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, 4973 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, 10801 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, 5922 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, 8887 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

Lessons of Impermanence
"As a palliative care doctor, I spend much of my time face-to-face with pain and suffering, debilitating disease and death. When I began my training, I thought I was comfortable with the idea of mortality, and with the notion that fighting death at all costs wasn't the sole purpose of medicine. But I hadn't expected that the type of medicine I'd chosen to practice would require a strength and pers... posted on Jun 14, 11179 reads

Equanimity, Mindfulness and Politics
While contemporary society praises the benefits of mindfulness in domains from schools to workplaces, open, non-judgmental awareness is far from a panacea for solving the world's most pressing dilemmas. Individuals and nations remain divided on the issues that define us. "Are we really creating individuals who can focus on improving their capacities for engagement and mediation while simultaneousl... posted on Jul 8, 6059 reads

Mercy Beyond Borders
Sister Marilyn Lacey is committed to go where the need is great, which, in the case of Mercy Beyond Borders, includes South Sudan and Haiti. The mission of Mercy Beyond Borders is to forge ways for women and girls in extreme poverty to learn, connect and lead by providing educational, economic and empowerment opportunities, bringing hope to areas where there was no hope. This hope is witnessed in ... posted on Aug 8, 2059 reads

Empowering the World One Bicycle at a Time
Knowledge@Wharton and Michale Useem interview Dave Neiswander, CEO of World Bicycle Relief on their unique business model. The desire to help in a world crisis and providing disaster relief has led to this non-profit that designs for purpose. They are creatively combining philanthropy with social enterprise to achieve results.They now provide their Buffalo bicycles, over 450,000 in 19 countries, ... posted on Aug 21, 4692 reads

Bronnie Ware: Living Without Regrets
"Bronnie Ware is an author and speaker whose bestselling book, The Top Five Regrets of the Dying, is based on her time as a palliative care worker. In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Bronnie outlines these five major life regrets with Tami Simon and discusses the experiences in end-of-life care that inspired them. Bronnie explains how most regrets arise from a lack of courage and why people ... posted on Aug 12, 13551 reads

Biking with Butterflies
Imagine if you could see the world through the eyes of a butterfly. What would you notice? In this beautifully woven piece, Sara Dykman explores the life cycle of the monarch through recounting her 10,201-mile bicycle journey from Mexico to Canada and back, intimately acquainting herself with newly hatched caterpillars and milkweed-nibbling monarchs. "Though people would gasp each time I told them... posted on Aug 17, 4368 reads

Joe Peace: A Peace Chain Reaction
"I was working at a friend's studio. I walked in and picked up these scraps of clay off the floor and made these pieces about softball size, maybe seven of them. For me they were small because I'd been making larger sculptural pieces. So I made these pieces and said to my friend, "It's a peace chain. I'm going to make it the rest of my life." The year was 1991, and true to his word Joe Murphy -- n... posted on Aug 25, 2144 reads

A Wall that Brings People Together
"Memphis Rox is one of the only facilities like it in the country: a climbing gym aimed at introducing disadvantaged urban youth to a sport that its founders hope will challenge them physically and mentally -- and keep them in school and off the streets. To lower the barriers, Memphis Rox has a pay-as-you're-able model that differentiates it from the standard membership-only setup. Opened in March... posted on Aug 30, 2775 reads

Why We Need Darkness
Diane Knutson is a former National Park Ranger and the creator of the Lights Out Movement in Rapid City, South Dakota. Light pollution not only impacts our view of the universe, but our environment, our individual health, and energy consumption. Not long ago, the starry night sky was clearly visible -- now, songbirds mistake city skylines for the rising sun, eight out of ten children will never se... posted on Dec 4, 2778 reads

One Quantum Transformation for Mankind
Preeta Bansal offers a new "quantum" vision of scale, impact, and social change. In this engaging talk in the American heartland, she shares what might be called a homecoming speech of the truest kind - a return to the heart. Weaving her family's personal moonshot of arriving into middle America concurrently with America's (and humanity's) own literal moonshot through the Apollo 11 mission, she se... posted on Oct 25, 8312 reads

