dropped 44% and ​domino​ed​ throughout the city​. From 2004 to 2014​ we experienced ten consecutive years in a row of decreas​e in violent crime and murder in the city of LA,​​​ and I credit the peace movement with that wor​k​​. I have labored ​for sixteen years on the frontline​s​ of the movement​.​ â€‹A​t the height of Ameri​Can's work we were in 15 cities across the country saving lives​.​ I​'ve​ traveled around the world to war zones​,​ and I've shared my experience about how ... posted on Feb 19 2021 (6,444 reads)

there was 14 tumors and the radiation department zapped all of them. This time there were 11, and 7 of them were very tiny, like little pinpoints and then 4 were larger. We radiated the 4. They recommended whole brain radiation and that's when my attachment to my brain came up. I love my brain. I’ve used it to live and I've used it in service. I felt this resistance. Everyone was worried. And there were also two new liver tumors-- the immunosuppressive therapy was no longer working. I'm learning to use this experience as compost. My therapist once told me, “You’ve called me, and you've told me all these things -- and something stinks — coul... posted on Mar 2 2021 (8,751 reads)

similar stories from around the world. What does it mean for the future of the human species to keep the richness of our multiple languages alive? How does language tether the Soul to the wisdom of the Earth? Written specially for Vikalp Sangam and originally published on Dec 22, 2020 “In our faith there is no heaven or hell”, spoke Mayalmit Lepcha in the Janata Parliament – an Indian people’s parliament which happened online this year, on account of Covid. Her network is spotty. She’s in the mountains. I listen hard and try to piece together what she’s saying. Mayalmit is from the Lepcha tribe in North Sikkim, and she is among the people on the gro... posted on Mar 7 2021 (5,982 reads)

Mallette. CC0 1.0. “Can we dare to think people are kind, and shape organisations around this view?” That’s the question Rutger Bregman examines in his latest book Humankind, and it’s one that anyone involved in youth and community work like me wrestles with on a daily basis. But is Bregman’s optimistic analysis grounded in reality? For anyone who’s read this piece on the “Real Lord of the Flies,” the gist of the first half of Bregman’s book will be familiar. His premise is that despite news reports, social media, politics, religions and ideologies that suggest otherwis... posted on Mar 8 2021 (4,783 reads)

around us. And there are profound and sometimes quieter losses piling up: parents forced to choose between being present to their children and making ends meet, relationships sunk by the weight of such stress, losses of identity and companionship and palpable community. We are living through a relentless constellation of loss, and I hear a near constant attempt to downplay just how hard it is. Asked how we’re doing, I utter such words too: “Of course it is impossible for me to work full-time and homeschool my children, but — but!” — I race ahead in the same breath — “it is a wonder to be so involved in their learning.” The gratitude is ge... posted on Mar 10 2021 (6,444 reads)

our power. We’re not accustomed to it and so we fear its consequences. To step into your power means to trust yourself, your instincts, and your intuition. To let the fear go and the shame and tell the stories which need to be told. Stephen Jenkinson Elder really first and foremost should be a verb and not a noun or an adjective, which is to say, it’s something that’s done. ‘Eldering’ now is kind of gone without a trace. I don’t mean that the work is not undertaken, but it’s fitful and it’s scarred and it’s wounded and it’s deeply not sought by people in their middle age or in their young age as a rule. The princ... posted on Mar 9 2021 (11,802 reads)

by tapping into a grassroots system of volunteers receiving and translating text message from people on the ground. And it began Patrick’s attempts to change the world in multiple ways, one map at a time, helping to revolutionize the power of ordinary citizens. Patrick now is using his various skills as a digital humanitarian and global-local activist to help silently transform the growth story of underdeveloped countries through technology. Over the past 15 years, he has worked around the world on a wide range of humanitarian projects with the leading international organizations including the United Nations, Red Cross and World Bank. In 2015, he authored Dig... posted on Mar 17 2021 (4,762 reads)

home from the U.S. with extreme suspicion. The students might even be in danger. Thankfully, he removed from their visas the requirement that they leave the country upon graduation. He granted them eligibility for green cards. That was Jihong’s first step toward becoming a U.S. citizen. He took it with gratitude, though it meant leaving his birth family behind. I met him only a couple years later. By then, he spoke and wrote English better than most homegrown Americans. He worked hard. He paid his taxes. He was law abiding. He was a living definition of “a good man.” After our marriage, when the crank calls were waking us in the night, we’d wonder: ... posted on Mar 31 2021 (4,629 reads)

chemical industry is enclosing the commons of our seeds and biodiversity through “intellectual property rights.” Led by Monsanto (now Bayer) in the 1980s, our biodiversity was declared “raw material” for the biotechnology industry to create “intellectual property”—to own our seeds through patents, and to collect rents and royalties from the peasants who maintained the seed commons.  Reclaiming the commons of our seeds has been my life’s work since 1987. Inspired by Gandhi, we started the Navdanya movement with a Seed Satyagraha. We declared, “Our seeds, our biodiversity, our indigenous knowledge is our common heritage. We recei... posted on Apr 19 2021 (6,844 reads)

call the sidewalk [6] Vijaya uses the translated adjective ‘lustrous’ in her book to explain what qualifies a kolam as exceptional and I believe it really hits the mark. The Tamil women she interviews tell her that it is something akin to the kolam exuding a soft grace, a sense of balance, proportion and shining beauty. [7] Sacred Plants of India, page 11; Nanditha Krishna and M. Amirthalingam [8] See https://www.cmi.ac.in/gift/Kolam.htm for an early example of this work [9] Ethnomathematics: A multicultural view of mathematical ideas; by Marcia Ascher [10] My art book consisted of several loose sheafs of white paper that I had hand-bound using needle and t... posted on May 20 2021 (18,011 reads)

