Seven Ways to Help High Schoolers Find Purpose
How do we bring engagement, real-life lessons, and a sense of meaning into teens' lives? Patrick Cook-Deegan discovered after years of experience and research that the most fulfilling and useful real-world lessons are not being taught in typical high school classrooms -- like collaboration, passion, and learning from failure. In a system that values extrinsic rewards over internal values, students... posted on Dec 12, 47248 reads

Cheryl Angel: Water Is Life
Cheryl Angel is an indigenous leader, wise (Sioux) Lakota elder woman, mother of five children, and lifelong devoted water protector who helped initiate and maintain the Standing Rock camp since April 2016, and who was vital in the nonviolent resistance to the Dakota Access and Keystone XL pipelines. Her voice among the water protectors is one of integrating deep prayer with nonviolent direct acti... posted on Jan 7, 1457 reads

Why the Moral Argument for Non-Violence Matters
There is a difference between using nonviolent tactics and having nonviolent principles. That difference matters even more today. Kazu Haga, a Kingian Nonviolence trainer based in Oakland, California and founder and coordinator of East Point Peace Academy, explains that nonviolent tactics have victory as the goal and define people as opponents. Nonviolent principles have reconciliation as the goal... posted on Jan 15, 15599 reads

The Spirit of Restorative Justice
Sujatha Baliga serves as the Executive Director of the Restorative Justice Project at Impact Justice, in Alameda County, California. Her background as a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, criminal law attorney, and meditator inform her critical and revolutionary work in restorative justice today. Following a life-changing encounter with His Holiness the Dalai Lama who advised her to meditate an... posted on Mar 5, 18818 reads

Trauma in the Body: An Interview with Dr. Bessel van der Kolk
Bessel van der Kolk, M.D.founder and medical director of the Trauma Center in Brookline, Massachusettsis professor of psychiatry at Boston University Medical School, and director of the National Child Traumatic Stress Network. His newest book, The Body Keeps The Score: Brain, Mind and Body in the Healing of Trauma, offers a revolutionary new understanding of the causes and consequences of trauma a... posted on Apr 21, 61450 reads

David Fryburg: Inspiring Kindness Through Images
We live in a world where news stories are riddled with negativity; wars, crashes, political and social strife fill our living rooms and enter our most personal of space, our homes. What are the implications on our neurological and physical health? And what are the effects when this is turned around and people are exposed to positive news, see acts of kindness and learn of human goodness? This wa... posted on Feb 27, 15064 reads

The Benefits of Being a Misfit
When master biographer Walter Isaacson sits down to chat with bestselling author Adam Grant, he shares secrets and insights on the inner and outer lives of great innovators like Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs, and Leonardo da Vinci. Who was a misfit? Who was a perfectionist? Who had a notebook full of unfinished projects? What did they have in common? In this fascinating conversati... posted on Apr 6, 12744 reads

Under the Volcano
Charlotte Du Cann is part of the core editorial team behind The Dark Mountain Project. In this essay, she describes The Dark Mountain Project and their new offering, Walking on Lava. The Dark Mountain Project is a collective body of work by recovering journalists who have faced the reality of our current ecological crisis and are producing narratives that look at things differently than the mainst... posted on May 22, 5486 reads

What If We Believed No Lives Mattered Less Than Other Lives?
"Homeboy Industries provides hope, training, and support to formerly gang-involved and previously incarcerated men and women allowing them to redirect their lives and become contributing members of our community. Each year over 10,000 former gang members from across Los Angeles come through Homeboy Industries doors in an effort to make a positive change. They are welcomed into a community of mutua... posted on Mar 7, 2586 reads

The Third Self: Mary Oliver on the Artist's Task
In "Of Power and Time" found in "Upstream: Selected Essays," poet Mary Oliver delves deep into the psyche of the artist and explores the external and internal factors affecting creativity. In it she describes three parts of herself -- two ordinary ones, and one third self "where the wellspring of creative energy resides." This third self cannot be controlled, and is often its worst enemy. "What d... posted on Apr 23, 14051 reads