Mercy Needs to Be Where the Need is Greatest
For decades, Sister Marilyn Lacey has aligned her energies and aspirations with refugee communities in the United States, as well as in some of the most ravaged pockets of our world. She describes her leap into the refugee universe in her breathtaking book, 'This Flowing Towards Me: A Story of God Arriving in Strangers.' The heart of the Scripture come glowingly to life in the words, works, and t... posted on May 6, 3593 reads

My Small Moment of Mending Brokenness
"I used to believe that I was a very accepting person. But a few weeks ago, something happened at my workplace that made me recognize my own brokenness -- it helped me see the disconnect between my values, and how I respond in certain moments. I work at the front desk of a hotel. On multiple occasions over the past couple of weeks, a sex-worker reserved a room on our property. Sitting at the front... posted on Sep 4, 7376 reads

A New Son Begets A New Mother
"I raised my daughter, Claire, to listen to her true self. She was an odd kid, unusually intelligent from a young age and socially awkward, sometimes lacking empathy and always coming at things from a different way than her peers. I had made it my practice as her mother to allow and defend her unique way of being in the world. But when she announced she was a man at age 15, she had gone too far ev... posted on Sep 11, 14671 reads

What Is Your Hearth of Hearths?
"Where--or what--is your hearth of hearths? Where is the place you feel most alive or connected? What is the thing that reminds you who you are and to what (or whom) you belong? In all the world, what do you call home? These are some of the questions that Annick Smith and Susan O'Connor pondered as they edited Hearth: A Global Conversation on Identity, Community, and Place. In the preface, they de... posted on Oct 5, 5016 reads

Visible Work, Invisible Women
"'Visible Work, Invisible Women', is a fully curated, online still-photo exhibition. This video tour takes viewers around the entire physical exhibition, with original photographs and texts reproduced below as an article. All the photographs were shot by P. Sainath across ten Indian states between 1993 and 2002. These roughly span the first decade of the economic reform and end two years before th... posted on Nov 1, 2521 reads

The Understory: Life Beneath the Forest Floor
"The first time I heard anyone speak of the "wood wide web," more than a decade ago now, I was trying not to cry. A beloved friend was dying too young and too quickly. I had gone to see him for what I took to be the last time. He was tired by pain and drugs. We sat together, talked. My friend was a woodsman. Trees grew through his life and thought. His grandfather's surname was Wood, he lived in a... posted on Oct 11, 12421 reads

The Butterfly Effect: Detained Children Spark a Youth-Movement
11-year old Kaia and 10-year old Lily were heartbroken when they first heard about the 15,000 kids at the US-Mexico border locked up and separated from their parents. With the help of friends and family, they aspired to gather 15,000 butterflies to help raise awareness. To date, this kid-led effort has gathered over 30,000 love-filled butterflies, and The Butterfly Effect is quickly gaining trac... posted on Nov 16, 5010 reads

Ben Quilty: Artist Activist
Ben Quilty is one of Australia's best-known artists. Internationally acclaimed and award winning, he is described as "complex, flawed, obvious, messy, courageous, funny," and an activist. An official war artist in 2011, he produced work for the Australian War Memorial's National Collection. The book, Home: Drawings by Syrian Children is the result of his experience visiting refugee camps in Greece... posted on Nov 20, 4988 reads

13 Life Lessons From 13 Years of Brain Pickings
"On October 23, 2006,Brain Pickings was born as a plain-text email to seven friends. It was then, and continues to be, a labor of love and ledger of curiosity, although the mind and heart from which it sprang have changed --have grown, I hope -- tremendously. At the end of the first decade, I told its improbable origin storyand drew from its evolution the ten most important things this all-consumi... posted on Oct 31, 17503 reads

Between Worlds
What is it like to be a living member of a dying community? Climate change is making this an increasingly common reality. Isle de Jean Charles, a slip of land off the coast of Louisiana is one such place. This island is home to a hundred or so people, members, mostly, of a Native American tribe called the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw--the BCC for short. For eight generations, the people of Isle de Je... posted on Nov 24, 5053 reads

