Silent Drum: Tips for Rhythmic Meditation
"'Drumming may be the oldest form of active meditation known to humanity.' What could meditation and drumming possibly have in common? I've been asking myself this question ever since I heard world-famous sound healing expert Jill Purce say, 'The purpose of sound is silence.' First, both meditation and drumming help us get out of our heads and into our hearts. They just go about it in different wa... posted on Sep 6, 4226 reads

The Greatest Nature Essay Ever
"The Greatest Nature Essay ever would begin with an image so startling and lovely and wondrous that you would stop riffling through the rest of the mail, take your jacket off, sit down at the table, adjust your spectacles, tell the dog to lie down, tell the kids to make their own sandwiches for heavenssake, thats why god gave you hands, and read straight through the piece, marveling that you had i... posted on Sep 24, 3084 reads

Horse Medicine, Horse Mystery
"Whether we love horses or not, whether we have contact with horses or not, they can teach us a lot about wisdom, love, and beauty. How do we get close to an honest openness to the potential magic of horses? And what does it even mean? The horse as a mirror for the soul and a vehicle for the soul could show us our true nature, and carry us into sacred spaces, initiating us into transformational he... posted on Oct 19, 3852 reads

George Saunders on Writing
"As a writer, the work is always particularization to move from mere concept (tree, forest) into specific descriptions that sort of take that thing apart and then cause a new and more intense perception of it to occur within a particular mindstate (usually that of a character). So, what really happens is that you start to dissolve the traditional distinction between the natural and man-made world... posted on Nov 1, 1553 reads

Activating Moral Discomfort & Spiritual Community for the Earth
"The Rev. Fletcher Harper believes that he felt God while mourning his fathers death on a solo camping trip in Montana. A violent hailstorm struck one night, and he sought shelter in the lee of a rock. "At about three in the morning, I felt this deep sense of well-being, he recalls. "I realized that I was going to be OK. I thought, 'I can move on with my life now.'"Later in his life and career whe... posted on Nov 17, 2062 reads

Shinrin-Yoku: Forest Bathing
Hopefully you have a little piece of green forest--a kind of a heaven on earth-- where you can find peace. If so, you already have experienced the health benefits of soaking up the beauty of nature. Forest bathing, in Japan where the practice originated, is called shinrin-yoku. This is the practice of walking through the forest slowly and quietly as a way to heal body, mind and spirit. This film, ... posted on Dec 8, 2167 reads

Balakrishnan Raghavan: Belonging to the World
When he was ten years old, Balakrishnan Raghavan was moved to tears listening to a centuries-old Tamil hymn about Lord Shiva, sung by musician M S Subbulakshmi. "I was wailing. Subbulakshmi's voice soaring high and low, calling out to that divine-beloved, the voice of the poet who lived hundreds of years before us, the fierceness of their devotion, the ultimate surrender of the devotee, the madnes... posted on Dec 15, 2101 reads

Davis Dimock: The Gift
"A guy came here once from some outsider art magazine. He was taking pictures and he asked, "Do you do anything else?" So, I showed him some of my drawings. He said, "These are great. We could use these." I told him I didn't want them out in the world. It seems pretentious to think of myself as an artist. I think of artists as people who are going through the angst of creating stuff, and then the ... posted on Dec 16, 1568 reads

A Special Kind of Grace: The Remarkable Story of the Devadosses
He was a writer and an artist whose captivating pen-and-ink drawings, books and greeting cards reflect the beauty of southern India. His wife helped compose his work. What makes their story extraordinary? Manohar Devadoss was near blind. His art was produced through a painstaking process of extraordinary will-power and dedication. His wife Mahema was paralyzed below the shoulders, the result of a ... posted on Dec 27, 0 reads

Five Thoughts About Sacrifice
"Sacrifice zone is defined as a geographic area that has been permanently impaired by environmental damage, often through locally unwanted land use. Take, for example, the boreal forest surrounding Fort McMurray near the Athabasca River in Alberta, once an expanse of wetlands, bogs, and trembling-aspen and white-spruce forest hunting grounds for First Nations people and habitat to caribou, bears,... posted on Jan 8, 1739 reads

