Rhonda Magee is a faculty member at the University of San Francisco law school, an expert in contemplative pedagogy, the President of the Board of the Center for Contemplative Minds in Society, and a teacher of mindfulness-based stress reduction interventions for lawyers and law students. She has spent her career exploring the interrelationship between law, philosophy, and notions of justice and humanity. Having grown up in a segregated North Carolina, Magee developed an early interest in racial and social justice, as well as a deep sense of spirituality and inner work - both aspects of her personal life that profoundly inform her daily work. In this Awakin call conversation, with ... posted on Jun 1 2017 (14,424 reads)

Pradervand has worked for decades in personal development and social justice. His career includes work on nearly every continent. He is the author of The Gentle Art of Blessing: A Simple Practice That Will Transform You and Your World, in which he posits that making the conscious choice to bless every person or being around you can truly make a world of difference in yourself and in others around you. Drawing from his own personally transformative experience while engaged in international development work, through which he converted to joy his own resentment (that “was literally eating me up”) by consciously blessing his detractors, Pierre shows that the pra... posted on Apr 7 2017 (16,081 reads)

a poem is, Arthur goes looking in the pantry, only to hear the noodles sigh that there is no poem there. He searches in the closet and under his bed, but the vacuum cleaner and the dust balls have no poem, either. Determined, Arthur continues his search. He runs to Lolo’s bicycle shop. Lolo knows everything, laughs all the time, and is always in love. He is repairing a tire and singing. So begins the wonderful meta-story of how poetry comes into being as a tapestry of images, metaphors, and magpie borrowings. Each person along the way contributes to Arthur’s tapestry a different answer, infused with the singular poetic truth of his or her own life. Lolo offer... posted on Apr 12 2017 (18,358 reads)

father who left before she was born.  Relocating with her mother and uncles as refugees from Vietnam to Canada as a young child.  Growing up in an overcrowded household.  Gangs.  A scholarship to the prestigious engineering program at the University of Waterloo.  Systems engineering jobs at some of the world's most prestigious technology corporations.  A diabetes diagnosis after nearly bleeding to death.  A recommitment to health, and a Kickstarter campaign to learn to cook and share it with the world.  A return to Vietnam as a foodie and blogger, and a newfound sense of purpose as a traveling food writer and published author.... posted on Apr 20 2017 (13,662 reads)

people who know me best know that at heart I am just a quiet gardener. My garden has probably taught me the most about how things grow - and thrive in a vibrant and sustainable manner. These lessons have shaped my approach to encouraging responsible growth in business and to the ways I apply my intention, attention and energy. A gardener sees the world as a system of interdependent parts - where healthy, sustaining relationships are essential to the vitality of the whole. "A real gardener is not a person who cultivates flowers, but a person who cultivates the soil." In business this has translated for me into the importance of developing agreements and partnerships whe... posted on Apr 26 2017 (12,330 reads)

following article is based on an Awakin Call interview with Teri Delane.You can listen to the recording of the interview or read the full-length transcript here. Founder and principal of San Francisco’s Life Learning Academy, Dr. Teri Delane says that the success of the school that serves the city’s highest-risk, highest-need students can be replicated.  The school tracks a 99% graduation rate with 85% of the students going on to college.  The kids that do so well here are the kids with histories of school failure, truancy, arrest and substance abuse.  The ones that traditional school settings can’t provide for. Having the right people ... posted on May 15 2017 (9,716 reads)

Pranis learned about peacemaking circles through her work in restorative justice in the mid-1990s.  Her initial teachers were First Nations people of Yukon.  Since her initial "accidental" exposure to indigenous people's use of peacemaking circles, the circle has become the center of all of Kay's work: "The circle became a way for me to see how humans can live more successfully with each other and the natural world, balancing group and individual needs and gifts," Kay says. "The circle became a way to move to a kind of world that I want to live in." What follows is the edited transcript of an Awakin Call interview with Kay P... posted on May 17 2017 (22,329 reads)

Ponce is a 16-year-old animal rights advocate and a citizen lobbyist from Casselberry, Florida. He is the founder of Lobby For Animals, the Coordinator for Fin Free FL, and founder of Harley’s Home, which is used as his school-based animal rights club. A vegetarian at age of 4, he began writing about animal rights at the age of 5.  Soon after, Thomas’s parents realized that his advocacy for animals was not a phase, but a way of life. “I feel that it is our responsibility as both citizens and human beings to use our minds, hearts and voices to speak up against the injustices we see in the world,” explains Thomas. What foll... posted on May 22 2017 (18,976 reads)

haven’t discovered what hasn’t already been discovered. The ancestors before us meditated on these things…I think the problem [with humanity] is obvious. We fall short…we can do better. I wouldn’t be in the world doing what I do if I didn’t think we can do better. Three to four houses had recently burned down in Tommy Joshua’s North Philadelphia neighborhood. In an empty lot behind his home, Tommy came to figure out the origins. The youth of the neighborhood used that space to hop around on the furniture, play with the debris, and kick the wood.  One Wednesday afternoon, Tommy was on the second floor of his home and heard commoti... posted on May 8 2017 (9,842 reads)

three constraints. We wanted to: 1) Show a celebration of love and respect for women  2) Tell the daily stories of women and 3) Do it all within a low budget.  These three aspects aligned in the idea of holding an art exhibition where the strength, courage and generosity of women of all generations could be displayed through art, making it festive -- by inviting the community to come and celebrate those paintings, and using post-production tricks to dive into some of the images (zoom in), and tell three unique stories of three different women (a mother, a wife and a grandmother). Q: Are there any inspiring stories from the process of composing the bi-lingual lyrics... posted on May 14 2017 (13,830 reads)

