that soon creativity, passion and beauty showed up as central themes. Passion, Johnson argues, is the element that makes it possible for a real breakthrough in thought to take place. And beauty, he explained, goes a long way in establishing the bona fides of the results of scientific experiments. Upon his home, he sent me an example of one of his beautiful electron microscopy photographs. Richard Whittaker: Maybe you could describe briefly your position and a general description of the work you do. Ed Johnson: I am a molecular biologist and do experiments toward basic molecular understanding of cancer and AIDs. A lot of people don’t know that these two are related, but they... posted on May 26 2014 (11,258 reads)

saying, “If anybody’s interested, please call this number.” My phone was ringing off the hook for the next week. So we invited everyone over to my house. We had a party, and we literally started the organization two days later. What happened at the party was that everyone was enthusiastic and relieved, even, to have something to do. Because everyone feels awful—in the face of hunger, in the world, but especially in their own community. So this person had a friend who worked for that bakery, and that person had a friend who worked in a restaurant. So already, in the first week, we already had about six runs that we could make. I contacted one particular food kitche... posted on Oct 30 2014 (16,648 reads)

that way. To be a writer and to have that daily — have a ritual of writing. MS. OLIVER: Well, I don't — as I say I don't like buildings. MS. TIPPETT: Yeah. MS. OLIVER: So I was — the only record I broke and in school was truancy. I went to the woods a lot with books. MS. TIPPETT: Right. MS. OLIVER: Whitman in the knapsack. But I also liked motion. So I just began with these little notebooks and scribbled things as I — they came to me. And then worked them into poems later. And always I wanted the "I." Many of the poems are "I did this. I did this. I saw this." I wanted them — the "I" to be the possible re... posted on Mar 18 2015 (29,525 reads)

decades, we've been taught that economic growth and buying more stuff will make us happy—while trashing the planet. The good news is, there’s a better kind of happy: It starts with meaningful work, loving relationships, and a thriving natural world. Photo by Tom Wang / Shutterstock. In the last 100 years, we got very confused about happiness. This is no small thing. The way we define happiness drives what we do, what we’re willing to sacrifice, and how we spend our money and our time. This confusion didn’t just happen. Advertisers spend billions spreading the illusion that more stuff will bring us happiness. And policy wonks of all pol... posted on Mar 13 2015 (34,571 reads)

article originally appeared on The Body Is Not An Apology and is reprinted by permission. More of Cody Charles’ writing can be found here. This is a follow-up to my previous piece entitled Ten Counterproductive Behaviors of Social Justice Educators. The latter was written for folks who consider equity work as their core life purpose. I wrote Ten Counterproductive Behaviors of Well-Intentioned People for the folks who consider themselves good people invested in social justice and conversations around equity, but who may show up in the ally role most often. Well-intentioned people make mistakes, lots of them. Mistakes must be expected and being held accountable has to be expected... posted on Mar 18 2016 (40,141 reads)

Project in San Francisco, and he’s an assistant clinical professor of medicine at University of California San Francisco. A self-described “suburban boy,” he moved all over the U.S. growing up with his family until he attended Princeton. And there, the accident that nearly killed him set him on a path to medicine, but first to studying art. MS. TIPPETT: Design is such an important word for you and such an important notion that I feel runs through all your life and your work, and, to me, there is a spiritual aspect of that, expansively defined. And I’m just curious about where you trace the origins of that. Would you say that you always had a “design sens... posted on Apr 4 2016 (26,211 reads)

minute I learned how to read, it was as though I’d been given this huge treasure. Every book was a box I suddenly knew how to open, and in it, I could meet people, go to other worlds, go deep in all kinds of ways. And I spent my childhood in the hills and in the books. And those — so that was not maybe what people think of conventionally as spirituality, but that was my company, my encouragement, my teaching, my community. MS. TIPPETT: That’s lovely. The sweep of your work is wonderful and it’s daunting as an interviewer, but I actually thought I would start with — I’d just love to have a conversation with you about this piece that was in Harper&r... posted on Jun 25 2016 (11,117 reads)