John Barton: A Certain Mathematics
As children, we naturally make art out of our lives. We paint with our fingers, color fantasies with crayons, build living room pillow forts, and dance and hum as we walk. Jim Barton, though, has continued his art-making through his adult life -- transforming decaying tree stumps, junkyard wooden doors, and scrap wood into mystical carvings, giant buddhas, and elegant salmon soaring into the sky. ... posted on Nov 29, 2164 reads

How an Army of Women Resurrected a River
Women in Vellore, India, have resurrected the Naganadhi river and the agriculture of the area that were almost lost to drought. In 2014, the women took matters into their own hands and worked with engineers and hydrologists to build 600 recharge wells by hand: digging wells, making cement rings, placing the rings and stones, and planting drought-resistant saplings along the river basin. This labor... posted on Dec 11, 1806 reads

Leading Above the Line
"In this Farnam Street interview, Jim Dethmer, founder of The Conscious Leadership Group shares practical advice about becoming more self-aware, ditching the victim mindset, and connecting more fully with the people in our lives. This episode is a masterclass in understanding and regulating your thoughts and emotions. Dethmer covers how to operate from a place of love rather than fear and anger, t... posted on Dec 30, 4571 reads

The Wonder of the Universe is Wondering in Us
Paul Fleischman is the author of numerous books, and has been honored by the American Psychiatric Association for his unique contributions to psychiatry and religion. He points to our sense of wonder as the apparatus by which we experience the intelligence of the universe within. "The wonder of the universe is wondering in us, he writes. And, To live with wonder one must persevere in unknowing, re... posted on Feb 13, 40105 reads

First Aid for Spiritual Seekers
Forms of religious devotion are shifting and theres a new world of creativity toward crafting spiritual life while exploring the depths of tradition. Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie is a fun and forceful embodiment of this evolution. Born into an eminent and ancient rabbinical lineage, as a young adult he moved away from religion towards storytelling, theater, and drag. Today he leads a pop-up synagogue ... posted on Feb 23, 4408 reads

How the Jump Rope Got Its Rhythm
The jump rope may be a simple object but for countless generations it has served as a powerful symbol of culture and identity for African American girls and women. The skipping rope is a steady timeline upon which girls add rhymes, rhythms and chants, creating a space that is uniquely their own. It is a word of mouth and word of body treasure passed down from one generation to the next, with influ... posted on Feb 26, 2008 reads

Living Gratefully in the Time of Corona Virus
"In the midst of times of uncertainty it serves us to reflect on how gratefulness might help to calm us, reduce fears and expectations, open us to greater clarity and love, and fuel action grounded in our deep intentions. Gratitude is not a panacea. It may not cure or solve our anxiety or concerns but it can foster ease, connection, kindness, and well-being -- all valuable qualities which would be... posted on Mar 15, 54456 reads

Love in the Time of Coronavirus
"Pandemics are powerful phenomena. One moment, life proceeds per usual routines, and the next, we find ourselves scrambling over toilet paper. The coronavirus (COVID-19) has affected our lives in every way, and preventing transmission, while far from assured, appears to be straightforward. An equally daunting challenge, however, is about how we are going to interact with one another as this crisi... posted on Mar 22, 8999 reads

My Freedom Is In Your Hands
"What if this virus had a hidden agenda other than spreading fear about how it might compromise our health? What if hidden in its drive to be contagious, there was another message, urging to be heard? Whether we come running or are being dragged, this virus teaches us to consider each other in a whole new way. Much like prisoners, we are being asked to give up our personal freedom to protect socie... posted on Apr 24, 7715 reads

Healing Our Relationship to Reality
"As human beings we are hardwired to search for stability, security, certainty and a sense of control in our lives. And yet, life by definition is perpetually in flux, it is famously unpredictable, riddled with uncertainty and fundamentally uncontrollable. These realities are the ground on which we practice. And practicing on this ground invites us into the heart of paradox. The paradox of finding... posted on Apr 8, 10882 reads