Awakin Call: Recent Episodes
ServiceSpace
Awakin Calls are weekly conversations that share insights and inspiration from various corners of the ServiceSpace ecosystem.
"For brief periods, when life breaks our way, it can feel as if we are finally getting somewhere. We may feel that we are finally becoming someone who understands this crazy life. With this self-image securely in place, we may decide that we are good and life is good and that we can share this with others. But things change. A voice or relationship or job or health is lost."One morning in 2018, writer and meditation teacher Tracy Cochran woke up with little audible voice and just a faint, breathy whisper. In a matter of hours, she was supposed to tell a story and teach mindfulness meditation at the Rubin Museum of Art in Manhattan. Concerned about how she would be able to lead on stage, the moment became another one for Tracy to take refuge in her practice of the past fifty years - to return home to the present moment with an open heart and mind through the sensation of breath. She accepted the circumstances, proceeding with the scheduled engagement. "I told people to lean in, as if I was on my deathbed and about to tell them the secret of life, and they did. All but one person stayed."In her blog post "Speechless", Tracy reflects, "Meditation and spiritual practice have been called death in life. We die to the hope that our life is taking us somewhere. We let go and allow ourselves to open to a new life, a shared life."In fact, Tracy learned to let go and open to new life many decades ago during her twenties, when a near-death experience turned into a pivotal turning point. While being mugged by three men on a deserted street in Manhattan one night, her heart opened to "a kind of feeling that cannot be created or destroyed by anyone, only received." "Behind the abandoned tenements, behind my attackers, behind all the appearances in this world, there was a gorgeous luminosity," Tracy wrote in "The Night I Died ". "It was clear to me that this light was the force that holds up the world, into which all separation dissolves."In her recently released book Presence: The Art of Being at Home in Yourself , Tracy shares stories and suggested practices for taking refuge in moments of presence even in the midst of difficult challenges, thus illuminating deeper truths, grounding us, and making deeper connection possible. The book has been acclaimed by people as diverse as Martin Scorsese (famous Hollywood director who is a regular reader of Tracy's writings), to Sufi teacher Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, and including several meditation teachers like Ven. Bhikkhu Bodhi, Sharon Salzberg, and Jack Kornfield.Tracy is the editorial director of Parabola, an acclaimed quarterly magazine that draws on the world's cultural and wisdom traditions to explore the deeper questions all humans share. She has taught and led workshops at the Getty Museum in addition to the Rubin Museum of Art, New York Insight Meditation Center, the Jacob Burns Film Center, and at corporations, schools, and medical facilities. She is the founder of the Hudson River Sangha, which is now online and open to all. She also offers one-on-one mindfulness mentoring and teaching. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Psychology Today, O Magazine, New York magazine, Boston Review, and many book anthologies and podcasts. Her essays and offerings can be found on parabola.org and tracycochran.org."One of the most liberating things that's happened is that I've gotten over the aspiration to be special. The more I embrace my common, flawed humanity, the happier I am. And the more awake and aware I am." Then she adds, with a laugh, "I've discovered that I love being totally average. Even in the slow end of average. I love it. I'm so happy."Our upcoming guest believes that we all have within us, "an enormous capacity" to heal and open our lives, by tapping into presence - "the wellspring of our deepest wisdom and compassion". Join us for a dialogue with this presence activist, writer, and meditation teacher on July 6th, in conversation with Richard Whittaker and Rahul Brown .
Victor Koo is a familiar face in China's tech industry. In the 90s, he was president of Sohu, China's second-largest search engine. Subsequently, he founded YouKu, China's largest online video platform with 500 million monthly users (commonly called the "YouTube of China" and later sold to Alibaba).Surprisingly, his journey of scaling began to turn inwards at a tech conference in Sun Valley in 2016, when a networking conversation with a young entrepreneur soon turned towards meditation. Upon hearing that Victor had always wanted to try it, the young entrepreneur let go of the opportunity to network with others, instead guiding Victor to an hour-long meditation.That was the first hour of meditation in Victor's life, a seed that he continues to cultivate through a daily practice now spanning several years. Along the way, on a trip to Thailand, he casually walked into a breathwork course without any context. That session, led by a teacher who had survived Stage-4 terminal cancer through breathwork practice, further opened up his inner world in a striking way. "If I never believed in chakras and energy body within each of us, that session blew all of that disbelief away based on direct experience that lasted over a day."As Victor's inner journey took root, it has also decidedly altered the course of his work in the world. After transitioning from his role at Youku, Victor shifted his focus to inner-purpose-driven service and investing. In late 2016, he co-founded Tianren Culture - a social platform based out of Hong Kong that aims to promote "One Wisdom, One Health" by encouraging and enabling contemplative practices and healthy lifestyles. It focuses especially on those practices and lifestyles with roots in spiritual and natural wisdom and non-dualistic philosophies, positing that human physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health and wellness is interconnected with the health of the broader environment and ecosystem.Tianren Culture partners with foundations, NGOs, and businesses to put in place effective social innovation initiatives to improve physical wellness through overall food system transformation, as well as mental, emotional, and spiritual wellness by supporting scientific research and promoting meditation and breathwork practices. The Tianren team is actively volunteering time for Servicespace's AI-related initiatives, including CompassionGPT. Related to Tianren's work, Victor is also a board director of Good Food Fund and on the advisory board of Global Wellness Institute.Victor's exposure to multiple cultures has been formative in his journey - he was born in Hong Kong, and apart from twenty-five years in China, he has lived extensively in Australia, US, and Japan - with Japan being his current home since the pandemic. He received his BS degree from University of California, Berkeley, where he was also a Regent's scholar and MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he currently serves on the Advisory Council. Victor's professional experience lies mostly at the intersection of the technology and media sectors, as well as private equity and venture capital investments. He continues to serve as Chairman of Heyi (his company that incubated Youku), which now focuses on disruptive innovation and social impact investments in areas such as health, genome, and new protein. He is also a senior advisor of Texas Pacific Group and a business advisor of DeCheng Capital."If there was one thing I wish I had known before I started my company, it is meditation (by far!) because of the calm and equanimity that it brings you, and really helps you question the purpose of why you're doing what you're doing." It's a piece of advice that Victor can often be found paying forward now to b-school students and young founders.Join us in conversation with this founder-turned-server, as we learn more about his journey of scaling inwards, or as he loves to quote Bruce Lee, to "be like water". The call will be hosted by Xue Devand and Birju Pandya. Xue formerly founded one of the "50 most innovative companies of the world" and now currently runs The Space Between, a venture capital fund aiming to be a "sacred hospitality" company that helps inspire wealthholders to transition their consciousness from being owners of money to being the stewards of money. Birju is Chief Mindfulness Officer/Managing Director at Mobius.life, an integrated capital family office, and a long-time volunteer with Servicespace.
I believe humanity is undergoing a profound transformation in consciousness. What the world needs most is for each of us to shine our light, love and genius into the realms we inhabit...and to share stories, examples, discovery and practices that will support humanity in taking its next evolutionary step. -- Stacey LawsonSitting in a corporate board meeting and planning quarterly targets nearly 20 years ago, Stacey Lawson recalls a strange vision: "We were talking about the next quarter of -- 300 million or 500 million or a billion, and all of a sudden I had this vision of this cascading series of quarter ends, that just never ended. And I thought -- that's the exact illusion, the sort of matrix that we're living in right now and this can't be the true reality."She quit her job, "stopped everything" and planned a trip to India. On the eve of the trip, she serendipitously attended a talk by a visiting spiritual teacher from India. When meditating under his guidance, she had a sensation of "I've done this many times before." As she recounts, "All of a sudden, even though my eyes were closed, I could see all of the people in the room and I saw them not as bodies, but this absolutely gorgeous, luminous light. I could literally see each light in the room where everyone was sitting -- the bodies of pure essence, pure source, pure love. In an instant, my body and the bodies in that room, the fullness of that light collapsed into one. This little grain of sand that was Stacey kind of just melted into the distance."She then visited the teacher's ashram while on her planned trip to India -- serendipitously on the date of a great gathering there -- and by the end, realized that she had studied with this teacher before, perhaps in a prior life.A lifelong student of the world's wisdom and mystical traditions, Stacey is crafting deep bridges between her inner practice and her outer work. As an entrepreneur and agent of change, she is also building bridges between heart intelligence and the corporate business world.Her belief that humanity is facing an unprecedented time of transformation (accelerating AI innovation, climate disruption, and social/political conflict) has led to her most recent passion project -- The Human Evolution Project (THE Project). Drawing from 20+ years as a speaker and teacher of meditation, inner transformation, and self-realization practices, THE Project aims to bridge ancient science with modern technology to foster a transformative community dedicated to the upliftment of humanity.As part of this effort, Stacey recently co-created the Benevolent AI Future coalition with leading developers and voices in Artificial Intelligence (AI). The coalition focuses on Wisdom + AI, bringing together builders and funders of AI solutions that incorporate deeper levels of wisdom in service to the public good -- solutions that may not be naturally addressed by commercial markets but are crucial and necessary for a positive future.Stacey grew up in a rural logging town in Washington state. Unsure what she wanted to do in life, she earned a B.S. in Chemical Engineering, and began working in Silicon Valley. A "big picture" thinker, Stacey quickly realized engineering was not her calling. Her father, a truck-driver-turned-entrepreneur, may be credited for her "entrepreneurial inklings." Stacey made her way to Harvard Business School where she earned an MBA and then spent 15 years as a senior executive in the high-tech industry.To balance the dominant paradigms of efficiency and scale found in the corporate world, Stacey has taken several sabbaticals for meditation and spiritual exploration. From 2004 and 2011, she spent about six months of the year with her spiritual community in India -- a balance that allowed her to dedicate time to deep inner work while continuing her journey as a leading California businesswoman and conscious leader.In 2012, Stacey ran for the U.S. Congress in California's 2nd congressional district where she advocated for critical economic, environmental, and social justice initiatives. Then, in 2018, shortly before her 48th birthday, Stacey learned she had breast cancer. While moving through the emotions of fear and dread, she also felt it was "a wake-up call from the universe." Stacey decided against conventional treatment, instead opting to work with her care team to design a personalized plan that ultimately healed her from cancer.A deep interest in energy healing and biofield research has led to advisory positions with Agastiya Biotech and Siddha Bioscience. She has won multiple awards including being named "one of the most influential women in business" by San Francisco Business Times and recognized as a "California Visionary Leader" by the California Endowment and California Vision 2020.Today, Stacey continues to work at the intersection of entrepreneurship, sustainability, and conscious leadership, most recently as co-founder, Vice Chairman and CEO of Ygrene Energy Fund, a clean energy finance company which has deployed over $1B in financing for 120,000+ renewable energy and climate resiliency projects. She also currently holds advisory roles with SDG Impact Fund, Second Time Founders, SRM University (India), and Pillai Center for Mind Science. She is an active board member of The Shift Network, Institute for Noetic Sciences (IONS), and Tripura Foundation."At heart, I'm a change agent and believe every one of us can make positive change. A change agent is someone who can see others as whole and perfect and powerful. I believe those who recognize and call forth the greatness in others will be the architects of our future," said Stacey.Join us in conversation with this heart-centered pioneer of change on June 8, in conversation with Kimberly Daniel.
Traversing through time and space, and through humanness to the beyond, listening is a powerful and underrated practice. So says author, educator, and cultural activist Christian McEwen. She prefers to use the word "listening" not simply for the work of our ears, but as an extended metaphor for openness and receptivity - less actual than symbolic, less physical than metaphysical - rippling out from the self-centered human to the farthest reaches of the non-human world.In her latest work, In Praise of Listening (2023), she offers many accounts of listening as a pathway to realities forgotten and hidden, ranging from intimate anecdotes about family and friends to transformational social narratives from researchers, healers, activists, and more. The book tracks the endangered practice of listening through literature, Buddhism, nature writing, science, and sociology, including interviews with writers and therapists, naturalists, storytellers, and musicians.Christian's latest work might be seen as a cousin to her earlier, popular book, World Enough & Time: On Creativity and Slowing Down (2011), now in its second edition. "From the beginning, I was concerned with how slowness might intersect with happiness, and then again with creativity," Christian writes in World Enough. "Like the English composer Brian Eno, I wanted to find a way of living in 'a Big Here and a Long Now.' It was obvious from the start that this would not be easy."Strewn with a delicious assortment of quotes on slowing down - ranging from Lily Tomlin to Gandhi to Rumi - World Enough also gave rise to a separate book of quotes celebrating slowness, aptly titled The Tortoise Diaries.Growing up in the Scottish countryside, perhaps it was the quietude of her childhood - or its contrast with the fast-paced life in New York she witnessed as a young adult - that drew her life to dedicate her life to listening. Even in her early work as a poet, listening was key to expressing what is experienced beyond the immediately visible. Her writing draws attention to minute everyday subtleties and deeply felt personal experiences. Pausing to listen to a snail as it munches on a leaf, or to a hyacinth growing loudly in its pot, she brings together many different stories of people who've learned to listen and attune.Her work grapples with a range of topics, including gender. In 2004, she co-produced a video documentary titled Tomboys! that celebrates "tomboys of all ages" - highlighting real-life stories of feisty girls who grew up to be spirited women. At the start of the documentary, you can hear Christian's crisp, enchanting voice, "When I was a child, I was what people called a tomboy. The word itself seemed magical to me: fiery, disobedient, gloriously untidy." She's also written a play Legal Tender: Women & the Secret Life of Money (2014), based upon personal interviews with more than fifty women about their relationship with money - intended as a creative catalyst, modeling courage and honesty for its listening audience, both through the play itself and through a linked project known as "The Money Stories" workshops.Christian's thesis as a writer and producer is simple: stories give rise to other stories, and courage and clarity inspire more of the same. She has edited four anthologies, including The Alphabet of the Trees: A Guide to Nature Writing and Sparks from the Anvil: The Smith College Poetry Interviews, based on a series of interviews she conducted with visiting poets. She has written for The Nation, The Village Voice, and numerous other journals, including The Edinburgh Review of Books and the Shambhala Sun.Growing up in the Borders of Scotland "in a big old-fashioned house" with "beautiful shabby rooms and scented gardens" and "a perpetual drone of adult anxiety about school fees and taxes and the latest heating bill," Christian first came to the United States on a Fulbright Scholarship. She has taught poetry and creative writing at a number of venues, including Williams College in Massachusetts, the Zen Mountain Monastery in Upstate New York, and the Scottish Poetry Library in Edinburgh. She has also worked as a writer-in-the-schools for ALPS and the Teachers & Writers Collaborative. Christian has been a fellow, several times, both at the MacDowell Colony, and at Yaddo. In 2011, she received a grant in playwriting from the MA Cultural Council.In all her work, she continues to encourage the reader to take a moment to stop and listen. "In a world of racket and distraction, generous, expansive listening is increasingly under siege. But it remains a skill worth honoring, worth passing on...Many an old story begins with the words, 'Long ago, when animals could speak....' Perhaps the corollary would be just as good an opening.... 'Long ago, when people could listen.'"Join us for a slow conversation with this ardent listener, as we co-create a circle to reclaim this ancient medicinal practice.
