Susan Bauer-Wu, the former President of Mind & Life Institute, is a teacher of contemplative modalities and a meditation practitioner. Having served for decades as a Registered Nurse (RN) in oncology care, a clinical scientist, and an academic, her mission emerges from a fusing of the spiritual, scientific, and secular realms, coupled with a calling for deep service and human care.
Since a young age, Susan felt an ability to see other persons and more-than-persons, regardless of their species. She recounts her early sense of connectivity, “taking care of injured birds and mourning big trees cut down, and befriending classmates who were ostracized for being poor or different.”
Inspired profoundly by first-hand exposure to her mother's generosity as a psychiatric nurse, she felt a natural draw towards the caring professions at age seventeen, leading her to pursue nursing as her college major. Simultaneously, her mother was diagnosed with cancer, whom she cared for, together with her father and brother, until her mother’s passing when Susan was twenty-three. Her mother’s life and death and the inevitable complexities from a serious disease that impact patients and their families, coupled with the grief that punctuated their mother-daughter bond, primally shaped Susan’s work with oncology care. More broadly, that defining and deeply felt period in her young life laid the groundwork for her approach to caring, mortality, and service.
Her life experiences have taught her “the undeniable truth of impermanence, a realization that has intensified my appreciation for life. Recognizing that life is not a rehearsal at a relatively young age has instilled in me the importance of authenticity, bold decision-making, and compassion for those facing challenges and grief. These experiences have also helped me to not take anything for granted and fostered a deep gratitude for the simple things—eating, drinking, breathing—and above all, for the presence of others in my life.”
As a registered nurse for over a decade, she was grounded in “an unwavering sense of the essence of her patients beyond their physical bodies.” She carried forward this prompting to look beyond the conventional medical principles that prioritize longevity, bringing tenets of compassion, attention, and mindfulness to augment her patients' capacity to attain well-being and resilience.
In 1992, she entered the academic world and began a PhD in psychoneuroimmunology at Rush University in Chicago, followed by post-doctoral training in psycho-oncology and behavioural medicine at Dartmouth Medical School. Despite the fulfilling move to Chicago, she was reeling from the loss of her mother, dissolution of a marriage, and challenging financial circumstances. Serendipitously, a newspaper advertisement introduced her to a meditation sangha, which went on to inform her work on contemplative sciences. She became an NIH-funded clinical scientist who received one of the first NIH R01 grants to study meditation in 2005, and thereafter became an early, accredited teacher of mindfulness-based stress reduction.
Susan’s research, scholarship, and teaching examined the effects of chronic stress and the use of contemplative approaches to corroborate stress resilience and well-being, especially for those challenged by serious illness. She translated the learnings into her first book in 2011, Leaves Falling Gently: Living Fully with Serious & Life-limiting Illness through Mindfulness, Compassion and Connectedness, and republished an expanded version of the book in 2025 to foreground critical insights and actions for caregivers and loved ones.
Susan has held leadership and teaching positions at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, Harvard Medical School, Emory University, and the University of Virginia, where she was the founding member of the Contemplative Science Center, and held joint positions in nursing and religion. Susan’s longstanding interest in spirituality has drawn her to being a student and practitioner of Buddhist studies and meditation for over three decades.
After her dedicated service as a volunteer advisor with the Mind & Life Institute, an organization founded by His Holiness The Dalai Lama, she happily surprised herself by uprooting her trajectory to leave academia and serve as the President of the Mind & Life Institute from 2015 – 2023. In 2021, she was recognized as one of ten of “the most powerful women in the mindfulness movement” by Mindful magazine.
As an advocate and experiencer of active hope in the core of adversity across personal and planetary scales, she authored, more recently, A Future We Can Love: How to Reverse the Climate Crisis Through the Power of Our Hearts & Minds (2023). The book aims to help readers get to the roots of eco-anxiety and grief, as affected by a warming planet, by more closely understanding human mortality.
Join us for an Awakin Call with this compassionate practitioner, advocate, and scientist of contemplative care and service.
