The Efficiency of Inefficiency
While studying the history of medicine and practicing for over twenty years, Dr. Victoria Sweet discovered approaches to healing that today would be considered inefficient--but put into practice, are just the opposite. One such lesson was from 12th century abbess Hildegard of Bingen, who felt that "the body is more like a plant than a machine . . . the difference being that someone has to fix a br... posted on May 9, 4643 reads

I Feel You: The Surprising Power of Extreme Empathy
Sometimes the world seems like a heavy and difficult place. While it's true that life has its share of challenges, one of the best ways to find the light in every day is to connect to one another. Sharing, listening, and identifying with one another helps us grow those connections through empathy. Empathy is something innate that lives in all of us, but its also something that can be grown and c... posted on Jun 26, 10744 reads

Designed by Masters, Woven with Dignity
Witness the beautiful fabric woven by traditional weavers in Toraja, Indonesia, and learn how their collective is working to bring economic independence to the weavers while preserving weaving as part of their cultural heritage. The social enterprise, Torajamelo, transforms the lives of these weavers, offering scholarships for their children and grandchildren and health insurance for themselves an... posted on May 18, 2179 reads

Embrace the Grace, Celebrate the Infinite
In a recent graduation address Nipun Mehta shares the origin story of ServiceSpace and the shifts catalyzed by exploring a set of questions unusual in the realm of technology: what do exponential love, exponential forgiveness and exponential kindness look like? He shares the power discovered in the practice of letting go/letting in and allowing "the vast conspiracy of the universe to drop you at t... posted on Jun 11, 15173 reads

The Art and Discipline of Seeing Compassionately
"Prophets and sages throughout the generations have all agreed on this one point: how you see determines what you see and don't see. So if we want to heal the divisions in our country and our homes, we have to learn a new way of seeing." In this excerpt from his book "Practice Makes PURPOSE: Six Spiritual Practices That Will Change Your Life and Transform Your Community", Paul Schroeder offers ins... posted on Nov 5, 12390 reads

We Are Still Here
Many indigenous cultures that once existed are now part of past history. However, many of those cultures are indeed alive; examples of resilience and strength. Camille Seaman, an award-winning photographer and Native American, was troubled by her childhood experiences hearing her culture and her people described in the past tense. As she says, "we are still here". With her camera and her purpose,... posted on Dec 8, 4765 reads

Healing Civilization Nature's Way
Cities of the future should have less grey and more green, according to leading thinkers Thomas Lovejoy and Jonathan F. P. Rose. In this Garrison Institute mashup conversation between biological diversity expert and urban developer, we get an overview of what might really work. Says Lovejoy, "I'm actually hoping that particularly when the ecosystem restoration part of the solution to climate chang... posted on Jul 30, 9001 reads

One Square Inch of Silence
Gordon Hempton is an acoustic ecologist who has spent over thirty years taking recordings of steadily vanishing natural soundscapes. Quiet places on earth are in danger of disappearing, a message that Hempton brought home in 2010 by marking one square inch of quiet space in Washington's Olympic National Park with a small red rock. His work was featured in a documentary entitled "Soundtracker" that... posted on Jul 12, 3007 reads

Eager: The Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter
A beaver is a change agent. They build a dam, create a pond, then over the course of years, the pond fills in, becomes a wetland, wet meadow and the cycle starts again. Humans like things static, which is one reason beavers and humans have not gotten along. We have fundamentally different visions of how the landscape is supposed to work. The consequences have been the decimation of the beaver popu... posted on Aug 15, 8178 reads

4 Ways to Train Your Brain to Feel Better
It might be difficult to think that stress could be an opportunity, but Laurel Mellin, Ph.D. believes that it can encourage us to pause long enough to change how we think. Mellin is the founder of EBT, Inc. (Emotional Brain Training) an educational organization that provides certification and brain training to health professionals and the public. With stress as the number one epidemic worldwide, M... posted on Aug 17, 30949 reads

