or do a grocery or drugstore run for them; you might also consider sending them a gift card for their meals. DO celebrate their wins, including the small ones  When a person is struggling with their mental health, every day can be full of challenges. So cheer on their accomplishments and victories. This can help affirm their feelings of agency and efficacy. This could look like thanking them for being so honest and vulnerable with you or  congratulating them for going to work or for taking their dog out for regular walks. DO read up on what they’re struggling with There’s another important burden you can remove from their plate: Having to teach you a... posted on Jan 5 2022 (7,568 reads)

again. Rampaging wildfires have displaced thousands of people in Colorado. Thousands more are without power after record snowfall in California. The nation’s had another deadly shooting spree. My family’s holiday travels across the country were, um, adventurous. Before our return home, my 82 year-old mother gifted me with her wedding ring, “in case I lose my mind and forget to do it later.” Busted my heart. Still, there are joys: Nathan, home from college, working his usual wizardry in the kitchen. Jihong, across the room, his cold thankfully just a cold. Beautiful snow, sifting down on the sub-zero world outside our snug house. Companionable cats, purr... posted on Jan 15 2022 (8,024 reads)

A weaver, she raises sheep for wool which she shears, cards, cleans, spins and dyes with plant dyes before weaving it into blankets and shawls.  She made a shawl for me, determining my colors from that one time we met – bright autumn shades – and designing it for the person she remembered. My hands touched heaven when I unwrapped the shawl, and for several minutes I simply stared, speechless with both the beauty of it and the magnitude of the gift. I imagined the months of work she had done, all the while imagining the person who would receive it at the end of the process. It was as if someone had been praying for me all this time, while I had had no idea it was happeni... posted on Feb 2 2022 (4,186 reads)

as I would have with other patients, instead of leaving the curtain in place in case his roommate returned, I pushed back the curtain and moved the chair to a spot where I could be seen from the doorway, a place from which I could escape if I needed to. M. began by ordering me to get him his birth certificate so that he could apply for public housing. He berated me loudly and at length when I told him that this wasn’t something I knew anything about, and that the hospital social worker would be able to help him get that done. Then he moved to the other side of the bed and faced the wall, his back to me, and began a torrent of stories, pouring out like the bitter water of a... posted on Jan 21 2022 (4,602 reads)

so we can be sensitive to the suffering of others and hopefully come to respect the basic human dignity of all. John Paul identifies four kinds of imagination that support rehumanization. The first is “the grandchild imagination.” By this he means that we can project ourselves into the future and see that our grandchildren and the grandchildren of our adversaries could easily have an intimate and common future. Through this process, we can imagine ourselves in a relational network that includes our adversaries. This kind of imagination can allow us to see beyond our current conflicts and biases. It prompts us to work for the common good of all. It also motivates us to unde... posted on Feb 6 2022 (4,556 reads)

are plenty of books that teach how to influence the behavior of others, but anyone who’s set a personal goal knows it’s a lot tougher to apply those lessons inward. Ayelet Fishbach, a behavioral science and marketing professor at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, has written a new book that can help. Get It Done: Surprising Lessons from the Science of Motivation, which was released in January, offers a framework for setting and attaining goals, working through roadblocks, and keeping the temptation to quit at bay. “It’s really important to set goals that are not so abstract that you cannot come up with a plan,” Fishba... posted on Feb 15 2022 (3,485 reads)

— a state called “coherence,” distinct from simple relaxation. When we are in coherence, our bodies function optimally. What’s more, HeartMath scientists measured the electromagnetic field of the human heart to extend some six to eight feet outward. While in a state of coherence, someone can bring others in his or her field into coherence, thereby amplifying the healing potential. I imagined ten people in coherence in a single space. What if the subtler qi energies worked similarly, which is what qigong practitioners had been experiencing for millennia? A hundred people in coherence across vast distances. A thousand. A million. This wasn’t a private mind-b... posted on Mar 17 2022 (5,518 reads)

direct action is perhaps better understood as a powerful tool for resilient local people—one that demanded courage and discipline but that also drew on, cultivated, and sustained power for rank-and-file demonstrators. But if nonviolent direct action proved to be an effective method for how local people might challenge Jim Crow, the philosophy of nonviolence be- came an answer to why many struggled in this way. Angeline Butler recalled the power of learning about nonviolence in a 1959 workshop taught by James M. Lawson Jr. “In these workshops what we were talking about was our future,” Butler remembered. “A new phase of my life began as we ad- dressed the truth ab... posted on Mar 23 2022 (2,840 reads)

who’d gone before, I experienced my first taste of what you might call “wordless presence.” And I knew I could trust it. Fast forward thirty years, to 1989. I am by now an Episcopal priest, with ten years of service under my belt. I have a Ph.D. in Medieval Literature, earned nearly a decade earlier and never put to full use, though I have done a fair bit of scholarly writing on the fourteenth-century spiritual classic The Cloud of Unknowing. I have at this point worked in a variety of parishes from Philadelphia to coastal Maine, chiefly in a teaching capacity. My parishioners are by and large well educated, verbal, and contentious. They like to argue about th... posted on Apr 3 2022 (3,550 reads)

age 4 Paulus Berensohn asked his parents for dance lessons. "Boys in our family don't dance," was their response. That didn't deter him. When his mother complained to a friend about his persistence, her friend exclaimed, "But Edith, to dance is to spring from the hand of God!" Berensohn would go on to study dance at Juilliard, but his life took another unexpected turn when he witnessed Karen Karnes, a famous potter of the time, at work. The play of breath, energy and movement in her practice of the craft led him to a deep revelation of his own aspiration. Says Berensohn, "I was suddenly overwhelmed with a longing to learn that dance. The bridge for me at f... posted on Apr 12 2022 (13,046 reads)

