4 Ways to Train Your Brain to Feel Better, by Laurel Mellin
have been barraged in the past couple of weeks by a series of major news events – some of them unsettling. President Trump’s trip to Europe left many unsettled about the future of the decades-old U.S. relations with Europe, and a summit with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin left many uneasy when Trump did not forcefully back the findings of American intelligence agencies. This all happens after hysteria on all sides over a Supreme Court nominee and a fountain of bad news about natural disasters, immigration issues, growing addiction rates, and a startling 30 percent increase in deaths of despair. It doesn’t matter which s... posted on Aug 17 2018 (30,930 reads)

Change the Worldview, Change the World, by Drew Dellinger
years after Thomas Berry’s “The New Story,” new generations are seizing on the power of narrative. I was sitting in a classroom in Assisi, Italy, with one of the leading environmental thinkers of our time, and he was talking about the power of story. “It seems that we basically communicate meaning by narrative,” he said. “At least that’s my approach to things: that narrative is our basic mode of understanding.” In that summer of 1991, Thomas Berry (1914—2009) was a 77-year-old sage; a Catholic priest—though never quite comfortably—a cultural historian, and a scholar of world religions, retired from teachi... posted on Sep 19 2018 (12,037 reads)

What Does a Compassionate Workplace Look Like?, by Nir Eyal, Monica Worline
Worline is Executive Director of the CompassionLab at the University of Michigan, a research scientist at the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education at Stanford University, and co-author of Awakening Compassion at Work, forthcoming in February 2017 from Berrett-Koehler. She sat down with author and entrepreneur Nir Eyal to discuss why empathetic teams make better business deals, how more caring leaders can help prevent corporate scandals, and the steps for cultivating compassion at work. This conversation originally appeared in Heleo: In-Depth Conversations with the World’s Leading Thinkers. Nir Eyal: What is the business case for c... posted on Sep 13 2018 (7,650 reads)

How Does Change Happen?, by Jason Angell
Angell at Longhaul Farm in the Hudson Valley, New York. Credit: Theo Angell. For most of my life I‘ve been a political activist, believing the story that social transformation comes through radical legislation pushed along by brave elected leaders. I once imagined becoming one of those leaders myself, and had a mental picture of giving a speech to a massive group of people in what looked like the National Mall in Washington DC.   I know I inherited that picture from my father, who harbored dreams of being a politician who had something true to say to people that would lead them out of the wilderness. He ran for Congress in 1972 unsuccessfully in the same commu... posted on Oct 28 2018 (7,379 reads)

Farewell Badger, by Tesa Silvestre
Books, 1992 Have you ever read Badger’s Parting Gifts? It tells the story of an old Badger who knows he will be dying soon, and worries about how his friends Mole, Frog, Fox, and Rabbit will cope with his departure after he goes down “the Long Tunnel.” The rest of this beautifully illustrated book revolves around the touching and creative ways in which Badger’s friends end up cherishing his legacy, and working through their loss. It is one of my favorite children’s books, and it has a very special place in my heart because it was first read to me on the night before my mother died. She was a gifted psychotherapist who worked fo... posted on Dec 6 2018 (12,107 reads)

Live In Your Soul: 10 Insights From A Visionary, by DailyGood Editors
dedicated this Doodle on their homepage in India and several other countries to Dr. V's centennial, October 1st 2018.  When a crippling disease shattered his lifelong ambition Dr. Govindappa Venkataswamy chose an impossible new dream: to eliminate needless blindness. There are 37 million blind people in our world, and 80% of this blindness is needless -- meaning a simple operation can restore sight. By 1976 Dr. V (as he came to be known) had performed over 100,000 sight restoring surgeries. That same year, he retired from government service at the age of 58, and founded Aravind, an 11-bed eye clinic in south India. No money. No business plan. No safety net. Over t... posted on Oct 1 2018 (9,919 reads)

Stephen Jenkinson Reimagines Dying, by Pierz Newton-John
Newton-John on Stephen Jenkinson Having taught classes on grief and dying, I’ve read many books on the subject of death, but nothing quite like Stephen Jenkinson’s Die Wise. From the moment I opened it, I was galvanised, not just by the depth of its insights, but by its remarkable prose style. Eschewing the cool, objective tone of most modern non-fiction, Stephen adopts a storyteller’s voice: passionate, poetic, at times elliptical and difficult, but always engaged at the level of heart and gut. For all the obvious intelligence, there is nothing academic here: these are the outpourings of a man who has grappled with death intimately, in the trenches of ... posted on Oct 19 2018 (12,519 reads)