The Sunray Peace Village
The Venerable Dhyani Ywahoo is Chief of the Green Mountain, Ani Yun Wiwa, the 27th generation holder of the ancestral Ywahoo lineage of the Tsalagi/Eastern Cherokee tradition and a well-respected teacher of Vajrayana in the Drikung Kagyu and Nyingma traditions of Tibetan Buddhism. She founded the Vajra Dakini Nunnery and is Director of the Sunray Meditation Society, an international spiritual orga... posted on May 31, 9693 reads

Looking for the Light in Vulnerability
Sarah Kay, a 29 year old spoken word poet from New York City touches audiences with her realistic portrayal of life, while focusing on 'finding the light' in life. In this interview Sarah discusses how her parents influenced her childhood with art, photography, and poetry, and how she in turn, influences students, teachers, and audiences around the world - encouraging them to listen to one another... posted on Jun 17, 10821 reads

Unu Spiro: One Breath Meditation Paintings
In 2016, artist Filiz Emma Soyak became a mother: "My heart expanded, my life changed, and I changed. But as I transitioned into motherhood, I felt more chaos than clarity as the days and nights blurred by with dizzying speed. I observed myself handling everything with less grace and more discomfort than I had anticipated. Intuition had always been my guide, but I couldn't hear my own thoughts cle... posted on Jun 8, 11224 reads

Kelly Orians: Getting Out and Staying Out
Kelly Orians, co-founder of Rising Foundations and attorney at The First 72+ has dedicated her life to helping the less fortunate, with a focus on the injustice and failing policies of the correctional system. In this interview Kelly discusses the unique challenges facing former inmates as they attempt to reintegrate into society, and the people and organizations attempting to change that for the... posted on Jul 16, 7711 reads

Cooking Stirs the Pot for Social Change
Every time we step to our stoves to make a meal we're engaging with the society around us. Each ingredient that we use, every technique, every spice tells a story about our access, our privilege, our heritage, and our culture. The foods and dishes we consume are all part of larger forces that impact our lives. Our appetites and what we crave are the result of our place in the world at that time. E... posted on Jul 9, 8081 reads

What Borders Are Really About
"The wonderful writer Luis Alberto Urrea says that a deep truth of our time is that we miss each other. We have this drive to erect barriers between ourselves and yet this makes us a little crazy. He is singularly wise about the deep meaning and the problem of borders. The Mexican-American border, as he likes to say, ran straight through his parents' Mexican-American marriage and divorce. His work... posted on Jul 15, 9091 reads

Burning Insight
Dr. Jay Bansal lost his home in the Tubbs fire last year in California. He reflects: "Fire is a powerful and destructive force, as well as a potentially purifying and healing force in just about all spiritual traditions. It is up to each person whether to treat fire's destruction as a tragic loss or as an opportunity for transformation and healing. In the fire's aftermath, I saw up close examples ... posted on Aug 31, 3050 reads

The Dinner Party
Loss is part of life for all of us, but the tendency in our time is to carry that burden alone. Lennon Flowers had lost her own mother to cancer and was carrying that burden alone when her friend and colleague Carla Hernandez reached out to her. Carla invited Lennon over to share dinner with other friends who'd lost a loved one, and the Dinner Party was born. Today, there are thousands of Dinner P... posted on Oct 10, 9730 reads

Against Self-Righteousness
Maria Popova shares insights on Anne Lamott's latest offering - "Almost Everything" Notes on Hope. How do we see past the illusions of polarity of right and wrong? Can we let go of these tightly held convictions that keep us small and separate and move into more mindfulness of our shared living beingness? It starts by bringing our awareness, curiosity and forgiveness - what we are designed for to... posted on Jan 8, 7064 reads

Breaking Out of Our Resistance Bubble
Explore the intersection of spiritual journey and social change with this riveting interview from Sounds True and Van Jones, NY times best selling author, public speaker and host of the Van Jones show on CNN. He calls on our collective soulfulness, grounded into life, and our strong sense of self, joy and dignity. Van challenges us to work with others that are unlike ourselves, to be in the chaos ... posted on Mar 5, 8543 reads