might be universal, but their impact can still be devastating. 
This is what science journalist Florence Williams discovered after her husband of 25 years unexpectedly asked for a divorce. William found herself in a daze, shocked and miserable, and even ill. 
 “Physically, I felt like my body had been plugged into a faulty electrical socket,” she writes. “In addition to weight loss, I’d stopped sleeping. I was getting sick: My pancreas wasn’t working right. It was hard to think straight.” To help understand what was happening to her, she turned away from self-help book advice—like “learn to love yourself first” o... posted on Apr 13 2022 (7,864 reads)

with. I also found out that the vision in my left eye was far worse than the right. I couldn’t see out of it at all. With support from my college professors and other faculty, I was able to obtain a bachelor’s degree in Business Administration from Cazenovia College in upstate New York. I learned early on that I wanted to be a storyteller. The journey hasn’t been easy, but it has been worth it. I have produced TV stories for Voice of America and I share most of my current work on my YouTube channel. My greatest goal as a storyteller is to tell stories that will ignite positive change in others’ lives, just as the stories I heard as a child brightened my d... posted on May 12 2022 (3,625 reads)

spoken word without spoken words—ASL SLAM is an open space for poets to perform their work in American Sign Language (ASL). As ASL SLAM's executive director Douglas Ridloff explains, ASL poetry doesn't rely on rhyming patterns or meter within auditory or written wordplay; rather, the art is "more about the movement, a visual rhyme versus an audio rhyme." Its performance is a stunning and emotionally potent artistry that connects with all audiences. ... posted on Jun 9 2022 (2,861 reads)

catch my breath for hours. My dad had been healthy, thriving, just 66 years old. I had texted him the day before. We had a dinner date planned for that week. “How could he possibly be dead?” I thought. There is a Buddhist story about a monk being followed by a lion in the woods. He notices the animal trailing him and walks a bit faster.  I used to think really bad things could only happen to other people. It sounds absurd, obnoxious. It only really works if it is secret, when you don’t even fully admit it to yourself. But it was there. I would read awful stories in the newspaper and think, somewhere in the back of my mind, “That won&... posted on Jun 22 2022 (4,466 reads)

As I thought back to those tedious, one-sided library books that I had discarded as unimportant, I realized that they contained either full-on New Age faith, or full-on skeptical dismissal, with no middle ground whatsoever. Those tiresome books separated the world into two warring camps of  believers and skeptics, with each camp slyly or not so slyly maligning the intelligence, the character, and the worth of  the members of  the other camp. Let me state clearly that my work — and my new book, Sacred Medicine — fall into neither camp. As a voraciously curious radical empiricist who is also a mystic, I do my best (at the expense of  belonging, mind yo... posted on Jul 7 2022 (7,505 reads)

student performs at the 2013 Louder Than a Bomb slam poetry competition in Boston, Massachusetts. John Tammaro / flickr, CC BY-ND The American poet William Stafford was often asked by friends, readers, students and colleagues: When did you become a poet? The response he regularly offered was: “The question isn’t when I became a poet; the question is when other people stopped.” Stafford was articulating what many poets believe: that the roots of poetry (rhythm, form, sound) go far back – both personally and culturally – “to the crib” and “to the fire in front of the cave.” No surprise, then, that children delight in the plea... posted on Jul 12 2022 (3,015 reads)

tendency to self-enhance! Discovering your own intellectual humility Here are four different types of intellectual humility to look for in yourself—and some tips on how you might cultivate each one. Remember the paper, discussed above, that proposed two dimensions of intellectual humility: internal vs. external and self-directed vs. other-directed? Together, the authors suggest that these dimensions create four types of intellectual humility. You can use them as a framework for assessing your capacity to be intellectually humble. Internal and self-directed intellectual humility. This one requires you to inquire, honestly, about yourself. For exampl... posted on Jul 24 2022 (4,589 reads)

a car in a tight space or making a decision about a business strategy. Thinking fast means the mind will turn to prior solutions. Thinking slow allows new ideas to emerge. There is a general perception that slowing down is wasting time or indicates laziness, while science suggests it is an important way to replenish the mind and generate new ideas. It is possibly more productive than communicating at the rate of 1,000,000,000 bits a second on one’s digital device. Art, even when a work is made at great speed — as Sadequain and Picasso often did — evolves out of a painstaking process of practice and formation of ideas. Art and photography can, quite literally, stop t... posted on Aug 4 2022 (4,040 reads)

must change. Including me." Her book, The Garden Awakening: Designs to Nurture Our Lands and Ourselves, is"a step-by-step manual to creating a garden in harmony with the life force in the earth, addressing not only what the people in charge of the land want but also asking what the land wants to become." Reynolds is also the founder of the international garden rewilding movement, 'We Are the Ark,' Ark standing for Acts of Restorative Kindness. Her groundbreaking work invites people all over the world to transforming their gardens into part of living, and deeply interconnected ecosystem.She shares more in this talk from 2016. ... posted on Sep 19 2022 (6,845 reads)

it even mean? The horse as a mirror for the soul and a vehicle for the soul could show us our true nature, and carry us into sacred spaces, initiating us into transformational healing and insight. Horses could heal conquest consciousness and help us reindigenize. But, for that to happen, we would have to become initiates. How can we properly seek initiation into the great mystery of life?- Nikos Patedakis Nikos Patedakis himself has practiced many things, having worked as a professional dance teacher and blackjack player, a negotiation trainer, a consultant for Fortune 500 companies, and an Alexander Technique teacher. Having pioneered wisdom-based learning a... posted on Oct 19 2022 (3,902 reads)