The Art of Sho: A Calligraphers's Pilgrimage
Filmmaker Jerry Hsu spent four months observing Dr. Ronald Nakasone practicing the art of calligraphy, and witnessed how this art requires contemplation, perseverance and single-minded concentration. The art of "sho" or "writing", can be properly called abstract art. It is nonfigurative, nonobjective, and nonrepresentational. The process of the work is one of experimentation and distillation. All ... posted on Mar 3, 3903 reads

Waging Life in a War Zone
"From the stones of the destruction we will build plant basins to grow flowers." It started with one man's efforts to beautify his home with paint and flowers, but the initiative spread as neighbors came forward to spread the beauty. Using salvaged and recycled material, with some funding from a local and U.S. nonprofit, the densely populated neighborhood of al-Zaitoun in Gaza City, Palestine, is ... posted on Feb 7, 2762 reads

Indiana Jones Meets Florence Nightingale
"One night I was driving home from a sales conference and I went blind -- I later learned it was stress blindness. I managed to pull over to the hard shoulder of the motorway. All the while I was thinking, 'My life is over; I will never see my kids again'. I promised myself then that if my sight came back, I would find my purpose. I was very lucky, and my sight did return...And then I started to w... posted on Feb 11, 12749 reads

Rising Women Rising World
"It is an unusual occurrence when the roll call of achievements of just three women includes several nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize; training roles for UN Development Programmes, and advice-giving to NATO military officers and government officials. That the Dalai Lama, Nelson Mandela and the Clintons, to name just a few, have sought them out for their input makes the individuals of this tri... posted on Mar 8, 15715 reads

Why Silence Is Good for Your Brain
"As our internal and external environments become louder and louder, more people are beginning to seek out silence, whether through a practice of sitting quietly for 10 minutes every morning or heading off to a 10-day silent retreat. Inspired to go find some peace and quiet? Here are four science-backed ways that silence is good for your brain -- and how making time for it can make you feel less s... posted on Mar 14, 81048 reads

Path to Freedom: A Former Prison Monk's Amazing Work
Redemption and transformation can occur in even the harshest of surroundings. During his 14-year incarceration Fleet Maull found meditation. With meditation he found a freedom that transcended prison walls. After his release he returns to prison to teach meditation, healthy survival skills and share his story of meaningful change. 1 out of every 100 Americans is currently behind bars. And 700,000 ... posted on Mar 30, 3721 reads

The Intelligence in All Kinds of Life
"Why is the world so beautiful?" This is a question Robin Wall Kimmerer pursues as a botanist and also as a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. She writes, "Science polishes the gift of seeing, indigenous traditions work with gifts of listening and language." An expert in moss - a bryologist - she describes mosses as the 'coral reefs of the forest.' She opens a sense of wonder and humility fo... posted on Apr 22, 14964 reads

We Are All Criminals
Emily Baxter is a public defender, turned policy maker, turned storyteller with an unusual cause. As founder of the nonprofit, "We Are All Criminals" she invites everyday people to anonymously share stories of crimes and misdemeanors that they were never caught or charged for. Through sharing personal experiences, her work seeks to inspire empathy and ignite social change. The project is gaining ... posted on May 11, 13373 reads

How to Cultivate Global Compassion
Paul Ekman, legendary psychologist and Professor Emeritus at UCSF, is an expert on emotion recognition and his work has been instrumental in helping us understand the universality of emotion and its place in our social lives. More recently, inspired by his exchanges with the Dalai Lama, Ekman's work has focused on applying his knowledge of emotion and compassion toward bettering human social inter... posted on Apr 24, 11695 reads

Slow Down to Get Ahead
Chronic rushing through a never ending to-do list feeds anxiety and heightens stress levels. Due to the epinephrine, also known as adrenaline, released in the brain during stressful periods, our brains get hooked on the stimulation of activity. Our bodies become addicted to rushing and our minds switch into autopilot with everything of high importance and needing to get accomplished quickly. We st... posted on May 1, 9767 reads

