What if love isn’t something we add to education — it’s what makes learning possible in the first place?
That was the question we brought to Portland State University earlier this month, in partnership with our friends at Peace in Schools. About 200 people showed up to sit with it. By the end of the evening, it was clear we weren’t the only ones who’d been carrying it around.
Two Rivers, One Conviction
On paper, it looked like a conversation between two organizations — one monastic, rooted in the Himalayas; one secular, rooted along the Columbia River. In the room, it felt like something else: two expressions of the same deep conviction, that when children are loved well, held by community, and met as the whole human beings they already are, they flourish. Everywhere.
Portland State opened its doors to us with real generosity, and it showed. The space, the welcome, the ease of the event — all of it let the conversation be the thing people remembered.
Basic Goodness, Offered Simply
Mingyur Rinpoche opened the gathering with a short practice, then turned to basic goodness — the understanding that awareness, love, compassion, wisdom and joy aren’t things we achieve, but what we already are, waiting to be recognized. He spoke the way he always does when he’s most at home: relaxed, unhurried, at ease in his own skin. You could feel the room settle with him.
The Brain Confirms What We’ve Always Sensed
Dr. Richie Davidson, founder of the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, took the conversation somewhere many of us needed it to go: the science. He was brilliant at it — translating what a child’s maturing brain actually requires into plain, grounded language. Safety, warmth, belonging — not preconditions for learning, but learning itself. Not soft ideals. Neurological ground.
A Decade of Showing Up for Teenagers
Starlight Rainbow, who has spent ten years bringing mindfulness into Portland high schools through Peace in Schools, spoke next, and the room leaned in. What happens when teenagers are finally met as whole human beings, not problems to manage? Starlight’s answer came from a decade of watching it happen, and it landed.
Maggie Steele, Head of Training and Curriculum at Peace in Schools, turned the lens toward the adults in the room: the teachers. Her case was simple and hard to argue with — forming teachers, not just training them, may be the most important work any of us can do. Both Maggie and Starlight spoke about their work with the kind of clarity that only comes from having actually done it.
Held by a Master of the Craft
Dr. Robert Roeser, Alice Valli Professor of Compassion and Ethics at Emory University, guided the whole event and he did it the way he does everything, from the heart. As a moderator, he made room for four very different voices to build on each other rather than compete for space. As a scholar sitting at the intersection of contemplative science and education, he made sure nothing said on that stage floated away from the ground it was standing on.
The Questions Told Us Something
The conversation didn’t end when the four speakers finished. The questions from the audience were vibrant, specific, and a little hungry — people wanted to know how this way of thinking about learning could take root in their own schools, and how the Tergar Schools model in particular might translate. That kind of curiosity is its own kind of answer. It told us this isn’t an idea people are politely entertaining. It’s one they’re ready to build with.
What Comes Next
We’re deeply grateful to Peace in Schools for being such generous partners in this — for the years of work they’ve already put into Portland’s schools, and for meeting us so fully in this conversation. We hope this is the beginning of a longer relationship between our two organizations, not the end of one evening.
And we’re grateful to everyone who filled that room and stayed curious past the easy answers. When children are loved well, they don’t just learn better. They become who they already are. That’s the work — from the Himalayas to the Columbia River, and everywhere in between.
