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, 6203 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, 9482 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, 6630 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

Thomas Merton and the Language of Life
"By listening closely to nature, we can hear an organized energy of life, full of patterns and meaning, that speaks to us. According to scholar Elizabeth Sewell, we experience our environment as alive and speaking to us in a great variety of linguistic forms, such as an alphabet, grammar, syntax, cipher, book, and secret language. This is probably because language renders us conscious, envelops th... posted on Oct 26, 6058 reads

Paul Farmer on 'Fevers, Feuds and Diamonds'
"In November 2014, Partners In Health Co-founder and Chief Strategist Dr. Paul Farmer was in Freetown, Sierra Leone, breaking bread with a group of Ebola survivors as the world's largest epidemic of the virus raged across the country. "It was the night I met Ibrahim," Farmer recalled, referring to one of the survivors. "We started talking and he told me he'd lost 23 members of his family to Ebola.... posted on Dec 16, 3756 reads

The Land Has Memory
"The denial and fear of death makes possession, possessiveness, and overconsumption possible. If we would just pull back a bit, slow down, and ask the "why" of each of our actions, based on the utter assurance of death, we would all be better off environmentally." Playwright, poet, and essayist Cherrie Moraga sees the world as a place where the body knows and "the land has memory." "Her writings h... posted on Dec 20, 3343 reads

The Clarinet in the Attic
"Pat and Peter went together to the doctor's appointment. In their eighties, theyd been married over sixty years. Pat was a poet; Peter, a retired minister. The specialist confirmed an earlier diagnosis: Peter was suffering from dementia, cause unknown. Some "accident in the brain" was robbing him of his short-term memory. Every ten or fifteen minutes, his mind would reboot, and he lost all recoll... posted on Dec 28, 5785 reads

Choosing Earth: With Duane and Colleen Elgin
"Duane Elgin's book, Choosing Earth projects a half-century into the future to explore our world in a time of unprecedented transition. Duane offers a whole-systems view of the converging adversity trends facing humanity and three major scenarios for the future that are most likely to emerge from these powerful trends. By illuminating deep psychological, spiritual and scientific changes that are a... posted on Jan 6, 5515 reads

The Sword & The Shield: The Struggle for Black Freedom
"To most Americans, Malcolm X and Dr. King represent contrasting ideals: self-defense vs. nonviolence, black power vs. civil rights, the sword vs. the shield. The struggle for black freedom is wrought with the same contrasts. In his latest book, Peniel Joseph upends longstanding preconceptions to transform our understanding of the 20th century's most iconic African American leaders, and addresses ... posted on Jan 12, 2719 reads

Fabiana Fondevila: The Many Flavors of Wonder
Fabiana Fondevila is an Argentinian writer, speaker, teacher, and all-around wonder activist. She began her career as a journalist and war correspondent, working for the main outlets in her native country. Returning to spiritual questions, she then spent years interviewing some of the world's top thinkers, mystics, scientists and philosophers in search of a map. And then, life transpired: her olde... posted on Apr 17, 6118 reads

Love is the Last Word
"To understand anything -- another person's experience of reality, another fundamental law of physics -- is to restructure our existing knowledge, shifting and broadening our prior frames of reference to accommodate a new awareness. And yet we have a habit of confusing our knowledge -- which is always limited and incomplete: a model of the cathedral of reality, built from primary-colored blocks of... posted on May 21, 5757 reads

Finding Time: Slowness is an Act of Resistance
"The four horseman of my Apocalypse are called Efficiency, Convenience, Profitability, and Security, and in their names, crimes against poetry, pleasure, sociability, and the very largeness of the world are daily, hourly, constantly carried out. These marauding horsemen are deployed by technophiles, advertisers, and profiteers to assault the nameless pleasures and meanings that knit together our l... posted on May 25, 6383 reads

Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul
"We know things in the core of our being that we have not necessarily been taught. And some of this deep knowing may actually be at odds with what our culture or religion or nation has tried to teach us. This book is about reawakening to what we know in the depths of our being, that the earth is sacred, and that this sacredness is at the heart of every human being and life-form. To awaken again to... posted on Jul 14, 5161 reads

