we will be changed by this awareness, and we will want to change the way the earth and its life-forms are being treated. Sacred is the right word to convey this Celtic way of seeing, because it is a word that is not bound by religion. Inside the walls of religious practice, we speak of sacred scripture or sacred music, for instance, but way beyond those walls we also speak of the sacred universe or sacred moments. The word points with reverence to the divine essence of life and the true nature of relationship. When we speak of something as sacred, we are offering it ultimate respect. We are honoring it. We also invoke something of the power and authority of this word when we used the... posted on Jul 14 2021 (5,040 reads)

only see what is right in front of her in the darkness of the cave. Such a comparison can be misleading, because in fact one can still report on what was within one’s peripheral vision at rates better than chance. And despite that spotlight, we seem to miss huge elements of the thing we are ostensibly attending to. A better way of thinking about attention is to consider the problems that evolution might have designed “attention” to solve. The first problem emerges from the nature of the world. The world is wildly distracting. It is full of brightly colored things, large things casting shadows, quickly moving things, approaching things, loud things, irregular things, sme... posted on Aug 11 2021 (6,095 reads)

infectious diseases at San Francisco General Hospital. She also served as a member of the Department of Health and Human Services Panel on Antiretroviral Guidelines for Adults and Adolescents. For Cohan, medicine and movement are deeply interwoven. She has studied with Anna Halprin of Life/Art Process, Tina Stromsted of Authentic Movement, and Valerie Chafograck of Dance Sanctuary and Movement Liberation. With an embodied approach that honors the inherent wisdom of our bodies and nature, she has served as a doula for those who are giving birth and those who are dying.  The flash mob video landed Cohan interviews on multiple mainstream media outlets, including Good... posted on Sep 1 2021 (8,983 reads)

rock and drips from the walls. Craning your neck, you glimpse a sliver of blue sky overhead, at least 50 feet up. Down from that slit filters your only light. It’s enough. You’re not afraid. You creep forward until a boulder obstructs your way … or no, not a boulder, after all, but a huge log that looks petrified, wedged between the walls. How long has it been there? you wonder. You sit in The Crack, bobbing on the water, contemplating the forces of nature and vast expanse of time that have created this place, and brought you into it. Even now, this fissure in the Earth is changing, massaged by the elements. Eons smack up against the moment. H... posted on Sep 13 2021 (4,320 reads)

is all the expression they need. Prayer, though, has a performative dimension that makes it effective and appropriate for expressing thoughts and feelings. So, prayer for the atheist can be like singing in the car or in the shower. No one is listening, and that is just fine.   Prayer does not need to be addressed to anyone. If this troubles you, though, there are some atheist options. The words can be addressed to “God” in scare quotes, or to the universe, or to nature. St. Paul describes a Greek altar dedicated to the “unknown god.” The Greeks were apparently covering their bases with whatever god or gods they had missed or dismissed. For the ath... posted on Sep 21 2021 (6,670 reads)

a so-called ‘wanted’ Palestinian. We had the potential to hate but our parents saved us from fear and despair by bringing the wider world to us through books and music. Mother used to sing songs by Fairuz to us in the long dark cold nights of military curfew when, if we opened the door, a tank could be sitting in front of our house.[i] I refuse to be either an enemy or a victim. The helplessness that comes from feeling yourself to be a victim is paralysing but it was not in the nature of the women I grew up with; they were always fighting, adapting and progressing. I’ve always tried not to think that there are people out there who want to kill me. After the 1982 massac... posted on Sep 22 2021 (3,414 reads)

van Leeuwen is the founder of Critical Alignment Yoga and Therapy-- a precise, slow, and uniquely rigorous practice aimed to free body and mind from conditioned preferences in order to move from higher consciousness rather than willpower. "We can start to move from profound strength instead of strain," says Gert. In these excerpts from an Awakin Call interview last year he shares more about his journey and work. Early Influences & Explorations in Movement:  I grew up in a Protestant family. We were very sober. Movement was not very familiar to us. My first yoga teacher came from Surinam, from an Indian family. It was flower power time, when everyo... posted on Oct 12 2021 (3,189 reads)

TIPPETT:That sounds wonderful. And then you’ve had 30 years to live that way. MS. PARKER:I see — it’s just such a gift. It is such a gift, and I’ve just — I don’t want to go back and change anything else that happened because that’s all part of what brought me here. MS. TIPPETT:I want to actually read — you have wonderful quotes all the way through. This quote of Martin Luther — where was it? About — something about all of nature has its sound. “There is nothing on earth that hath not its tone. Even the air invisible sings when smitten with a staff.” MS. PARKER:Yes. Isn’t that lovely? MS. TIPPETT... posted on Oct 24 2021 (3,532 reads)

understand the root causes of the pathologies we see today which impact all of us but affect Brown, Black and Poor people more intensely, we have to examine the foundations of this society which began with COLONIZATION. To me, to be colonized means to be disconnected and disintegrated — from our ancestry, from the earth, from our indigeneity, our earth-connected selves. We all come from earth-connected people, people who once lived in deep connection to the rhythms of nature. I believe it is not a coincidence that the colonization of this land happened at the same time that Europeans were burning hundreds of thousands of witches, those women who carried the traditi... posted on Oct 11 2021 (3,761 reads)

with particular personality traits or career paths may suffer burnout more easily, writes Moss. For example, those who have higher levels of neuroticism (over-worry), conscientiousness (especially if it leads to perfectionism—a potential problem), and introversion (in a highly social office) may be particularly susceptible. Also, health care workers and teachers have higher levels of burnout than other professions, says Moss, because of the nature of their work and the personality types drawn to those jobs. And their potential stressors have only increased since the pandemic, as teachers scrambled to switch to remote teaching and health ... posted on Nov 22 2021 (5,231 reads)