The Strange Beautiful Side of Death
"Its no surprise to anyone who knows my family well (or perhaps anyone who has a teenage daughter themselves) that growing up, my mom and I had a strained relationship.Simply put, she insisted that I sit at the table for dinner, go to bed at nine, periodically clean my room and go to church. She ran the whole house, had a full time job, and was frequently stressed. My dad, on the other hand, seeme... posted on May 5, 24560 reads

Forward the Smile
Angelo Pangalos' project has a simple purpose - to encourage and inspire people to share a smile with a stranger. Pangalos has been in and out of hospitals since the age of five. Faced with one health crisis after another, and unable to work, Pangalos decided to give the one thing he didn't have - a smile. For the last several years, Pangalos has used his passion for magic and music to entertain s... posted on May 15, 4017 reads

How to Avoid Abusing Power
"When we receive power, it feels like a vital force. It surges through the body, propelling the individual forward in pursuit of goals. When an individual feels powerful, he or she experiences higher levels of excitement, inspiration, joy, and euphoria, all of which enable purposeful, goal-directed action. Feeling powerful, the individual becomes sharply attuned to rewards in the environment and q... posted on May 17, 15174 reads

The Lullaby Project: Homeless Mothers Make Music
Since 2011, the Lullaby Project, a Carnegie Hall program (part of its larger Musical Connections initiative) that takes music's transformative power outside gilded concert halls and into neglected communities throughout New York City and across the nation, has paired more than 300 homeless or incarcerated mothers with professional musicians to create a musical experience for their child. Over thre... posted on May 29, 16587 reads

They & The Emotional Weight of Words
"Language is the space in which we carve a place for ourselves, where we demand to be seen. A reflection point for culture, community, and family to acknowledge our existence on our terms." For many, the pronouns 'he' and 'she' are limiting and do not adequately express their identity. "The entire lexicon for how we understand gender is shifting. For many of us, it can be a weighty, disorienting e... posted on Aug 28, 6056 reads

Our Relationship With Media & Attention
Mary Rothschild studies the effects of media on young children. She tells this story, "Each child was happily kneading their dough, these two, two-and-a-half to five-year-old children, and making a bread animal or something. I thought, "Wow. It's been like four minutes and they're all quiet!"Then this little girl next to me looked up and said, "Mary, the Lion King video is too loud." So I thought ... posted on Jul 11, 21377 reads

'Tashi & The Monk' Wins an Emmy!
Lobsang Phuntsok is a former Tibetan monk who trained with the Dalai Lama and spent years teaching Buddhism in the West. In 2006, he moved back to establish a community in the Himalayan foothills for orphans and impoverished children. Phuntsok remembers, "My birth wasn't something to celebrate. I brought a lot of pain and embarrassment to my family. That's why when I was younger I was always call... posted on Sep 20, 0 reads

Street Books: Library on Wheels For People Outside
Recognizing that "those living outside or in temporary shelters are usually barred from borrowing books from regular libraries because they lack the required documentation," Professor Laura Moulton began lending books to people living on the fringes of society in Portland, Oregon. In 2011, Moulton founded a bike-powered mobile library, Street Books, to make sure those in isolated communities have ... posted on Aug 10, 11799 reads

We Save What We Love: Gordon Hempton
Acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton is in love with nature's music -- sounds and silences he says that have either changed or vanished in the three decades he has been recording them. Bird songs, dolphin clicks, and insect chirps are all sounds of communication. If those sounds are drowned out by noise pollution, creatures can't hear each other. The results can be devastating. If danger warnings, ma... posted on Aug 12, 18024 reads

Color Your World With Kindness
Delight in this gorgeous animation designed for children and adults alike by 'A Better World'. The film portrays how small acts of kindness can positively change the feelings and attitudes of others and how naturally this will spread, grow and flourish within our communities and beyond. The Better Worldian's strategy is to plant flowers instead of pulling weeds, cultivating the goodness in everybo... posted on Aug 13, 4881 reads

