In search of innovations to break through seemingly impermeable realities, Bernstein and colleagues began to, once again, look in for therapeutic solutions. His group discovered that mindfulness-based interventions can be used to train refugees and asylum-seekers to generate moments of refuge, characterized by awareness, agency, and safety.

“By training refugees to engender these momentary states of refuge, we are able to train the mind to access an intrinsic capacity to adapt, to be resilient, and to heal,” says Bernstein. “We began to study this mechanism and how, despite really impossible life conditions, repeatedly experiencing these healing moments of refuge allows refugees to begin to recover from the trauma and chronic stress that are endemic to forced displacement.”

In a recent paper published in Mindfulness, his team presents the results of an innovative effort to make these moments of refuge more accessible through a mobile health adaptation of their group-based mindfulness program.

A new chapter

After 15 years cultivating his research program and raising his three kids in Haifa, Bernstein and his wife decided it was time to explore new opportunities and challenges. Seeking a new intellectual environment in which to be inspired and challenged to learn and grow, the family departed for a sabbatical in the U.S. in the Spring of 2023, just a few months before the October 7 attack on Israel and tragic war in its wake.

UW–Madison and CHM quickly became a new home and the new chapter that Bernstein and his family were hoping to find. In addition to offering a fitting environment for his research program, he sees UW–Madison as a place where his whole family can flourish.

“One thing that was really important in our family decision making was that we hoped to find not only an intellectual home for my work, but more importantly a home for our kids that was safe, welcoming, open and multicultural—a place where they can grow and thrive,” Bernstein says. “We are so grateful that Madison is that kind of community.”

Thinking big

Now, with a permanent position on the CHM faculty and relocation of his Observing Minds Lab to CHM, Bernstein has big aspirations for growing his basic and theoretical work and scaling mindfulness-based interventions for greater impact.

Perhaps most pressing, he and his group are now beginning the implementation of an innovative post-war mindfulness-based collective trauma recovery program—The Shared Healing Project—in Arabic and Hebrew. Part of the global scaling of Moments of Refuge, this will become one of the first sites, now centered at CHM, that aspires to promote recovery and flourishing, and mitigate intergenerational transmission of trauma, among survivors of conflict, collective trauma, and forced displacement.

One of the major strengths Bernstein sees in CHM is its position at the nexus of multiple intellectual communities housed within a remarkable university ecosystem. This creates fertile ground for multidisciplinary work that can unlock insights and applications beyond the constraints of a single field.

For example, he emphasizes that the workings of our inner life are inherently complex, dynamic phenomena that unfold across different timescales, yet the empirical studies and even theories we use to examine them are often quite modular. In an upcoming paper published in American Psychologist, Bernstein and his students propose a novel multi-disciplinary approach to the study of mindfulness and meditation grounded in complexity science and dynamical systems theory, which Bernstein believes can help unlock basic science and therapeutic breakthroughs.

As he becomes more connected with the campus community, Bernstein is excited about the ways his research will stretch and grow in this new environment, broadening the sophistication and impact of his work locally and globally.

By Anne Johnson