Cultivating Calm and Stillness at the Doctoral Level: A Collaborative Autoethnography

Abstract

Academia is a stressful environment for students and professors alike. While pursuing a degree, students often experience emotional and psychological distress, which may affect their ability to balance their personal, financial, and professional lives. Similarly, faculty in higher education also experience undesired feelings and emotions such as burnout, stress, fear, insecurity, anxiety, depression, and burnout, connected to their job. The authors of this article engage in a collaborative autoethnography to explore the cultivation of calm and stillness as self-care practices that promote well-being at the doctoral level. In this article, we seek to answer the questions, What does engaging in the practice of cultivating calm and stillness at the doctoral level look like? and What are its implications for doctoral students and faculty? To do this, we first explain wholehearted living as the guiding framework of our inquiry, describe procedures in our method, followed by personal vignettes shedding light on our realities as students and faculty at the doctoral level. We conclude this piece with final thoughts on the lessons learned from our own experiences engaging in calm and stillness during and after writing this collaborative piece, and invite researchers to engage in autoethnographic works for further exploration.

Notes

1 Dissertation Core Faculty refers to a faculty position at the doctoral level where the professor teaches doctoral-level courses and provides mentorship for doctoral students.

2 In the United States, Adjunct Faculty refers to a type of part-time academic appointment in higher education.

3 In this article, we use the phrase doctoral level to refer uniformly to doctoral students, candidates, and doctoral faculty.

4 In the United States, K-12 refers to schools from Kindergarten to 12th grade.