After an inspiring Awakin Call with Madhu Anziani last month, Reinaldo, Madhu and a few more heartful artists are coming back for a unique experiment -- A musical immersion into the three worlds of shamanic journey, through singing, chanting and drumming. About Three Worlds: As per Inca mythology, we inhabit three worlds simultaneously, and many other spiritual practices discuss the “middle path” in a similar way. These worlds are said to exist within us and all around us:Ukhupacha: the “lower world,” that of our unconscious and house of psychological wounds, ancestral baggage, past life influences, and as-yet-realized potential (snake energy)Kaypacha: the “middle world,” which might define the tapestry for our everyday experiences; the primal energy of this world is survival, but when balanced and secure, we can focus on mindfulness and present-moment awareness (puma power).Hanaqpacha: the “upper world,” also known as the world of our becoming, future potential, and possibilities; this may also be a link to where our destiny or purpose feels in alignment with our actions, as if we are “divinely inspired” (condor symbolism).Our hope is co-create a vibrational field for a deeper integration of the three worlds, within and without and we welcome you to join the experiment. Please note that this will be a 75-minute call, including some space for open-mic chants. About Reinaldo: Reinaldo Pamponet is a Brazilian social entrepreneur and an Ashoka fellow. After working with Microsoft for seven years in Sao Paulo, at the age of thirty, he founded “Eletrocooperativa” in 2004 in Salvador, an impoverished northeastern region of Brazil, to offer an innovative learning atmosphere to youth that better prepares them to be active members of society. After educating on themes related to sustainable development, they were challenged to engage their dormant creativity (like singing!) to produce digital multimedia content to drive social awareness, while also promoting their cultural arts and generating income. The project went viral and was later adopted by the government of Brazil. Building on that, he founded ItsNoon in 2009, a social network to connect people at opposite ends of the economic pyramid, helping those at the bottom earn income using digital technology. He’s recently moved to the United States with his wife and two children. Music has always been a integral part of Reinaldo’s life – spiritually, professionally and in community. He calls himself “a terrible musician, a good singer” and one who can play almost any instrument, with his favourite being Afro drums.About Madhu: Madhu is a gifted musician, composer, and sound healer. At the age of 23, a few months short of graduating with a degree in jazz and world music from San Francisco State University, a serious accident left him paralyzed from the neck down, incontinent, and unable to breathe on his own. From his hospital bed, he began to apply sound and energy healing practices, together with his family, discovering the true power of vibration to restore health. A few months later, he walked out of the hospital on his own two legs, an extraordinary healing journey featured in a book on energy medicine. Since his recovery, Madhu has been bringing harmony, vibration, and healing to the world as a vocal looping artist, hypnotherapist, sound healer, and ceremonialist. He is certified in sound, voice, and music from the California Institute of Integral Studies. He has also studied with elders and masters in multiple traditions, including the Pachakuti Mesa tradition of Ancestral Peruvian Healing Arts and Wisdom Healing Qigong. The many ancient languages in which he chants include Sanskrit, Tibetan, Shipibo, Quechua, and Hebrew. For his full bio and recent Awakin Call conversation/toning workshop, please click here. To join, simply RSVP below. You'll be able to see the Zoom link on screen, and it will also be emailed to you.In service,Awakin Call Volunteers P.S. Meanwhile, you can soak in a couple of recent clips from our guests - here and here.
"As a Westerner, my heart was lifted in the 1980s when I heard about Sarvodaya. It answered my longing for a way to transform our very individualistic and materialistic culture. Thus began my own 40-year journey to translate Dr. Ari's principles into American cities." - Richard FlyerA disciple of the late, recently deceased Dr. A.T. Ariyaratne, who was informally revered as the Gandhi of Sri Lanka, Richard Flyer has dedicated his life to integrating embodied spirituality and the building of community-based ecosystem networks.Author of Birthing the Symbiotic Age: An Ancient Blueprint for a New Creation (2023), he synthesizes his learnings from five decades of experiments and explorations across different nations, wisdom traditions, and organizational structures, seeking a shift from a culture of separation to a culture of connection. The book provides his autobiographical and historical roadmap outlining "how we can emerge from our fragmented and conflicted social networks/silos and create sustainable, interconnected ecosystem networks consisting of local leaders, organizations, businesses, and local government -- in parallel to our already established systems." He concludes that a new culture of connection can only be created from the bottom up by connecting and amplifying the positive work of local communities. Realizing that every crisis in the world is at its root a spiritual crisis, he writes that we must first cultivate "spiritual climate change" within ourselves and practice it daily "in the context of a down-to-earth, face-to-face, local community" rather than "trying to reform, fix, or tear down the systems by which society operates."Birthing the Symbiotic Age is partly based upon Richard's first-hand experiences with Sarvodaya Shramadana, an ongoing grassroots movement in Sri Lanka, founded in 1958 by the late Dr. Ariyaratne. The movement has mobilized millions of poor across 15,000 villages in Sri Lanka to build tens of thousands of small businesses, preschools, health centers, village banks, etc., without any government support -- restoring to the poorest people "control over their own lives and destinies.""Meanwhile, I've gotten to experience Sarvodaya's wise theme and motto time and time again: We build the road, and the road builds us," says Richard. In addition to his decades-long involvement in various regenerative projects in Sri Lanka, Richard has been engaged with a syntropic food forest project in Big Island, Hawaii, and a Local Food System Network in Oahu. He is also the visionary behind Symbiotic Culture Lab, which aims to activate 50,000 micro-bioregional villages, towns, and cities as community networks by 2033.In reflecting on Dr. Ariyaratne's unique impact flowing from the blend of personal spirituality with community-based practice --which inspired Richard's own desire to develop and embody spirit in his community-building work in the West -- Richard writes, "Dr. Ari is an example of living a spiritual life wherein one does not have to make the ego smaller by beating it into submission. Rather, by living a daily, engaged Spiritual AND community life -- being of service to others, with all its challenges and egos involved, and by seeing everyone as sisters and brothers -- our ego identification with everyone keeps growing until it disappears!"Born into a middle-class Jewish family in the 1960s, Flyer enjoyed a typical American childhood until he had his first spiritual experience at the age of twelve. "I connected to a 'Luminous Web' that I recognized as the Ultimate Reality beyond that which we see and feel with our senses. The experience was truly 'trance-ending' -- ending the trance of separation. I was left awestruck and feeling connected to something larger than myself -- in fact, connected to everything." Rather than retreating from the material world after such an "other-worldly" experience, he writes that he "ran TOWARD the world. I was fueled by the desire to embody the Love I had received from those transcendent experiences and be that Love in the world -- to bring the two worlds I have been experiencing together as one."Richard's experiments in "connecting the Transcendent with the Immanent" or "bringing Heaven to Earth" extend well beyond Sri Lanka's villages -- including when he found himself stuck in a confrontation of drug dealers armed with baseball bats, knives, and guns. He also founded Vecinos Unidos (Neighbors United), a non-profit initiative in a high-poverty and high-crime community of 50,000 people in San Diego, and subsequently led San Diego Food Bank, one of the county's largest nonprofit social service agencies. Overcoming his own prejudice and negative feelings about "the business world", he even started his family business in the medical industry in Reno, Nevada, where he parallelly engages in creating in local symbiotic networks by customizing his learnings from Sri Lanka -- a developing country, for an "overdeveloped" western city context.In addition to Dr. Ari, many teachers have graced his journey, including a Vietnam war Veteran in San Diego who taught him about Christianity and service; an Aztec medicine woman in Mexico who taught him what Love and Service in action are; a Tibetan Buddhist Rinpoche who taught him meditation; his wife Marta, who he says "has shown me what unconditional love is."Richard's list of teachers would be incomplete without including nature. After high school, he worked as a Hellitack firefighter at Challis National Forest in Idaho, sometimes rappelling down from a helicopter to fight a blaze and then hiking forty miles back to the station. Years later, he would spend hours in solitude in nature, often with insights bursting forth spontaneously in the form of his poetry. Inspired by Jane Goodall, he spent several years researching pilot whales, often literally immersing himself in their society around Catalina Island. He also pursued a master's degree in biology, seeking to unravel the mystery of whale and dolphin communication.The call will be moderated by Rick Brooks and Preeta Bansal. Rick is the co-founder of the Little Free Library project, a movement that has spawned 60,000 registered Little Free Libraries in all U.S. states and over 80 other countries. Preeta is an Awakin Calls anchor and has served for more than 25 years in some of the most senior posts in the public and private sectors including the White House and the U.S. Supreme Court. Join us for a conversation with this visionary leader, community weaver, and student of nature.
**Please note special time for this call. Lucy Grace never intended to embark upon a formal spiritual path. Yet again and again, she felt called deeper into it.Raised by a young, single mother in an impoverished neighborhood in New Zealand, Lucy experienced significant trauma throughout childhood. Her neighborhood was riddled with gang violence and burglaries. Her mother worked at a secondhand shop, and meager earnings meant they sometimes went without food, heat, furniture, or schoolbooks - much less trips or vacations. They did not have the means for a car until Lucy turned fourteen.Despite the violence and trauma Lucy experienced and witnessed, she often felt joyful as a child. She also had a keen sense that though she didn't fit, she was in the wrong place. As an only child without much exposure to the world beyond her immediate surroundings, Lucy discovered the gift of spaciousness within herself. She describes her relative isolation as a kind of "welfare-child ashram". In her poem, "Kairos Time," she wrote, "I lived my whole life / on a whim and a dime / - on God's time / found solace and / wonderment / in the light that lives / inside the darkest quiet."Since childhood, Lucy has lived many lives, including graduating from college and working as a television journalist for New Zealand's largest national news channel, Channel One News. For 15 years, she worked as a humanitarian aid worker based in Europe for UNICEF, Save the Children, Fairtrade, and Oxfam. She has worked in orphanages and disaster zones around the world, helping to bring relief to people who are suffering.Returning to New Zealand in her early thirties, Lucy navigated a sudden debilitating illness with no recognizable cause. When she was thirty-six, she became a mother and experienced a sense of total separation in which she felt severed from the inner guidance that had accompanied her since she was a child. Many of the things she loved - including her career, marriage, and home - also came to an end during this time.But with a gentle cheerfulness, Lucy sees that her whole life has been about attuning to nature's messages - and learning to move with them. "There are things that want to happen and we can feel that pull," she has said. "And the plans of life are always so much more amazing and incredible than little Lucy's brain can think up."Today, Lucy is a spiritual guide who humbly observes that we are, each of us, teachers. She is also a mystic, holistic therapist, and the author of This Untameable Light, a book of poems that, in Adyashanti’s words, “shine with the light of deeply embodied spirit. A dance of light upon the land.” She is based in New Zealand and offers occasional retreats in other parts of the world, helping "unlock and integrate" the unique truths and wisdom in each of us.Join us on April 27 for a call with this mystic poet and deeply relatable spiritual guide, who regards her mother and daughter as her greatest gurus. My Mothers’ love ...I love you—in all your ways and always will!She taught me God will too, you will too, life will too, no matter what I am, aren't, do or don't do.And what else is there?Somewhere in my marrow is the sense that all of life is benevolentand it loves me like she did, without exception, without expectation-conditionlessShe gave me unearned-love's freedom, no life-lines to toe, no scripts to follow.So who needs dollars and cents?That's her gift, that'sinheritance...Thank you ...We are all haunted, grace-filled beings-I was just trying to live with the hauntings, wasn't seeking, anything.But you brought me to my knees, you broke me bodily (the heart was just the half of it.)You opened me,white flagged the wars in me.My three-foot guru, in gumboot feet...The call will be moderated by our volunteers Mark Peters, and Mili Nair, a young teenager "exploring life through the wonders of sentences and words, periods and exclamation marks"!
