A woman from Kalmia — a remote region of Russia — had immigrated first to Prague, then to the US, where she worked on a hotel cleaning crew under a boss who was an absolute tyrant. Publicly berating. Impossible to satisfy. No matter how carefully this woman cleaned a room, there would always be something to humiliate her about in front of the staff.

At her lowest point, she found her way to meditation — kindness practices, compassion practices. And she began to notice something shift in how she saw her boss: not justifying the harm, but beginning to perceive the suffering underneath it. She is really, really suffering herself.

So she started a private practice. Every time she was being berated, she would silently repeat: I love you. I love you. She said nothing. She did nothing different externally. But her inner posture toward the woman completely changed — and instead of the tirades triggering a wave of toxic emotion, she began to feel something like warmth. Uplifted, even, in a genuinely toxic environment.

Then one day — during a training session with new cleaning staff — the boss pointed to this woman unprompted and began gushing with compliments. The whole room froze. Are we on a different planet?

Cortland is careful not to overstate the mechanism — it's maybe not entirely due to this. But the point stands: something purely internal changed the dynamic between two people. No conversation. No confrontation. Just a transformed relationship to the moment.

The Science

The Teacher Study: Flourishing Measured in Grades

The most exciting research Richie describes comes from a study led by scientist Matt Hirschberg at the Center for Healthy Minds. The design: a randomized controlled trial with approximately 850 public school teachers, conducted mostly in the US with some work in Mexico. Teachers were randomly assigned to either a four-week wellbeing training using the Healthy Minds app — moving through the four pillars of awareness, connection, insight, and purpose — or a rigorous active control condition.

The expected results came through: teachers in the training showed decreases in stress, anxiety, and depression, and increases in wellbeing measures — effects that held at a six-month follow-up.

But the real novelty wasn't what happened to the teachers. It was what happened to their students.

The researchers obtained the academic records directly from school systems. No student surveys, no classroom observations — just test scores, compared across the two conditions. Richie calls it "the holy grail of this kind of work." An empirical demonstration, in a real-world setting, that a teacher's inner state is a learning variable.

Richie distinguishes between two types of research outcomes: proximal measures (what meditation directly changes — attention, emotion, stress) and distal outcomes that matter — the things policy makers and the world care about. Academic performance. Healthcare costs. Longevity. He points to Nobel Prize-winning economist Angus Deaton's concept of "deaths of despair" — that there are subgroups in the US where life expectancy is now declining, the first time in recorded US history this has occurred for any group, driven by loneliness, erosion of trust, and lack of meaning and purpose.

The teacher study is evidence that wellbeing training produces precisely these kinds of distal outcomes. As colleague Inger Puer puts it with characteristic simplicity: buy one, get two free.

The Lens

Interdependence: The Illusion of the Island

Cortland connects the science to one of the foundational concepts in Buddhist meditation: interdependence. Not as abstract philosophy, but as a direct challenge to the felt sense most people carry through the day — that we are essentially separate, autonomous units moving around the world, contained within ourselves, occasionally bumping into others.

The teaching of interdependence, Cortland explains, is that this is a misperception. Every moment of experience is being shaped by an enormously vast web of causes and conditions — things in your immediate environment, things from your distant past, what you ate this morning, how you slept, what happened in your childhood. And among all of those, one of the most important and most influential is relationship in the present moment.

So a teacher who six months ago was burned out and stressed — and came into the classroom carrying that — and who now arrives with a sense of purpose, presence, empathy: that shift changes the web. The children in that room are part of the web. One child is affected by the teacher. That child then affects the others. It becomes a mutually reinforcing cycle.

At Cortland's workplace, this sometimes takes the form of a meeting that ends with a single invitation: express appreciation once to someone you work with today. Send a text, write an email, say something. Just once. Multiply it by everyone in the room — and you've seeded something exponential.

The Practice

Two Invitations

Cortland distills this episode into two practical invitations — not rules, not prescriptions, but orientations worth carrying.

The first is about what you're putting out. Not that we need to perform happiness or suppress what we genuinely feel. But that there are moments — before a meeting, before a text, before sitting down to a meal with someone — where we can pause and ask: what am I radiating right now? Not to force anything, but to be a little more conscious of a process that usually happens entirely on autopilot. Even the smallest intentional shift — more presence, a little kindness — matters, because the influence is real whether we're conscious of it or not.

The second is about what you're taking in. We can't control everything, and the goal isn't to surround yourself only with perfect saints. But there's something empowering in simply recognizing that what you listen to, what you expose yourself to, what you let into your mind stream — that's all shaping your inner world. If the inputs are a rage machine running twenty-four hours a day, that's what's being injected into your own mind. Knowing this, even small choices become meaningful.

Richie adds one thing: it's easier than you think. Once you get into the conscious habit, it becomes self-reinforcing — nourishing to you as much as to the people around you. Born to Flourish calls this a conscious habit — not mindless automaticity, but intentionality that eventually becomes spontaneous. More aware and more intentional at the same time.

Dharma Lab · Born to Flourish series · Richie Davidson & Cortland Dahl