How Silence Leads Us To Awe, by Matthew Fox, Lama Tsomo
Reverend Matthew Fox is a former Dominican priest in the Catholic Church. In 1993, he was expelled by the Vatican for espousing feminism and other progressive ideas in his Institute for Creation Spirituality. Lama Tsomo is an American-born secular Jew who first made a career as a psychotherapist. In her forties, she embraced Buddhism, and began study at home and abroad. She was ordained a lama in the Namchak lineage in 2005. Fox and Tsomo’s new book, The Lotus & the Rose, features a series of conversations in which the friends explore the essential principles shared by Buddhism and Christianity, as well as the differences that distinguish them.  Matthew... posted on Oct 20 2018 (10,620 reads)

Conscious Business & the Spiritual Wisdom of Sounds True, by Nadia Colburn
Simon is the founder and CEO of Sounds True, a multimedia publishing company that Tami founded in 1985 at the age of 22 with the mission of disseminating spiritual wisdom. Today, still faithful to its original mission, Sounds True has grown to have nearly 110 employees and a library of close to 2000 titles featuring some of the leading teachers and visionaries of our time.  Sounds True is a pioneer in the conscious business movement, and Tami leads in a way that values their multiple bottom lines, which include relationship and mission as well as profit.  Tami also hosts Insights at the Edge, a popular weekly podcast where she has interviewed many of today’s... posted on Nov 24 2018 (6,473 reads)

Where Homework Means Building Affordable Housing, by Deonna Anderson
year, beginning in the fall, a group of third-year architecture students from Auburn University take up residence in a small rural Alabama town to begin building a house. In the winter, when a new semester begins, they are replaced at the Newbern, Alabama, project site by another cohort of 16 students who finish up the job and prepare the house for its new occupants. The 20K Home Project began 13 years ago as a challenge to architecture students at Auburn to build a $20,000 house, with $12,000 in material and $8,000 for labor. The idea was to create “the perfect house” for needy families in rural areas where dwellings are often substandard and where affordable build... posted on Nov 30 2018 (3,985 reads)

The Extra-Ordinarily Committed Life of Lynne Twist, by Rachel Zurer and Meghan French Dunbar
get to meet a lot of amazing, powerful leaders in our work here at Conscious Company — and yet some people stand out even more from that rarified group. Lynne Twist is one of those standouts. She’s a rare combination of driven and playful; flexible, yet clear. She brings a laser-sharp focus to living her values. She’s relentless in her pursuit of changing the dream of modern society, and it’s not all talk — she’s authentic about living it day to day. She sees the core worth of every person she’s with, whether they’re a billionaire or a poor orphan (and she’s spent plenty of time with each). If you’re with her, she... posted on Dec 7 2018 (10,778 reads)

Pope Francis' Encyclical: Hearing the Cry of the Earth, by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee
Earth “now cries out to us because of the harm we have inflicted on her.” So begins Pope Francis in his powerful and long-awaited encyclical on ecology. “The earth herself, burdened and laid waste, is among the most abandoned and maltreated of our poor.” Pope Francis chose to be called after a saint for whom love for all of God’s creation was central to his life, and all creatures were his brothers and sisters. Speaking in the voice of this saint “who loved and protects creation,” he calls for a moral response to prevent the “unprecedented destruction of the ecosystem,”—that we urgently need to recognize the consequences of, ... posted on Dec 16 2018 (8,074 reads)

12 Truths I Learned from Life and Writing, by Anne Lamott
seven-year-old grandson sleeps just down the hall from me, and he wakes up a lot of mornings and he says, "You know, this could be the best day ever." And other times, in the middle of the night, he calls out in a tremulous voice, "Nana, will you ever get sick and die?" I think this pretty much says it for me and for most of the people I know, that we're a mixed grill of happy anticipation and dread. So I sat down a few days before my 61st birthday,and I decided to compile a list of everything I know for sure. There's so little truth in the popular culture, and it's good to be sure of a few thing... posted on Feb 12 2019 (848,806 reads)