**Please note this call is on Friday, rather than our usual Saturdays."Losing all of the basic functions of being a human being was the greatest teacher," says musician and composer Madhu Anziani. "It was an opportunity to go fully into the teachings I had received around energy, sound, and vibration."In a baseball cap, hoodie, and jeans, Madhu stands behind a table, singing, swaying, and commanding a loop station, easy and natural as can be. There are no visible signs of his serious accident at the age of 23, during which a broken neck and spinal cord injury left him paralyzed from the neck down, incontinent, and unable to breathe on his own. Left only with his mind and its despairing thoughts, amid a flurry of emotions and poor prognoses, Madhu was forced to discover the gaps between his thoughts. And to realize the immense healing potential of his voice.At the time, Madhu was just about to graduate from San Francisco State University with a degree in jazz and world music performance. He had also just attended his first reiki workshop, a Japanese form of energy healing. Supported by his parents and community, Madhu began to apply sound practices. From his hospital bed, he practiced or listened to them day and night. Two and a half months later, upon his discharge, he walked out of the hospital on his own two legs, an extraordinary healing that was featured in the book, Energy Medicine, by Jill Blakeway. With humility and grace, he distills the process to this: "The primary purpose of a voice is to create vibration. We have this beautiful gift, and we can either create harmony or disharmony." Since his recovery, Madhu has been bringing harmony in a myriad of ways to all dimensions of himself, his ancestors, and the community at large.Madhu was born and raised in a Jewish-Puerto Rican family in the Bay Area, California. When he was in high school, he learned how to meditate from his grandmother. She also taught him how to do toning, an ancient sound healing practice in which vowels are elongated. "The vibrations can heal on the physical level, and can transform the mental, emotional, and spiritual levels, too." There is the sound, he explains, and then the silence between the sounds. The silence allows for the transformation of the sound to integrate more deeply into cellular memory. Toning, he continues, is a way to create space, and this allows us to live our lives with more spaciousness and flow.Madhu is perhaps best known as a vocal looping artist, musician, and composer. He studied jazz and world music at San Francisco State University, and is a regular lecturer there. He chants in numerous ancient languages, including Sanskrit, Tibetan, Shipibo, Quechua, and Hebrew. His music can be found on Spotify and other platforms, as well as under the name The Sami Brothers.Madhu is also a healer and ceremonialist, befitting of his name, which means "sweet nectar of the elders." He offers sessions in clinical hypnotherapy, vocal lessons, sound healing, and ancestral divination. Respectively, he is certified in sound, voice, and music healing from the California Institute of Integral Studies. Sanctioned as a teacher in the Pachakuti Mesa tradition of Ancestral Peruvian Healing Arts, which offers apprenticeship in earth honoring rituals and living in sacred reciprocity with spirits of nature. Blessed by Master Mingtong Gu to teach 5-Organ Sound Healing for emotional purification in the lineage of Wisdom Healing Qigong, Madhu has also been initiated as a stick diviner in the West African Dagara tradition, and serves as a medium between this world, the ancestral world, and the spirits of nature."The whole universe is vibration. So when we make vibrations, we are communicating with the whole universe. We are vibrational beings in a vibrational experience."Please join us with this creative maker of harmony and healing in a call that will be part-conversation, part-workshop, with an invitation to explore sound, vibration, and the essence of being.
**Please note special time for this call."Each 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." - Ajaan GeoffThanissaro Bhikku, an American Buddhist monk of the Kammatthana (Thai Forest) tradition and more commonly known as Ajaan Geoff, embarked on a path outside his mainstream American upbringing soon after graduating from Oberlin College in 1971. Having eschewed the campus activism of his day because he didn't want to follow a crowd, Ajaan Geoff once described the defining issue of the day for him not as being the Vietnam War, but a friend's attempted suicide. When the opportunity to meditate in a religious studies class arose for him, he said "I was ripe for it. I saw it as a skill I could master, whereas Christianity only had prayer, which was pretty hit-or-miss."Born in 1949 as Geoffrey DeGraff, he grew up in Long Island where his father had a potato farm. After graduating from Oberlin College in 1971 with a degree in European Intellectual History, he traveled to Thailand, where he eventually came to study meditation under Ajaan Fuang Jotiko, and then proceeded to become an ordained monk in 1976. His life in the Thai jungles was spartan and the rigorous schedule and training in meditation was a hard one; but it was one that forged monks of a high standard of knowledge and skill in the practice.The Thai Forest tradition is known for upholding the strict standards of 200+ precepts of external conduct for monks as originally laid out by the Buddha, called the Vinaya. For example, the monks don't handle money and cannot ask for anything that is not freely offered; eat only one meal a day, before noon; do not spend time alone with a woman, or drive. In his early days as a monk, Ajaan Geoff himself didn't think much of the Vinaya. "They were just rules I had to put up with if I wanted to stay in Thailand and meditate. But then I began to see that every time something went wrong in the community, it was because someone had broken a rule. I also began to see the rules as protection for me in my practice."Five years after this teacher's death, he left Thailand and came to San Diego County, USA, in 1991 at Ajaan Suwat's invitation to help establish Metta Forest Monastery. It is the first monastery in the Thai Forest Tradition in the U.S. Ajaan Geoff was appointed as its Abbott in 1993. Nestled among groves of avocado trees with a spectacular view of Mt. Palomar, the monastery serves as a place of apprenticeship for the monks to master their inner worlds through meditation and the practice of vinaya.For thousands of outsiders who come to the monastery for visits and stays each year, it offers an opportunity to engage and live around monks who have dedicated their lives to cultivate virtue, concentration and discernment. They meditate, receive the teachings and make offerings. All of this happens in a completely non-transactional way, that Ajaan Geoff calls an economy of gifts, "an atmosphere where mutual compassion and concern are the medium of exchange; and purity of heart, the bottom line." This also helps them keep the practice and teaching in its pure form without getting commoditized in accordance with popular likes and dislikes. "In this country of ours, where democracy and the marketplace are all-powerful, the question of what sells determines what's Dhamma, even if it can't walk or fly. And who loses out? We lose out. The Dhamma doesn't lose out; it's always what it is."Ajaan Geoff is also a prolific author of books and essays on both Buddhist practice and theory. The topics range from those that have everyday use, such as meditation guides (With Each And Every Breath), to how to deal with aging, illness and dying (Undaunted), to more niche topics, such as the Buddha's use of humor in his teachings (The Buddha Smiles), and the influence of Western Romanticism in the way Buddhism is taught in the west (Buddhist Romanticism). In addition, he is a well-respected scholar and Translator of the original Buddhist Pali scriptures. In keeping with the Forest Tradition, all his books, essays and daily dhamma talks are offered freely through their website.Join us for a wisdom talk with this inspiring teacher, moderated by Jay Patel and Rahul Brown.
**Please note special time for this call.As Parag Agarwal started moving up in his 35-year global career with Fortune 500 corporations, he began to notice a lot of suffering around him. “I used to sit in a car with my son next to me playing with a toy while there were kids outside who were begging. Pretty early on, I decided I wanted to do something for the vulnerable.” His heart’s journey started with helping educate underprivileged children. But when his niece sent him videos showing how animals are abused in our society, “it opened a door of awareness for me which cannot be closed.” He decided to dedicate “the second innings of his life” to reducing the suffering faced by animals in India. In 2022, while also serving in his current role as CFO of Dr. Reddys, a multi-billion dollar Indian multinational pharma company, he co-founded India Animal Fund with the blessings of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. India Animal Fund is a backbone organization for ecosystem development of the animal protection movement in India. It works to reduce animal exploitation – including their use for consumption, as objects of research and testing, and other forms of labor – and to enable them to live a life of dignity without fear, hunger, or confinement. “No one gets up thinking I am going to exploit and be cruel to an animal today,” he reflects. “But somehow it has become part of the system… The suffering of animals is intense.” In a relatively short period of time, IAF has been able to mobilize various stakeholders and has positively impacted the lives of thousands of animals. Parag has co-founded several other social impact organizations in this area, including Ahimsa Trust (an organization to catalyze more investment and leadership talent in the field of animal welfare), Plant-based Foods Industry Association (an industry body of plant-based alternatives start-ups), and Physicians’ Association for Nutrition (a body of doctors that educates medical professionals about nutrition). Another pivotal turning point in his life came more recently, when he sat a 10-day Vipassana meditation retreat followed by extensive reading of Buddha's original teachings about the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path. “This has been the start of my real inner transformation. I feel as if I have just taken a few steps on a very long and beautiful path.” Parag is a Chartered Accountant and a Company Secretary and has previously been associated with organizations such as Reckitt, Unilever, GSK Consumer Healthcare & Genpact. He is also the founder of TAP India Foundation with the vision of an India where no child is out of school. Parag’s family has taken a pledge to share 50% of their net worth with society, and are signatories to Living My Promise. Join us for a conversation with this passionate vegan and a voice for the vulnerable. The conversation will be moderated by former Awakin Calls guests Ariel Nessel and Rev. Bonnie Rose. Ari is currently focused on advancing the alternative proteins sector to address animal cruelty. Bonnie is a minister with Ventura's Center for Spiritual Living and has recently authored a book titled Dances with Dogs.
Mary Ann Brussat learned as a young teenager how to see the sacred in the everyday, and in every culture and context. When her South Dakota-based family moved to Karachi, Pakistan, in the early 1960s so her father, a physician, could work with a USAID-affiliated project for Pakistani doctors, Mary Ann became foundationally trained to be open to and aware of the beauty in the ordinary. She met local Pakistanis through the interdenominational church her family attended, the bazaars, villages, and people right next door -- and began recognizing the sign of the universal connection in that new land and people. "Our family used to say that every time we left our house in Karachi, we would see something we had never seen before," she reflects. "And it was the little things I was most fascinated by."Along with her husband Frederic Brussat, Mary Ann for the past several decades has co-architected SpiritualityandPractice.com (S&P), an excavation of cultural and spiritual resources across faith, culture, and ethnic lines. The website's curation of materials -- from quotations and poems, to reviews of books and films, to virtual courses by leading wisdom teachers -- serve as insightful companions for those on spiritual journeys.She lives and works with the tenet that eternal, universal truths are not localized to holy places. extraordinary acts, or a special day in the week. Instead, they are embedded in our contemporary lives -- in signs, symbols, poems, music, films, rituals, places, daily chores, and relationships. She believes anyone can develop the capacity to connect with the passage of spirit through the quotidian landscape - if they are open to "start where they are." The crux of cultivating this spiritual perspective is to entrain our cognitions -- a subtler form of re-cognition -- to relate anew with the materials of our day-to-day lives.She shares: "a snowflake melting, a bee sucking honey, a seemingly ordinary (hu)man at a traffic light giving you directions. That's it to me. Little acts. Everyday things. Moments when we feel connected to something greater than our individual selves. Times when we serve others." Her lens of perception shares roots with diverse religious traditions and also upholds secular and spiritual sensibilities. "Sufi mystics share that the fingerprint of the beloved is in everything," she shares, "whereas Islam holds that everything that happens inside and outside of us is 'a letter to be read', and medieval monks called it reading the book of the world." In that sense, the practice of being open to the sacred in everyday, ordinary reality propels a multi-faith worldview.This goal speaks through Spiritual Literacy: Reading the Sacred in Everyday Life, a book she and Frederic co-authored in 1996 as a collection of more than 650 examples of spiritual perspectives on everyday experience. They introduced the Alphabet of Spiritual Literacy -- 37 spiritual practices that are common across world religions. In 1999, a Canadian film company turned the Brussats' Alphabet of practices into a 26-episode television series. Soon after, the Brussats wrote Spiritual Rx: Prescriptions for Living a Meaningful Life, an experiential book that helps readers explore practices befitting their particular path.Mary Ann is an interfaith Minister ordained by the One Spirit Interfaith Seminary and a 'Christian-Sufi' Initiate of the Mevlevi Sufi Order that traces its inspiration to Mevlana Jelaluddin Rumi. She remains actively attuned to the idea that "in our era of extreme polarization, we need to find points of connection among groups." She and Frederic, who is a United Church of Christ clergyman, have embraced a far-sighted view of their work from the get-go. They arrived in New York City in 1969 with no jobs and to dream up their own careers at the intersection of spirituality and culture. This was largely unheard of -- but they were persistent. Together they brought along interests and degrees in philosophy, history, media and arts, religion, and political science.In 1972, they started their first publication Cultural Information Service (CIS) where they reviewed movies, books, and events. They described it as a "monthly rendezvous with serious art which offers us opportunities to deepen our perceptions, expand our vision." As their creative approach rippled across New York, they began producing educational materials and television guides -- eventually working with leading media houses to launch a constellation of projects merging the internet, art, media, and spirituality. Their work eventually culminated in SpiritualityandPractice.com, which consolidated previous newsletters and websites to establish sections on more than 2000 spiritual practices. Bonus: Enjoy this 2018 review Mary Ann wrote for Bruce Springsteen's Broadway show in New York City, and the sermons on place, relationships, and service underpinning the show.Mary Ann is a member of Judson Memorial Church, a United Church of Christ congregation in New York City. Judson's long-standing commitment to arts and social justice for LGBTQ+ and immigrant communities bears special meaning for her. The Brussats live in Pilgrim Place, an intentional community in Claremont, California, since 2015, together with their Maine Coon cats, Rumi and Shams.Come join us for a call with this explorer, culture-shaper, and practitioner of everyday sacred adventures.The call will be moderated by Charles Gibbs, an Episcopal priest and Sufi by adoption and Janessa Gans Wilder, a CIA officer turned peacebuilder.