Ms. Liz's Allies
Why might you choose to step in? This is one question that fourth graders in Elizabeth Kleinrocks class are asked as they learn terms like ally, advocate, and bystander and consider them in various historical, social, and cultural contexts. If the complexity of our world, its problems, pains, and difficult questions can feel overwhelming at times, a look inside this classroom goes to show that wit... posted on Sep 8, 2809 reads

Bring Your Whole Self to Work
We all want to "do a good job"; in our work, in our homes, in our relationships and ultimately in our lives. Sometimes we are successful and sometimes we make mistakes. Being afraid of mistakes, ridicule and failure can lead to "hiding" the vulnerable parts of ourselves; leaving those parts of ourselves "at home" away from scrutiny and judgement. How would the work we do in our lives change if we ... posted on Sep 30, 8281 reads

Ten True Things About Gratefulness
Gratefulness is a deceptively simple practice that has the potential to change your life and those around you. "The benefits of gratitude range from deeper sleep and better health to higher self-esteem and enhanced stress resilience. Gratitude has also been shown to enhance our relationships. And, if that's not enough, gratitude makes us happier." And happiness spreads. Here, an ode to the practic... posted on Oct 17, 22910 reads

Musicians for World Harmony
The healing power of music is widely known, from bustling cities to remote villages. Since 2002, Musicians for World Harmony has relied on the gift of music to help those impacted by war, disease, aging, and cultural divides. Founder Samite Mulondo, a professional musician and former refugee, believes in using music to help create a safe space where participants don't feel judged. "The stories usu... posted on Oct 12, 6870 reads

How Doctors Use Poetry
While doctors are educated to focus primarily on medical science, some are beginning to expand their outlook and focus on something greater: language, in particular, poetry. While the Hippocratic Oath many physicians take requires them to "remember that there is art to medicine as well as science, and that warmth, sympathy, and understanding may outweigh the surgeon's knife or the chemist's drug",... posted on Jul 19, 2886 reads

Stephen Jenkinson Reimagines Dying
Stephen Jenkinson brings a stark new attitude to work with people who are dying. When asked why in this interview, he explains that this is an ambivalent time. "And the culture that I know well...believes in knowing. It rewards knowing." So in speaking with with the dying, who are in a not-knowing situation, even consternation, he wants to "subvert knowledge and certainty...so that learning gets a... posted on Oct 19, 12524 reads

The Nun Who Has Saved Thousands of Lives From Violence
The very same night that Sister Lucy Kurien turned away a pregnant and frightened woman from an overnight visit to her convent in India, the woman was immolated by her husband. Sister Lucy held her in her arms as she died. That night she vowed to do something for the women of her country. So she founded Maher, "a refuge for women whose poverty prevents them from being able to leave abusive homes o... posted on Oct 22, 7060 reads

How to Save Creative Culture from the Syphoning of Substance
Maria Popova reflects on the thoughts of mathematician, philosopher, and cybernetics pioneer Norbert Wiener in his book The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society. She reminds us of the danger when "creative culture is reduced to mere 'content' as the life of the mind and world of substantive ideas collapse into an abyss of marketable sensationalism and cynicism, (flattening) life's nu... posted on Oct 21, 4272 reads

The Monk, the Butcher & the Origins of Deep Counting
Our lives are based on what we count and how we count it. Somik Raha asks what would be different in our lives if we changed how we engage with counting. Raha takes us through stories of what is meritorious, which leads us into deep counting-- counting which facilitates meaningful experiences. He then brings us into the understanding of how making distinctions is an act of creation and is juxtapos... posted on Oct 23, 3374 reads

Letters from Max: A Book of Friendship
"In 2012, Sarah Ruhl was a distinguished author and playwright, twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Max Ritvo was an exuberant, opinionated, and highly gifted poet in remission from pediatric cancer. Studded with poems and songs, their correspondence is a deeply moving portrait of a friendship, and a shimmering exploration of love, art, mortality, and joy." What follows is an excerpt from 'Le... posted on Nov 10, 4891 reads

