The Artifact

by Meditation Artifacts

Issue No. 2 · June 2026

Hello everyone. It’s been an incredibly busy month. In the past month Meditation Artifacts finished MonasteryX (our Thailand Meditation + Work Residency), held the Future of Meditation Symposium in Cambridge, MA and went to California for the first time so that we could run the Contemplative Futures Residency at Edge Esmeralda. Over the next couple of weeks I will be editing and sharing footage from all three events and publishing that on our YouTube channel and Instagram, so stay tuned for those updates. We’ve also started to build out our collaborators list in a really significant way and this newsletter is part of that. It’s been a pleasure to connect with more people in this work, doing fantastic things to further meditation’s development in a variety of ways.

I’m taking this editorial note to reflect on some of the things I’m learning about Meditation Artifacts’ mission. At the core of this mission is field-building. When I finished my master’s at the Harvard Divinity School I wanted nothing more than to use the skills and ideas I had spent the past 6 years of academia developing to better the world. I wanted to research, to build, to ideate, and collaborate with people who also understood meditation as one of the most important topics for advancing human culture and technology. And yet, that presence simply wasn’t there. Not only was meditation not widely recognized as the most exciting area of human innovation over the past several millennia, there was not even a community for its study that didn’t shoehorn itself into one sectarian or secular perspective or another. There was no place to revel in the cross-cultural and scientific interest in meditation. This was why I had to create Meditation Artifacts. There needed to be a place to bring together every interest and investment in the concept of “meditation.”

The next step in this work is shaping around community. Not just any community, but a scene. A place where ideas and interests can move at the speed of nightly dinner conversations to realize new potential the very next day. Meditation needs this space: where monks, professors, and technologists can agree and disagree in generative directions for a positive future for our minds. I’m expecting the future of Meditation Artifacts events to lean further in this direction, expanding the forms of capital production involving meditation so that intellectual, cultural, and economic capital commingle to produce benefits greater than their collective sum.

What does this mean more practically speaking? Meditation Artifacts is starting a long-term residency. So much of our community is based in Cambridge, MA and now this trip to Edge Esmeralda has allowed for some exciting opportunities to open up in San Francisco. We’ll be making moves on both this Fall. The picture right now is a co-living space borrowing from the concept of a hacker house. The goal is to make a curated community of people who want to accelerate their ideas and their work by being in community with those who equally care about the futures of our minds and practices, blending technologists and founders, researchers and creatives, and meditation teachers and professionals under one roof. This is the scene I’m envisioning.

If you’d like to get involved, reach out via any of our channels. There are openings for partners of all kinds.

On that note, don’t miss two big events:
1. MonX Residency - We have an upcoming residency in NY. If you’re reading this, we want you there. Reach out with any questions, and learn more here: https://meditationartifacts.org/monx
2. Futurative: The Contemplative Futures Residency - Our current residency is producing a documentary series with interviews with leaders in the meditation world (centered around those in the SF area, of course). We’re open to sponsorships to appear within the documentary to support the project. Also open to collaborators for editing and producing it into a cohesive single narrative.

Luca Del Deo, Founder of Meditation Artifacts

Featured this month

MonX, Meditation Residency in the Catskills, NY
A focused meditation and work residency lasting one week in the Catskills of upstate New York. Focus on the work that matters to you most while held in community with meditation teachers, a private chef, and a work coach to make one week the model to live by for the rest of your live. This program is perfect for founders, designers, creatives, researchers, and anyone self-motivated to live life to the fullest.
Learn More & Apply →

Launches, publications, and notable news from the field.

The Divinity School Anthology, now open for pre-order
The Divinity School
The Divinity School, an R&D and education institute and a collaborator of ours, has opened pre-orders for their upcoming Anthology. It gathers chapters from leading voices across the life and mind sciences, including wisdom skills researcher Tom Murray, theologian and AI for Science founder Jonah Lynch, and philosopher of consciousness Anna Ciaunica, among others.
Learn more

Where the community is gathering this month.

MonX: Meditation >< Work Residency in the Catskills
Meditation Artifacts
Date: August 2, 2026 – August 7, 2026
Location: Catskills, New York
A focused meditation and work residency lasting one week in the Catskills of upstate New York. Focus on the work that matters to you most while held in community with meditation teachers, a private chef, and a work coach to make one week the model to live by for the rest of your live. This program is perfect for founders, designers, creatives, researchers, and anyone self-motivated to live life to the fullest.
Learn More & Apply

Futurative: The Contemplative Futures Residency
Meditation Artifacts
Date: May 30, 2026 – June 27, 2026
Futurative is a four-week residency at Edge Esmeralda 2026 in Healdsburg, California, gathering founders, scientists, artists, and contemplatives to explore the future of consciousness, meditation, and human flourishing.
Learn more

Mindful Makers - Boston Hackathon Series
Meditation Artifacts
Date: Ongoing
Mindful Makers is an initiative partnered with Meditation Artifacts. Every other Saturday, join a mindfulness-themed hackathon developing new technologies, ideas, and interventions related to meditation or mindfulness.
Join the Next Hackathon

Open calls, fellowships, roles, and grants.

Become a Residency Ambassador
If you loved MonasteryX, our Meditation Artifacts Hacker House, The Contemplative Futures Residency, or feel called to connect people with meditation+work residencies then you can apply to become an ambassador for our residencies. We’re looking for someone who cares about developing the intersection of meditation and high-impact work, and is connected with communities that benefit from our residencies and programs to help them learn about our programs. Best for people with big networks or deep relationships with practitioner-professionals. See our next residency here: https://meditationartifacts.org/monx Email us at residency@meditationartifacts.org to learn more.
Email Us

Institute for Meditation Brainwave Research Study
Join a citizen science initiative to help build the largest, most comprehensive study of meditation brainwaves ever conducted. The goal: 1,000 meditators. 10,000 sessions. 1,000+ brain features. Every major tradition. Any group of three or more experienced meditators willing to share a loaner Muse headset. Participants receive brainwave-based coaching based on their style and level of practice, plus the warm fuzzy feeling they are contributing to meditation science. Apply at www.IMBR.org.
Apply

Bring your question to Binghamton
Complex Systems and Contemplative Studies Consortium
Deadline: June 30, 2026
We’re putting together a one-day satellite at the Conference for Complex Systems in Binghamton, NY this October and would love to have people from this community present. The theme is observer-dependence in complexity science; essentially, how the ‘observer’ is always necessarily a part of a scientific process. If you’ve been sitting with something related to this theme, even if it’s not explicitly tied to complexity science, we would love to hear it. Short 15-minute talks, abstracts due June 30th, submit at cscs.conference@gmail.com or through the form on our website.
Apply

The Artifact is free, and so is everything Meditation Artifacts publishes. If this newsletter has been useful to you, please consider making a gift, we’re a small nonprofit and your support makes the work possible.

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Have something for next month’s issue? Submit by July 18 at meditationartifacts.org/submit.

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