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This interdisciplinary course equips students with essential life skills for excelling in school, work, and the broader demands of the 21st century. Research over the last few decades has shown that one's ability to thrive is highly correlated with growing and developing as a person: emotionally, socially, cognitively, and psychophysically. This practice-based course fosters inner growth through a specific form of evidence-based meditation called Transcendental Meditation, shown to enhance awareness, creativity, resilience, and balance. The course also focuses on developing key communication, relationship-building, and collaboration skills. It delves into holistic human development, neuroscience of performance, and integrative leadership. Its design is based on a training program utilized by thousands of leaders of larger established organizations, venture backed startups, NGO's, and government agencies. It includes insights from recent research on what differentiates successful versus unsuccessful founders. This integrative approach to leadership development can reduce stress and lead to emotional balance, mental clarity, empowering students to be more effective in all areas of their lives.

There is no one way to change, and no specific change you are "supposed to" make. This is, at its core, a course about learning who you are and how you are wired so you can make lasting, meaningful changes that work with your individual make-up. This journey includes deeper dives into self-compassion, behavior change science, contemplative practice, neuroscience, and reflective inquiry. You also will learn how to be a peer coach and utilize motivational interviewing techniques, supporting your classmates through the process of change. You will design an initial behavior change plan which you will iterate throughout the quarter as you engage research, peer coaching, and reflective practice. The goal is not to change every desired behavior in ten weeks, but rather to know yourself and the science well enough that you are equipped to change, as you do, over a lifetime.

Learn to cultivate and sustain emotional, physical, and sexual intimacy in relationships. Course takes a sex-positive approach. In addition to scholarly readings on science-based perspectives, the course includes individual, paired, and group exercises in and out of class. Didactic components address the art and science of intimacy through a sociological lens, addressing embodiment, the nuances of consent, needs and boundaries, empathy, safer sex and safer heart conversations, flirting, attunement, escalation and de-escalation, fantasies, pornography, pleasure, selecting partners, repairing relationships, and breaking up.

Purpose is not a singular thing; it's a way of living with what matters at the center. Investigate and own your unique journey for purpose. Explore the connection between an inner journey for compassionate self-understanding and an outer focus on engaging with the world. In this highly interactive class, we will create a supportive and inclusive community from which you can investigate the contemplative, psychological, social, and communal factors that deepen meaning-making, support authenticity, and encourage living more purposefully. Drawing from disciplines as diverse as art, poetry, design, contemplative practice, sociology, and positive psychology, we will cultivate skills that promote wellbeing and flourishing at Stanford and beyond.

Examine the main factors impacting metabolic rate including stress, sleep, movement, and nutrition. Review the science behind the continual need for nourishment from these factors and how they work together synergistically down to the level of gene expression. Practically apply principles of metabolism to one's unique physiology and lifestyle for optimal wellbeing

Introduces diverse forms of meditation practice in both theory (contemplative neuroscience, phenomenological traditions) and practice. Practices in guided imagery, compassion, loving kindness, positive emotion, mindfulness and mantra meditation will be offered to enhance stress management and well-being. While meditation practices emerge from religious traditions, all practice and instruction will be secular.

Explore the intersection of queerness, sexuality and wellbeing. Learn skills and practices to associate queerness with thriving and flourishing. This course integrates empirical psychological and neuroscientific research, community history, and health psychoeducation to provide frameworks for exploration. An interactive structure supports the reflection and development of your relationship with self, community, and queerness.

While mindfulness training sometimes takes on a somber or even pious tone, this course chooses a different track, learning to "play attention" through traditional methods, humor, games, and exercises drawn from improvisational theater. Integrating insights and exercises from Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) and Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) with those from improvisational theater, this course will help students forge new neural pathways and develop a more connected personal presence, one that leaves them more resourceful, resilient, and creative. As a collaborative art form, improv sharpens the senses, improves listening skills, and teaches effective communication and collaboration. Taken together, the two traditions of mindfulness and improv develop precisely the qualities and abilities most needed for skillfully responding to the challenges of uncertainty and ambiguity.