day, after a talk I had given on altruism, a person in the audience got up and said in an irritated tone: “What are you hoping for by encouraging us to cultivate altruism? Look at the history of humanity! It’s always the same thing! An uninterrupted succession of wars and suffering. That’s human nature, you can’t change anything about that!” But is this truly the case? We have seen that cultures can evolve. For example, we have gone from regarding torture as an entirely acceptable public spectacle and war as noble and glorious, to tolerating violence less and less, and increasingly regarding war as immoral and barbaric. But can the individual change? ... posted on Sep 9 2015 (16,016 reads)

I hear stories of people who’ve forgiven those who’ve harmed them—people like Nelson Mandela, who forgave his South African jailers, or Scarlett Lewis, who forgave Adam Lanza for killing her son at Sandy Hook Elementary School—I can’t help but be moved by the nobility of their actions. They seem superhuman in their ability to rise above their own loss and heartache in order to forgive what others consider “unforgivable.” Many of us under the same circumstances would be unable to make that emotional shift. Even when faced with minor slights—like a husband forgetting our birthday or a friend not inviting us to a party—we hold onto g... posted on Sep 16 2015 (14,541 reads)

Keep a Gratitude Journal. Establish a daily practice in which you remind yourself of the gifts, grace, benefits, and good things you enjoy. Setting aside time on a daily basis to recall moments of gratitude associated with ordinary events, your personal attributes, or valued people in your life gives you the potential to interweave a sustainable life theme of gratefulness. 2. Remember the Bad. To be grateful in your current state, it is helpful to remember the hard times that you once experienced. When you remember how difficult life used to be and how far you have come, you set up an explicit contrast in your mind, and this contrast is fertile ground for gratefulness. 3. Ask Yourse... posted on Nov 17 2015 (49,256 reads)

On the small balcony outside my window, bright red cardinals flitted from the railing to a bird feeder a neighbor had hung. Ingenious squirrels had figured out how to leap from the balcony railing onto the feeder, make withdrawals and time their dismounts from the swinging platform so as to land safely back on the railing. I had positioned a comfortable chair facing the window where I could work at any time of day or night. Birds, light, privacy. A lifetime making photographic images has engrained in me the habit of squinting at the world. It is my way of answering the question: Is this scene worth a picture? Squinting allows me to see the most contrasting components of the... posted on Dec 16 2015 (10,888 reads)

still remember the shame of getting back my very first draft for a Greater Good article from the editor and seeing it filled with red ink. Immediately, my mind went to the worst-case scenarios: My editor thinks I’m stupid; I’ll never be a writer; I’m not good enough. I was almost ready to quit on the spot. Fortunately for me, I swallowed my pride, talked to my editor about my fears, and got a compassionate response in return—as well as some helpful criticism. Still, the internal concern of not being good enough haunts me, sometimes making me fearful of being found out or causing me to lash out at those who try to help. It’s a lifelong struggle. Accor... posted on Dec 26 2015 (18,036 reads)

the motives of others — we get very complicated when we walk into this territory of gratitude — and to withhold gratitude from others. You speak about having the courage to let ourselves down into the depth which gratitude opens up. And I wonder if you would just say a little bit more about that, and maybe how that has come to you, how you have experienced letting yourself down into that depth. BR. STEINDL-RAST: Yes. When I speak of depth and so forth, those are all only images, the poetic images that one must not... MS. TIPPETT: But it’s very magnetic language, I think. BR. STEINDL-RAST: Yeah. Well, poetic language has more power than most other language.... posted on Feb 9 2016 (21,038 reads)

from Salt, what follows is one of the Salt Ideas Essays: 15 pieces of expert thought leadership on the innovations and ideas that will change the world for the better. The golden rule of compassion is the key to a better, safer world for all, writes Karen Armstrong, OBE, inventor of the Charter for Compassion. How can we respond creatively and realistically to the pain that we see everywhere in our world? We have been deluged with images of suffering from Paris, Pakistan, Nigeria, New York, and Palestine. We have witnessed thousands of migrants literally dying in their desperation to get into Europe. It is difficult not to feel helpless as we witness the widespread cru... posted on Feb 16 2016 (15,873 reads)

the sustainability of the project? Or using it as a template for other poor areas of the world that might benefit from a similar project? Yes! We would love to continue the project and travel to other countries. We realize that giving a photo is not like building a school or a hospital or feeding the hungry. But, I think a photo is something that feeds the soul. So many people we gave photos to said that they would have them framed and put on their wall. It’s hard to know how these images will impact people’s lives but I think we’ve brought some small amount of happiness. How are you measuring the success of the project? Personally I think about the sheer joy... posted on Feb 27 2016 (11,643 reads)

do we feel shame and how does shame change us? According to Brené Brown, a researcher at the University of Houston, shame is an “intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love and belonging.” It’s an emotion that affects all of us and profoundly shapes the way we interact in the world. But, depending on how we deal with it, shame can either shut us down or lead us to a new sense of bravery and authenticity. Brown’s research involved interviewing thousands of people about difficult, sensitive experiences in their lives, in order to uncover common themes around shameful experiences. Almost single-h... posted on Feb 25 2016 (21,138 reads)

began with an email. Someone had discovered the magazine and had been touched, Irene Sullivan. It opened an exchange. I learned that Sullivan had lived in remote regions of Alaska providing health care as a nurse practitioner to theInupiat speaking peoples there, that she was an avid photographer, that her experiences with indigenous people awakened an interest in the role of women in shamanic practices among arctic peoples, and that later she found herself doing independent research as a Fulbright Scholar in Denmark at the Institute of Eskimologi. When Sullivan left her career as a nurse practitioner she went on to become an ordained priest in the Episcopal Church. Her ministr... posted on Mar 17 2016 (13,671 reads)

