34 Affirmations for Healthy Living, by Catherine Swift
positive self-talk to eat better, feel stronger, and rejuvenate your body.  When day-to-day life seems to revolve around providing for others, we can forget to nourish our own bodies and spirits. And yet, self-care is what empowers us to give back to the world, fully and joyfully. Start your practice by taking just a few moments each day to affirm your commitment to eat well and live a healthful life.  Each bite of food contains the life of the sun and the earth. The whole universe is in a piece of bread. —Thich Nhat Hanh I choose well so that I can feel well. —Nathalie W. Herrman Preparing fresh, healthy meals instead of ... posted on Feb 2 2015 (69,464 reads)

Empathy with the Enemy, by Roman Krznaric
will give you a talisman. Recall the face of the poorest and weakest man whom you may have seen, and ask yourself if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him. Will he gain anything by it? Will it restore him to a control over his own life and destiny? Will it lead to swaraj [freedom] for the hungry and spiritually starving millions? Then you will find your doubts and yourself melting away." —Mahatma Gandhi Mahatma Gandhi was one of the great empathetic adventurers of the twentieth century, a master in the art of looking at the world from another’s perspective. His philosophy was embodied in what is known as “Gandhi’s talisma... posted on Mar 2 2015 (24,627 reads)

Music Is Something You Do, by Richard Whittaker
Gail Needleman: Music Is Something You Do  Gail Needleman teaches music at Holy Names University in Oakland, California. Her work as a writer and teacher addresses the essential role of music in the moral and spiritual development of children. She is the recipient of the Parsons Fellowship from the Library of Congress for research in American folk music, and is the co-creator of the American Folk Song Collection website, a pioneering online resource of American folk songs for teaching music to children. We met at her home to talk about music...  Richard Whittaker: How did music enter your life? What were the early experiences? Gail Needleman:... posted on Jan 18 2015 (28,684 reads)

3 Ways to be a More Mindful Leader, by Janice L. Marturano
been more than a decade since I started exploring the intersection between excellence in leadership and contemplative practices like meditation. The leaders I worked with, first as vice-president of a Fortune 200 company, and then in my work as executive director of the Institute for Mindful Leadership, came from different cultures, professions and backgrounds. They were influencers in small and large organizations, teams, community groups and even their own families. Despite their differences, they had some things in common. They had bright minds, warm hearts and were drawn to leadership roles because they wanted to make a difference. They were also often overbooked, overw... posted on Feb 18 2015 (28,403 reads)

Touch As Nutrition by John Tuite, by Kindness Blog
could properly be regarded as a form of nutrition. We mistakenly think that touch occurs on the periphery of our self, a skin thing. But truthfully each surface stimulus travels far into the most hidden interior landscapes of our self, traversing long nerve cells right through the buried spinal core to enter and gather in the deep folds of our brain. It’s not by accident that our skin and brain each are generated from a single ectodermic substance, cascading outwards and inwards as we grow in the womb, because right at the very root and origin of us, we are built to connect the inner and outer worlds. The necessity of nurturing touch is very clear when we are at our y... posted on Oct 16 2021 (45,390 reads)

7 Ways to Help Kids Unplug from Technology, by Launa Schweizer
childhood unfolded in the last few years BC (Before Computers). However, my own children and my students have lived their entire lives with bleeps and buzzes and signals from multiple channels of information. Parents and teachers alike worry about the impact that constant multitasking is having on children’s developing brains. Kids—digital natives—swim comfortably in the floods of information and often crave the sensation of clicking from screen to screen, flicking from channel to channel, and juggling tasks throughout each day. The problem, according to neuroscientists, is that multitasking is changing our human brains as we prioritize juggling ov... posted on Apr 14 2015 (30,615 reads)