Life's one non-negotiable is to be loved and to see our love make a difference. - Matthew T. Lee"Are we becoming more fully alive through Education?" After a decade of conventionally successful research and university teaching as a sociologist, Matthew T. Lee, Ph.D., found himself meditating upon this existential question. It triggered a shift in how he showed up in class, and what emerged at Akron University from collaborations with colleagues were Unclasses. He began to meet the students downtown instead of in a classroom. Each class would begin with a heart check-in (and sometimes haikus!). Open space was carved for silence, contemplation, and even rest. As he changed the context, shifts in content naturally followed. His intense course "Conflict and Justice" at Harvard University expanded to "Conflict, Justice and Healing".A sociologist and former criminologist, Matt is one of the leading experts in research on human flourishing - a relative state in which all aspects of a person's life are thriving, including the contexts in which that person lives. To "measure what we truly treasure", he took an interdisciplinary approach integrating quantitative social sciences with the deep wisdom of humanities. Currently, he serves as a Research Associate at the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard University and is co-leading the working group on love and care for the Global Study of Human Flourishing, one of the largest studies of its kind. He is also the Director of Flourishing Network, the program's community of practice. Alongside, he is a Professor of the Social Sciences and Humanities at Baylor University and a Distinguished Visiting Scholar of Health, Flourishing, and Positive Psychology at Stony Brook University, as well as a Visiting Scholar at the Benson-Henry Institute for Mind Body Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital.Matt has extensively researched and written on shifting current extractive systems towards regeneration and "daring to say love". How do we bring the grammar of business into a constructive dialogue with the grammar of love? How might we re-imagine health as flourishing that locates the individual in social, ecological, and spiritual contexts beyond merely the absence of disease? What's the role of creating open spaces in education for greater self-discovery and transformative growth? His most recent three books are: Measuring Well-Being: Interdisciplinary Perspectives from the Social Sciences and the Humanities; The Heart of Religion; and Transcending Crisis by Attending to Care, Emotions, and Flourishing.Underneath the long list of his leadership positions, courses taught, papers published and awards, a simple insight grounds his daily actions - "Every person is infinitely valuable." Join us for an illuminating conversation with this inspiring teacher dedicated to fostering flourishing and well-being in our world. This call will be moderated by our past guest and volunteer Navin Amarasuriya, who is passionate about bringing scientifically evidenced practices of well-being to schools around the world, and into his own heart.[Some useful resources - Measure Your Flourishing Score, Flourishing App, Articles and Journals by Matt. And a couple of recent articles by others that Matt invites you to pre-read for this call --From Accessing Your Ignorance to Accessing Your Love and Fixing The System.]
**Please note special day for this call to accomodate for our guest Moshe's weekly Shabbat practice. "When you're open to meaningful coincidences, opportunities will present themselves to you all the time." Rabbi Moshe GershtRabbi Moshe Gersht found himself at a pivotal decision point early in his life. At 18, he chose to leave school in response to a forced choice between pursuing his passion for music or graduating instead. It was at this crossroad and subsequent ones that he learned there are two things that shape our decisions: how we see ourselves and how we see the world."I wasn't walking about believing in accidents. There were no mistakes in the universe. I was looking for hidden opportunities wherever they could be found. When you're the one looking for silver linings you'll be the one who finds them", said Moshi.By the age of 20, having "made it" as a pop-punk rockstar, Moshi found himself wondering what living a successful life actually entails. This question led him to Jerusalem, where he experienced a spiritual awakening. He went on to spend two decades in Israel immersed in Torah study, prayer, and meditation as well as the mystical teachings of Kabbalah and Chasidus.In bridging his spiritual and mystical studies with an exploration of the inner landscape, Moshe brings a new energy to the journey of personal transformation. Today, he is an international speaker, a meditation guide, and spiritual teacher helping people find fulfillment through self-discovery. The spiritual journey is essentially a journey to ourselves, and in being true to ourselves we are able to live out our highest good. "My mission is to share the life-giving wisdom of unconditional love, by empowering [people] to awaken to a higher consciousness," he said.Many of Moshe's talks share his uniquely holistic approach to a spiritual and fulfilling life. He is a Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestselling author of several books including, It's All the Same to Me, a spiritual self-help guide endorsed by Deepak Chopra, and its companion journal. He also authored The Three Conditions: how Intention, Joy, and Certainty will Supercharge Your Life and the workbook, "The 5 Steps to Manifesting and Co-Creating Your Life".Moshe grew up in an Orthodox household in Los Angeles (U.S.) and currently lives in Israel with his wife and their children, whom he believes he learns as much from as he shares with them.Join us on Feb. 18 for a call with this compassionate spiritual guide.
"Why is it that certain people are vulnerable to life's slings and arrows and why are other people more resilient?" Dr. Richard Davidson, Ph.D, felt guided by this question, and dedicated himself to developing insight into how our brains regulate our emotions.But in 1992, Richard was inspired by the Dalai Lama to revise his initial question and instead consider: What qualities foster well-being? "His Holiness challenged me and asked why we are not using the tools of modern neuroscience to study qualities such as kindness and compassion rather than negative qualities of the mind such as depression and anxiety. I had no good answer, and on that day, I made a commitment to His Holiness and to myself that I would do everything within my power to help place these positive qualities on the scientific map," Richard said.That renewed and refocused commitment has generated ripples of goodness. Named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time Magazine in 2006, Richard founded in 2008 the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he has served as a faculty member and professor since 1984. Richard's research is broadly focused on the neural bases of emotion and methods to promote human flourishing including meditation and related contemplative practices. A prolific researcher, he has authored more than 570 articles, numerous chapters and reviews, and edited 14 books. His research has identified four keys to well-being - resilience, outlook, attention, and generosity - that can be strengthened in each of us through practice.Richard founded Healthy Minds Innovations (HMI), a nonprofit affiliate of the Center for Healthy Minds, in 2014. HMI translates well-being science into tools (including a Kindness Curriculum and the Healthy Minds program and app) to cultivate and measure well-being."I really feel a moral calling [to help people develop well-being as a skill], because I feel most people would agree that the trajectory we've been on is not a particularly healthy or sustainable one. Everyone has a role to play in this, everyone can be a participant, just like with climate science. Everyone can play a constructive role in helping the planet heal," said Richard.Born in Brooklyn, New York, Richard earned his Bachelor's Degree in Psychology from NYU before completing his Ph.D in Personality, Psychopathology, and Psychophysiology at Harvard University. He authored (with Sharon Begley) the New York Times bestseller, The Emotional Life of Your Brain and co-authored Altered Traits with Daniel Goleman. In 2000, Richard was the recipient of the American Psychological Association's prestigious Distinguished Scientific Achievement Award in 2000. He was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2017, and appointed to the Governing Board of UNESCO's Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Education for Peace and Sustainable Development (MGIEP) in 2018.Join us on February 3 for a conversation with this transformative psychologist and well-being advocate.
Please note special day and time for this call."Creation is moving toward us; life is moving toward us all the time. We back away, but it keeps pushing toward us. Why not step forward and greet it?" -Rev. Roshi Joan HalifaxIn a catastrophe-turned-blessing, Roshi Joan Halifax discovered her rich inner world at four years of age when she contracted a virus that left her legally blind for two years. Today, as a Zen Buddhist teacher, anthropologist, ecologist, social justice activist, and hospice caregiver, she demonstrates a deep capacity to hold societal challenges and catastrophes for the blessing of our collective inner as well as outer development and conscious evolution.Born in 1942 in New Hampshire, Roshi Joan started out as a scientist in the field of medical anthropology and psychology. During her university years, she became drawn into participating in the US civil rights movement and in anti-war protests in the 1960s. She was first introduced to Buddhism and meditation when she worked at the Universities of Miami and Columbia, and was instrumental in developing the dialogue between science and Buddhism.Roshi Joan is the founder and abbot of the Upaya Zen Center, a place she calls a "refuge of practice, learning and service for our complicated and fraught world". Upaya is a culturally diverse place, where meditation and compassion meet to reduce suffering and celebrate the gift of life.Realizing early on how much misery is rooted in the fear of death, Joan set an intention to be present for people going through the death and dying process. She became a pioneer in the field of end-of-life care and works in other areas where hope is scarce. She has served as a hospice caregiver and Buddhist teacher in conventional medical centers and other clinics in remote areas, such as the Himalayas, where she has worked with death row inmates and refugees. Joans work with dying people and their relatives as well as her efforts as a social and environmental activist have been recognized and awarded internationally.She is now present as we face collective fears of extinction and death of our social systems, our planetary ecologies, and our very notions of humanity in an age of machines. She is an artist, a prominent author of many books, a teacher, an abbot, and founder of the Nomads Clinic in Nepal. Most of all, though, Roshi Joan is living her Buddhist vision with everything she does. Apathy is not an enlightened path, she says. Instead, she advocates engaged Buddhism, social activism and, most of all, compassion as responses to the multifaceted crises we are confronted with today.Join us for an inspiring conversation with this renowned Buddhist teacher, compassionate caregiver, and social activist.Please note special day and time for this call (Friday instead of Saturday).
Margaret Jacobs grew up in the American West but, like many others, never considered the history of the place she grew up in as particularly interesting or worthy of study. "There was, and still is, so much mythology around" the West, she said. "I had not been interested in this kind of 'boots and spurs' or 'wagon wheels and sunbonnets' type of history."But a pivotal history course in college changed her trajectory. She realized there was much important work being done in the field, and she accepted with curiosity the sense of responsibility and inquiry that came with her self-identification as a descendant of White settlers of Indigenous lands. Jacobs is now an award-winning author, professor of history, and Director of the Center for Great Plains Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln who studies the history of the American West in a transnational and comparative context with a focus on women and gender as well as children and family.Jacobs has published over 35 articles and 3 books, including White Mother to a Dark Race (2009), which won the esteemed 2010 Bancroft Prize. The book concerns government-enforced separation of Indigenous children from their families through the use of distant boarding schools and other institutions, and the role of White as well as Indigenous women with respect to those policies. Her more recent scholarship examines how government authorities in the U.S., Australia, and Canada continued to remove Indigenous children from their families after World War II through foster care and adoptive placements in non-Indigenous families. She also highlights how Indigenous women mobilized transnationally to reclaim the care of their children.Jacobs' most recent projects delve into truth-telling, healing, and reconciliation efforts. Her newest book, After One Hundred Winters: In Search of Reconciliation on America's Stolen Lands, has two goals: to confront the history of American settler colonialism, and to explore possibilities for reconciliation. "I have come to see reconciliation not as a one-time effort that our nation will achieve and then move on," she says. "I see it, indeed, as a practice, as a way of life, in which all of us can engage. This practice is based on considering how the past has shaped us today and how we can work to promote healing and respectful relationships. I'm a big believer that settlers, like myself, should start where we are and use whatever strengths, skills, and resources we possess to practice reconciliation within our own communities and institutions. This must be done in close collaboration and partnership with Indigenous colleagues."For Jacobs, reconciliation is not simply about returning land; "an ongoing sustained relationship" is needed to really achieve reconciliation. She collaborates with Rosebud Lakota journalist Kevin Abourezk on Reconciliation Rising, a multimedia project that showcases Indigenous people and settlers who are honestly confronting painful and traumatic histories, and who are creating pathways to reconciliation, including through voluntary repatriation of land by settlers to Indigenous peoples.She is also the co-founder and co-director of the Genoa Indian School Digital Reconciliation Project, a space for telling the stories of the American Indian children who attended Genoa, the stories of their communities, and the stories of their descendants. The Project, which was featured in The New York Times, aims to repatriate government records of Nebraska's Indian boarding school back to their families and tribal nations, to "bring history home."Jacobs received an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship in 2018 for her project, "Does the United States Need a Truth and Reconciliation Commission?," which compares reconciliation efforts between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in the U.S., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. From 2015-16, she served as the Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions at Cambridge University.Join us in conversation with this "pioneering" scholar and practitioner of historical uncovering and reconciliation.
"Make the world your Temple." In 2019, Sarah Tulivu had been given this clear instruction by two Taoist masters, including her direct teacher, Master Waysun Liao. At the time, Sarah, ordained as Fong Yi, was living and training full-time as a monk in a Taoist temple in Lago Atitlan, Guatemala. For six years, she had practiced meditation and the embodied consciousness practice of taiji (tai chi) in the lineage of Taiji Tao for six to seven hours a day. In the two years prior to her monastic life, Sarah had been a deep student of the Buddhist tradition across Nepal, India, and Thailand. It was now time for her to venture into the world. "Find the Teacher and the Teaching everywhere, and in everyone," said Master Liao.While she considers herself still in training, Sarah has done just that. With her gentle presence, light-filled eyes, and a tender smile, she shares her wisdom in retreats and workshops around the world, mostly in Tuscany, Ireland, Vienna, Lebanon, and Greece. She also returned to be part of the world of humanitarian aid, which she had been doing in East Africa and the Middle East before her immersion in contemplative practice. This second time around, Sarah was called to conflict in regions -- like the border of Lebanon and Syria during the Lebanese Revolution (2019-2020), and again in 2021. Sarah also led Taiji Tao practices in support of the aid workers, addressing burnout and healing at its root. She has seen how cultivating inner stillness and harmonizing the complementary forces within can sustain the great need for compassionate service.For her early childhood, Sarah was in Canada and Italy. Despite Catholic influences in the Italian town of her upbringing, her family didn't observe any particular spiritual or religious traditions. At 16, Sarah began to travel, and she encountered many different traditions and approaches to the spirit. She never felt herself an "-ist" of any particular doctrine, but rather, embracing the diversity of ways to find truth, love, service, freedom, and beauty. For Christianity, "it was only when I was in Kenya, in a slum of Nairobi," she reflects, "that I met the life of Jesus through different eyes, thanks to the volunteers there who lived his teachings in a very different way than what I had seen growing up. For example, I was reminded that Jesus lived with the poor and the marginalized, and spoke up to oppressive powers."When she moved to the Tao Temple at 24 years old, it happened in a very organic way, just as the "natural consequence, the natural next step in my journey." A monastic lifestyle seemed to be the best fit for her priority of "waking up," so she followed the call. The tradition happened to be Taiji Tao. Taiji, Sarah explains, is often translated as "the unlimited, absolute, boundless..." Similar to other wisdom traditions, Taiji Tao is a path that aims to return us to our origin, to our most natural state, which means to return us to a state of harmony, balance, and union of the yin (feminine) and yang (masculine) aspects of ourselves, our communities, and the world at large.For a taste of Sarah's presence and offerings, please explore her introductory video and a series of 10-minute meditations, for all levels.Please join Cynthia Li and Rohit Rajgarhia for this special offering -- part conversation, part workshop on taiji and embodied consciousness practice -- as a response to the great challenges and the great flux in the world.