The Effortless Effort of Creativity
"Every good poem begins in language awake to its own connections -- language that hears itself and what is around it, sees itself and what is around it, looks back at those who look into its gaze and knows more perhaps even than we do about who are, what we are. It begins, that is, in the mind and body of concentration." Poet Jane Hirshfield shares more on creativity, concentration, the pleasures ... posted on Sep 6, 11180 reads

'Love Rounds' at Loma Linda
"Love Rounds" are done at the Loma Linda hospital once a week. "This unique idea was started by Dr. Wil Alexander, PhD, who is currently 94 years old and still teaching and lecturing within the family medicine department. He is not a physician -- he is a minister and professor of religion at Loma Linda University, and brings an important non-medical perspective to the way we learned to look at pat... posted on Oct 7, 7198 reads

A Fun Way to Stop Buying Things You Don't Need
"A few years ago, illustrator and editorial cartoonist Sarah Lazarovic felt like she was buying too much junk. So she stopped shopping for a year, then documented her withdrawals and, eventually, all the lessons and tips and tricks she learned about not buying things. Instead of buying the items she coveted, she made paintings of them.During that time, instead of buying the items she coveted, she ... posted on Sep 9, 18788 reads

Shoulders
In his moving creation, Kindred's Artist-in-Residence, Daniel Sperry gives voice and music to Naomi Shihab Nye's poem, "Shoulders", a poem that speaks "directly to the connection between what we do as parents and the prospect of living in a world where we take care of each other in that same careful, and tender way." Sperry's transcendent work connects with and inspires those "on the quest ...to... posted on Dec 15, 10063 reads

Gifts for Gifted Children
"What gifts can we offer gifted children? How can we who are their guardians do justice by them? The first gift is not to praise them for their talents alone. Just as a beautiful child is often praised only for their beauty, and grows simultaneously vain and insecure, an intelligent child can easily learn that their mind is what makes them lovable...Instead, give these children the gift of praise ... posted on Sep 28, 34210 reads

The Running Program That's Pulled 1,300 People Out of Homelessne
At 5:45 a.m., on a Friday morning, a group of about 20 homeless guys warmed up in a parking lot in East Harlem. In a circle, they did jumping jacks, twisted their torsos and touched their toes, and then huddled up, they chanted the Serenity Prayer ("God give me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change...") and took off running. They ran with Back On My Feet, a program started by social en... posted on Nov 30, 17060 reads

A Lesson in Letting Go From My Mother
This delicious essay is a paean to a mother who nourishes and nurtures, is selfless, gracious, and wise. . . even when a domestic ritual changed forever. The source of many happy memories for the writer as a teen was watching her mother make fresh roti (Indian bread). There was a process she followed -- one that was methodical, careful, and slow, that included plenty of leisurely talk while calmly... posted on Nov 19, 16499 reads

Whistling in the Wind: Preserving a Language Without Words
The last speakers of a language without words reside on La Gomera, one of the smallest islands in Spains Canary Islands. "El Silbo," a whistled communication used in rural and isolated areas, is dying out as islanders embrace digital communication and move to cities and the mainland. Even so, El Silbo has a firm place in the island's culture. Some of La Gomera's schools are teaching the language a... posted on Oct 14, 3116 reads

Cafe Momentum: Serving Second Chances
At a Texas restaurant staffed by ex-offenders, young men ditch criminal backgrounds to roast, toast and saute high-end cuisine. That restaurant was created by Chef Chad Houser who realized that the inmates who he was teaching cooking were more than his pre-conceived stereotypes and deserved a second chance: "When he arrived in the kitchen, none of the eight boys were the tattooed toughs he'd expec... posted on Nov 2, 12813 reads

Community, Conflict and Ways of Knowing
"I argue that the relation established between the knower and the known, between the student and the subject, tends to become the relation of the living person to world itself." In this beautifully articulated piece Parker Palmer reflects on how we should be thinking about the nature of community in modern higher education, what role conflict plays in community, and the two types of love that are ... posted on Nov 13, 13272 reads