Caverly Morgan: The Heart of Who We Are
"When Caverly Morgan reentered society after eight years as a Zen monk, she was confronted with a question many of us are asking these days: Considering the enormity of the problems before us, how can one individual's spiritual practice make a tangible difference in our world? Tami Simon speaks with Caverly about her new book, The Heart of Who We Are, and the connection between self-realization an... posted on Jan 17, 3083 reads

Waging Conflict Without Violence: Maria Stephan
"Can nonviolent civil resistance be successful even against the most militarily sophisticated and brutal regimes? My podcast guest this month, political scientist Maria Stephan, says unequivocally 'yes.' Co-Lead and Chief Organizer at The Horizons Project and the former Director of the Program on Nonviolent Action at the United States Institute of Peace, Maria is the co-author, with Erica Chenowet... posted on Feb 6, 1137 reads

Bicycling Around the World for Love
A young Indian artist met a Swedish tourist in New Delhi, and painted her portrait in the 1970's. They formed an immediate bond and got married in PK Mahanadia's ancestral village. When the love of his life, Charlotte von Schedvin, had to go back to Sweden after a few weeks, he worked on a plan to sell his few possessions, purchased a used bicycle, and traveled 8000 kilometers to reunite with her.... posted on Feb 10, 1739 reads

World Peace & Other 4th Grade Achievements
The World Peace Game, a brainchild of public school teacher John Hunter, pits teams of students against each other as leaders of countries in crises and conflict. The students scheme and negotiate, compete and cooperate, wage war and make peace. But the game is not won until all countries enjoy security and prosperity. Says one fourth grader, "One of the things I learned is that other people matte... posted on Feb 16, 1251 reads

An Ethics of Wild Mind
"Winter is a kind of pregnant emptiness. Spring emerges out of that--it flourishes. And life flourishes in summer and then dies back into that emptiness of winter. And you realize, oh, my thoughts are doing the same thing that the ten thousand things do--they're part of the same tissue...And so that's another radical reweaving of consciousness and wildness--what I mean by "wild mind." In this conv... posted on Feb 18, 2111 reads

The Rights of All Beings
"The UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights, inspired by Franklin D Roosevelt's four freedoms, outlines the rights to which humans are equally and inalienably entitled: of speech and religion, from want and fear. They are our global guiding principles for protecting humans from humans essential in establishing the legal frameworks within which humanity can operate freely to express ourselves,... posted on Apr 2, 1409 reads

It's Not A Thing You Do. It's A Thing You Are
"I think people just want to feel like they're home like there's no one they have to be and there's nowhere else they have to be. Here we are. It's enough. You belong. There was never any condition to that, ever. You distance yourself and you say, "Well, they're wrong over there. They should believe what I believe." When all along, you could wrap your arms around them, everyone, no matter wha... posted on Apr 11, 3283 reads

Irises: Shape-shifters and Magical Reinventors
"In grocery stores iris buds are bundled together, like perfectly sharpened purple-pointed pencils, like slender indigo-edged spears, like a quiver of Spring arrows poised to unbend unhappy bents of mind. Take a sheaf home, place it in a glass vase and by morning, from poised purple-tipped silence, spill sepals and petals frothy with filaments and ruffles, loquacious little fountains self-released... posted on Apr 24, 3209 reads

A Whetstone to the Spirit: An Interview with Barbara Kingsolver
"I'm reluctant to give advice to people Ive never met. Every relationship is unique. I can only say whats worked for me as a parent, and to boil it down to its essence, its this: I trust my animal instincts. Regardless of our myriad plans, were hardwired for reproduction. Pregnancy is the most natural of processes, not a medical condition, and parenting follows from there. All this hard work is ba... posted on Apr 30, 1936 reads

Sacred Time
"Beneath the thin surface layer of our present consciousness--a world of rushed days and time crushed into ever shorter segmentsis the older world of the collective psyche, the archetypal world that used to be known as the domain of the gods. Here time moves more slowly, according to ancient rhythms. This is the home of Kronos, the primordial god of time, whose rhythm is like the movement of the s... posted on May 2, 3550 reads