The thread binding together Shaylyn Romney Garrett's perhaps unorthodox career path - spanning diverse fields of research, writing, activism and social entrepreneurship - is community. "I've studied it, experimented with it, been fascinated by it, and been frightened by it," she says, adding poignantly, "I often feel that community is something I have thought more about than almost anyone but have less of than almost everyone."After a profound 3-year personal healing journey, Shaylyn experienced the wisdom in the old adage "If you want to go far, go together." In 2019, she decided to spend a year engaging in a series of radically simple but transformative monthly challenges to shift from "I" to "We" - 15-minute connections, meeting her neighbours and hosting dinner parties - giving birth to Project Reconnect. When suicide rates, bullying, loneliness and polarization are on the rise, Shaylyn believes that such everyday interactions are where we do the "heart work" required to transform our hyper-individualistic culture and reclaim the power of "We."Shaylyn is a co-author along with best-selling author Robert D. Putnam of The Upswing: How America Came Together A Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again, which has been acclaimed "a magnificent and visionary book," and "a must-read for those who wonder how we can reclaim our nation's promise" to once more turn the tide from "I" to "We". Her writing also includes uniquely revealing portraits of religious communities across the United States in American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us, which won Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson Award for best political science book of 2010-11. Her thoughtful opinions, writing, and research have been featured in numerous outlets including TIME Magazine, The New York Times, National Public Radio, BBC Radio, and the PBS Newshour.She is also the founder of Project Reconnect and a founding contributor to David Brook's Weave: The Social Fabric Project, an Aspen Institute initiative. Formerly, along with her husband, she co-founded Think Unlimited, a nonprofit in Jordan that helped thousands of young Arabs find their voice and their place as changemakers in their countries and the world. It won multiple international awards while also partnering with the Queen of Jordan.Shaylyn holds a BA magna cum laude in Government from Harvard University, and is a returned Peace Corps volunteer. She’s also a certified Holistic Health Coach, as well as a permaculturalist who loves to get her hands in the dirt, and thinks a lot about healthy soils as a metaphor for healthy human communities. She now lives in Southern New Hampshire with her husband James Garrett, their daughter Sophie and son Aeon, and their loyal dog Dewey (named for John Dewey, one of her favorite Progressives!)Join Shayna Parekh and David Bonbright for a conversation with this remarkable author, planting seeds for a new story of "we" in the garden of her own life and that of others.
Cornelius Pieztner, currently a high-impact financial professional, spent the first 45 years of his life at Camphill - a network of intentional communities co-founded by his father Carlos Pietzner. The communities were designed for children and youth with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Through his interactions and work with teenagers with pronounced developmental disabilities, Cornelius realized that his primary work was not to fix the "other", but to work on himself to cultivate tolerance, acceptance, and love."The inner aspect of community" as he calls it, became one of the central inquiries of his life and work - "What would be needed for an aggregation of people to understand themselves and experience themselves as a community of people?"For more than 30 years, Cornelius has carried this inquiry into leading roles at the intersections of philanthropy, investment, social impact enterprises, transformative education focusing on the well-being of the planet, and commercial ventures toward a human-centered economy. Currently, he serves as the CEO of Alterra Impact Finance GmbH, an impact investment, management, and advisory firm in Switzerland with private equity investments in several European companies. Until 2021, he served as Managing Director of Mind & Life Europe, founded by the Dalai Lama. He also served as Chief Financial Officer on the Executive Board at the Goetheanum, General Anthroposophical Society, Switzerland (2002-2011), with affiliates in 90 countries and approximately 10,000 related institutions in agriculture, medicine, and therapy, (Waldorf) education, ethical banking and business, and the arts. He was the President of Camphill (life-sharing) Communities in North America.Growing up in a community that had no concept of individual ownership or income, Cornelius also developed a deep interest in understanding money and working with it in new ways to foster greater belonging. His earliest experiment was to set up a youth group fund with the principle, "put what you can, take what you need". His various leadership roles in finance have been guided by his vision of "positive economy" to catalyze a shift from consumerism to "enoughness", rationality to wisdom, and self-interest to compassion for others.Cornelius is also the steward of the Pietzner Art Collection, composed of over 1,500 artworks from his father and several other revolutionary artists. He is a partner at NOW Partners and serves as a member of the Board of Directors of the Karl Konig Institute in Berlin Germany, among other privately held European companies. He has also served on Advisory Boards for Gross National Happiness Center in Bhutan, B Corps Europe, Partnering for Global Impact, and OOOM World. He is the author and editor of several books (Candle on the Hill, Village Life) and presents on various topics in conferences internationally. Born in Northern Ireland in 1957 and having grown up in Pennsylvania, USA, he received his degree (Highest Honors) in Political Science from Williams College, Mass., and was awarded a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship. Pietzner lives near Basel, Switzerland and Vienna, Austria.Join Birju Pandya and Susan Clark in conversation with this remarkable agent of change, impact investor, and community builder.
"Disability is not the characteristic that defines you; it's the characteristic that others project onto you, and it's up to us to change those perceptions." - Haben GirmaAs the first deafblind graduate from Harvard Law School, Haben Girma aims to help eradicate "ableism" in society, the assumption that disabled people are inferior. "We are not inferior. But society often sends this message," she says. Now a distinguished human rights lawyer advocating for disability justice, she is an internationally recognized beacon of empowerment and inclusivity - appealing not to a sense of charity, but rather to a belief in societal opportunity and the creative potential that comes from honoring the multi-sensory nature of human perception.Haben reminds business leaders that disabled persons spark growth and innovation. "Employees with disabilities drive innovation. Disability creates a constraint, and embracing constraints spurs inventive solutions," she wrote in The Financial Times. "Our history has numerous examples of people with disabilities leading advances in science, technology and other fields."And she notes that many of the tools developed by people with disabilities benefit non-disabled colleagues as well. One of the first working typewriters, for example, was developed by a couple - a sighted man and blind woman - who sought to send secret love letters to one another. "After much deliberation, the lovers came up with a tactile solution. By treating blindness as a design challenge, they developed a revolutionary method for producing print by touch." Similarly, a blind astronomer developed a non-visual system for studying stellar radiation, converting complex data from space into sound - a system that expands the pattern detecting techniques for sighted astronomers as well.Haben has transformed disability into opportunity at the cutting edge of many innovations herself. She came up with the idea of having transliterators in the classroom who would narrate discussion for her using an assistive listening system into her headphones (Haben can hear higher pitched sounds) so that she could follow the back and forth of the debate. Going further, Haben aided in development of an ingenious text-to-braille communication system using a braille device connected to a keyboard so that people can type her messages, or their speech can be transcribed such that she can then converse with them. Along the way, she's developed both personal non-visual systems for understanding things as varied as salsa dancing, rock climbing, and handling electric saws.Her graduation from Harvard Law catapulted Haben into the global spotlight, and she was subsequently honored by President Obama as a White House Champion of Change. Former President Clinton, Prime Justin Trudeau, and Chancellor Angela Merkel have also formally recognized her innovative work and advocacy. Her journey from a child learning to communicate through touch to a formidable Harvard Law graduate ignited her passion for justice and equal access, and is upliftingly captured in her memoir, Haben: The Deafblind Woman Who Conquered Harvard Law- a Publisher's Weekly Bestseller and Oprah Magazine "Book of the Month" favorite.Haben's influence extends beyond her individual achievements; it resides in her pursuit of systemic change. She works to ensure that technology is a tool for all, not a barrier. As a leading advocate for digital accessibility, Haben collaborates with tech giants and governments to make websites, software, and products user-friendly for people with disabilities. Her impact is not confined to legal frameworks; it spans across industries.Born in California to an Eritrean mother and Ethiopian father, Haben's life journey has been a testament to the power of embracing the creative potential of uniqueness to forge unexpected connections. Her advocacy for disability rights has paved the way for a more accessible and compassionate world. Her work, as she aptly puts it, is about "changing the way we think about disability" - a mission that reverberates far beyond the classroom and courtroom.Join us in conversation with this trailblazer whose journey of empowerment and advocacy has touched hearts across the globe. **Note: This call will be 60 minutes, to support the hands and wrists of the typists assisting with the call.
"For a child who has been struggling to read, discovering how to crack the code of reading is like learning to do a magic spell that suddenly opens the whole world to you. You are getting a passport to an entirely different future in which you can trust your ability to shape your life, and change your world." -- Rayna DineenA passionate educator, social innovator, and children's literacy advocate, Rayna Dineen has infused her humanitarian and professional passion for lifting up young children with a sense of service guided by a deep spiritual practice. At a time when two thirds of 4th graders in the United States are unable to read proficiently at grade level -- and with illiteracy a major pipeline for unemployment, incarceration, and homelessness -- Rayna Dineen holds a vision of a world in which all children are lovingly and effectively supported to become confident readers and emotionally literate citizens.Rayna has dedicated the past 40 years of her life to researching and implementing the art and science of teaching children how to read and thrive. Experience has taught her that all children can learn, regardless of their personal and socio-economic background, the language they speak at home, and whether or not their parents read to them. So her primary focus has always been to support the kids who struggle the most.She currently directs Reading Quest, a Santa Fe-based organization which provides free structured literacy tutoring and social emotional skills to hundreds of undersupported, struggling readers. Reading Quest employs a team of 24 reading specialists who tutor 450 low income students in reading every week. Rayna's creative approach to literacy, which she has finetuned over many years, draws on evidence-based scientific research about the critical importance of phonics, as well as of play, loving community, and a growth mindset. The effectiveness of Reading Quest's approach has been beautifully documented in two short videos: The Story of Reading Quest made by SONY and Breaking the Boundaries of Literacy made by Meow Wolf.What inspired Rayna's passion for teaching children how to read? Several threads have run through her life since she was a child: a love of reading, learning, and teaching; a dedication to the path of seva, or selfless service; and a commitment to social justice and inclusion for those who are often left out.In elementary school, she hosted classes in her family's basement for kids in her neighborhood. In high school, she started a club to help people with disabilities. During her college years, she started a dyslexic students organization, and worked at several schools and camps focused on supporting kids with special needs. Upon graduating, she worked at a residential school for troubled teenagers where she learned a lot about what works and what doesn't work with young people. She went on to get two Masters degrees from Teachers College at Columbia University, including one in Counseling Psychology.It is at Columbia that Rayna met Brian, who was a doctoral student as well as a Transcendental Meditation practitioner and teacher. They bonded over their passion for education, and their mutual desire to live a life of service guided by a deep spiritual practice. Upon getting married, they gave all their belongings away, and embarked on an open-ended pilgrimage to sacred sites around the world, with the intention of meditating for world peace. After a year of traveling through Europe, the Middle East, Pakistan, and Nepal, they arrived in India and were serendipitously introduced to Amma-ji, the hugging saint, who became one of their greatest inspirations on the path of selfless service, and the initial reason they moved to Santa Fe.In 2000, Brian and Rayna founded the Santa Fe School for the Arts & Sciences which they envisioned as a "sanctuary school." Rayna served as a teaching principal there for 13 years. She has also worked as an education consultant for EL Education, a transformational education non-profit serving hundreds of schools in the US. She has consulted for Harlem Village Academies, Heritage and Polymath schools in India, and Discover Learning in Tanzania - a collaboration between Save the Children and UC Berkeley. Rayna contributed to the ELA (English & Language Arts) Primary Literacy Foundation Skills Block portion of the EL Education K-2 curriculum, one of the country's most highly rated ELA curriculums. Rayna later supported a group of middle and high school students to start a literacy campaign called Hooked On Books, and some of the young literacy activists who gave a TEDx talk about that initiative later became Reading Specialists at Reading Quest which she started in 2016.Rayna also provides workshops on teaching reading and positive classroom management for teachers, tutors and parents. She contributed to the writing of Management in the Active Classroom, a highly regarded positive classroom management book for educators. and the EL Education book Learning That Lasts.While working in the trenches of children's literacy for the last few decades, Rayna has given a lot of thought to the question of how to end illiteracy, and has been invited to consult on policy issues at local, state and national levels. She agrees with Oakland-based NAACP activist Kareem Weaver, and the producers of a 2023 documentary titled The Right to Read, that the current literacy crisis is both one of the greatest civil rights issues of our time, as well as one of the most solvable issues of our times. She believes in the power of young people to change our world and loves supporting children as they discover the joy and magic of reading.Join Rahul Brown for a conversation with this dedicated teacher, social innovator, and champion of service.
