Can Awe Buy You More Time and Happiness?, by Stacey Kennelly
plugged in and constantly juggling tasks at work and at home, many of us feel like there aren’t enough hours in the day to do all the things we need to do. But wouldn’t it be awesome to feel like you had more time? In fact, a new study suggests that experiencing awe—which psychologists define as the feeling we get when we come across something so strikingly vast in number, scope, or complexity that it alters the way we understand the world—could help us do just that. What’s more, awe might make us more generous with how we spend our time and improve our overall well-being. In one part of the study, researchers induced feelings of awe in pa... posted on Dec 3 2012 (14,442 reads)

Ready to Start Living? First, Consider Your Death, by Roman Krznaric
of the great tragedies of modern life is that we live in a culture of death denial. The advertising industry tells us we are forever young, and we retire elders away to care homes, out of sight and mind. As a Western culture, we’ve lost the connection with our mortality our forebears had, when dancing skeletons decorated medieval church walls and people wore skull brooch memento mori (Latin for ‘remember you must die’) as a reminder that death could take them at any moment.  We are constantly dying. The proximity of death propelled our ancestors to live with a radical aliveness that we can hardly imagine in our tech-saturated sedentary present, as we check o... posted on Sep 9 2017 (15,798 reads)

2000 Years of Kindness, by Maria Popova
kindness all day to everybody and you will realize you’re already in heaven now,” Jack Kerouac wrote in a beautiful 1957 letter to his first wife turned lifelong friend. “Kindness, kindness, kindness,” Susan Sontag resolved in her diary on New Year’s Day in 1972. Half a century later, the Dalai Lama placed a single exhortation at the center of his ethical and ecological philosophy: “Be kind whenever possible. It is always possible.” Nothing broadens the soul more than the touch of kindness, given or received, and nothing shrivels it more than a flinch of unkindness, given or received — something we ha... posted on Mar 18 2023 (4,616 reads)

7 Guidelines for Healthy Social Connection, by Kiffer George Card
public health guidelines help stop loneliness? 7 tips that show how crucial social connection is to well-being United States Surgeon General Vivek Murthy recently called loneliness an epidemic and issued a public health advisory on the healing effects of social connection and community. The report warned of the considerable adverse effects of loneliness and social isolation — comparing it to other leading risk factors for premature death such as smoking, obesity, elevated blood pressure and high cholesterol. Loneliness and social isolation can be harmful In my work as a social and behavioural epidemiologist, I have studied how social and community connectedness s... posted on Jun 29 2023 (4,741 reads)

Creating a Compassionate Economy, by The Moon Magazine
Brown is a professor of economics and director of the Center for Work, Technology, and Society at the University of California, Berkeley. Her recent book, Buddhist Economics: An Enlightened Approach to the Dismal Science (Bloomsbury), draws upon simple Buddhist ideas to argue for an economic system based on environmental stewardship, shared prosperity, and care for the human spirit. Brown measures economic progress by the well-being of all people, not Gross Domestic Product (GDP) or average national income. She advocates creating an economy that recognizes the interdependence of people with each other and the planet, and works toward achieving the goals of reduci... posted on Jun 22 2018 (9,136 reads)

David Whyte On Being At The Frontier Of Your Identity, by Tami Simon
Simon: You’re listening to Insights at the Edge This week is a rebroadcast of one of my favorite episodes of Insights at the Edge, and one of the episodes that has received the most positive feedback from listeners: “Being at the Frontier of Your Identity” with David Whyte. David Whyte is a passionate speaker, poet, and the author of the Sounds True audio learning program, Clear Mind, Wild Heart, and a new program from Sounds True, What to Remember When Waking: The Disciplines of an Everyday Life. David is also a featured presenter at our 2013 Wake Up Festival: A Five-Day Experience of Transformation, August 14th-18th in Estes Park, CO. In this conversation, David and ... posted on Jul 7 2014 (40,644 reads)

Grit: The Power of Passion & Perseverance, by Knowledge@Wharton
is grit? Angela Duckworth, a psychology professor at University of Pennsylvania’s School of Arts and Sciences, says it is the capacity to work hard and stay focused. In her recent book, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, she explains why grit is necessary in addition to talent, and why talent needs the drive that grit provides in order for one be successful. Duckworth, a 2013 MacArthur Fellow, discussed her ideas on the Knowledge@Wharton show on Wharton Business Radio on SiriusXM channel 111. (Listen to the podcast at the top of this page.) An edited transcript of the conversation follows. Knowledge@Wharton: Could you talk about g... posted on Nov 26 2016 (15,285 reads)

