a very young age, my oldest daughter has been a gift giver. Like most children, her offerings consisted of items that adults wouldn’t ordinarily classify as gifts. Broken seashells, traumatized frogs, dying weeds, and misshapen rocks were often presented in small, dirt-laden hands beneath a wide smile. In the past two years my child’s gift giving practices have moved up a notch. Gifts are no longer found in nature; they are found in our home. Yes, it’s re-gifting at its best—wrapping barely-used items and presenting them with great love.   I must be honest; I used to cringe at the sight of my child tearing through our (multiple) junk drawers looki... posted on Feb 9 2013 (26,028 reads)

science and technology offer great hope to cure various ills, the cures I have seen are equally associated with the art of medicine.  There is no science or technology that will hold or comfort a child in pain or comfort the dying.  It is human touch and connection that is equally if not more powerful than all the science and technology in the world.” The US suffers an epidemic of depression and loneliness.  This is due to our money-conscious, do-it-yourself nature which creates a fear of vulnerability.  We wear a mask of invincibility which cuts us off from our feelings, and authentic human connection dissolves.  We get little nurturing, and so... posted on Feb 22 2013 (21,313 reads)

alone. But it was Mrs. Laverne Perrin, my seventh-grade teacher at Bel Pasi School, who introduced me to the great literature of the world. We had to learn a poem each week. She would read Sir Walter Scott’s work, and in a different vein, ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin; was one where we hung onto every word. She read us, I am sure, all the things she loved, for I remember her great passion for these books. Each story, was more than its words: it was the whole realm of history, culture, nature, philosophy, religion and psychology. Because of this heritage, I now read, and re-read from several books a day, all of which I own in my library. Reading is one of the most important even... posted on Dec 3 2013 (25,010 reads)

little is known about the view from the other side – the psycho-social and spiritual impacts of the disease on patients, and their subjective processing of the disease. The Cartesian split in modern medicine between body and mind has perpetuated the myth of the body-mind dichotomy. Another parallel development was the reductionist paradigm in modern science that attempts to understand the whole by examining its constituent parts. This approach has led to tremendous insights into the nature of disease, predict its course, and plan treatments. Yet the scientific preoccupation with objectivity and scientific phenomena has led to a “flight from consciousness.” It also led... posted on Mar 24 2013 (14,788 reads)

coming to only replace old gaskets. A few days later, he came across a statistic in the newspaper: a tap that drips once every second wastes a thousand litres of water in a month. That triggered an idea. He would take a plumber from door to door and fix taps for free – one apartment complex every weekend. As a creative artist, he had earned more goodwill than money and the first challenge was funding. “But,” he says, “if you have a noble thought, nature takes care of it.” Within a few days, he got a message that he was unexpectedly being awarded Rs.1,00,000 ($2,000) by the Hindi Sahitya Sansthan (UP) for his contribution to Hindi literat... posted on Mar 25 2013 (14,295 reads)

spring day in 1909, a little boy found his mother’s magazine clipping — the portrait of a man bearing “the aureole of sunny hair” — and asked her this was God. She chuckled with equal parts amazement and amusement, and got to writing the man in question a letter to recount the delightful incident — not only because of its inherent charm, but because her son had intuited a shared cultural sentiment: The man pictured was Samuel Clemens, better known as Mark Twain — one of the most revered men in all the land. Over the course of his prolific career, Twain received countless letters from his adoring readers and, occasionally, his cri... posted on Mar 27 2013 (11,545 reads)

"officially" exist before, it exists now. Wabi-sabi resides in the inconspicuous and overlooked details, in the mirror and the hidden, in the tentative and ephemeral. Twenty-plus years have elapsed since my initial wabi-sabi formulations. Back then, the industrialized world was just beginning its headlong drive to digitize as much of "reality" as possible and transfer it into a "virtual" or "dematerialized" form. Back then, wabi-sabi's nature-based sense of "aesthetic realism" offered genuine comfort and inspiration for sensitive, creative souls. Will wabi-sabi's quintessentially analog sensibility still provide emotio... posted on Apr 23 2013 (30,802 reads)

the realisation that the efficiency which money provides is skewed took him closer and closer to the decision of moving on. “It was brewing inside me,” he says. He found moral support from some unexpected quarters—his boss at Edelweiss. When he told him that he would quit, his seemingly-capitalist boss opened up to him about a secret desire that he nurtures in his heart: He wanted to build an ashram for old people. This reaffirmed his conviction that people are generous by nature, but they act in correspondence with the space they are in. There are days when he has his doubts about the choices he has made. “On some days, I do feel ‘what I am doing here,... posted on Apr 29 2013 (31,215 reads)

of “Meditations” on life, of which she’d go on to produce another seventy-three besides the four included here. The letter, featured in the 1897 tome The Poems of Mrs. Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672): Together with Her Prose Remains (public library), was found after Bradstreet’s death in 1672 at her home in Massachusetts. For my deare Sonne Simon Bradstreet. PARENTS perpetuate their lives in their posterity, and their maners in their imitation. Children do natureally rather follow the failings then the vertues of their predecessors, but I am perswaded better things of you. You once desired me to leave something for you in writeing that you might look up... posted on May 12 2013 (20,526 reads)

deeds one has done in the course of one's life. So, you know, the relation to aging is quite interesting to explore in other cultures. And one of the most important things about Buddhist cultures is this view, not that we want to hurry up and die at all — in fact, our lives are an ongoing opportunity for us to realize compassion in the world and to really be a benefit to others — but that how extraordinary at the moment of death we have this opportunity to unify with our basic nature, which is, in a way, what heaven is. So, you know, that kind of shapes people's relationship to death. And, I mean, Victor Frankl said it very simply: "Death gives life meaning." ... posted on Jun 5 2013 (25,508 reads)