When Dr. Akil Palanisamy recounts his recovery from a debilitating illness during medical school, he says it began with two words: "bone broth." In hindsight, this may not sound so surprising, because Akil (or "Dr. Akil," as his patients know him) has been a doctor, author, and educator at the forefront of the food-as-medicine movement for the past 20 years. Dr. Akil has been described by leading integrative doctor Mark Hyman as "a unique triple threat in the field," combining expertise in functional medicine, Ayurveda, and the Paleo diet and ancestral lifestyles.At the time that bone broth was given to him as a "prescription," however, Dr. Akil was a vegetarian. He had renounced meat a few years earlier "for ethical, environmental, and spiritual reasons" and had become an active member of the San Francisco Vegetarian Society while in medical school there, having completed his undergraduate work at Harvard. The Ayurvedic practitioner he had sought out for his ailment -- because conventional medicine and physical therapy did not help -- was well aware of this. But she saw it as a necessary means to nourish his depleted body and rebalance his excess "vata" (or "air" energy).Dr. Akil was torn. What had started out as a repetitive stress injury to his wrist -- while writing his senior thesis in biochemistry at Harvard University -- had now escalated into chronic pain, severe fatigue, and a weight loss of 30 pounds (from his already lean baseline of 138). He had to take a prolonged leave of absence from medical school.In his desperation, he turned to the story of the Buddha. After practicing an extreme form of asceticism that left the Buddha weak and near death, he was visited by a milkmaid who offered some milk. Despite the taboos, he accepted the offer and eventually regained his health. The Buddha would go on to teach about "The Middle Way," living by neither indulgence nor deprivation. Dr. Akil reached a similar turning point. He started with bone broth, which he could rationalize as being "animal bones that were to be discarded." Eventually, after more stalled periods of healing, he decided to experiment with eating meat again. "I could not fulfill my dream of becoming a doctor without a healthy body."With a nutrient-dense diet that supported his individual constitution, Dr. Akil tried other alternative and complementary therapies, including a holistic chiropractor who practiced functional medicine -- or root-cause medicine. He would heal his gut, regain his weight, and eliminate the pain for a full recovery, allowing him to graduate from the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine, then complete a residency program at Stanford Medical Center. He went on to receive a fellowship in integrative medicine with Dr. Andrew Weil at the University of Arizona, study Ayurveda in Southern India at the Arya Vaisya Chikitsalayam, and certify in mind-body medicine from the Georgetown University Center.With this breadth and depth of knowledge, Dr. Akil has treated thousands of people living with chronic diseases and conducts clinical research studies. He serves as the Department Chair for Integrative Medicine at the Sutter Health Institute for Health and Healing (IHH) and as IHH Physician Director for Community Education. Dr. Akil has also served as a consultant with the Medical Board of California for many years.A widely known speaker and educator, he is the author of two books, The Paleovedic Diet: A Complete Program to Burn Fat, Increase Energy, and Reverse Disease -- a customized Paleo diet that incorporates spices, specific fruits and vegetables, intermittent fasting, and an Ayurvedic lifestyle -- and most recently, The Tiger Protocol: An Integrative 5-Step Program to Treat and Heal Your Autoimmunity. Dr. Akil lives in Sacramento, CA. In his free time, he enjoys playing tennis, traveling, and spending time with his wife and daughter. Originally from India, he grew up in Singapore before immigrating to America.Join us in conversation with this "Middle Way" practitioner of medicine and healing who is skillfully weaving East and West, ancestral and novel.
No individual can truly thrive without looking inward. The same is true for societies. - Thomas LegrandAuthor and sustainable development leader Dr. Thomas LeGrand invites us to co-create a new development paradigm focused on "being" and human flourishing instead of a materialistic "having." Through his work as a social scientist, spiritual search, and 20 years of professional experience in microfinance and sustainability for the UN and other public and private sector entities, Thomas has come to believe that sustainability and paradigmatic systems change in and across sectors require activating the latent power of inner-transformation. "The inner pathway to change is so foreign to our cultural software, that its potential is left untapped," said Thomas. "And while culture has been referred to as the fourth pillar of sustainable development [...] we understand very little about creating conditions for bringing out the best in humans." Currently, Thomas serves as the Lead Technical Advisor for the Conscious Food Systems Alliance convened by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP). Along with his wife and their two young daughters, he lives near Plum Village, the monastery of their teacher, late Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh, in the South West of France. He also regularly engages as a speaker and consultant on topics focused on spirituality and sustainability, and is an energy healing practitioner.As a young adult, Thomas's "momentary glimpses of life's vast potentiality" remained overshadowed by looming default narratives of fear, insecurities, and loneliness. At the age of 23, he explicitly began a spiritual journey following his profound, serendipitous encounters with shamans of one of the most preserved indigenous people: the Huichols. In their teaching, "All paths are the same: they lead nowhere... Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good; if it doesn't, it is of no use..," Thomas found a new guiding compass for his life and his work.He went on to complete his master's in international development in Paris, and returned to Mexico for nearly three years, working as a microfinance consultant while continuing to learn from shamans. While he appreciated the non-paternalistic way microfinance emphasized empowerment, he also learned that microfinance can be a "beautiful idea conceived for the greater good [that] could easily be transformed into an instrument of exploitation by corrupt minds and systems." Thomas' experience also shaped his understanding that economics can inherently work against environmental sustainability. His calling to serve Mother Earth led him to pursue a Ph.D. in Ecological Economics and a deeper way to pursue paradigmatic change. Parallel to these events, he embraced the wisdom of a wide range of traditions and practices, including meditation, energetic healing and Tai-chi-chuan.Thomas's book, The Politics of Being, published in Dec 2021, synthesizes ten years of his dedicated research and contemplation on radically reframing our model of development to prioritize "being" and human flourishing over having (economic growth) and aligning our institutions "with our true reason for being here on Earth". Along with deep evolutionary insights at the intersection of science and spirituality, the book offers concrete action steps in various sectors of society.Please join David Bullon and Aidyn Laurynz in conversation with this wisdom's seeker, social scientist, and sustainability practitioner.
Please note the special time for this call, to accommodate the time zone of our guests and other Australian participants.Danny Almagor and Berry Liberman are pioneers of impact investing in Australia. In 2007, the married couple founded "Small Giants", a rare 100% impact family office that invests in businesses driving positive impact for people and planet.Sounds like a dream job? But this wasn't the dream they started with.As a child, Danny wanted to be an astronaut. He enrolled in aerospace engineering as an imagined pathway to be Captain Jean Luc Picard of the next Starship Enterprise. But witnessing a devastating earthquake while travelling in India planted seeds for a different form of service. Straight out of college, he let go of a lucrative job opportunity and founded "Engineers Without Borders" in Australia, mobilizing thousands of engineers to make a difference via aid work and education in marginalized communities across the world.Berry, on the other hand, was deeply drawn to storytelling. After studying acting in Australia, she moved to Los Angeles and began her career in Hollywood. After a short time, however, Berry's focuses shifted to using business and capital as a force for good, in a world that was desperate for radical change.These changes in career and mindset coincided with Danny and Berry's meeting and marriage. For two decades since, they have lived and worked together, bringing their diverse gifts - their skills, wealth, and networks - into alignment with the simple and profound Gandhian principle: "Be the change you wish to see in the world."In 2007, wandering through Hong Kong airport, the couple stumbled upon Bo Burlingham's book Small Giants. A book about companies that chose to become great instead of big. Inspired, and with Bo's blessings, the couple started Small Giants with a new vision that business can and should be a force for good.At a time when the term "impact investing" hadn't even been coined globally, they committed to moving 100% of their wealth to solely positive impact businesses - something that's extremely rare even today in the impact circles. Small Giants also went on to become Australia's first certified B-Corp."You guys are just weird hippies with money. This is not how business is done," somebody told them. Yet, not only did Small Giants flourish, but in 2013 they also launched Impact Investment Group (IIG) where many more investors joined the journey of aligning their wealth with their values. This led to more than $650 million worth of impact investments by 2020, and IIG consistently performed in the top quartile of all venture funds in Australia.Come 2020, the pandemic and the lockdown, instead of shrinking in times of uncertainty, they've launched a new impact funds manager Sentient Impact Group, to further mainstream the idea of harnessing capital to benefit the living world.Danny and Berry recognize that if we reallocate capital without changing ourselves, we just change the face of the problems. "From oil barons, we will move to having solar power barons." That's where they see the work of Small Giants Academy, a not-for-profit accelerator, education and media initiative, to help move hearts and minds towards more authentic life-giving choices within, and greater harmony without.Additionally, they have founded over a dozen ethical, sustainable, and regenerative businesses in several sectors including agriculture, property development, and impact investing. Between them, they have received dozens of awards including a Medal of the Order of Australia, Social Entrepreneur of the Year, and UN's Shared Values Award.Danny has a flair for combining adventure with values - he was part of a team that broke the record for racing a solar car across Australia from Darwin to Adelaide; guides impact safaris to places like Bhutan, Israel and Palestine; and loves jumping on the trampoline with his three kids. Berry was the Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Dumbo Feather Magazine (now a podcast), which has reached over 500,000 people. She has interviewed hundreds of the world's deepest thinkers, philosophers, and change-makers and believes that "stories have the power to heal us and give us a vision of the way forward."Together, they have been the best sounding boards and greatest blessing in each others' lives helping them make more authentic and compassionate choices, and nourishing the best in each other. They are also parents to three young humans and do their life's work in service to them and to the generations beyond.Please join Ari Nessel and Navin Amarasuriya in conversation with this remarkable couple on a beautiful, courageous and inspiring journey to change the world both within and beyond.
How does it feel to see yourself as an "error" in the system? When you try out over 40 jobs and you fit into none?From system error to futurist, Ali Mahlodji discovered his sense of purpose in the midst of his life's difficulties. Having zigzagged his way from refugee to technology entrepreneur and CEO to global thought leader, he helps children and at-risk persons navigate the multiple paths to a sense of purpose in an uncertain world and often amid difficult circumstances. And he does so by drawing on his own inner and outer journey.As a boy, Ali had no idea what kind of career he wanted when he grew up. He envisioned a Handbook of Life Stories that would feature people in a variety of jobs from all around the world and would be available for anyone to borrow from libraries. When he was 30, he launched that vision as a digital platform (whatchado.com) with a few friends - an opportunity made possible by enhanced technology, social media, and the internet. At the time of its launch, whatchado.com featured 17 stories. Today, it is Europe's largest video job orientation platform featuring nearly 8,000 stories and hundreds of company profiles, including partners in education and non-governmental organizations (NGOs).If you asked Ali whether his younger self knew that he would one day become an award-winning entrepreneur, he would likely say no. "Life itself starts and ends by chance, and in between we think we can make plans for the next 40 years which is crazy. Life is a zigzag...The most beautiful thing about life is its uncertainty," says Ali.Ali was born in Tehran, Iran in 1981. His parents, both professionals in academia, took Ali and fled persecution in 1984. The family left Iran in the middle of the night and traveled to Turkey before making their way to Vienna, Austria. By the time Ali was 10 years old, he had lived in 13 different apartments. In Vienna, his mother cleaned for an architecture company while his father stocked groceries. When he was 13, Ali's parents divorced and he developed a stutter. He went on to drop out of school at 18, just before his exit exams. Ali remembers, "My father always told me to find out what I don't want to do, so the only way to do that was to try things out."And so he did, exploring more than 40 jobs before returning to finish his education in his late twenties. Ali went on to earn a Bachelor's Degree in Computer Programming and joined the technology sector. After his father passed away, Ali felt called to do something that felt more meaningful, so he left his high paying job as a Global Systems Engineer and became a grammar school teacher until founding whatchado.com. Ali said, "A lot of young people don't have any idea of what to do in their future. It's so powerful when you have a chance to talk to someone about your experiences. We started this platform to show people if they want to have a job one day, don't think there's only one way to get there."Passionate about helping prepare youth for the future, Ali dedicates 50% of his work to young people pro bono. In his TEDx Talk, Ali encourages young people to question the status quo, to be grateful so they do not end up acting in greed, and to believe in the future because "we need the energy to create the kind of world we want to live in." In his voluntary work, Ali also works with adult prisoners and youth at-risk of exclusion. The other half of his time he works with leaders and focuses on professional development.Since launching whatchado.com, Ali has gone on to create start-ups such as futureRocka, ALIDO, and futureOne (which also has a podcast called futureOne HEROES). He is a best-selling author of multiple books including Und Was Machst Du So? (or, And What Are You Doing?), Next Level WORK, Ent-Decker Dein Wofur (or, Discover What You're Doing For), and Work Report. He has worked with various companies and organizations including Google, BMW, IBM, Siemens, Mastercard, Microsoft, Red Bull, and the United Nations. He has won numerous awards including HR Excellence Award and New Work Award (twice each), Voices Award for Best Business Podcast, Digital Communications Award, and Andreus Peace Award, among others.Ali currently lives in Vienna with his wife, whom he describes as "the woman of his dreams," and they have two super cool daughters. Ali travels around the world as a keynote speaker on topics such as focus and simplicity in business, mindful leadership, leading new generations, diversity and inclusion, and "the art of making one's own life authentic."Join us in conversation with this master speaker and author, who inspires us to live with relentless enthusiasm and compassion through all the zig-zags of life.
