Vivek Murthy: To Be a Healer, by On Being
follows is the syndicated transcript of an On Being interview between Krista Tippett and Vivek Murthy. You can listen to the audio recording of the interview here.  Krista Tippett:We need a modicum of vitality for what simply being alive in this time asks of us. And we’re in an enduringly tender place. The mental health crisis that is invoked all around, especially as we look to the young, is one manifestation of the gravity of the post-2020 world that each of us is carrying. Even as we try to power through in the face of ungrieved losses and unnerving change. I’m longing for us to find ways to name and honor this more openly. Because it is showing up sideways in our... posted on Apr 14 2023 (4,018 reads)

When Savoring a Pleasant Moment Is a Radical Act, by Ari Honarvar
9, 2020 As we grapple with the first global pandemic lockdown of our lifetime, our daily routines have been upended, and it’s difficult to keep up with new changes. Many of us are overwhelmed by the precarious nature of our health, our loved ones’ well-being, and our financial security. But in the midst of uncertainty and fear, inspiring videos are emerging from the countries most affected by coronavirus—Iranian doctors and nurses dancing in hospitals and Italian residents singing from their balconies. This footage not only uplifts the spirit of those in close proximity, it also brightens the mood of people watching from around the world.  ... posted on Apr 18 2023 (26,035 reads)

Unpacking a Gift from 21 Years Ago, by Guri Mehta
I was cleaning out my dresser, I found a small red, blue, and green hand-woven pouch, with a silver zipper on top. Ms. Macias, an English teacher I had in my Senior year of high school had given it to me fifteen years before I ever visited Guatemala, the country in which it was made. I remember sitting near Ms. Macias’ desk every day to the right side of the classroom, near my best friend Tia. We would both bombard her with questions about life and all that is important to a teenager. She would willingly engage in many conversations with us. One day she took out this little woven bag from her desk, walked over to my desk and asked if I liked it. I told her it was beautiful. ... posted on Dec 22 2014 (22,812 reads)

Make Good Art, by Neil Gaiman
Commencement May 17, 2012 I never really expected to find myself giving advice to people graduating from an establishment of higher education.  I never graduated from any such establishment. I never even started at one. I escaped from school as soon as I could, when the prospect of four more years of enforced learning before I'd become the writer I wanted to be was stifling. I got out into the world, I wrote, and I became a better writer the more I wrote, and I wrote some more, and nobody ever seemed to mind that I was making it up as I went along, they just read what I wrote and they paid for it, or they didn't, and often they commissioned me to write somethi... posted on May 21 2023 (4,616 reads)

The Most Tender Gaze I Have Ever Beheld, by Catherine Carney-Feldman
exquisite face of a doe with her summer coat I will always remember the date, November 16, 2001, not only for an unforgettable deer encounter but also for another reason which I will tell you about at the end of this blog.  On that day, David and I were doing many chores on our 2 ½ acre animal sanctuary. We, along with our horses, dogs, cats, chickens, ducks and rooster, live in a pine forest with many wild animals all claiming the same territory and calling it home.  David was at the front of the property working on a project next to the street. I was at the back of the property on a sloped area digging holes in the ground to put in some new native hydrangea bushe... posted on May 22 2023 (7,143 reads)

Attention as an Instrument of Love, by Maria Popova
fundamental reality might exist, we live out our lives in a subjective reality defined by what we agree to attend to. “An act of pure attention, if you are capable of it, will bring its own answer,” D.H. Lawrence wrote. But we live largely in the territory of the unanswerable because there is no pure attention — the aperture of our attention is constricted by myriad conditionings and focused by a brain honed on millions of years of evolutionary necessities, many of which we have long outgrown. How the brain metes out attention and what that means for our intimacy with reality is what the philosophy-lensed British psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist take... posted on May 23 2023 (3,421 reads)

Off By an Inch in the Beginning..., by Preeta Bansal
Speech Delivered to Dharma Realm Buddhist University May 20, 2023   Thank you, President Susan Rounds and to the distinguished faculty and board of DRBU. Special thanks to the many dear friends who are part of the extended community here and have been shining lights for me for more than a decade now. Above all, warmest Congratulations to all of you in the Class of 2023. And to the families, friends, ancestors, and loved ones – near and far – who have set in motion and nurtured the ripples that allow us to be here today. It’s customary, I realize, for the person standing here to pretend or at least attempt to share with you sto... posted on May 30 2023 (8,635 reads)

