Sep 5, 2025

A live online broadcast with Doctors Tawni Tidwell and Tenzin Namdul of the Center for Healthy Minds and Center for Spirituality & Healing and host Alejandro Chaoul, Ph.D.

Join us for a special dialogue exploring tukdam, a rare meditative state described in Tibetan Buddhism and Bön. In tukdam, the body of a realized practitioner shows minimal signs of decomposition for days or even weeks after clinical death. This phenomenon is believed to reflect a profound mastery of meditation, merging consciousness with the Clear Light of the mind’s primordial nature.

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This timely broadcast brings together leading researchers to illuminate the intersection of science and spirituality, following the recent passing of H.E. Yongdzin Tenzin Namdak Rinpoche, the revered, most-senior teacher of the Tibetan Bön tradition. His Eminence entered the tukdam meditative state upon his parinirvana on June 12, 2025, at his retreat residence in Kathmandu, Nepal; and remained in the state until the night of June 20.

More information: “Tukdam: The Point of Death,” by Irish director Donagh Coleman and Wildfire Films (video, 52 minutes).

About the Presenters

Tawni Tidwell, T.M.D., Ph.D., is a Tibetan medical doctor and biocultural anthropologist. She is currently a research assistant professor at the Center for Healthy Minds of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is project lead for the Tukdam Study, a collaboration led by the Center for Healthy Minds and the Russian Academy of Sciences with Tibetan medical and monastic colleagues. Dr. Tidwell’s research facilitates bridges across the Western scientific tradition and Tibetan medical tradition along with their attendant epistemologies and ontologies. Previously, she was a Numata Visiting Professor at the University of Vienna and postdoctoral fellow at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, where her work focused on pharmacological innovations in Tibetan medicine and training practices for medicine compounding. Dr. Tidwell earned her Ph.D. in biocultural anthropology from Emory University and Tibetan medicine degree from Sorig Loling Tibetan Medical College at Qinghai University in Amdo, Tibet. Her doctoral work detailed the entrainment process for learning Tibetan medical diagnostics of Tibetan medical conceptions of cancer and related metabolic disorders. More about Dr. Tidwell.

Tenzin Namdul, T.M.D., Ph.D., is a Tibetan medicine doctor and medical anthropologist. He is an assistant professor and the director of Tibetan Healing Initiative at the University of Minnesota’s Bakken Center for Spirituality & Healing. Dr. Namdul earned his Ph.D. in medical anthropology from Emory University and Tibetan medicine degree from the Men-Tsee-Khang Tibetan Medical College in India. His research and teaching focus on cognitive resilience, cross-cultural medicine, death and dying, aging, and end-of-life care. He incorporates his diverse training to examine how the intersection of bio-sociocultural factors shapes the ways individuals age and die, as well as care for the dying. Dr. Namdul’s current research is an interdisciplinary study of healthy aging among Tibetan Buddhist monks in India. More about Dr. Namdul.

Alejandro Chaoul, Ph.D. (host) serves as director of research for Ligmincha International. He has studied in the Tibetan traditions since 1989, and for nearly 30 years in the Bön Tradition with Yongdzin Tenzin Namdak Rinpoche, His Holiness Lungtok Tenpai Nyima Rinpoche, and Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche. He holds a Ph.D. in Tibetan religions from Rice University and is scholar and founding director of the Mind Body Spirit Institute at the Jung Center of Houston. For the last 20 years he has been teaching and researching the benefits of Tibetan mind-body practices for people touched by cancer. He is a Contemplative Fellow at the Mind & Life Institute, and is the author of Chöd Practice in the Bön Tradition (Snow Lion, 2009), Tibetan Yoga for Health & Well-Being (Hay House, 2018), and Tibetan Yoga: Magical Movements of Body, Breath, and Mind (Wisdom Publications, 2021).