Lifecycle of Emergence: Using Emergence to Take Social Innovation to Scale, by Margaret Wheatley and Deborah Frieze
current ads and slogans, the world doesn’t change one person at a time. It changes as networks of relationships form among people who discover they share a common cause and vision of what’s possible. This is good news for those of us intent on changing the world and creating a positive future. Rather than worry about critical mass, our work is to foster critical connections. We don’t need to convince large numbers of people to change; instead, we need to connect with kindred spirits. Through these relationships, we will develop the new knowledge, practices, courage, and commitment that lead to broad-based change. But networks aren’t the whole story. As ... posted on Apr 22 2015 (13,760 reads)

How a New Dutch Library Smashed Attendance Records, by Cat Johnson
declining visitors and uncertainty about what to do about it, library administrators in the new town of Almere in the Netherlands did something extraordinary. They redesigned their libraries based on the changing needs and desires of library users and, in 2010, opened the Nieuwe Bibliotheek (New Library), a thriving community hub that looks more like a bookstore than a library. Guided by patron surveys, administrators tossed out traditional methods of library organization, turning to retail design and merchandising for inspiration. They now group books by areas of interest, combining fiction and nonfiction; they display books face-out to catch the eye of browsers; and they trai... posted on Apr 24 2015 (34,849 reads)

Nancy Mellon: Storytelling as a Healing Art, by Anne Veh
Mellon “Storytelling is our effort as human beings to find greater truths.” On a warm June morning, I am seated with a circle of dear friends in the garden of Betty Peck and Anna Rainville, mother and daughter who for over 30 years have welcomed children, friends, families, early childhood educators to play, sing, and share gifts at their home in Saratoga. Longtime friend, Mary Roscoe of the Children in Nature Collaborative brings fresh strawberries and bread from a local farmers market; family friend Stefan and his finance Lauren are in town visiting, and decide to stay on for the conversation. We are speaking with Nancy Mellon, an elder in the global... posted on Jun 27 2015 (17,736 reads)

Donald Hoffman: Do We See Reality As It Is?, by ted.com
I love a great mystery, and I'm fascinated by the greatest unsolved mystery in science, perhaps because it's personal. It's about who we are, and I can't help but be curious. 0:25     The mystery is this: What is the relationship between your brain and your conscious experiences, such as your experience of the taste of chocolate or the feeling of velvet? 0:37     Now, this mystery is not new. In 1868, Thomas Huxley wrote, "How it is that anything so remarkable as a state of consciousness comes about as the result of irritating nervous tissue is just as unac... posted on Jul 11 2015 (29,591 reads)

Interview: Stephen De Staebler, by Richard Whittaker
De Staebler John Toki encouraged me to interview his old friend and mentor, sculptor Stephen De Staebler. The following conversation is distilled from three meetings with the artist at his home and studio.  Stepping through the high redwood gate at his home, I found myself in another world. Several of De Staebler's ceramic figures stood around his pool, along a walkway to his studio and scattered in the landscaping as if waiting to be placed in more considered alignments. It seemed I'd stumbled upon an archeological site full of relics, ancient fragments and timeless figures halfway gone or partly restored, poised between here and now-and a distant then... posted on Aug 9 2015 (9,253 reads)

The WE-economy: Value Creation in the Age of Networks, by Peter Hesseldahl
8, 2015 Underlying the collaborative economy are a handful of very strong and general trends that are challenging the conventional business models in just about every sector of the economy—not just in the types of transactions that we usually think of as the sharing economy. Focus is shifting from selling stand-alone, physical products to creating services that enable users to make the most of the resources around them. The cost of coordinating even very small and non-standard resources to fit individual user’s needs is falling. Everyone is increasingly empowered to participate and contribute to the value creation. Everything is getting connected; ... posted on Sep 1 2015 (12,828 reads)