Inner Strength Foundation
Many adolescents growing up in poverty have limited resources to help them cope with the difficulties their circumstances may bring: violence, resource scarcity, homelessness, to name but a few. In Philadelphia, the poorest of America's ten largest cities, the Inner Strength Foundation is equipping aspiring youth from vulnerable communities with tools to self reflect, develop interpersonal skills,... posted on Mar 11, 6202 reads

Grateful for the Dark Stuff Too
Orienting ourselves toward gratitude is a cultural trend and a healthy practice. Whether we are keeping a daily list, posting on social media platforms, journaling, or praying each morning, practicing gratitude has positive results for physical and emotional health and even in our professional lives. Laura Grace Weldon suggests taking this practice even further and being grateful for those people,... posted on May 6, 8149 reads

Artists as Hoarders
When does collecting material for prospective art projects cross over and become hoarding? When it takes up so much space it requires a warehouse? When the time to collect and sort and store it all amounts to your entire lifetime? And what kind of imagination plus dedication does it take to finally assemble all the bits and pieces into something qualifying as art? Mirka Knaster opens the portal in... posted on Sep 8, 5571 reads

J.B. Priestley and Life's Delights
"I followed a path that led me into one of these woods, through a tunnel of green gloom and smoky blue dusk. It was very quiet, very remote, in there. My feet sank into the pile of the pine needles. The last bright tatters of sunlight vanished. Some bird went whirring and left behind a deeper silence. I breathed a different air, ancient and aromatic." A joyful observer of the quotidian, playwright... posted on May 1, 0 reads

God Who Weeps: A Story of Grief and Redemption
It all started in 1980 when Sister Marilyn Lacey responded to a call for volunteers at San Francisco airport to help refugee families from Southeast Asia make their connecting flights. The experience laid a galvanizing hand on her heart. Soon after, she flew to Thailand and spent a year working in a refugee camp. Later she would go to South Sudan and multiple other countries in Africa to witness f... posted on Apr 24, 8119 reads

James Fox and the Prison Yoga Project
James Fox is the founder and director of the Prison Yoga Project, an organization dedicated to establishing yoga and mindfulness programs in prisons and rehabilitation centers worldwide. Since 2002, Fox has been teaching yoga and meditation to prisoners in California and around the world. The Prison Yoga Project helps incarcerated men and women build a better life through trauma-informed yoga with... posted on Apr 25, 4911 reads

We Are Designed for Connection
Diane Poole Heller, a licensed therapist and noted expert in trauma, integrative healing, and secure attachment, talks to Tami Simon of Sounds True about the different attachment styles that we pick up in childhood and carry subconsciously into our adult behaviors. They discuss strategies for coping with and healing from insecure and disorganized childhood attachment. Diane explains how these atta... posted on May 27, 11301 reads

Mother's Day: Belonging to Each Other
"Mother's Day offers us opportunities to express our love and thanks to the women who have cared for us in our lives --the birth or adoptive mother, the grandmother, the teacher, or the elder friend who have helped grow us up. But it's not all Hallmark cards and breakfasts-in-bed. This particular holiday can stir up feelings of grief and pain for some of us. We may suffer for the mother we have lo... posted on May 12, 8383 reads

A New Republic of the Heart
When we face a moment of crisis, individually or collectively, a whole wave of radical conversations is inevitable. For these conversations to really make a difference, we must break through our personas and our inauthentic poses. This is a deeper level of discourse than has hitherto seemed thinkable in public--disarming, tender, and authentic. Such a conversation requires a level of trust, vulner... posted on Jun 2, 5684 reads

A Primer for Forgetting
"We live in a culture that prizes memory--how much we can store, the quality of what's preserved, how we might better document and retain the moments of our life while fighting off the nightmare of losing all that we have experienced. But what if forgetfulness were seen not as something to fear--be it in the form of illness or simple absentmindedness--but rather as a blessing, a balm, a path to pe... posted on Jun 27, 5246 reads

