Student Profile: Luca Del Deo, MTS '24
At age 18, Luca Del Deo, MTS & CRPL ’24, struggling with mental health challenges, almost dropped out of high school. Having graduated with his master's degree from HDS, he credits much of the healing that led to this shift in his life to one practice: meditation.
Through meditation, Del Deo found redemption. “I began to think of the mind as part of the body,” he says. This was so profound to Del Deo that he has devoted his academic career to exploring how to make meditation more accessible for others, especially those facing mental health issues and economic inequality. He explains, “For the past seven years, I’ve been on a journey to understand meditation better and to make it more widely accessible, to make the benefits of meditative practices as psychological healthcare more available.”
This accessibility, what Del Deo refers to as cognitive equity, may be a lifeline to those who need mental care but do not have the resources to afford it. “Meditation is poorly understood as a technology of mental health improvement, and it is quite inaccessible in the United States,” Del Deo says. “I found that the only way I could meditate around Boston was within explicitly religious contexts which I did not feel connected to.”
Del Deo believes that there is a false binary in the meditative realm where the practice either needs to be fully steeped in a religious tradition or fully stripped of its religious ties. Through the CRPL program, Del Deo has been able to embrace a both/and stance where meditation can be pluralistic and non-sectarian. This intersection of the religious and the nonreligious is where he sees the largest gap in research. This is the gap he hopes to fill. “RPL offers me a way to expand my understanding of how meditation can be directly practiced in the world where change matters.”
In utilizing the RPL methodology to address this issue, Del Deo approached the practical application of cognitive equity through the CRPL capstone project, which he is now turning into a business endeavor—the Meditation Artifacts Initiative. As the founder of this initiative, Del Deo works alongside peers and students from Harvard Divinity School and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health to create a coaching model for meditation. “Our goal is to make meditation a more effective tool for mental health and other purposes that unite people beyond the ideological and religious borders,” he shares. “At the same time, we are committed to creating equitable cultural practices as part of our mission to create a better future for meditation and its use by people of all religious backgrounds, for all altruistic purposes.”
Del Deo credits the CRPL program, especially his CRPL internship, for providing him with the leadership tools to make this business startup, his dream, into a reality. As a CRPL intern at the Adriano Olivetti Leadership Institute in Italy, Del Deo grew in meeting people where they are at as a leader rather than seeing himself as the expert. “Everyone has skills,” he explains. “Leadership through moral imagination is about collaboration to prevent perpetuating cultural violence.” This has been essential not just in Del Deo’s academic endeavors, but also in his professional and personal life. With this morally imaginative toolkit, he intends to cultivate the skills to be not just a leader, but a changemaker.
“I'm grateful to RPL for making me slow down and challenge my assumptions about what meditation is and how I should go about researching it,” Del Deo concludes. “Not all my ideas have changed, but the way I see them in the world has changed; I want to see these ideas brought into the world together with others rather than see myself pushing them forward on my own. It is in the co-doing, co-learning, and co-teaching that we are truly able to build the future together as a community.”
by Scarlett Rose Ford, MTS ’25