What Happens When Old and Young Connect, by Marc Freedman
essay is adapted from How to Live Forever: The Enduring Power of Connecting the Generations (PublicAffairs, 2018, 224 pages). This year, for the first time ever, the U.S. has more people over 60 than under 18. That milestone has brought with it little celebration. Indeed, there are abundant concerns that America will soon be awash in a gray wave, spelling increased health care costs for an aging population, greater housing and transportation needs, and fewer young workers contributing to Social Security. Some fear a generational conflict over shrinking resources, a looming tension between kids and “canes.” Without discounting these very real challen... posted on Jul 14 2019 (7,063 reads)

How to Trick Your Brain for Happiness, by Rick Hanson
this great line by Ani Tenzin Palmo, an English woman who spent 12 years in a cave in Tibet: “We do not know what a thought is, yet we’re thinking them all the time.” gobyg It’s true. The amount of knowledge we have about the brain has doubled in the last 20 years. Yet there’s still a lot we don’t know. In recent years, though, we have started to better understand the neural bases of states like happiness, gratitude, resilience, love, compassion, and so forth. And better understanding them means we can skillfully stimulate the neural substrates of those states—which, in turn, means we can strengthen them. Because as the... posted on Sep 15 2012 (148,563 reads)

Top 10 Insights from the Science of a Meaningful Life, by Kira M. Newman, Mariah Flynn, Jill Suttie, Jeremy Adam Smith
science, nothing can be taken for granted; even the most seemingly settled notion is a candidate for further testing and exploration. That’s part of what makes our work at Greater Good so exciting: We’re constantly uncovering research that looks at humanity in new ways, helping us all learn to be happier, more compassionate, and more resilient. This year’s top insights are a tribute to that spirit. They debunk things we thought we knew, like how many human emotions there are. They inject some questions into the popular discussion of mindfulness, which can at times be overenthusiastic. And they open up new horizons for us to consider, like the possibility of ... posted on Jun 21 2018 (19,009 reads)

Why Gratitude is Good, by Robert A. Emmons
more than a decade, I’ve been studying the effects of gratitude on physical health, on psychological well-being, and on our relationships with others. digitalskillet In a series of studies, my colleagues and I have helped people systematically cultivate gratitude, usually by keeping a “gratitude journal” in which they regularly record the things for which they’re grateful. (For a description of this and other ways to cultivate gratitude, click here.) Gratitude journals and other gratitude practices often seem so simple and basic; in our studies, we often have people keep gratitude journals for just three weeks. And yet the results have been overwhelmi... posted on Jun 20 2011 (77,726 reads)

What Will The Theme Of Your Life Be In 2017?, by Kira M. Newman
your life were a movie, where would the plot be headed right now? You may not be immortalized in film anytime soon, but your life is still a story. According to psychologists, we all have an internalized narrative that explains how we became the person we are today and where we are headed tomorrow. Like any Hollywood blockbuster, this narrative has settings, scenes, a plot, characters, and themes. As we ponder resolutions for the coming year, New Year’s can also be a time to reflect on our life story—and to figure out how everything fits together. Incorporating our goals into the larger narrative of our life can give us more energy to pursue them, and to become the ... posted on Jan 1 2017 (20,857 reads)

Viktor Frankl and the Search for Meaning: A Conversation with Alexander Vesely and Mary Cimiluca, by Fran Grace
we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.” “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” --Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning Few books of the last century have had a greater impact on our quest for meaning than Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. This all-time bestseller was written by a Jewish man who had just lost everything in the Holocaust.  When Frankl, emaciated from concentration camps, returned to his beloved Vi... posted on Apr 14 2017 (58,070 reads)