one hesitates to pronounce. And yet it has to be pronounced; for, after all, Love is the last word. Complement this fragment of Huxley’s wholly illuminating and illuminated The Divine Within — which also gave us his meditation on mind-body integration and how to get out of your own shadow — with his contemporary Erich Fromm on the six steps to unselfish understanding and the pioneering nineteenth-century psychiatrist Maurice Bucke, whose work greatly influenced Huxley, on the six steps to cosmic consciousness, then dive into what modern neuroscience is revealing about the central mystery of consciousness. ... posted on May 21 2021 (5,847 reads)

coast of California. Their journey began in Pasadena and ended three years and 800 miles later at the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas in Ukiah. And most astonishingly, their knees had already endured over a million bows…. Loc: Would you describe the purpose and benefits of a bowing practice? Rev. Sure: Bowing, like other Dharma practices, can be considered a technology. It’s actually a method for changing one’s consciousness. And because it’s a Dharma practice, it works by using the body. It is true that Buddhism emphasizes the mind; however, we often use the body to get to the mind. A renowned Chinese monk from the Tang dynasty, Master Cheng Guan, explained th... posted on Jun 1 2021 (6,774 reads)

awareness. When we are in touch with physical reality, we feel physically grounded. As subtle levels of feeling and energy unfold, we feel subtly grounded. When we know ourselves as open awareness, not separate from anything, we rest in and as our deepest ground that is sometimes called our homeground or groundless ground. As attention deepens and opens, our experience of and identification with the physical body changes. Our felt sense of the ground shifts accordingly. After decades of working with clients and students, I have observed a continuum of groundedness that spans four broad experiential stages: no ground, foreground, background, homeground. Each has a corresponding body i... posted on Jun 10 2021 (9,685 reads)

all other living beings.2> A fundamental shift is waiting for us. In my last book, I called this new logic and worldview ‘Enlivenment’—the insight that every living being is fundamentally connected to reality through the irreducible experience of being alive. The experience of being alive is not an epiphenomenon, however. It is the center.3 It is still too early to even guess the future implications of this revolution in biology. The neurobiologist David Rudrauf, who works together with the brain researcher Antonio Damasio, asserts that “the search for the way organisms bring forth value and meaning is at the heart of modern cognition research, from robotics... posted on Jun 29 2021 (4,107 reads)

humans, we inevitably experience harm: we feel hurt, we get hurt, and we hurt others. We free ourselves from this experience not by imagining we can escape harm but knowing we can heal it— moving from wound to scar—and then learning to love the scars. This can, of course, be the work of a lifetime. Luckily, I have long loved scars. When I was four, I accidentally cut my left eye. As a result, a small scar formed directly under my eye and inside the eye, where the pupil stayed dilated with a keyhole in it. After I had the eye removed at twenty-one, a photographer I knew told me she wanted to record people’s scars, so I asked her to photograph me with my empty socket. I... posted on Jul 4 2021 (5,372 reads)

self-respecting artist must not fold his hands on the pretext that he is not in the mood,” Tchaikovsky wrote to his patron as he contemplated the interplay of discipline and creativity. A century later, James Baldwin echoed the sentiment in his advice on writing, observing: “Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance.” But for those of us who show up to do what we do day after day, inner rain or shine, as the days unspool into years — Brain Pickings turns 15 this year — there is something more than white-knuckle discipline makin... posted on Jul 24 2021 (6,106 reads)

Pennsylvania, Johnstown's scenic location belies its tragic history as the site of one of the worst catastrophes on American soil. On May 31, 1889, the Great Flood tore through Johnstown, destroying the city and killing 2,209. My life is intertwined with this tragedy. Not only was I born there, but all four of my grandparents immigrated to Johnstown from Eastern and Central Europe in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Most survived the Flood and got on with their lives. They owned stores, worked in the coal mines, raised families, and died. Many rest in Grandview, near the 777 unknown people who perished in the Flood. Visiting the graves of our departed at Grandview is a significant... posted on Jul 30 2021 (4,891 reads)

letters of the alphabet. … Objects and people on our route became possibilities for interaction, rather than decoration or obstruction, as the urban pedestrian might define them. Kalman gently nudges Horowitz to remove the “invisibility cloak” so familiar to us urbanites as we shield ourselves from strangers, and the two do something city dwellers — especially New Yorkers — never do: They talk to policemen, movers, a mailman, churchgoers, and the social workers tending to a halfway house. In other words, they cease to simply coexist with their fellow citizens and, for the duration of the walk, live with them instead, attend to them with pre... posted on Aug 11 2021 (6,271 reads)

how this is made? Three reasons. First, curiosity. Primates are extremely curious -- and humans most of all. And if we are interested, for example, in the fact that anti-gravity is pulling galaxies away from the Earth, why should we not be interested in what is going on inside of human beings?  Second, understanding society and culture. We should look at how society and culture in this socio-cultural regulation are a work in progress. And finally, medicine. Let's not forget that some of the worst diseases of humankind are diseases such as depression, Alzheimer's disease, drug addic... posted on Aug 15 2021 (8,754 reads)

You are not the same person you were a moment ago. Our life's moments are like film footage: played onscreen they look like a single thing, but if you look at the reel frame by frame, each is slightly different. Therefore, the Buddha said, there is no need to cling to anything. Clinging or craving is what causes the dissatisfaction in the first place. Learning to get beyond that, following his precepts and path, is our spiritual quest. Karl Sundermeier, a German missionary with whom I worked early in my ministry, used to say that Christians are called to live in tents—meaning that they must live lightly, ready to move when God calls.  Having gained insights such as th... posted on Sep 15 2021 (5,097 reads)