The Alphabet Rockers
"Based in Oakland, California, Alphabet Rockers is unlike other bands that make music primarily for children, and over the last several years, Grammy voters have noticed. The hip-hop collective--which weaves the stories, spirit, and voices of a widely diverse group of young people into their work has earned a total of four nominations for Best Children's Album. This year, they took home their firs... posted on May 18, 1209 reads

Off By an Inch in the Beginning...
The Venerable Master Hua, famously and pithily recounted: "Off by an inch in the beginning, off by ten thousand miles at the end." I have to say -- Christopher Columbus might have benefited from that advice in 1492 when he missed India by nearly 10,000 miles. I wonder what that says about the scope of our compounding trajectory 530 years later. But luckily the NASA engineers working on getting Apo... posted on May 30, 8722 reads

Murmurations: Breaking is Part of Healing
"The material world is necessarily temporary, and it is only a matter of how deep we are willing to look, how far into the past and future we are willing to consider, to understand this. If you don't believe me, look at the ruins of every society that has predated us on this planet. Remember that the matter that makes up our moon and planet is the dust of stars exploding in other galaxies. Remembe... posted on Jul 12, 5234 reads

Honey Church
"Our first summer in Baltimore. The first year of our marriage--your only marriage, my second one--when my kid became our kid. This house, our home. We watched the parade of ants--polite little soldiers marching single file along the kitchen baseboards in a thin and steady stream. You took a white sheet of paper from the printer, slipped it under their quick feet, then whoosh, like a magician and ... posted on Jul 17, 2131 reads

The Medicine of Memory
"Every life is like a day. We begin the night before and, in the darkness, we are formed as a word that strikes a spark. This spark lands like a seed coming to the ground in the soul of the womb. Then miraculous growth pulses like wildfirean unstoppable explosion of unimaginable geniusthe exponential roar of universal proportion. Every life well-lived holds in its hearts core the knowing that all ... posted on Jul 18, 4962 reads

Beannacht (Blessing) for Our Death
Tracey Schmidt's poetic reading of a Blessing for Our Death reminds us of the complexities of life - how we can be gatekeepers and entrance points, light filled and vulnerable, lonely and loved, all at the same time. She praises life and exhorts us to do the same, to "sing as if tomorrow will not come because one day it will not." This singing of life's praises enables us to live fully, "as if hom... posted on Jul 21, 4179 reads

Parenting Advice from Mister Rogers
"Being responsible for ourselves, knowing our own wants and meeting them, is difficult enough -- so difficult that the notion of being responsible for anyone else, knowing anyone else's innermost desires and slaking them, seems like a superhuman feat. And yet the entire history of our species rests upon it -- the scores of generations of parents who, despite the near-impossibility of getting it ri... posted on Aug 3, 4825 reads

Alison Benis White: Light on the Page
"Chaos--confusion, bewilderment--these are things I'm always working against and within as a writer. Frost famously argued that a poem is a "temporary stay against confusion"--and by "stay," within the context of 'The Figure a Poem Makes,' he means clarification--a temporary clarification of life. This resonates with me, although I don't know if I agree with the certainty of his claim. I think poe... posted on Aug 1, 1039 reads

A Turtle's Silver Bead of Quietude
"One day in the fall, as water and air cooled, at some precise temperature an ancient bell sounded in the turtle brain. A signal: Take a deep breath. Each creature slipped off her log and swam for the warmer muck bottom. Stroking her way through the woven walls of plant stems, she found her bottom place. She closed her eyes and dug into the mud. She buried herself. And then, pulled into her shell,... posted on Aug 7, 3812 reads

Eating the Wild
"In recent decades, and especially since the Covid-19 pandemic, there has been a growing interest in foraging and cooking with food gathered from the countryside around us. In this article, Charlotte Maberly talks to the distinguished Scottish food writer Fi Martynoga about the benefits of eating wild food, and also looks at the history of the movement and its wider implications in terms of health... posted on Aug 15, 1300 reads