"Every person - every place is a map to somewhere else." - Michael NyeAlejandro went hungry as a child and describes hunger as a "lion in your stomach that wants to be fed." Christine became a mother at 15 and expresses her hopes to "build a home across the street from my parents." Taylor reflects on her brother who lives with mental illness: "The great thing about him is he is always creative," and, "Unfair things that people shouldn't say are 'crazy' and 'are you retarded?'"What these individuals have in common is that they are all subjects of the soft lens of photographer and audio documentarian Michael Nye, who has been traveling the world for 30 years to capture unique stories, images, and voices. "Each face invites you to listen," he writes. "Stories are often found resting on the edges of surprise and revelation. Everyone knows something important and valuable, a precious wisdom born from experience."Michael's work focuses on remembering and holding on to voice and story and image and presence. One person at a time. "What is forgotten is lost." He can spend up to four days with a subject. He will then, for the purposes of his exhibits, distill everything down to one image accompanied by a five-minute sound clip. "It's a slowly revealing process, like unwinding a ball of string.... It's not about those people, but about humanity."Wherever he travels, Michael carries an antique 8x10 camera and a voice recorder. He has been aptly described by National Public Radio as "part reporter and part anthropologist" too. His projects have taken him to Iraq during the first Gulf War, refugee camps in Palestine, as well as Siberia, China, Morocco, and Mexico. His documentaries, photography and audio exhibitions, "Children of Children -- Teenage Pregnancy," "Fine Line -- Mental Health/Mental Illness," and "About Hunger & Resilience" have traveled to more than 150 cities across the United States.His newest exhibit is called "My Heart Is Not Blind -- About Blindness and Perception," based on seven years of listening to men and women who are blind and visually impaired. Michael explores how perception and adaptation are deeper than we can imagine, and much more mysterious. "How does anyone, blind or sighted understand the world outside themselves? These conversations focus on the deep and shifting pools of perception and the mystery of transformation. Our other senses, separate from sight, have their own wisdom." In 2019, he published a book by the same name, My Heart Is Not Blind - About Blindness & Perception, and in 2023, launched a podcast with 47 episodes devoted to the subject (Season 1). Season 2 of his podcast (forthcoming) will focus on Hunger & Resilience.Michael has received numerous awards, including the Mid-America National Endowment for the Arts grant in photography and two Kronkosky Charitable Foundation grants. He has also received the San Antonio Arts & Letters Award and the Dr. Jacob Bolotin Award from the National Federation of the Blind. He has participated in two Arts America tours in the Middle East and Asia. His work has been featured on NPR's All Things Considered.Michael is currently working on a series of essays/photographs relating to the nature and complexity of photography and aesthetics. Michael writes: "Photography is not just about Photographs, they are also about what is imagined or remembered inside and outside the borders of the photograph at that moment in time. Mood rearranges understanding. Care attaches weight and gravity. Experience wraps its arms around a moment. Perception rises like bread and is rarely limited to what is directly in front of us. Photographs specialize in time travel moving from now to then. The language of 'looking' goes deeper than surfaces."Before full-time photography, Michael practiced law in the appeals court for ten years. He lives in San Antonio, Texas, with his wife, the poet Naomi Shihab Nye.Please join Pavi Mehta and Danusha Lameris in conversation with this gifted photographer and keen listener of the soul.
Stephen Lewis, a social catalyst of community transformation and healing, was shaped by the classroom and medicine making activities that existed within his grandparents' kitchen. Without a college education, Stephen's grandparents held degrees in the practice of hospitality, leadership formation, and business. They were wise elders, farmers, food alchemists, educators, and community healers who imparted wisdom about life, the Sacred, and responsibility to family, friends, and neighbors who visited, ate, or graced their kitchen.Today, Stephen leads and instigates change and healing in faith communities, higher education, and social entrepreneurship. He is an innovative, organizational change strategist and a leadership development specialist serving as president of the Forum for Theological Exploration (FTE). He is also creator of DO GOOD X, an accelerator and a community of support designed for underrepresented and under-resourced social entrepreneurs who are passionate about developing businesses that do good in the world. He has co-authored Another Way: Living and Leading Change on Purpose and A Way Out of No Way: An Approach to Christian Innovation.During the past 20 years, Stephen has worked to inspire the next generation of artists, healers, freedom fighters, faith-inspired leaders, and entrepreneurs to live and work on purpose. What he learned and experienced in his grandparents' kitchen continues in his work of cultivating faith-rooted change-makers and centering BIPOC leaders' diverse, lived experiences, religious practices, and reflections on the Sacred.As a deeply curious individual driven to widen his understanding of God, calling, purpose, and mental health, Stephen leads with the desire to inspire, encourage, and form a new generation who yearns "for ancient wisdom that can withstand the big questions, worthy dreams, and severe tests of resilience and perseverance that greet or confront them daily." Through the years, his curiosity led him to explore mystic traditions of Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and African-centered wisdom traditions and discernment practices, as he shares in Another Way.The Late Elder Malidoma Some, innovator, spiritual teacher, and expansive thinker, reminded Stephen of his formation and the seeds that were planted in him by his grandparents and the generations before them: "What you woke up to is not something that is external to you. It's internal. It's your nature. It's who you are...The time has come because your ancestors have woken you up to a plan that you must take to heart...You are cut for this work. You have been cut all along. You needed something to fire you up in the direction of bringing your gift to the community in your work, which has to do with healing."Stephen has a background in business and finance and is an ordained minister with a Master of Divinity degree from the Divinity School at Duke University. In addition, he is a sacred herbalist and student of Master Herbalist Karen Rose and Sifu Falokun Fasegun. Stephen has reclaimed "the spiritual giftedness of his own twoness -- being both African and American" by excavating the African spiritual wisdom and genius that runs through his blood and is rooted in Burkina Faso and Nigeria. Further noted in Another Way, Stephen explains, "Why? Because this is the soil that birthed the soul of the Black church and its syncretized expressions of spirituality, and that in turn made possible the survival of Black people in this country. These sources nourished a communal sense of purpose, steeped in the multi-generational resistance and resilience of freedom fighters, warrior-healers, and dream defenders working to create a better life for future generations."One of Stephen's guides and theologian, mystic, and philosopher, Rev. Dr. Howard Thurman, shares in his 1980 baccalaureate speech at Spelman College:There is something in every one of you that waits, listens for the genuine in yourself--and if you cannot hear it, you will never find whatever it is for which you are searching and if you hear it and then do not follow it, it were better that you had never been born. You are the only you that has ever lived; your idiom is the only idiom of its kind in all the existences, and if you cannot hear the sound of the genuine in you, you will all of your life spend your days on the ends of strings that somebody else pulls.Stephen's journey and experiences have led him to connect with the Sacred and to be intentional about listening for the "sound of the genuine" within. In doing so, he follows his ancestral call illuminated to him through a vivid dream: "Fear less. Retrieve the ancestral gifts entombed in the graves of your community. Share this healing wisdom to create a more hopeful future for others."Join us in conversation with this healing leader and changemaker!
"All 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 LeachEverything 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, poetic digression, philosophical conjecture, and a flair for the comedic.Her debut essay collection, Things That Are, shines a spotlight on everything from the passionate yearning of pea tendrils, and the particularity of panda bear palates, to the perturbability of caterpillars, the oracular nature of mushrooms, and the dynamic between planets and their moons. Described as "a descendent of Lewis Carroll and Emily Dickinson," Amy defines her genre simply: Words. And what she conjures up with denizens of the dictionary is incantatory, full of incandescent observations, and almost always intoxicated with an unsentimental admiration for Things. That. Are.To read Amy Leach is to find yourself frequently wondering, "Is that a real word?" And then you encounter in the singular glossary of Things that Are (alongside her definition of "vasty") this unequivocal response: "Do not let anyone tell you these words are not words; all words are words." But "even more than words, I think I love music," confesses Amy, who plays bluegrass and the piano, "If a word doesn't sound right, I don't care if it means the right thing, it's not the right word. I can sort of get swept away with soundy things."In the realm of prestigious recognitions, Amy's soundy words have done their own share of sweeping, carrying away the Nautilus Book Award, a Whiting Writer's Award, and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Award. Her much-awaited second book -- published nine years, two children and a move from Chicago to Montana, after her first -- is titled The Everybody Ensemble: Donkeys, Essays and Other Pandemoniums. It is at once a book of praise, a sharply intelligent critique, and a musically attuned, scientifically informed philosophy of life and living. Inasmuch as it does anything else, this "effervescent tonic of a book" makes a winsome case for everybodyism.Where universalism maintains only that "all humans will be saved, whatever their sect or non-sect," Amy's everybodyism espouses a more playful and radical redemption for "not just all the human rascals but also all the buffalo rascals and reptile rascals and paddlefish and turkeys and centipedes and wombats and warty pigs." While Leach's admiration for Earth and its inhabitants is seemingly inexhaustible, it is not unaware. Her essays surface, often in lyrically satirical ways, the inconsiderate and often unconsidered impact we humans -- with our conquests, our categories, our need for control and our appetite for consumption -- have on this finite and fallible world.The trajectory of this essayist's writing is not predictable like an orbit, but incalculable like a dream. It seems to follow an inner impetus, bent only on discovering what happens when the writer's thought breaks free of habit, and encounters itself and this shape-shifting world. "There are not just cliches of phrases and words," Amy maintains, "but cliches of thought too, and that is something worth fighting." Part of this fight on the page involves "an exorcism of personal and cultural programming." To root out, so as not to simply reproduce conventional thinking. "I feel like writing crystallizes all of somebody's strengths and faults. You get to know yourself.... What I love about writing is that I can think the way I want to think because I can see all my thoughts there on the page. I can see my thinking; I can see where I've gotten into easy thinking, and I can take it out."If you are looking for a message in her work, you might find one, but not because Amy intended it. "I don't really write for a message, I write for myself. If someone else finds a message in it, then hooray!" What she is much more interested in is much more disruptive. "A lot of the things that I'm celebrating, like babies. music and donkeys, are really beautiful confusers of certainty."A graduate of the University of Iowa's MFA program, Amy currently resides in Bozeman, Montana, where she is a creative writing and nonfiction instructor at Montana State University. Rumor has it (and if it doesn't it should) that in this role she primarily instructs her lucky students on the art and science of liberating their pens from instruction. "I grew up in a church that taught you all the rules. How to go to heaven, here's what to follow -- and it's all dogmatic," says Amy, adding with a laugh and a paraphrased rendition of Hafez, "But how you really get to heaven is, you get on a drunk mule, and you recite poetry."Embedded at the heart of Amy's work is also a full-throated celebration of antidogma. A lifting up of all the unwieldy and ultimately undefinable being-ness at large in our world -- a being-ness that, despite the 21st century's best attempts, continues to evade propaganda, platitudes, practical purposes, and the profit motive.So, come miss the boat with us! Join us in conversation with this astonishing and enlivening writer, one who celebrates all things "speckled and plain, perfect and imperfect, indigo-feathered, green-skinned, orange-toed, squashed of face, cracked of shell, miniature of heart, young as ducklings, old as hills...indigenous to Earth."The mule I sit on while I reciteStarts off in one directionBut then gets drunk,And lost inHeaven-- Daniel Ladinsky rendering Hafez
"We must remember we are exhaustible. We need renewal. Silence, quietude, time alone, naturally gives that. Then we can come back in to serve others in small ways. That we do. Then we take time for renewal. Jesus, the Buddha, Mahatma Gandhi and all the great sages recognize the importance of connection with others to serve, then step back from that into quietness, then renewal, and then serve. This is the great rhythm of life."Christopher Titmuss, a former hippie turned Theravada Buddhist monk turned social critic, is Britain's senior Dharma teacher. Having once lived on 39 British pounds per year for ten years, he has sat beneath The Tree of Enlightenment in Bodhgaya, India and, so impacted by the experience, returned to Bodhgaya for years afterward to offer retreats there. For five decades, he has been teaching Dharma around the world for free. Living primarily on donations since 1970, Christopher has noted his intention to stay true to the spirit of dana, a practice of cultivating generosity.Christopher is a teacher of Awakening and Insight Meditation in the Buddhist tradition. He does not use the label 'Buddhist' for himself but expresses the deep benefits of his long-standing connection with the Buddhist tradition. He is the founder and director of the Dharma Enquiry Programme as well as co-founder of the Prajna Vihar School in India and Gaia House, an international retreat center in Devon, England. Many of the spiritual practices along with the Dharma talks and videos he offers also are freely available online, including a conversation between Christopher and Krishnamurti in 1984.Christopher was born on Earth Day in 1944, in County Durham, England. As a practicing Roman Catholic, he attended Catholic school as a boy, where he broke the school record for the number of times he was caned for his self-described prankster ways and a lack of cooperation. At age 15, he left school and began clerking in the newsroom for a Roman Catholic weekly before becoming a reporter in the London office for the Irish Independent Newspaper. At 22, disillusioned with the Catholic Church and politics, Christopher began his journey around the world. "I felt that the world is such an extraordinary place," he has said. "I wanted to be connected, involved and listen to other cultures and environments." Arriving in India, Christopher picked up a couple of books on Buddhist teachings and, inspired, became a Buddhist monk three years later. He went on to spend six years as a Buddhist monk in Thailand and India, during which time his experiences led him to contemplate on the corpse as well as contend with snakes and scorpions while living in a cave for nine months. He disrobed in 1976 and completed his journey around the world before returning to England, having spent ten years abroad. "The freedom makes possible the adventure," Christopher has shared. His spiritual recognition that everything is changing, and that non-clinging leads to a sense of freedom in one's life, has given him the ability to embrace continuously the next adventure.A prolific writer, Christopher maintains an active blog and has written numerous books that dive deeply into meditation, spirituality, political, social and global issues, and other topics in the Buddhist tradition. Despite this depth, Christopher has an accessible approach. "I found myself deeply touched by his willingness to be utterly ordinary, available, and walking his talk with humility and simplicity," recounted author Eliezer Sobel after attending a meditation retreat given by Christopher. Christopher has even found opportunities to reflect on Buddhist teachings through songs by The Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney and The Beatles, works by William Shakespeare, and Dharma Dancing.Christopher is known as a steadfast exponent of applying the Dharma to contemporary issues facing people, animals and the environment. He speaks, writes, and campaigns on social, political, and global issues. He also advocates the development of spiritual values, community renewal, and a green economy. He encourages Dharma practitioners to be Agents of Change and Caregivers.Since 1982, Christopher has lived in Totnes, Devon, England, regularly engaging in local activities. Vegan and environmentally conscious, Christopher only takes flights out of the EU to teach. He has one adult daughter and four grandchildren.Join us in conversation with this master seeker and teacher of wisdom and compassion in action.