the scattered members come together. In health the flesh is graced, the holy enters the world. II The task of healing is to respect oneself as a creature, no more and no less. A creature is not a creator, and cannot be. There is only one Creation, and we are its members. To be creative is only to have health: to keep oneself fully alive in the Creation, to keep the Creation fully alive in oneself, to see the Creation anew, to welcome one’s part in it anew. The most creative works are all strategies of this health. Works of pride, by self-called creators, with their premium on originality, reduce the Creation to novelty, the faint surprises of minds incapable of wonder. ... posted on Jul 18 2016 (34,608 reads)

year, about fifteen of us had a breakout call with some visionaries of World in Conversation and Laddership Circles, around working with volunteers.  Below is a glimpse of the Q&A that emerged, on the call and afterwards.] Our efforts attracts many volunteers, but we don't use them effectively. What do you suggest? The most fundamental design principle is our mindset. Typically, volunteers are used as a means to an end -- this is our mission, we need this stuff done to achieve our mission, and you can help us do these chores. ServiceSpace doesn't work that way. For us, volunteer experience is an end in itself. We believe that if a volunteer ha... posted on Jan 12 2017 (20,009 reads)

don’t love yourself enough. Or you’d love your nature too, and what it demands of you.” “If we design workplaces that permit people to find meaning in their work, we will be designing a human nature that values work,” psychologist Barry Schwartz wrote in his inquiry into what motivates us to work. But human nature itself is a moody beast. “Given the smallest excuse, one will not work at all,” John Steinbeck lamented in his diary of the creative process as he labored over the novel that would soon earn him the Pulitzer Prize and become the cornerstone for his Nobel Prize two decades later. Work, of course, h... posted on Jan 15 2017 (17,396 reads)

at one-time was the CEO of Accuray, a company that went public in 2007 with a valuation of $1.3B. Amazingly, having lost essentially every penny he had in the dot com bust, he gave all the stock he had in Accuray away to live up to charitable commitments. He ultimately gave over $30M to charity when he was effectively bankrupt. He remains on the advisory board or the board of directors of a number of non-profits and until recently was the chairman of the Dalai Lama Foundation. Dr. Doty’s work has been highlighted in newspapers and magazine throughout the world. -- Immanuel Joseph The Interview  IJ. I wanted to start with something that is on top of everyone's mind here ... posted on Feb 1 2017 (12,259 reads)

for thirty years. She is the co-founder and research director at the international TerraMar Research and Learning Institute, a nonprofit cetacean research institute located in Santa Barbara, California. Dr. Frohoff is also co-founder of Wild-Wisdom, a new nonprofit that not only provides educational and experiential opportunities for connecting with what is wild and wise within and around us, but also contributes to the lives of the wild animals from whom we learn. Dr. Frohoff’s work for government and non-profit agencies has contributed to the revision and implementation of management and legislation protecting marine mammals in captivity and in the wild in almost a dozen co... posted on Jun 30 2017 (13,881 reads)

offer children of Tibet. He said to her, "You must go into Tibet and help rural people. When you are on the path of service, all doors will open to you." That meeting deeply impacted the trajectory of Arlene's life of service. In 2004, she left behind her clinical practice to dedicate her life to serving pregnant women living in the most vulnerable conditions in the most remote places of the world. By 2009, she started One Heart World-Wide, which spread its life saving "network of safety" model to 60,000 women in remote villages in Nepal, the Copper Canyon in Mexico, and deep into the Amazon jungle in Ecuador where few dared to go. What follows is an edited transcr... posted on Jul 11 2017 (7,796 reads)