Jeffrey Bale: The World Needs Beauty
"Jeffrey Bale received his degree in landscape architecture from the University of Oregon back in 1981. He quickly landed a job at a Portland architecture firm -- but he only lasted 20 minutes behind a desk. Instead, he began traveling the world, finding inspiration in the stunning architecture of Europe and SE Asia. He returned home and began creating elaborate and intricate pebble mosaics from s... posted on Sep 25, 2642 reads

Elizabeth Alexander: Light of the World
"In 2009 at President Barack Obama's first inauguration, Elizabeth Alexander read a poem she wrote for the occasion called "Praise Song for the Day". It was a high point in her celebrated career as a poet, essayist, playwright, and academic. She has published many books of poetry and prose, she taught at Yale for many years, and now she's teaching at Columbia, in New York City, where she was born.... posted on Oct 1, 1647 reads

Meeting Gojira: A Conversation with Craig Nagasawa
"There's this idea that, as an artist, your job is to put your ego into your painting and push it at everybody else, that a good painting is 'full of you' somehow.But the art I like is made when the artist actually has gotten out of the way. At some point doing a painting, it literally feels like I'm the one stopping it with my decisions, and my aesthetic--and all that stuff about, 'I'm the artist... posted on Oct 10, 856 reads

The Marvelous Connections Between Poetry & Medicine
"Sri Shamasunder likes to say he was a poet before he was a doctor. His college mentor, the legendary poet and activist June Jordan, passed away from cancer during his first year of medical school, but had a lasting impact on his practice of medicine. She encouraged him to harness righteous anger and to use his voice to fight inequity, inspiring Shamasunder's work as a professor of medicine at the... posted on Oct 26, 1244 reads

Pooja Lakshmin: Self Care the Right Way
"The wellness industry saturates our cultural consciousness, with juice cleanses, organic skincare, and spa retreats flooding our social media feeds. But what does this plethora of dazzling -- and often expensive -- lifestyle products all amount to? Not much, argues Dr. Pooja Lakshmin, a psychiatrist who specializes in women's mental health and clinical assistant professor at George Washington Uni... posted on Oct 30, 2296 reads

Cultivating Inner Stillness for Compassionate Service
"Make the world your Temple. In 2019, Sarah Tulivu had been given this clear instruction by two Taoist masters, including her direct teacher, Master Waysun Liao. At the time, Sarah, ordained as Fong Yi, was living and training full-time as a monk in a Taoist temple in Lago Atitln, Guatemala. For six years, she had practiced meditation and the embodied consciousness practice of taiji (tai chi) in ... posted on Nov 14, 2073 reads

Attuned: Global Social Witnessing
"What would trauma-informed media look like? It's a question that deserves critical research. What's clear is that contemporary societies need to focus as much or more attention on healing and health as they do on increasing gross domestic product. Imagine a new media and economic landscape that is grounded, professional, and ethical, whose leaders value human health above personal profit. Imagine... posted on Nov 16, 1317 reads

Jennifer Bichanich: Rising from the Ashes
In this deeply moving episode, Fill to Capacity podcast host Pat Benincasa speaks with writer and life coach Jennifer Bichanich. Jennifer opens a window on her experiences with profound loss, including losing her beloved husband when the church they were remodeling went up in flames. Despite immense grief and despair, Jennifer found ways to rebuild her life and discover her own creative resilience... posted on Nov 20, 2867 reads

Personal Integrity in C.P. Cavafy's Poetry
"The current world situation, with war raging in the Middle East and Ukraine, presents a particular challenge to those people who wish to take a unified perspective one which goes beyond polarities and tribalism in search of justice and humanity. It is hard to know how to respond. At such a time, the gentle but insistent voice of Constantine Cavafy, the modern Greek poet, carries a welcome remind... posted on Nov 26, 1402 reads

How Rituals Support Us
"I dont know if I could have survived seven years of my childhood without the soul-saving rituals of my Persian culture. I grew up amid the Iran-Iraq War, which killed a million people. Besides the horrors of the war, freedom of thought and expression were severely restricted in Iran after the Islamic revolution. Women bore the brunt of this as, in a matter of months, we were forced to ditch our p... posted on Nov 27, 2292 reads