Native Women Reclaim Land Plot by Plot
In the San Francisco Bay Area, demand for land seems endless. Property values are sky-high, rents are backbreaking, and people just keep coming. Over 2 million more are expected to settle here by 2040. Today's land rush is nothing new. For more than 200 years, there has been a run on Bay Area real estate a relentless wave of colonization, then suburbanization and now gentrification that left the O... posted on Dec 18, 5541 reads

The Two-Year Phone Conversation That Changed a Life
More than 20 years ago, over the course of two years, a young woman had helpful conversations with a gentleman who volunteers for the Care Corner Counselling Center in Singapore. She was at a low point in her life at this time and received support, empowerment and a sense of hope from these conversations. Twenty years later, wanting to thank this man whom she had never met for helping her to move ... posted on Nov 4, 2347 reads

Sustainability and the Sacred
Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, Sufi teacher and author, implores us to change our present global predicament by changing our consciousness. Our current mindset sees Earth as a resource. He argues that this worldview creates a sense of separation and one in which we have forgotten the sacred nature of the Earth. If we embrace the sacred in all of life, we will remember our primal relationship to the Earth,... posted on Nov 22, 6512 reads

Conscious Business & the Spiritual Wisdom of Sounds True
Tami Simon is the founder and CEO of Sounds True, a multimedia publishing company that Tami founded in 1985 at the age of 22 with the mission of disseminating spiritual wisdom. Today, still faithful to its original mission, Sounds True has grown to have nearly 110 employees and a library of close to 2000 titles featuring some of the leading teachers and visionaries of our time. Sounds True is a p... posted on Nov 24, 6479 reads

Waiting to Unfold
Mirka Knaster, fiber and mixed media artist, asks us "How many times have artists thought, while working on a project, 'Will I ever get this completed?' How often do we face seemingly unsurmountable obstacles on the path to turning our vision into reality? And when will we reach the level of proficiency and excellence we aspire to?" These questions are familiar to any creative person who has a vis... posted on Jan 11, 7944 reads

Scilla Elworthy: A Business Plan for Peace
A distinguished activist for peace for over 30 years, Dr. Scilla Elworthy has met with scientists and nuclear weapons policy makers from all five nuclear powers. She founded the Oxford Research Group, Peace Direct, and co-founded 'Rising Women, Rising World' and FemmeQ, and was nominated three times for the Nobel Peace Prize. She is interviewed here about her latest book, "The Business Plan for Pe... posted on Feb 15, 7880 reads

George's Best Friend: A Christmas Story
"A new neighbor moved in next door. His name was George, and he was an older gentleman. He always nodded a greeting when he saw us. It was around Thanksgiving when we saw him park in his space near ours. We were bringing in groceries, and my mom asked him if he had plans for the holiday. When he said no, that he would spend it alone, my mom mentioned her open house on Christmas Eve. 'Please join... posted on Dec 25, 0 reads

How Books Solace, Empower and Transform Us
Since the invention of the printing press, books have fed the human animal's irrepressible hunger for truth and meaning. Books offer refuge and companionship during lonely childhoods. The following piece opens the pages of a wonderful collection of essays about why we read and how books transform us from some of the most inspiring humans in our world: artists, writers, scientists, philosophers, en... posted on Jan 19, 7344 reads

12 Truths I Learned from Life and Writing
A few days before she turned 61, author Anne Lamott wrote down everything she knew. "There's so little truth in the popular culture," she says. "And it's good to be sure of a few things." In this TED Talk, with her characteristic wit and wisdom, Lamott delivers 12 things she knows for sure. Reflecting on grace, faith, family and more, she explores what it means to be human in a world where blessin... posted on Feb 12, 849357 reads

Ask Where I'm Local
So many times when we introduce ourselves others, or are introduced by someone else, we place a lot of importance on naming where we are from. Often, this where is explained with the name of a country or state or city. But these are not naturally occurring phenomena. Countries, states, and cities are concepts; explaining almost nothing about us. The experiences of our daily lives and the actual ph... posted on Feb 2, 10712 reads