Soft Power: A Magnetic Approach to Practice
"The desire to be in control is a normal survival response, but what I love about the art of aikido is that we can move beyond survival to a vast and universal perspective in which all life is connected and interwoven. Such an orientation is not self-conscious. Since it relates to the connecting aspect -- that of the space and energy -- rather than individuals, there is no thing that needs to be o... posted on Jul 18, 9481 reads

Bearing Witness: The Animal Dialogues
"It was a fortuitous flip to the essay on pronghorns that persuaded me to pick up Craig Childs' The Animal Dialogues: Uncommon Encounters in the Wild. In each intimately wrought tale on antelopes, hawks, and red-spotted toads, I found a writer and translator more versed in the tongues of the non-human world than I will ever be. Childs honors the weight and magnitude of his encounters with creature... posted on Aug 15, 5599 reads

Wild Mumbai
"Every night for the past eleven years, Rajesh Sanap and Zeeshan Mirza have spent the post-dinner hours combing the woods behind their homes. Like restive sprites, the young men skirt ponds, bash through spiky hedgerows, upturn rocks, shake up leaf litter, and thread through dirt trails hairy with undergrowth. In the course of their nocturnal walkabouts, they've found about a dozen arachnids, incl... posted on Aug 14, 2419 reads

Wendell Berry on Caretaking
"In 2018, Helena Norberg-Hodge sat down with Wendell Berry for a far-reaching discussion. The two are giants of the local economy movement. Berry is a poet and activist, an author of over forty books. Norberg-Hodge founded Local Futures, which works to renew ecological, social, and spiritual well-being by promoting a systemic shift toward economic localization.Together they touch on human nature, ... posted on Aug 31, 4885 reads

Love and Philosophy Between Prison Walls and Ivory Towers
In 1987, while teaching a class at MIT [the Massachusetts Institute of Technology] on nonviolence, philosophy lecturer Lee Perlman had a novel idea: "Why not take the students to a prison, to talk with men who had committed extreme forms of violence?" Now, 30 years later, through the MIT Prison Initiative that he founded, Perlman teaches classes to a mixed cohort of both MIT students and prisoners... posted on Dec 28, 7025 reads

Tinkering with Intent
Delightful, creative and completely engaging, Blair Somerville's work defies description, and evokes a sense of magic. He lives in the remote town of Papatowai, on the South Island of New Zealand, and uses found materials and other curious objects to re-purpose into moving artworks. Blair realized early in life that he didn't need a lot to live, and that money and material possessions were not imp... posted on Aug 23, 2970 reads

The Religious Value of the Unknown
In an age when the fate of the world is unknown, George Prochnik makes a case for uncertainty as a form of faith and hope. Restoring a sense of the unknown requires unlearning, calling into question our way of life. In uncertainty, reason fails whereas love guides. This love can be exemplified by those who spend hours practicing arts and handicrafts with no concern for real-world application, but ... posted on Oct 15, 3292 reads

What Are the Best Ways to Prevent Bullying in School?
Did you know that all 50 U.S. states require schools to have a policy against bullying? Despite this preventive measure, there has been a slight uptick in bullying over the past 3 years. "Bullying occurs everywhere, even in the highest-performing schools, and it is hurtful to everyone involved, from the targets of bullying to the witnesses--and even to bullies themselves." In this Greater Good art... posted on Nov 4, 6629 reads

Love Letters from La Pineta
"Love Letters from la Pineta" by DailyGood volunteer Jane Jackson is more than a book -- it is a living gesture of love that wings its way between the visible and invisible world. A book that embodies hospitality in its deepest sense. For to truly welcome love and all its bright gifts we are required to keep our hearts open when grief's shadow descends. And that is exactly what Jane does in this b... posted on Feb 14, 4825 reads

Learning to Move from Strength Instead of Strain
As a young man he trained for a decade in the classical dance form of bharatanatyam. As an adult he studied yoga, and ran a studio of his own. One day he announced he was going to observe his students in silence, and see what arose. It was a radical decision, and for Gert van Leeuwen, it led to the birth of Critical Alignment Yoga and Therapy - a precise, slow, and uniquely rigorous practice that ... posted on Feb 20, 5147 reads