word “yes” barely escaped from my mouth when my child jumped straight into the air and screamed, “Yes, I would! I would!” Without missing a beat, she eagerly asked, “Can I get started right away?” Although it was close to bedtime, I was thrilled by her enthusiasm. I offered her twenty minutes to write. My excited little author ran to get a pencil and paper then positioned herself next to me on the floor. Although it is my inherent nature to instruct, guide, and make suggestions, I said nothing. This was her story, not mine. Therefore, I knew the words must be hers, not mine. So there the two of us sat in the peace and quiet ... posted on May 19 2013 (35,199 reads)

natural instinct is, and always has been -- to give. When you take Econ 101 in college, you will learn that all of economics is rooted in the assumption that people aim to maximize self-interest.  I hope you don’t just take that for granted.  I hope you challenge it.  Consider the likes of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. and Mother Teresa who have rocked the history of our planet with the exact opposite assumption, with the belief in the goodness of our human nature. Or consider Ruby Bridges. Six-year-old Ruby was the first African American girl to go to an all-white school on Nov 14, 1960.  All the teachers refused to teach her, except for one ... posted on May 27 2013 (549,466 reads)

hunter-gatherers. We’ve become addicted to where the next click might lead us, so we keep hunting incessantly. Overwhelmed by inputs, caught in our self-sealing cycles, we devolve into self-manufactured people driven apart by rigid opinions and lonely for acceptance, into hungry ghosts grasping for the next new thing to satisfy us.  I chose the word devolve very carefully. The most dire consequence of this instant-access, information-rich world is that it has changed the very nature and role of information. In living systems, information is the source of change; Gregory Bateson defined it as that which makes a difference. Information no longer plays this mind-changing role... posted on Jun 7 2013 (68,361 reads)

Two leaders in the same circumstances doing the same thing can bring about completely different outcomes, depending on the inner place from which each operates. I learned this from the late Bill O’Brien, who’d served as CEO of Hanover Insurance. When I asked him to sum up his most important learning experience in leading profound change, he responded, “The success of an intervention depends on the interior condition of the intervenor.” The nature of this inner place in leaders is something of a mystery to us. Studies of athletes’ minds and imaginations as they prepare for a competitive event have led to practices de... posted on Jul 9 2013 (88,358 reads)

(Then Again, You Really, Really Do): Time, energy, vision, and love will go an astonishingly long way, but funding counts. “Your balance sheet is feedback,” a business adviser bluntly told me. “It shows whether you have a viable model." True, the only meaningful metric is the thriving of people and planet. And the financial system is fictive (the numbers only work when people at the “bottom of the pyramid” are omitted from the bottom line, and the value of nature is discounted to near zero). Put on a realgreen eyeshade and nearly every business on Earth is revealed to be running in the red. Still, one must respect—no, embrace—the dance-... posted on Apr 13 2014 (13,344 reads)

renowned spiritual teacher on getting stuck in the future and saving the planet. To the uninitiated, Eckhart Tolle might be mistaken for a nature photographer. His persona—a soft German-accented voice, a boyish visage, his love of vests—doesn’t exactly scream, “guru!” Yet Tolle is one of the world’s most popular spiritual teachers and a literary powerhouse whose best-selling books The Power of Now and A New Earth have influenced millions. Born in Germany, educated at the universities of London and Cambridge, and now a resident of Vancouver, Canada, Tolle writes and lectures on the evolution of human consciousness. His work syn... posted on Jun 23 2013 (84,175 reads)

the work was worth. She had been inspired by the "pay what you will" model of Panera Bakery, a large restaurant chain that decided to use one of its branches in Missouri as an experiment in giving several years ago. They removed prices and asked patrons to pay according to their own sense of the value of the "purchase." Ron Shaich, Panera's former CEO who ran the Panera Foundation, explained the innovation to USA Today: "I'm trying to find out what human nature is all about." The flourishing gift economy - from charitable donations to volunteer service to pay-it-forward generosity - seems to have a welcome answer to Ron Shaich's question. ... posted on Jun 26 2013 (24,451 reads)

best way to talk about it is through poetry and with music. So let's listen to another one. TS: OK. We'll listen to a piece, this is called "Raggedness." And this is also from Just Being Here: Rumi and Human Friendship. Maybe you can introduce it for us, Coleman. CB: Well, this is [about] lots of changes that happen in a student-teacher relationship. You'll see, "I was dead, and then alive." So it's all about the continuous changing nature of a relationship, where maybe a teacher's involved, but nobody knows who's the student and who's the teacher. It keeps changing back and forth. OK, let's hear it. [Music and... posted on Dec 29 2013 (35,771 reads)

were able to build a more compassionate, cosmopolitan patriotism, such when Martin Luther King, Jr., argued in 1967 that opposing war is the “privilege and the burden of all of us who deem ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation’s self-defined goals and positions.” Nussbaum draws on history and philosophy to make her case for a new brand of patriotism, but does her argument cut against human nature, as some allege? The answer is no—recent psychological research points to many steps we can take to extend the legacy of King. As we celebrate this Fourth of July, here are four for us to... posted on Jul 4 2013 (20,275 reads)

century ago, industrialists like Andrew Carnegie believed that Darwin’s theories justified an economy of vicious competition and inequality. They left us with an ideological legacy that says the corporate economy, in which wealth concentrates in the hands of a few, produces the best for humanity. This was always a distortion of Darwin’s ideas. His 1871 book The Descent of Man argued that the human species had succeeded because of traits like sharing and compassion. “Those communities,” he wrote, “which included the greatest number of the most sympathetic members would flourish best, and rear the greatest number of offspring.” Darwin was n... posted on Jul 15 2013 (37,654 reads)