One Poem That Saved a Forest, by Jacqueline Suskin
can a single poem inspire? What can one verse induce? One poem can offer an outlet for healing. A distinct lyric can allow connection to occur. One poem can lead to the most unlikely friendship. A single stanza can change the fate of a forest. 2. I’m Jacqueline Suskin. The past four years I’ve performed Poem Store: a public project that consists of exchanging on-demand poetry about any subject, composed on a manual typewriter, in trade for any donation. I’ve done most of my work in Arcata at the Saturday Farmers Market. I’ve lived in and around this northern California coastal town for three years. The c... posted on Sep 8 2015 (16,101 reads)

How to Be More Patient (and Why It is Worth It), by Art Markman
gratification is hard. You may have seen the adorable videos of kids in Walter Mischel’s classic experiments, in which one marshmallow is placed in front of a child. The child is told that the experimenter will leave the room and that the child will get two marshmallows if he or she simply avoids eating the marshmallow while the experimenter is out. The children in these studies go through all kinds of gyrations to keep themselves from eating that one marshmallow. Adults also have a lot of trouble delaying gratification: People pay extra to get faster delivery from online stores. And they accept small rewards in the present rather than waiting for longer rewards... posted on Sep 18 2015 (13,368 reads)

Learning Forgiveness in an Unforgiving World, by Jill Suttie
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 (14,344 reads)

Six Pillars of the Wholehearted Life, by Maria Popova
Palmer’s Spectacular Commencement Address on the Six Pillars of the Wholehearted Life “Take everything that’s bright and beautiful in you and introduce it to the shadow side of yourself… When you are able to say, ‘I am … my shadow as well as my light,’ the shadow’s power is put in service of the good.” In 1974, the Tibetan Buddhist teacher and Oxford alumnus Chögyam Trungpa founded Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado — a most unusual and emboldening not-for-profit educational institution named after the eleventh-century Indian Buddhist sage Naropa and intended as a 100-year experiment of combining the best... posted on Nov 3 2015 (60,439 reads)

Neil Gaiman on How Stories Last, by Maria Popova
have shapes, as Vonnegut believed, and they in turn give shape to our lives. But how do stories like the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm or Alice in Wonderland continue to enchant the popular imagination generation after generation — what is it that makes certain stories last? That’s what the wise and wonderful Neil Gaimanexplores in a fantastic lecture two and a half years in the making, part of the Long Now Foundation’s nourishing and necessary seminars on long-term thinking. Nearly half a century after French molecular biologist Jacques Monod proposed what he called the “abstract kingdom” — a conceptual parallel to the biosphere, populat... posted on Nov 18 2015 (14,525 reads)

Eight Steps Towards Forgiveness, by Robert Enright
another person hurts us, it can upend our lives. This essay has been adapted from 8 Keys to Forgiveness (W. W. Norton & Company, 2015) Sometimes the hurt is very deep, such as when a spouse or a parent betrays our trust, or when we are victims of crime, or when we’ve been harshly bullied. Anyone who has suffered a grievous hurt knows that when our inner world is badly disrupted, it’s difficult to concentrate on anything other than our turmoil or pain. When we hold on to hurt, we are emotionally and cognitively hobbled, and our relationships suffer. Forgiveness is strong medicine for this. When life hits us hard, there isnothing as effective as forgiveness for he... posted on Aug 27 2023 (38,304 reads)

Debt as a Relationship Based in Love, by Nathan Schneider
82-year-old artist Mary Frank traces her earliest debts to the prehistoric images in books that her mother kept around the house. Their shadows have reappeared throughout her sculptures, paintings, and photographs. But she knows none of their creators’ names; there is no address where she can send a royalty check. The best repayment she can offer is the work of her own hands. Those of us who came of age in the millennial period have learned to think about debt and credit quite otherwise. Debt does not motivate so much as it inhibits and stigmatizes. We accumulate it in order to have an education, to make a home, to pay for medical necessities. (Student debt, at upward of $1.3 tr... posted on Dec 7 2015 (9,042 reads)

How To Move Beyond Pain, by Jill Suttie
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 (17,961 reads)