What We Should Know About Animals
It's easy to assume that animals experience happiness (just think of a dog wagging its tail), but what about higher-level emotions and qualities like selflessness, empathy, or even love? In "Beyond Words: How Animals Think and Feel," conservationist Carl Safina shares stories from decades of observing animals and combines it with new brain research to paint a picture of animals' emotional landscap... posted on Jun 28, 2980 reads

John Muir's Spiritual and Political Journey
A self-taught mechanical genius and trained botanist, John Muir was offered a lucrative job, but an accident that had nearly blinded him had given him the resolve to abandon convention, renounce the prospect of wealth and success, and go "wholehearted and unafraid" into the American wilderness. Read on about how his spiritual awakening became a catalyst for social change.... posted on Nov 22, 20591 reads

Three Ways to Keep Technology from Ruining Your Relationships
We all know there's nothing like a warm smile, loving hug, sympathetic eyes, shared laughter, or long talks. These are the things that make us human and happy, and they are best done in person. Yet sometimes we are too busy to get together. Enter technology, with promises of improving relationships. However tempting, technology needs to be limited. While Facebook, Instagram, and e-mail give us the... posted on Jan 8, 20071 reads

Ode to Lesvos
"It was natural to help." "Next time it might be my family." When over 300,000 refugees passed through the island of Lesvos, Greece, in 2015, the people there fished them out of the water, opened their homes and businesses, fed them, washed and ironed their clothes, and held their babies. This ode to the people of Lesvos celebrates the triumph of compassion and kindness over the tragic politics an... posted on Nov 18, 4168 reads

How to Only Do Things You Actually Want to Do
"Can you remember the last time your to-do list was short enough to be, well, do-able? How about the last time you looked at your list and actually wanted to do everything on it?" Christine Carter, Senior Fellow at the Greater Good Science Center, started getting loads of requests for help managing too-long task lists. Recognizing that ineffective task lists make us feel like we have too much to ... posted on Dec 17, 22962 reads

Inside the Rush to Preserve Indigenous Languages
A good puppet has to be liked, so Binnabannas was given a pair of friendly brown eyes, a set of uneven blue antlers, and leather shoes with red trim and curled toes reminiscent of samiske komagers, the traditional reindeer skin shoes worn by the Sami, the indigenous people of Northern Europe...Binnabannas's main goal is to keep the Sami language alive in the next generation, but the character may ... posted on Dec 18, 7980 reads

Educating Our Children's Hearts
In November 2016, a university in Vadodara, India hosted a panel discussion titled "Education for Compassion: Rethinking Means and End," seeking to answer how schools, parents, and communities can prepare children to lead more compassionate rather than competitive lives. One of the panelists, Meghna Banker, is a graphic designer, volunteer, and a full-time mother home-schooling her daughter. In he... posted on Jan 6, 18920 reads

Good Morning Beautiful Business!
Judy Wicks is an entrepreneur, activist and author working to build a more compassionate, environmentally sustainable and locally based economy. She notes, "Not long after I opened the White Dog Cafe in Philadelphia in 1983, I hung a sign in my bedroom closet in my home above the business -- right where I would see it each morning. "Good morning, beautiful business," it read, reminding me daily of... posted on Jan 29, 5703 reads

Coming in Peace, 2017
In this brief, poignant post, Tracy Cochran of Parabola magazine reminds us of a profoundly simple yet overlooked soul-soother that anyone can practice and share: forgiveness. This year, why not take one small step toward self-compassion and taste the peace that comes with self-acceptance. Say, "Forgiven." To yourself, then others. "To ask for and offer forgiveness is to put down arms, daring to s... posted on Jan 23, 10984 reads

How to Find and Support Trustworthy Journalism
In this world of fast-paced news and the proliferation of news sites-- some reliable and some far less so-- how can we make sure the journalism we rely on to help us learn about the facts and events unfolding around us is reliable? This insightful piece from Shareable.com suggests some ways that we can evaluate the news sources we use and encourage responsible journalism on the issues we care abou... posted on Feb 6, 20552 reads