How Conscious Leadership Can Unlock a Better Workplace
Diana Chapman is one of the world's foremost experts on conscious leadership, and co-author of the influential book, "The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership". Her mission is to help individuals, teams, and organizations learn how to eliminate drama and suffering from their individual and collective lives. In this interview, Diana shares her ideas about what conscious leadership is, how to star... posted on Feb 13, 8538 reads

When the Market is Our Only Language
Many in the West revere the creation of wealth. Anand Giridharadas wants us to examine this and how it shapes our lives together. In this challenging conversation with Krista Tippit of the podcast, On Being, he explores the moral compromises behind notions like "win-win" and "doing well by doing good." Giridharadas describes this as being an historic time similar to that of the first Gilded Age, d... posted on Feb 22, 4970 reads

Growing a Cross-Cultural Garden
Padma Hejmadi paints a delightful landscape of her life of travels and setting roots through gardens all over the world. She weaves back to memories of her roots and family gardens in India and learns of community and connection and culture through her relationships with the garden of life.... posted on Feb 16, 4972 reads

Quantitative and Qualitative Healing
"A bit over a year ago, my grandmother passed away. During the last couple of years of her life, she was dealing with a lot of different health problems -- literally ranging from head to toe. And, thanks to Western medicine, she was able to add years to her life, because of these different drugs and therapies that were working on the physical problems that were happening in her body. But, in the c... posted on Jan 20, 4420 reads

On Compassion, Equanimity and Impermanence
"Compassion is practiced in two ways: subtly and overtly. You can subtly serve any person with whom you interact by allowing their pain to resonate deeply within you, and experiencing it completely so that it does not turn into suffering within you. This is the healthy alternative to both callous indifference and enervating enmeshment." Author and mindfulness teacher Shinzen Young shares more in t... posted on Jan 25, 15088 reads

On Defining Spirit
"What then is the spiritual? I find it difficult to define directly. It's much easier to say what it isn't that what it is. For example -- the spiritual is often confused with the moral, but it's not the moral. Morality is concerned with issues of right and wrong. Although often attributed to the "godhead", it actually has a social basis and reflects a social tradition or consensus. What is consid... posted on Feb 4, 10897 reads

Nathan Oliveira: Fundamentals
In this beautiful interview, renowned painter Nathan Oliveira muses about a lifetime of art making, "Something comes to life that doesn't normally come to life, but it's something rather rare because you can paint, and keep putting material on and on and on, and nothing can happen. It's something you simply have to find --and at a given moment, there is something there: it's extraordinary! A sort ... posted on Feb 7, 2270 reads

Embracing the Great Fullness of Life
"We all have our ideas about how life should go. Ideas painted within us as hopes, longings, opinions. Those painted around us as cultural norms, trajectories, worthwhile goals. We have ideas in mind about most everything how our bodies should work, how love should work, how the world should work. Politics. Sleep. Weather. What we want and do not want. Ideas that make things bad or good, yes or n... posted on Feb 10, 10635 reads

Pauline Boss: Ambiguous Loss and the Myth of Closure
Pauline Boss is professor emeritus at the University of Minnesota. She is the author of, among other books, "Loving Someone Who Has Dementia." Boss offers the perspective that the idea of closure leads us astray, "a myth we need to put aside, like the idea we've accepted that grief has five linear stages and we come out the other side done with it. She coined the term "ambiguous loss," creating a... posted on Feb 11, 10800 reads

Maya Soetoro-Ng: Ceeds of Peace
Learn the roots of peace building in this engaging recap of an interview with Maya Soetoro-Ng. Maya is an educator, peace builder and non profit leader. She is the co-founder of Ceeds of Peace, a teaching curriculum for peace-building action. Maya sees herself and her organization as encouraging people on how they can be more connected to self, others, and nature and through that journey create mo... posted on Feb 24, 5994 reads