In Praise of Fallibility, Everybodyism & Confusers of Certainty, by Awakin Call Editors
bodies are radiant but not all radiance is visible: stars radiate visible light; planets and donkeys and couches radiate infrared waves. (If your couch is emitting visible light GET UP IMMEDIATELY!)" -- Amy Leach Everything is visibly illuminated under Amy Leach's virtuosic pen. Whether she's writing about beavers, migratory birds, mesquite trees, or the moon, to read her words is to see things in a new light. To see in things a new light. And to find your mind being woken up, your conventions jostled, and your ribs being tickled multiple times along the way. Arguably no other writer in the world waltzes so delightfully between scientific fact, p... posted on Jun 21 2023 (1,992 reads)

Hermann Hesse on Breaking the Trance of Busyness, by Maria Popova
all ridiculous things the most ridiculous seems to me, to be busy — to be a man who is brisk about his food and his work,” Kierkegaard admonished in 1843 as he contemplated our greatest source of unhappiness. It’s a sobering sentiment against the backdrop of modern life, where the cult of busyness and productivity plays out as the chief drama of our existence — a drama we persistently lament as singular to our time. We reflexively blame on the Internet our corrosive compulsion for doing at the cost of being, forgetting that every technology is a symptom and not, or at least not at first, a cause of our desires and pathologies. Our intentions are th... posted on Jul 2 2023 (6,138 reads)

Love's Work: Gillian Rose on the Value of Getting it Wrong, by Maria Popova
is hardly any activity, any enterprise, which is started with such tremendous hopes and expectations, and yet, which fails so regularly, as love,” the humanistic philosopher and psychologist Erich Fromm wrote in his classic on the art of loving. In some sense, no love ever fails, for no experience is ever wasted — even the most harrowing becomes compost for our growth, fodder for our combinatorial creativity. But in another, it is indeed astonishing how often we get love wrong — how, over and over, it stokes our hopes and breaks our hearts and hurls us onto the cold hard baseboards of our being, flattened by defeat and despair, and how, over and over,... posted on Jul 14 2023 (2,500 reads)

Mark Nepo: The Half Life of Angels, by Tami Simon
follows is the syndicated transcript of an Insights at the Edge podcast from SoundsTrue, with Tami Simon and Mark Nepo. You can listen to the audio version of the conversation here. Tami Simon: In this episode of Insights at the Edge, we have with us a beloved poet, storyteller, spiritual teacher, and friend, Mark Nepo. Let me tell you a little bit about Mark. He’s been called—you ready for this? — one of the finest spiritual guides of our time, and I think it’s true. In his 30s, Mark was diagnosed with a rare form of lymphoma, a struggle which helped to form his philosophy of “experiencing life fully while staying in relationship to an unknowab... posted on Jul 16 2023 (3,852 reads)

Bone, Breath & Gesture: Practices of Embodiment, by Don Hanlon Johnson
century has witnessed an incomprehensible savaging of flesh.  Its global and local wars, genocides, politically directed torture and famine, terrorist attacks, the selling of children and women into prostitution, and personal wanton violence to family members and street victims would be more than enough evidence for a non-terrestrial to condemn us for criminal disregard for the muscle fibers, fluids, and neural networks within which we live.  An alien visitor might not notice, however, that these painfully tangible wounds to the body politic are symptomatic manifestations of highly abstract ideas that rapidly gained a disproportionate amount of physical power.  While viol... posted on Sep 17 2023 (2,432 reads)

Relational Neuroscience & Art: A Love Story, by Mary Kay Neumann
from online blog for the Global Association of Interpersonal Neurobiology Studies (mindGAINS), August 2020   “There is so much other work that love has to do in the world….I hang out with a lot of climate activists, and there’s this profound love they have for the natural world, for the future, for justice, and that really shapes their lives and gives them tremendous meaning. And it benefits all of us that they have this, and that this motivates them because they’re acting on behalf of all of us. And we should call that love.” -Rebecca Solnit (2020) “When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace&... posted on Sep 26 2023 (3,297 reads)