Peacemaking the Navajo Way
Navajos have been using a peacemaking system to resolve conflicts long before contact with Europeans. Built upon K'e, the fundamental idea is to restore relationships and harmony, rather than to assign guilt and punishment, through the use of four foundational values: Respect, Relationship (K'e), Responsibility, and Reverence. Mark Sorensen joined the Navajos as a Phd. student and stayed on for 40... posted on Feb 11, 19893 reads

How to Listen with Compassion in the Classroom
In classroom environments where the need to belong is thwarted, young people may grasp for power and prestige rather than learn how to form authentic connections. Students may try to fit in in negative ways like bullying, buying in to peer pressure, or conforming to negative stereotype, because, often they lack the necessary social-emotional skills to form healthy, supportive relationships -- whic... posted on Feb 26, 21556 reads

Combating a Creativity Crisis
"KH Kim, author of the new book "The Creativity Challenge" has tested more than 270,000 people, from kindergartners to adults, looking at (among other things) their ability to come up with original ideas, think in a detailed and elaborative way, synthesize information, and be open-minded and curious -- what she considers creativity. Her research has found that Americans' creativity rose from 1966 ... posted on Feb 21, 13812 reads

Sleeping Enough to Be Truly Awake
"Human beings are the only species that deprives themselves of sleep. No other species that we see will do this... And what that means is that evolution has never faced the challenge of insufficient sleep since the dawn of time. As a consequence, Mother Nature has never had to solve this problem of insufficient sleep -- so there is no safety net [to bank on when it comes to sleep loss.]" In this ... posted on May 31, 59275 reads

Shai Reshef: The Man Educating the World
After his retirement, educational entrepreneur Shai Reshef felt nagging questions: "What if everyone could go to university? What if education was a human right?" He "set about bringing together volunteer tutors, low-tech open-source software and the internet to create the world's first tuition-free online, accredited university....Today University of the People (UoPeople) has enrolled students fr... posted on Mar 11, 19822 reads

Angeles Arrien: On What Is Gratitude?
The expression of gratitude is the glue that holds society and relationships together, while its opposite - ingratitude - contributes to societal dissolution and separation. That means gratefulness is essential to humankind's sustainability and survival, whether cultural, psychological, physical, spiritual, or even financial. Cultural anthropologist and beloved author and teacher, Angeles Arrien s... posted on Apr 8, 21872 reads

The Refuge
For hundreds of generations, the Gwich'in people of Alaska and northern Canada have depended on the caribou that migrate through the Arctic Refuge. They believe that they are guardians of the herd, and that the fates of the people and the caribou are forever entwined. For the last 30 years, the Gwich'in have been fighting to preserve a pristine coastal plain where the caribou calve their young, "t... posted on Oct 14, 2365 reads

The Couple Who Turned Barren Land Into a Wildlife Sanctuary
Wouldn't it be great to wake up to the sound of chirping birds, with fresh air and splendid scenery around? In the concrete jungle of our cities where even house sparrows are fast disappearing, this seems like a dream. But a couple has converted this dream into a reality by creating a wildlife sanctuary of their own. Passionate about wildlife and nature conservation, they bought 55 acres of land i... posted on Apr 6, 23394 reads

The Power of the Mindful Minute at Work: One Company's Brave Exp
Investing and finance aren't exactly fields synonymous with mindfulness and kindness, but some companies are starting to change that. During his annual review at an investment firm, Birju Pandya's boss looked at him and said, "You've done well. What do you want?" Pandya, now a senior advisor at RSF, calls it "the 'Godfather offer'" of the investment bank world. His mind teetered on the verge of a ... posted on Apr 29, 5054 reads

Why Defending Human Rights Is Women’s Work
Whether it is Black Lives Matter activists working to encourage and support school-age black girls so that they can thrive, formerly incarcerated black trans women fighting police brutality, Muslim women debunking dangerous stereotypes besetting their communities, or undocumented Latina women promoting the rights of domestic workers, women human rights defenders in America are building solidarity ... posted on Jun 8, 5684 reads