Neil Douglas-Klotz on The Aramaic Jesus
"This is, what I would say, the beauty of the approach that I have used is common in looking at the Semitic language teachings of various prophets. It's common among the Sufis today, it's common among the Jewish mystics, that when you look at the words of a prophet or a mystic or a teacher in the Semitic languages, the language itself allows you to look at it in a number of different ways, from a ... posted on Jul 28, 7985 reads

What Do Gardens Mean?
"This much is clear: people calling themselves artists and who are called artists by others -- are making gardens and calling it art, or are making art in which the making of gardens is part of what they are calling art. And for a very long time, people who may not call themselves anything, have been making gardens that other people call art. Further, it would be greatly surprising if all this we... posted on Aug 5, 2307 reads

Singing: Most Companionable of Arts
"Singing is able to touch and join human beings in ways few other arts can. Alice Parker is a wise and joyful thinker and writer on this truth, and has been a hero in the universe of choral music as a composer, conductor, and teacher for most of her 90 years. She began as a young woman, studying conducting with Robert Shaw at Juilliard, and collaborated with him on arrangements of folk songs, spir... posted on Oct 24, 3622 reads

The Seed Wheel Turns
"'Something will always rise up and fall again' is a collaboration between the poet Kathryn Hunt and Camille Seaman, a photographer. The photographs are part of Seaman's years-long project chasing and photographing stormsdynamic, alive, wedded to wind. "I always wanted my images to speak to the duality of all things--to speak to the essential truth that there can be beauty in something terrible an... posted on Nov 8, 2802 reads

Listen: Four Love Songs
Kathleen Dean Moore is a writer, moral philosopher, and environmentalist. Her many books and awards include Holdfast: A Home in the Natural World, and Great Tide Rising: Towards Clarity and Moral Courage in a Time of Planetary Change, and, most recently, Earth's Wild Music: Celebrating and Defending the Songs of the Natural World. In the following essay, "she considers the looming loss of wild mus... posted on Nov 21, 3764 reads

ThanksBeing with Rumi
"It's Thanksgiving time...the holiday of humility and togetherness. The holiday that asks us to look within toward that ever-present beacon of gratitude which is often obscured by the frenetic world we've created. It reminds us to give, to make amends, to repair ruptured friendships and family ties. It leans into sustenance and nourishment. The table becomes the altar. The family become precious g... posted on Nov 25, 7600 reads

Transforming Trauma
"This is the timeless wisdom of the shamans, our planet's oldest indigenous healers, and also of our great religious and spiritual traditions: suffering is the soil in which wisdom and compassion grow; it is the school from which we graduate, committed to healing others' hurt. Recent scientific studies on post-traumatic growth yield similar conclusions.This is what I know after fifty years of clin... posted on Nov 30, 4839 reads

Tracking Wonder
"In a world obsessed with work and productivity, many people feel broken by distraction, disengagement, and a default reactivity to life's surprises, but can rediscover their innate genius to lead a more creative life rooted in the present. In the new book 'Tracking Wonder', Jeffrey Davis an acclaimed teacher, consultant and speaker presents a science-based, soul-centered, counter-approach to hy... posted on Feb 1, 3014 reads

Time to Shed Our Skins
Nils Kercher and Kira Kaipainen are life partners and unique world musicians who simultaneously draws listeners into the stark realities of our greater world, while also drawing them inward into the dazzling potentials of the human spirit. Theirs is a music that believes deeply in our fundamental interconnection, and the capacity we have to heal together. In the music they create together, the int... posted on Dec 8, 5047 reads

Her Imagination is a Beautiful Garden
"My winter garden is quiet and lovely, with snow piled onto the shrubs and outlining the trees. For me, this is a time for resting and reflection, reading, drawing, and planning next year's garden. Gardening has always been a part of my life. As a child, I spent summers playing in my grandfather's stately and formal garden in Rochester, New York, where my great grandfather had managed the Ellwange... posted on Dec 9, 6596 reads