How Conscious Leadership Can Unlock a Better Workplace, by Rachel Zurer, Meghan French Dunbar, Diana Chapman
1997 year, Diana Chapman was a stay-at-home mom teaching scrapbooking in Ann Arbor, MI — “as mainstream a life as they come,” she says. Then her brother-in-law, the CEO of Monsanto at the time, gave her a gift that would transform her life: $5,000 to use as she pleased. She had always been interested in personal development and human consciousness, so when he made the suggestion that she use the money to learn from the best coaches he knew, psychologists Gay and Katie Hendricks, she jumped on the opportunity. After studying with the Hendrickses for a decade and taking their work into a business context, Chapman is now one of the world’s foremost experts on ... posted on Feb 13 2019 (8,533 reads)

Breaking Out of Our Resistance Bubble, by Tami Simon
Simon: You're listening to Insights at the Edge. Today is a very special broadcast. Sounds True produced a 30-part series that aired in the fall—called Waking Up in the World—that looked at the intersection of the spiritual journey and social change. One of my very favorite presentations from that series was with CNN host and bestselling author Van Jones. Quite honestly, Van Jones blew my mind when he talked about breaking out of our "resistance bubble"—our kale-eating and Prius-driving subculture; a subculture that many people I know live in—and instead working to find common ground with those that have different viewpoints from... posted on Mar 5 2019 (8,549 reads)

The Difference Between Fixing and Healing, by On Being
follows is the transcript of an On Being interview between Krista Tippett and Rachel Naomi Remen. KRISTA TIPPETT, HOST: Rachel Naomi Remen is one of the wise people in our world. I quote from my conversation with her all the time. She’s a physician and a lyrical writer whose long struggle with Crohn’s disease has shaped her view of life and medicine. Living well, she says, is not about eradicating our wounds and weaknesses but understanding how they complete our identity and equip us to help others. The way we deal with losses, large and small, shapes our capacity to be present to all of our experiences. There’s a difference, she says, between curing and heal... posted on Jan 15 2019 (14,409 reads)

On Compassion, Equanimity and Impermanence, by Shinzen Young
People's Pain, Not Their Suffering Just as insight has many facets, so also with service. I would like to talk about just one aspect -- compassion. Compassion is practiced in two ways: subtly and overtly. You can subtly serve any person with whom you interact by allowing their poison and pain to resonate deeply within you, and experiencing it completely so that it does not turn into suffering within you. This is the healthy alternative to both callous indifference and enervating enmeshment. This subtle service is a natural extension of the self-liberation process. You purified your own pain by willingly experiencing it with mindfulness and equanimity. Now, in daily interac... posted on Jan 25 2019 (15,058 reads)

Who Gets to Cry?, by Trebbe Johnson
Radical Joy for Hard Times: Finding Meaning and Making Beauty in Earth's Broken Places by Trebbe Johnson, published by North Atlantic Books, copyright © 2018 by Trebbe Johnson. Reprinted by permission of publisher.  “Why don't you switch channels and see if there’s anything else on?” That’s what the husband of a friend of mine would say during those weeks in the spring of 2010, when oil from BP’s Deepwater Horizon well was spewing into the Gulf of Mexico and his favorite news channel showed him yet another image of dying wildlife: a brown pelican struggling to raise heavy wings drenched in oil; a pod of dolphins plowing through vi... posted on Apr 1 2019 (6,521 reads)

The Magic of Moss and What it Teaches Us, by Maria Popova
without feeling,” Mary Oliver observed in her magnificent memoir of love and loss, “is only a report.”In Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses (public library) — an extraordinary celebration of smallness and the grandeur of life, as humble yet surprisingly magical as its subject — botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer extends an uncommon and infectious invitation to drink in the vibrancy of life at all scales and attend to our world with befitting vibrancy of feeling. One of the world’s foremost bryologists, Kimmerer is a scientist blessed with the rare privilege of belonging to a long lineag... posted on Mar 29 2019 (7,046 reads)

Who is Mother?, by Matt Hopwood
midwife in Oslo, Norway. | Karen Beate Nøsterud/norden.org via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 2.5 DK. "Who is there in this world but Mother? I am Mother, you are Mother, Mother is mine, Mother is yours, Everything is Mother." Traditional Baul Song from Bengal. Since 2012 I have walked thousands of miles throughout the United Kingdom and spoken with people around the world, asking them to share their experiences of love and connection. What are the loving narratives of their lives? What does love mean to them? As the journey has grown so the experiences have deepened, and the sharings with others have deepened too. What started as a personal jour... posted on May 14 2019 (5,838 reads)