The Problem with the Paradigm of Urgency
"Wouldn't you like to be part of a different kind of revolution?" In this excerpt from The More Beautiful World our Hearts Know is Possible," Charles Eisenstein presents an alternate view of being "revolutionary." Rather than continuing along the same path of urgency and effort and struggling with a problem, which come from a place of scarcity and domination, he suggests we slow down, do nothing, ... posted on Mar 28, 9800 reads

Children, Anger Control and Inuit Wisdom
"Traditional Inuit parenting is incredibly nurturing and tender. If you took all the parenting styles around the world and ranked them by their gentleness, the Inuit approach would likely rank near the top. (They even have a special kiss for babies, where you put your nose against the cheek and sniff the skin.) The culture views scolding -- or even speaking to children in an angry voice -- as inap... posted on Mar 19, 16434 reads

Recording the Healing Sounds of Nature
"Through repeated, in-depth exposure to nature's melodies, I soon developed a deep appreciation of their healing qualities and came to regard myself as a sound healer of sorts, with a focus on the voices of nature. I likened myself to an herbalist who goes into the forests and fields in search of medicinal herbs but I head into the wilds in search of immersive and atmospheric soundscapes that are... posted on Mar 27, 5679 reads

Ceres Community Project
According to the food and agriculture organization there are 821 million people struggling with hunger worldwide. Though more prevalent in developing countries, it is present even in wealthy nations. The United States Department of Agriculture reports that 40 million Americans struggle to feed themselves and their children sufficiently. These households have difficulty purchasing adequately nutri... posted on Apr 5, 4783 reads

Quiet Spirituality
Go within and you will find the noise of the world if you don't also allow the quiet of silence to reveal itself. And what we need so very much is quiet to help us skillfully navigate our lives. Many of us yearn for the deep peace that comes from being in touch with the stillness in our depths. By seeking out silence in our daily lives, we are able to find balance within the constant noise and de... posted on Apr 14, 12275 reads

This Library Takes an Indigenous Approach to Categorizing Books
For over a century, the traditional Dewey Decimal classification system has dictated how libraries organize their collections. Yet the way information is sorted conveys a lot about what's prioritized and what's left out. Xwi7xwa Library (pronounced whei-wha) at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada is working to change the way materials on indigenous cultures are sorted in an eff... posted on Apr 19, 5921 reads

The Seasons of the Soul
In The Season of the Soul: The Poetic Guidance and Spiritual Wisdom of Hermann Hesse, Ludwig Max Fischer, Ph.D., makes Hesse's vivid, evocative poems on love, imagination, nature, the divine and the passage of time available in English. Through his commentaries, Fischer helps readers understand Hesse's poetry and wisdom within the context of his life. Although Hesse, author of the novels Steppenwo... posted on Jun 9, 8883 reads

Cultivating Courage in Young People
The youngest generations of our world are shaping the future. With extraordinary drive and determination, they are paving the way to a society in which their voices are heard and their opinions matter. This article explores how we can help them as they build on their strengths, develop resilience, and stand up for what they believe in. Tips include allowing them to embrace their failures and honor... posted on Jun 18, 6249 reads

How Do You Want to Be When You Grow Up?
Today young people are trying to balance the question of "What do I want to do when I grow up?" with the question of "Who and how do I want to be in the world?" Physician and writer Abraham Verghese and education researcher Denise Pope argue that's because the way we educate for success doesn't support the creation of full, well-rounded humans. And they see the next generation challenging our cult... posted on Jun 7, 6242 reads

The True Life of the Forest
Dr. Diana Beresford-Kroeger, botanist, medical biochemist, writer and broadcaster, combines medical training with a love of botany. She is an expert on the medicinal, environmental and nutritional properties of trees, and author most recently of The Global Forest. When her parents died, she was raised by an uncle who taught her everything from physics to Buddhism and Gaelic poetry. She was one of ... posted on Sep 12, 6947 reads