The Art of Paying Attention, by Wendy McNaughton
right, I'm going to go out on a limb here. I'm going to say that every single one of us in this room made drawings when we were little. Yes? Yes? OK. And maybe around the age of like, four or five or something like that, you might have been drawing, and a grown-up came over and looked over your shoulder and said, "What's that?" And you said, "It's a face." And they said, "That's not really what a face looks like. This is what a face looks like." And they proceeded to draw this. Circle, two almonds for some eyes, this upside-down seven situation we have here,&... posted on Oct 21 2023 (5,377 reads)

Kintsugi: The Golden Joinery of Love, by Sue Cochrane
Sue Cochrane's website is a button that says "Click Here for Unconditional Love"- it leads to a selection of writings that offer exactly that. It isn't just the words of Sue's stories that touch the reader, but the wordless energy behind them. Sue Cochrane survived a traumatic childhood to become a pioneering family court judge. Throughout her career she strived to put the heart back into the body of the law. Her first stark cancer diagnosis came when her three adopted sons were little more than babies. In the eighteen years that followed, Sue lived and loved through a series of profoundly serious diagnoses, including Stage IV breast cancer, and a brain tumor that wa... posted on Oct 31 2023 (54,384 reads)

Telling is Listening, by Maria Popova
act of communication is an act of tremendous courage in which we give ourselves over to two parallel possibilities: the possibility of planting into another mind a seed sprouted in ours and watching it blossom into a breathtaking flower of mutual understanding; and the possibility of being wholly misunderstood, reduced to a withering weed. Candor and clarity go a long way in fertilizing the soil, but in the end there is always a degree of unpredictability in the climate of communication — even the warmest intention can be met with frost. Yet something impels us to hold these possibilities in both hands and go on surrendering to the beauty and terror of conversation, that ancient ... posted on Nov 13 2023 (3,137 reads)

How to Reboot After Disappointment at Work, by Julien C. Mirivel and Julie Allison
can bounce back better from a disappointment if we pay more attention to our internal dialogue. All of us have experienced disappointment, sadness, and setbacks at work. A few years ago, Julien served as an academic leader at a regional university for three years. He gave his full heart and soul to the role. He was on a mission to do good. At the same time, the university was undergoing a budget crisis that culminated with the global pandemic. The university had no choice but to restructure, and, when it did, Julien lost his role and returned to the faculty.  In the crucible of organizational change, Julie hit a crossroads after dedicating 15 years to building an impactful organiz... posted on Apr 3 2024 (4,027 reads)

Conversation with Peacemaking Mystic, Orland Bishop, by Berry Liberman
in New York at the age of 15 from Guyana, Orland Bishop studied medicine as a young man, enamoured of science and its mysteries. Conscious from a young age of the different layers of awareness and the construction of the ego, his life quickly steered towards spiritual inquiry and practice. Today, Orland is many things: as founder of Shade Tree Multicultural Foundation, he engages in peace work with Los Angeles gangs and he also works with social healing, youth initiation projects and research into esoteric and indigenous cosmologies. Orland cautions that the modern world is one of winners and losers. This is problematic, he says, because “Even if you win, you feel alone in t... posted on Apr 30 2024 (2,227 reads)

Inner Worlds, by Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu
of us lives in many different worlds. There’s the world of work, the world of our family, and our inner worlds. These worlds inside are the ones we’re most responsible for, because no one else can take care of them. So we have to learn how to make them nourishing. If they’re starved, if all we can talk to ourselves about is how miserable we are, how impoverished we are, how much we’re in danger, it spills out to our other worlds as well. So even though as we’re meditating we’re focusing inside, it’s not a selfish activity. When you learn how to develop a nourishing inner world here, you’re nourishing not only yourself in this world, but al... posted on Apr 8 2024 (3,203 reads)

Be-The-Change Corporations, by Jay Coen Gilbert
morning everyone. I want to start by paraphrasing something that Rohit said, "If you want to see us at our worst, go talk to our families." I wanted to start by acknowledging my wife Randi, who is responsible for me being here, not just by creating the space to allow me to do my work and care for our family, and having been the primary caregiver for our kids. She also carried the financial burden - when we started our first company, she was the only one of the three of us (who started the company) that actually had income. And so, to the extent that we had food on the table, it was because she was employed.While that business grew incredibly rapidly and was quite successful, there was... posted on Apr 16 2024 (1,936 reads)