entrepreneur, meditator, and activist for the common good. He is also the founder of "ReLoveUtion" -- a renaissance of compassionate societies. What follows is an edited transcript of an Awakin Call interview with Joserra, moderated by Rina Patel. You can read the full transcript or listen to the audio here. Rina Patel: I want to jump right into things and ask you what a Re-Love-ution is? Joserra Gonzalez: I had an experience in India, two years of volunteer work, and I was touched by many of the things I could see there. I can say I have never received so much love. It really touched me deeply how people treated me, how everyone gave me everything withou... posted on Jul 21 2017 (8,794 reads)

and saddening. The failure of those students in every aspect of their lives sickened the heart. And along came a new principal, a principal who—it’s relevant to note—came from the Philippines, a culture which has an inherent respect for things spiritual in a way American culture does not. And he brought the teachers together and said to them, in substance, as his very first proclamation as principal, that: We have to start to understand that the young people we are working with have nothing of external substance or support. They have dangerous neighborhoods. They have poor places to live. They have little food to eat. They have parents who are on the ropes and b... posted on Aug 25 2017 (16,210 reads)

listening to Insights at the Edge. Today my guest is Albert Flynn DeSilver. Albert is an internationally published poet, memoirist, novelist, speaker, and workshop leader. He served as Marin County's first Poet Laureate from 2008 to 2010. His work has appeared in more than a hundred literary journals worldwide. He's the author of the books Beamish Boy: A Memoir, Letters to Early Street, and Walking Tooth and Cloud. With Sounds True, Albert Flynn DeSilver has written a new book called Writing as a Path to Awakening: A Year to Becoming an Excellent Writer and Living an Awakened Life, where he invites the reader on a year-long journey of growth and... posted on Sep 20 2018 (11,082 reads)

for a while. And those moments of uncertainty - will the experiment, conducted for the thousandth time with some tiny modification, finally yield the desired result? - can be quite dramatic. Films about painters can be spectacular, as they go about recreating every stage of a famous painting's evolution, from the first penciled line to the final brush-stroke. Music swells in films about composers: the first bars of the melody that rings in the musician's ears finally emerge as a mature work in symphonic form. Of course this is all quite naive and doesn't explain the strange mental state popularly known as inspiration, but at least there's something to look at and listen to. ... posted on Dec 1 2017 (8,837 reads)

expert Robin Dreeke and co-author Cameron Stauth talk about their book on building trust. Building good teams starts with having strong relationships based on a foundation of trust. But how does one develop that trust at work or in life? Counterintelligence expert Robin Dreeke, who spent decades as a senior FBI agent, knows how to make strangers trust him enough to be recruited as spies. And it’s not about deception or being a ‘yes’ man. In the book, The Code of Trust: An American Counterintelligence Expert’s Five Rules to Lead and Succeed, Dreeke and co-author Cameron Stauth share simple steps to generating trust from all sorts of people. T... posted on Feb 5 2018 (12,777 reads)

Her recent lecture at University of California Berkeley’s Law School, “Law’s Middle Way: Mindfulness and Restorative Justice” typifies her skill at bringing alternative and controversial approaches to powerful institutions. I interviewed Sujatha in Berkeley, California in the Spring of 2016. What follows is an adapted excerpt of our conversation. Sebastian Robins (SR): Can you tell us about your spiritual and religious beliefs and how they intersect with your work? Sujatha Baliga (SB): I was raised Hindu and was a very devout Hindu child. I ultimately lost my faith because of the abuse I was suffering in my home and my inability to reconcile h... posted on Mar 5 2018 (19,064 reads)

find your prince or princess" principle. I found out what didn't make me happy, and that continuous search led me into what we would call "spiritual realms," life's bigger picture, and which finally integrated more into the everyday life. TS: Let's say someone is listening right now and they have a sense in some way of feeling disillusioned in their life. Maybe a relationship has ended that was an important relationship, or there's some sense that their work in the world needs to shift. It's really interesting that you pointed out—I hadn't thought about it—the word itself, "disillusioned," that we're dropping our ill... posted on Jul 13 2018 (14,052 reads)