Edmund Benson: Constructive Aging, Positivity Cards and More, by Awakin Call Editors
businessman Edmund F. Benson, together with his wife Susan, declined to rest on their laurels when their well-earned retirement began.  Instead, the energetic and service-committed couple in some ways just began (again) their service journeys during their golden years.  They devoted their retirement to establishing the ARISE Foundation in 1986, a global skills-teaching program for at-risk youth.  The Foundation has had a remarkable history and impact, from its initial focus on environmental education for young people to now addressing a range of needs for the young, the elderly, and many populations in between. What follows is the edited transcript of an Awakin Call in... posted on Nov 1 2017 (8,362 reads)

Vandana Shiva: For Love of Mother Earth, by Patrick Pittman
Pittman on Vandana Shiva There are forces of nature, and then there is Vandana Shiva. Hers is a name close to the lips of anybody engaged in questions of sustainable agriculture, of social justice, of globalisation, of any of the great sociocultural fights of the past couple of decades. Wherever there is a pulpit, where there is land and tradition to protect, she’ll be there. She is loved or she is loathed, depending on who you talk to, but she is clearly a woman with a mission—to fight the rise of Big Agriculture, and the end of biodiversity. Born in 1952 in India’s Dehradun Valley, in the Uttarakhand state at the foothills of the Himalayas, Vandana didn&r... posted on Aug 23 2021 (4,825 reads)

What It Really Means to Live Our Mission, by Maria Popova
beautiful meditation on how we learn to stand at the gates of hope in troubled times. “How are we so optimistic, so careful not to trip and yet do trip, and then get up and say OK?”Maira Kalman asked in pondering happiness and existence. What is it that propels us to get up after loss, after heartbreak, after failure? What is that immutable rope that pulls us out of our own depths — depths we hardly knowuntil that moment when the light of the surface vanishes completely and unreachably? That’s precisely what the Reverend Victoria Safford explores in a gorgeous essay titled“The Small Work in the Great Work” fromThe Impossible Will Take a Little Whil... posted on Dec 15 2014 (23,242 reads)

Mister Roger's Message of Love, by Richard Gunderman
release of the Mister Rogers documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor? calls to mind the essential message of Rogers’ long-running children’s program, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. Fred McFeely Rogers, who died in 2003, was also an ordained Presbyterian minister. Over the course of three decades on public broadcasting, he brought to millions of children what his faith’s General Assembly referred to as “unconditional love.” In preaching love, Rogers wasn’t just attending to the moral character of his youthful audience. He believed that he was also promoting their health. As he said in 1979, “My whole ap... posted on Jul 19 2018 (20,588 reads)

Paying It Forward: An Interview with Nipun Mehta, by Nathan Scolaro
March, I interviewed Nipun for our magazine, Dumbo Feather -- and I left so energized by our chat! It left a deep impression and we locally got active in trying to create an Awakin Circle in Melbourne, we've published another article on "multiple forms of capital", our founders are coming out for a ServiceSpace retreat, and most recently we've been doing some kindness experiments too. I feel so grateful to know ServiceSpace, and look forward to supporting the "ripples". The photo-essay looks gorgeous in the print magazine, but below is a snapshot with some interspersed photos by the talented Ramin Rahimian. Hope you enjoy! For more than 2... posted on Nov 19 2019 (7,773 reads)

Gratitude, Grief and Finding Your Yes, by Terry Patten
one can say with certainty how our civilizational crisis will play out. We don’t know exactly how much suffering and destruction—human and nonhuman—might lie in store for us, or how soon. But we do know, with increasing certainty, that the actions of human beings have created horrific disasters and an existential predicament; and we also know that the actions of human beings—for good or for ill—will determine the future of our great grandchildren and the great grandchildren of thousands of other living beings. The stakes could scarcely be higher. We cannot wait to “see what happens” before we act on this awareness. Rather, we are obliged right now... posted on Feb 3 2020 (8,923 reads)

Epilogue: OUT OF THE BOX, by Alicia Doyle
boxing career doesn’t have the typical fairy tale ending. I quit after my first and only professional match. I never won a world title or a championship belt in the pros. The crescendo of my story doesn’t end with my arm raised victorious in the ring. My wins came after I left the roped-off square, when I had a chance to contemplate the lessons I learned in the fight game. These lessons, which transcended into epiphanies, are my greatest reward. Now, into middle age, I know I will never be able to capture or mimic the elation I felt inside the boxing ring, the natural high I felt after a win, the adrenaline that rushed through my veins in a fight, the adoration that fed my ... posted on Feb 8 2022 (2,696 reads)