The Soul of Care
Arthur Kleinman's wife, Joan, began to struggle with a rare form of early Alzheimer's disease at 59. Eight years after losing her, the Esther and Sidney Rabb Professor of Anthropology in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and professor of psychiatry and of medical anthropology at Harvard Medical School chronicles their journey in "The Soul of Care: The Moral Education of a Husband and a Doctor." The... posted on Feb 21, 5121 reads

Humanity's Wake Up Call
"The rapid spread of novel coronavirus has prompted government, business, and civil society to take dramatic action--canceling events large and small, restricting travel, and shutting down major segments of the economy on which nearly all of us depend. It is a demonstration of our ability, when the imperative is clear, for deep and rapid global cooperation and change at a previously unimaginable s... posted on Mar 25, 8582 reads

Caring For Self and Others in Troubled Times
"Warm greetings of peace, hope, and healing to you and yours. As we navigate these perilous waters of our common life -- with all the grace and gratefulness we can muster -- you might find support in exploring these thoughts on 'Caring for Self and Others in Times of Trouble: Some Spiritual Tools and Tips'. Please share these wherever you wish, taking what you need and leaving the rest."... posted on Mar 27, 13784 reads

Even If You've Not Been Fed, Be Bread.
"In my role as director of the nonprofit Mercy Beyond Borders, I am frequently in South Sudan visiting our education projects for girls and our micro-enterprise projects with women and our leadership training of young women for advocacy. Keeping girls in school protects them from early marriages, allows them to develop their gifts, sets them on the path to pursue professional careers. The small lo... posted on Apr 4, 7645 reads

Helping Parents When Parenting Gets Hard
"I love the act of listening to parents, one-on-one or in a group. Parents have so much love they want to give to their children and families, they work so hard at it, they summon unprecedented amounts of energy and persistence to love well. I love listening over time, and being privy to the creativity of parents, and to their successes in transforming difficult situations in their families into p... posted on Apr 30, 4663 reads

Greg Tehven: Business, Local Community and Love
"I think we have to love our sense of place, and champion the heck out of it", says Greg Tehven, who is turning the world of economic development on its head, and inviting people to build the communities they want to live in. Confronted with the business failings of his beloved hometown of Fargo, North Dakota, he asked himself what the community could offer to the public that would help get it bac... posted on May 11, 3398 reads

Health for All: The Journey of Dr. Abhay Bhang
In 1986, when Dr Abhay and Dr Rani Bang decided to adopt Gadchiroli, a tribal village in Maharashtra, India as their home and workplace, the district was infamous for Naxalism, abject poverty, poor infrastructure and abysmal health services. Today, nearly 30 years later the Bangs' model of home-based newborn and child care is now being practiced across India and even in Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan... posted on May 14, 5679 reads

John Welwood: On Spiritual Bypassing & Human Relationship
"When we are spiritually bypassing, we often use the goal of awakening or liberation to rationalize what I call premature transcendence: trying to rise above the raw and messy side of our humanness before we have fully faced and made peace with it. And then we tend to use absolute truth to disparage or dismiss relative human needs, feelings, psychological problems, relational difficulties, and dev... posted on Jun 27, 4333 reads

Ayni: Living Life in the Round
"Today For You, Tomorrow For Me." This is the meaning behind ayni, a living Andean philosophy and practice that awakens a balanced and harmonious relationship between nature and man. In Andean cosmology, this is expressed through complementary opposites such as male/female; sun/moon; gold/silver. Their interaction is a form of reciprocity called ayni. One of the guiding principles of the way of l... posted on Sep 4, 5277 reads

Hot Gravy: A Story of Hope and Healing
""Hot Gravy," is a story of hope and healing, redemption and forgiveness, captures one such moment. It is featured in the "Guiding Rage Into Power (GRIP) Course Book," developed by Jacques Verduin, founder of GRIP, a yearlong program that enables prisoners "to turn the stigma of being a violent offender into a badge of being a non-violent Peacemaker." We invite you to take a few minutes to meet Ja... posted on Sep 7, 5570 reads