subliminal information from multiple resonating sources, including inflection, body language, eye contact, auditory signals of stress, and other signs that are often too faint to distinguish consciously, yet are perceived subliminally. Much of what we think, feel, and do in conflict is grounded in these microscopic, subliminal, nearly unconscious messages that are often beneath the level of conscious awareness. In one experiment, for example, volunteers were shown a video with peaceful visual images punctuated by a car crash that produced a characteristic stressful response in the brain. Researchers then sped up the video so that none of the subjects could recognize that there had been a c... posted on May 24 2017 (8,901 reads)

simply put, is our brain’s ability to repair connections and find alternate pathways to memories, emotions, and even physical systems such as speech—and utilizing music is a wonderful way to achieve this effect. 4. Attention Ever hear a song that engages you so profoundly it takes hold of your mind’s full attention? By engaging our brain and our attention in the right ways, music is able to activate, sustain, and improve our attention. Using brain images of people listening to short symphonies by an obscure eighteenth-century composer, a research team from the Stanford University School of Medicine investigated the power between music and ... posted on Jul 27 2017 (77,119 reads)

evidence is overwhelming, it is irrefutable.  Sleep is the single most effective thing you can do to reset your brain and body health each and every day,” -- Matt Walker, Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and Director of the Sleep and Neuroimaging Laboratory. Calling the global sleep-loss epidemic “the greatest public health challenge we now face in the 21st century,” Walker examines the impact of sleep on human brain function in healthy and clinical populations.  Through his work at UC Berkeley, he has been at the forefront of sleep research. He has linked sleep deprivation to psychiatric ... posted on May 31 2017 (59,625 reads)

can forget Maria at the opening of The Sound of Music, when she goes to the mountains, twirling in a grand circle of life and joy? "I go to the hills, when my heart is lonely--I know I will hear, what I've heard before, my heart will be blessed with the sound of music, and I'll sing once more." A lonely heart, fear, stress over the political state of the world, ill health, job worries, all these can create anxiety that can drag down our spirits. When the unexpected happens, we always have our inner core strength; we can cultivate that from our connection to the earth, to God, and our relationships with people as well as animals and plants. John Muir says, “... posted on Aug 12 2017 (16,722 reads)

is a feast in these gardens here at Festival Hill. It's not the usual meal that we think of with vegetables and edible flowers and herbs, but a feast of flowers, indeed, food for the senses as well as the spirit. Driving here to Roundtop, our eyes feasted on fields of bluebonnets, purple winecups, Indian paintbrush, splashes of magenta, and generous expanses of yellow. Who could not fall in love with a flower? How could you ignore one? That little being whose soul must be acknowledged and met? Georgia O Keefe once said that people rarely see a flower, for “to see it takes time, ... posted on Jun 13 2017 (11,442 reads)

you give away 90 per cent of your salary? Dan Price, CEO of Gravity Payments, did just that and shared it among his staff. It’s a commendable move but will it pave the way for wider pay equality? In April the CEO of a US tech company did something with barely any precedents in the modern business world. He gave away 90 per cent of his own pay to raise the salaries of his employees to a minimum $70,000 a year. Dan Price, CEO of Seattle-based Gravity Payments, recalls the moment when he announced the decision to his 120 staff: “There was a moment of stunned silence. Some people were looking around at each other, a few jaws had dropped, and then someone actually asked me... posted on Jun 5 2017 (35,281 reads)

social entrepreneur known for building huge, global coalitions, Jeroo first started in Mumbai, working with street children. She gave them her private phone number in case of emergencies. Soon every night it was ringing. From that caring and then recognition of system need came Childline. Any street child could call a free number and be answered by a trained and sympathetic street child. Shortly thereafter help would be on the way. The consequences were profound. Services could connect with need. Bad and good performance became clear. Areas of shortage gained resources. And police exploitation fell sharply because a call to a sympathetic operator from half a block a... posted on Jun 7 2017 (9,782 reads)

Sandberg + Adam Grant, Image by Christophe Morin / Getty Images The following is the audio and transcript of an onbeing.org interview between Krista Tippett and Sheryl Sandberg. Krista Tippett, host: Sheryl Sandberg’s name is synonymous with Facebook and Silicon Valley success, and she’s the voice of Lean In. Today, she joins us with vulnerability and frankness, together with the psychologist Adam Grant. He was there for her after the shocking death of her young husband, David Goldberg, while they were on vacation in 2015. Adam’s friendship — and his data — helped Sheryl find her way to what deep resilience might mean for herself and he... posted on Jun 17 2017 (17,967 reads)

Kolbert and Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard each had big books in 2015. Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History—winner of the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction—takes an unflinching look at the history of extinction and the different ways that human beings are negatively impacting life on the planet. Ricard’s Altruism: The Power of Compassion to Change Yourself and the World explores global challenges, such as climate change, and argues that compassion and altruism are the keys to creating a better future. Together these books—filled with grief and hope—feel like two sides of a coin, each necess... posted on Jun 19 2017 (16,475 reads)

We know that dolphins communicate with extreme precision and complexity acoustically, and where they really seem to excel is in echolocation, or sonar, probably as the result of adapting to an aquatic environment, in which sound travels much farther than sight. They can send and receive acoustic messages, and they have developed sonar that still exceeds that of our own Navy’s capabilities. Some scientists, including Lilly, postulate that dolphins can send holographic acoustic images that can convey symbolic meaning, much as we use printed words, although this has yet to be empirically demonstrated. We do have data showing that dolphins can make sounds that can stun fish... posted on Jun 30 2017 (13,884 reads)