adds: The reasons for depression are not so interesting as the way one handles it, simply to stay alive. Perhaps Albert Camus was right in asserting that “there is no love of life without despair of life,” but this is a truth hard to take in and even harder to swallow when one is made tongueless by depression. In an entry from October 6, still clawing her way out of the pit of darkness, Sarton considers the only cure for despair she knows: Does anything in nature despair except man? An animal with a foot caught in a trap does not seem to despair. It is too busy trying to survive. It is all closed in, to a kind of still, intense waiting. Is this a key? K... posted on Nov 4 2021 (5,011 reads)

go into a neglected tangle. Throughout the growing season I pass by this fallow spit of wildness and it feeds my somewhat fierce soul. In early autumn, when I am obsessed with our latest harvest of slim, white-stockinged leeks and golden beets, I look across the ordered rows of the garden to that far tangle of seedy cow parsnip and dry skunkweed and my wild roots stir back to life. 2. Garden Organically My second principle is to garden organically, always within the ample embrace of nature, without relying on chemical fertilizers, pesticides, or herbicides. Organic gardening and ecological farming is rooted in and encourages local stewardship and protection of land and water reso... posted on Nov 19 2021 (5,237 reads)

are they related? Their source is the same. With no boundaries, the two are indistinguishable, each embracing the myriad forms. Not discriminating between coarse and fine, how can you be attached to either? The great way is unperturbed, being neither easy nor difficult. Those with a narrow view are filled with doubt, going in circles quickly or slowly. When grasping overcomes you, you are sure to go astray. Yielding with ease, the heart neither comes nor goes. If your nature is in accord with the way, you wander freely without fear. Caught in thoughts, you betray reality. Trapped in delusion, you miss the point. Weary from what is not clear, what is the use ... posted on Nov 28 2021 (4,098 reads)

learn to use slow, deep breathing to quiet anxiety and agitation, Shaking and Dancing to melt trauma-frozen bodies, surface buried emotions that need tending, and feel physical and emotional freedom. As these techniques bring them into greater physical and psychological balance, they are able to successfully use all the other tools and techniques in Transforming Trauma—guided imagery, creating a trauma-healing diet, using biofeedback and genograms (family trees), accessing gratitude and nature’s healing powers, and expressing themselves in words, drawings, and movement. They are able as well to more effectively reach to others—family and friends as well as professional co... posted on Nov 30 2021 (4,752 reads)

being. And you’re not in a position to challenge them either—when you’re already vulnerable. Yeah, I felt very small a lot of the time. And I just expected that was normal, that they are the heroes. I remember one of the first pediatricians we met was trying to explain chromosomes to me. We had been living in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit for two weeks and Evie had undergone so many tests, and he was trying to explain the long and short arms of the chromosome, the nature of splitting and how it all works. I was sleep deprived, recovering from a caesarean and emotionally exhausted, and I thought he was telling me that Evie had short arms. I was really confused b... posted on Jan 16 2022 (3,880 reads)

been, I want to say, distracted by external forces or overly placed their attention on teachers that have maybe gone astray and made people question their own practice, I felt like we all need a practice that is entirely our own. TS: Beautiful. Now I want to ask a question that I could imagine is part of the space right now listening to this. So belonging belongs to me here, the belly, feeling embodied, feeling at home. But look, when I get up off of my chair or stop walking in nature being in my belly, I’m facing a world where there’s so much injustice, where I’m clearly being considered part of the out group and discriminated against, and there are struct... posted on Jan 18 2022 (4,011 reads)

move closer. Some of these patterns were then used to create realistic looking animal groups in films, starting with Batman Returns in 1992 and its swarms of bats and “army” of penguins. Crucially this model did not require any long-range guidance, or supernatural powers – only local interactions. Reynolds’s model proved a complex flock was indeed possible through individuals following basic rules, and the resulting groups certainly “looked” like those in nature.From this starting point an entire field of animal movement modelling emerged. Matching these models to reality was spectacularly achieved in 2008 by a group in Italy who were able to film star... posted on Feb 18 2022 (5,135 reads)

of kind others—has always been our cellular superfuel.” Practice awe When we experience awe, we not only feel happier, we also have a sense of ourselves as part of something bigger than us. It can help us be more creative and even improve our immune system. The perspective and creative problem-solving that comes with experiences of awe, argues Williams, can be good for heartache. One way to find awe is by tuning into beauty. For Williams, a nature enthusiast, that meant spending time in natural settings. Staring at sunsets, looking closely at the intricacies of flowers, or doing a full-on wilderness retreat helped shift her mind away fro... posted on Apr 13 2022 (7,644 reads)

I want to be with? Am I living in the part of the world I want to be living in, with the partner?” Etc. From your perspective, how do we each make the most use of a time that’s liminal. JSB: [We have] to be aware of, are we just going through motions and collecting a paycheck? Is it something that matters to us personally, because we get involved with the people that we work with? I mean, you can be someone, for example, who’s a gardener who happens to love nature and watch plants grow. Well, that person may not be making much money compared to a salesperson of an object that is just something that you sell to get a commissioner on. And you don’t r... posted on May 9 2022 (3,997 reads)

she no longer can compute the simplest 1+1 equations. So what remains? What remains with so much loss of body and mental function? How do we value a person who no longer is a “productive” member of society and in fact takes enormous resources to support? What I have had a deep privilege to find out is that her value is not ONE IOTA diminished. I see that with the right attitude, those that surround her feel a sense of both duty and honor to care for her with such attention. By the nature of her physical and mental condition, we are asked to be 100 percent present to her needs throughout the day and night. While it can be tiring at times it is also brings such depth of unspeakab... posted on May 26 2022 (3,443 reads)