in life, you may find yourself trying to help other people change. Whether you’re acting as a mentor, a parent, or a well-meaning spouse, you hope to exert a positive influence and assist someone in reaching their goals. What’s the best way to do this? If you want to influence other people’s behavior, then you need to develop trust. The core of trust in persuasive interactions is authenticity—the degree to which people think that the public face you have adopted fits who you really are inside. When people feel you are telling them things you truly believe, they are less likely to be skeptical of their interactions with you. Thus you have to see yourself as... posted on Mar 22 2016 (26,868 reads)

these fascinating connections between breakthroughs in art and breakthroughs in science, and that space. And that’s also something — you’ve kind of moved into that lineage, as well. MS. SHLAIN: Yeah. I think a lot of my — the apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree. He wrote this this book, Art and Physics, which looked at the parallel visions in these two worlds, and how artists and scientists are often talking about the same ideas, but one’s with images, and one’s with equations. And then ended up — actually, the way I met my husband, who is an artist and a scientist, is he went to hear my dad speak, and we fell in love that nig... posted on Apr 11 2016 (10,431 reads)

I tell her that the painting is my work. She smiles and opens up with motherly warmth. She tells me that she has enjoyed the painting ever since she received it. We spend the next 45 minutes talking about perfection, beauty, and reality. I ask her if the three are perhaps one and the same. She is quiet for a while and then tells me, “No.” They are different, but there is a place where they all come together. She also talks about cave paintings and about the fact that they are images of hunts and battles. At first it is not clear to me as to what she is getting at, but later I realize that perhaps art has always been an arena for battle: a battleground for our egos, our des... posted on Apr 16 2016 (14,592 reads)

up, Jim Doty had many strikes against him: an alcoholic father, a mother with depression, a family living in poverty. But somehow—in a journey he recounts in his new book, Into the Magic Shop—he managed to overcome them. Dr. Doty is now a clinical professor of neurosurgery at Stanford University. He founded and directs the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education (CCARE), where the Dalai Lama was a founding benefactor. As a philanthropist, he has given millions of dollars to support health care and educational charities around the world. He attributes his success partly to a kind woman named Ruth, who took 12-year-old Doty under her w... posted on Jul 5 2016 (57,637 reads)

the fall of 1979, Yalda Modabber had just moved from Iran back to her birthplace in Boston. Her timing was bad: Just weeks later later, a group of armed Iranians took more than 60 U.S. citizens hostage at the U.S. Embassy in Iran. As a result, her fellow students bullied her ruthlessly. Golestan Education's Yalda Modabber “It was nonstop for two years,” says Modabber, who has dark curly black hair and a warm smile. “That period in my life was so hard that I blocked it out. I don’t even remember my teachers’ names. The entire class turned on me.” Modabber is now the principal and founder of Golestan Education, a Persian-language prescho... posted on Jul 8 2016 (33,561 reads)

happens when we become too dependent on our mobile phones? According to MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle, author of the new book Reclaiming Conversation, we lose our ability to have deeper, more spontaneous conversations with others, changing the nature of our social interactions in alarming ways. Turkle has spent the last 20 years studying the impacts of technology on how we behave alone and in groups. Though initially excited by technology’s potential to transform society for the better, she has become increasingly worried about how new technologies, cell phones in particular, are eroding the social fabric of our communities. In her previous book, the bestselling Al... posted on Jul 31 2016 (31,335 reads)

met Marvin Sanders during a film festival at Berkeley Art Center. At the time, Sanders ran the Sunday evening music series there. On the first evening of film screening, Sanders was there to help at the front desk. Chatting with him, I discovered he plays the flute.      "Jazz?" I asked.       "You say that because I’m black, don’t you?" he replied.         I was taken aback, but realized I’d been offered an opening to a deeper level of conversation. I admitted he was right and before long, we were in the middle of an unexpectedly rich exchange. The question of the use of music in... posted on Aug 7 2016 (12,044 reads)

the past five years, I haven’t lived anywhere for more than six months. I spent 28 days in Lisbon, three months in Bali, and a random half-year in downtown Las Vegas. With just two suitcases in tow, I was lucky enough to scuba-dive in Thailand, explore the ruins of Pompeii, and do karaoke with a Korean movie star. According to Melody Warnick, author of the new book This Is Where You Belong, that makes me a Mover with a capital M. And I have plenty of company: These days, the average American moves nearly 12 times in their lifetime, and 12 percent of Americans move in a given year. But moving continuously has its downsides, according to Warnick. Research sho... posted on Aug 31 2016 (15,356 reads)

Great art, we might say, is thought that has been concentrated in just this way: honed and shaped by a silky attention brought to bear on the recalcitrant matter of earth and of life. We seek in art the elusive intensity by which it knows. Hirshfield turns to the role of language in concentration and the role of concentration in language, in writing, in poetry itself: Great sweeps of thought, emotion, and perception are compressed to forms the mind is able to hold — into images, sentences, and stories that serve as entrance tokens to large and often slippery realms of being… Words hold fast in the mind, seeded with the surplus of beauty and meaning that is conc... posted on Sep 6 2016 (11,270 reads)

‘Oh, what a blessing! Thank you, God!’” “Rainbows just turn the place upside down!” Krumpelman added. Their pleasure in rainbows and sunsets at first struck me as childlike—odd to find among women in their 70s and 80s. But I soon realized it was deeply rooted in contemplation and prayer. Their love of nature derived in part from the texts they have studied and prayed over, they said, especially the Psalms, the ancient Hebrew poems that utilize images of mountains, birds, and stars to express the glory of divine creation. “The Psalms rave about nature, so I probably imbibed the beauty of it when I prayed,” Knabel said. They fe... posted on Sep 26 2016 (9,704 reads)