Duct Tape and Dreams
Become a kid again! Imagine building a soapbox car; anything you could dream up and build. And then getting to ride it downhill being cheered all the way down. Produced in collaboration with Stink Studios, "Duct Tape and Dreams: Reviving the Soapbox Derby at McLaren Park" captures the creativity, collaboration, and exuberance of everyone who participated and, of course, all that exciting downhill... posted on Dec 1, 1162 reads

How to Bless Each Other
"Every once in the bluest moon, if you are lucky, you encounter someone with such powerful and generous light in their eyes that they rekindle the lost light within you and return it magnified; someone whose calm, kind, steady gaze penetrates the very center of your being and, refusing to look away from even the most shadowy parts of you, falls upon you like a benediction.
That we can do th... posted on Dec 11, 6141 reads

The Living Sculpture Made by 90 Generations
While walking outside your home, or on a familiar street in your neighborhood, have you ever wondered who -- what kinds of people and life journeys -- walked those very same steps before you? The land has a way of connecting us across time, and a 3,000-year-old natural sculpture in Oxfordshire, England is a living embodiment of such interconnection. The Uffington White Horse is a football-field si... posted on Dec 14, 1702 reads

Life as a Cup of Tea
"'The key to tasting tea,' she said, 'is to never judge it. Some teas open in the beginning and fade quickly, some teas take 6 cups to open and last longer,'" writes Mina Lee, as she steeps in her first experience with a tea ceremony and the words of Chan teacher, Mudeng. Lee observes, "The way the leaves are picked, the water used, the ceramic used, the tea pourer, how they hold the lid to steam ... posted on Dec 18, 1552 reads

How Two Enemy Soldiers Saved Each Other, Over 20 Years Apart
In the brutalities of the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s, two soldiers on opposite sides formed an unlikely bond. In 1982, Iraqi forces captured the Iranian city of Khorramshahr. In response, Iran plotted to retake the city. Shortly after that battle began, Najah Aboud, from southern Iraq, was severely wounded in the head, chest, and back. Crawling to a bunker, he prepared for the death that seemed in... posted on Dec 29, 2096 reads

Niksen: The Dutch Art of Purposefully Doing Nothing
In an increasingly busy world, the Dutch have mastered the art of niksen - purposefully doing nothing. This powerful practice counteracts anxiety and bolsters creativity and productivity. Instead of always focusing on efficiency, practicing niksen by setting aside specific time for purposeless relaxation, such as sitting in a caf simply savoring your coffee and daydreaming, can b... posted on Dec 30, 3335 reads

Tsultrim Allione: Turning Towards What’s Difficult
After losing her infant daughter suddenly in 1980, the search for stories to help process grief led her to write what would go on to become a book that rippled into a burgeoning community of practice. Along the way, Lama Tsultrim found herself delving into research of the sacred feminine, deepening her own inner practices, and a whole lot more. In an intriguing podcast conversation, Tami Simon jou... posted on Feb 11, 2425 reads

Something Old Is Something New
"When Rue MaCall walked down the aisle at her wedding in September, everything she wore was second-hand, borrowed or stitched from someone else's discarded fabrics. Her earrings were made from tassels she found in a donation bin. A friend lent her pearls purchased 50 years ago. She made her dress by hand, finding all the second-hand silk, thread and lace she needed from a single source, the Ragfin... posted on Feb 23, 1820 reads

From Accessing Your Ignorance to Accessing Your Love
"Ed had an amazingly minimalist teaching style. He did not give lengthy lectures. He never used a superfluous word. Ed the teacher inverted the relationship between learner and educator. Normally that relationship is based on the professor knowing things that the students don't, a learning structure in which the professor conveys information and insights through lectures, discussions, and readings... posted on Mar 1, 2970 reads

Dishes in the Sink
When Bethany Renfree was 20 years-old, she lived with her three young daughters in a low-income apartment in California. Like most of the tenants, Renfree was a single mom. Life was full and overwhelming. One cold morning, as Renfree shuffled into the kitchen, she looked at the sink piled high with pots and pans and dishes. "These pots were caked in grease and burnt because I actually didn't reall... posted on Mar 10, 4860 reads