Note: This is a special experiential and participatory workshop. The movements will entail sitting or working on the floor. Please wear comfortable clothing and find a quiet, carpeted or lightly padded area.What allows painful events to continue affecting us over time? How can we transform our relationship to these events, to reduce their traumatic impact?These are the questions Breema Bodywork teachers Angela Porter, MFT, and Alexandra Johnson, MD, will explore in a special experiential and participatory workshop. Breema Bodywork is a "teaching of the heart, an expression of the unifying principle of Existence."Angela and Alexandra will lead a variety of somatic (body-based) movement practices to help nurture connection between the body and mind, open possibilities to process events in a new way, and strengthen the capacity to assimilate, heal, and live fully."To experience unity in our life, we must be unified within ourselves. A first step in this process is to bring body and mind together to bring us from a passive state to an active one."Angela Porter, MFT, is an activist and somatic therapist specializing in the treatment of trauma and addictions. She has trained in multiple modalities, including Gestalt Therapy, Somatic Therapy, counseling psychology, and EMDR. As an instructor and practitioner of Breema Bodywork since 1998, Angela uses the mind-body connection as the foundation of her work with individuals and groups.Outside of her Oakland-based private practice, Angela serves as adjunct faculty of graduate psychology at California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, JFK University, and The Psychotherapy Institute in Berkeley. She also teaches clinical trainees at various institutes.Formerly a program director and group facilitator at various substance abuse treatment centers, Angela has a passion for supporting veterans, formerly incarcerated men and women, and people with co-occurring mental health concerns.Angela enjoys traveling internationally to teach workshops for therapists, doctors, nurses, midwives, other healthcare professionals, and teachers.Alexandra Johnson, MD, is an integrative and functional medicine physician specializing in family medicine, women's health, and care for the underserved. Even before her medical training, she was interested in holistic care, learning Breema Bodywork and also certifying as a doula. In addition to studying and teaching Breema locally and internationally for over 20 years, she has served as teaching faculty for the University of Colorado and Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia. During her time in Ethiopia, she developed an infection in her brain, leading to significant health challenges, only to reinforce the role of Breema to transform body and mind.Her work in prenatal care, and labor and delivery, incorporates the Breema principles. To facilitate cross-talk between home birth and hospital birth providers, she was featured in the 2016 film, Why Not Home?Her current clinical practice in Northern California integrates Breema, hypnosis, diet, and personalized medical care. She lives in Santa Cruz, CA, with her husband -- who is also a Breema instructor -- and their five children.Please join us in this special offering to experience individual embodiment practices in a collective field.
This will be an interactive workshop that is two hours, not the customary 90 minutes. See the description below for more details.To Mayuka Yamazaki, a high-level business executive who sits on the boards of three Japanese public companies, ikebana -- the ancient Japanese art of floral creations -- is not just about arranging flowers. It is about attuning to the wisdom and beauty of nature to become more whole. A master of the art form, she launched an initiative in 2017 called IKERU to bring the wisdom of ikebana into business and leadership development. Previously, Mayuka was Assistant Director of Harvard Business School Japan Research Center, where she co-authored over 30 HBS cases related to Japan, and also worked as a management consultant at McKinsey.Mayuka was an Awakin Call guest in January, 2023.* We are delighted to share that this Spring she will be offering a special Wildflower Ikebana workshop to the Awakin Calls community!The two-hour workshop will include a presentation on what ikebana is, as well as a brief demonstration by Mayuka. Participants will then be invited to take a 15-minute walk outside, attuning to Nature in whatever forms it is present in their environment, and discerning to the best of their abilities which flowers, twigs, branches or leaves would like to be brought back home to "play." If you live in an area where it would be hard to do this real-time, you are welcome to do your Nature walk earlier and have your selections already on hand. Participants will then create their own Ikebana-inspired arrangement, keeping some of the core principles in mind. There will also be opportunity to share the creations with workshop participants, as well as reflections and learnings from the experience with the circle.Says Mayuka:"I love the concept of letting flowers lead. In order for us to let flowers lead, we have to calm ourselves and empty our mind. Otherwise, we cannot hear, listen to the voice of the flowers. And if you can listen to the voice of flowers, you just know where you should put your flowers. You just know it. Your body spontaneously starts moving. It's beyond our head, and I really love that... It's not like you have to empty your mind and then you can listen to the flowers. If you try to listen to the voice of flowers, you naturally start emptying your mind. For me, ikebana is a practice of the mind."Please join us in learning from and practicing with this gentle artist and changemaker!Note: Prior to the workshop, you may be interested in viewing or reviewing the transcript of Mayuka's Awakin Call earlier this year. Please also note that the workshop will be two hours, rather than the customary 90 minutes.
As a seven-year-old living in Shiraz, Iran, Ari Honarvar stood on the rooftop of her home with her family one night, a "simmering terror brewing in her belly." Beholding the sky, she was aware that their electricity was just shut off, warning of an imminent attack. Missiles shot across the darkness. Sirens blared throughout the streets. Then, from a neighboring rooftop, Ari bore witness to a different kind of explosion:Even if, from the sky, poison befalls all, I'm still sweetness wrapped in sweetness wrapped in sweetness... A verse from Rumi, a burst of joy! Then, joining in from another rooftop:While others sing about love, I am the Sultan of love!" "I could feel the ecstasy of these verses in my heart, radiating to every cell of my being," Ari recalled of that moment amid the Iran-Iraq War that would last eight years and kill over a million people. "In an instant, my world not only became sane, but infinite and glorious. And what bomb could ever touch that?" When Ari's family sought to secure a visa out of Iran a few years after the war ended, it was also a poem that changed Ari's world -- this time, verses written by her mother to the Indian Embassy. After being granted passage to India, Ari would immigrate to the United States at 14 years of age.Those bombs touched neither her body nor soul, and in fact, ignited in her a joyful resilience. Currently based in San Diego, California, Ari is an award-winning writer, speaker, artist, "dance-ivist," who seamlessly integrates the arts with social justice and community building. She is the founder of Rumi with a View, an organization building bridges across war-torn and conflict-ridden borders "through the enchanted medium of poetry," and using dance, the visual arts, and other modalities. Her projects span sending musical love letters from American musicians to the people of Iran, to Dance for Freedom, an initiative to garner global support for Iranian protesters, to Musical Ambassadors of Peace, a nonprofit she collaborates with, bringing music and dance to refugees at the U.S.-Mexico border and in Europe.What does Ari-in-action look like? A few times a month, she drops off her son at school in San Diego and drives for an hour to Tijuana, Mexico, to serve as a "musical ambassador of peace." Her car is stocked with donations, food, drums, and a portable stereo. Along with two other musicians, Ari plays live music and cumbia songs on the stereo, popular among the Central American refugees. The children learn to drum and dance with partners, embodying a new rhythm by which to live -- and all of this done in time for Ari to drive back to San Diego to pick up her son when school lets out. Due to the program's success, she now offers a customized program to schools, nonprofits, and corporations committed to social justice.Ari also sparks community closer to home. In 2021, the Washington Post ran her op-ed on Arranged Friendships, describing her experiment to arrange friendships similar to how marriages in Iran are arranged: "commitment first, then let everything fall into place." Arranged does not mean forced, she clarified. "Counterintuitively, this offers more freedom because you can customize your group based on your own needs and desires." She has since been interviewed by numerous podcasts and publications on the subject, including The Atlantic's Friendship Files, and is helping to facilitate other arranged friendship groups.Ari's work has been featured in other outlets like The Guardian and New York Times. She is the author of Rumi's Gift, an oracle deck and book of Ari's original translations, meditations, stories, and the artistic collaboration with the renowned illustrator, Carmen Costello. Ari's critically acclaimed novel, A Girl Called Rumi, is based on Ari's experience growing up in post-revolution Iran. Ari also presents at conferences, universities, nonprofits, and other venues. She is a mentor at the College of Graduate and Postdoctoral studies at The University of Saskatchewan."Joy is such a sustainable fuel. It's sustainable energy that we tap into to help us with the challenges. Seeing how people build their own resilience in difficult situations has been a tremendous inspiration."Please join Haleh Liza Gafori and Pavi Mehta in conversation with this activist-alchemist of verse and vibrations.
Chris Hoffman, a lifelong humanitarian serving in crisis situations in dozens of countries around the world, realized after nearly two decades of intense work in the field that humanitarians often do more harm than good – largely because they themselves are “not well”. Being passionate individuals who move from crisis to crisis, country to country, in short-term stints on behalf of international organizations, humanitarians often are suffering from the trauma they already embody as well as from what they experience afresh in crisis and conflict situations – to the detriment of their clients, their families, and their own effectiveness.Realizing after 20 years in the field that he was losing touch with what was most important to him (his family and his programs’ clients), Hoffman came to see a more generalized crisis of both well-being and effectiveness in the humanitarian and international aid sector. So he stepped out and stepped back to consider how he could support the humanitarian sector to be more effective and innovative. He first helped through contemplative resilience offerings for humanitarians (consisting of mindfulness and somatic practices) while serving as Managing Director of Garrison Institute International from 2019-2020. Now he aids the sector as Managing Director of Humanity Link, a firm that links innovative companies with humanitarian agencies to develop effective technology for flipping the paradigm in humanitarian programming to be more client-driven. Humanity Link acts as a matchmaker of sorts by linking up those who need help and those organizations who can provide that help. “We have corporates come to us and say 'We have a product we think will work really well in the humanitarian sector. Help us find who we can partner with to use it,'" Hoffman said.Hoffman is perhaps an unlikely global humanitarian. Born in small-town Ohio to a loving but very young teen mother, the seed for travel was planted by the time he was 10 years old, by which time he had already moved six times with his family. At age 13, he sought to travel abroad, and his local community supported him. He later said, “All of the churches, all of the people and our friends chipped in for me to go. So when you say it takes a village, I'm living proof that it takes a village. It took the village of Bremen, [Ohio] to be able to take a kid and get him out and see the world and really be able to change things." His local school district allowed him to progress by giving reports for his grades through a journal he kept.So at age 13, Chris went to live in the bush of Matabeleland in Zimbabwe with a group of young missionaries working to help a small community. At 14, he was off to the jungle of Rhodonia in Brazil to work with orphans stranded on the Madeira River. At 16, he landed in Beira, Mozambique soon after peace was declared, living in the basement of an orphanage helping children who were coming of age to have a trade skill to take into their adult lives. A war in Mozambique was just winding down when he was there, and so he got to see United Nations peacekeeping operations and international humanitarian functions in development settings and in crisis situations. He recognized his life’s purpose. After graduating from Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, Hoffman went to work for the Peace Corps in Kenya, and then worked across four continents for the U.N., World Vision, and other international agencies. “The 20 years from teen to now is peppered with crisis, disaster, more than 40 countries and countless experiences with the United Nations and International Non-Profits trying to find the simplest most effective answers to some of the world’s most complex problems,” he says.He established Humanity Link in 2020 to help develop tools and systems that transform how humanitarian organizations interact with people in need – from service delivery to genuine partnership. He partners with corporates to create transformational technology innovations using artificial intelligence, digital identity authentication, and cash distribution solutions for humanitarian agencies around the world. His clients include the International Federation of the Red Cross, the International Organization for Migration, and the Norwegian Refugee Council.Chris is the father of four global children and husband to Wakanyi, "an amazing partner" who he met at a Nairobi bus stop on a sunny Sunday. They live in Groningen, the Netherlands with their dog Thomas and their cat Totoro.Join us in conversation with this resilient and innovative humanitarian!
In July 2021, Neil Douglas-Klotz gave an inspiring Awakin Call: Breathing life into words, prayers, and scriptures. A renowned teacher, scholar, author, and musician who specializes in the native traditions and ancient Semitic languages of the Middle East, Douglas-Klotz shared with this Awakin community his personal discovery of what he calls the “Aramaic Jesus” — or Jesus before the religion of Christianity — and guided some moving meditations in Jesus’s original words and sounds.Now he returns to share this wisdom even more deeply, both as specific to Jesus’s culture and time, and to its relevance today. Douglas-Klotz’s most recent book, Revelations of the Aramaic Jesus: The Hidden Teachings on Life and Death, released in October 2021, is the culmination of his life’s work over 40 years. By examining the “heart talks” of Jesus — the Lord’s Prayer and the Beatitudes — he addresses universal themes and challenges like, How do we respond to the critical state of the world, individually and globally? How do we find renewal and healing amidst challenging times? How do we keep our hearts open? Or more fundamentally, who am I? What is my purpose?From his previous call in July 2021, Douglas-Klotz provided a glimpse into the Aramaic Jesus’s hidden teachings on prayer and its power to transform, beyond words or concepts:At different times, Jesus's disciples would ask him, “How should we pray?” It's in the Gospel of Thomas, they ask him, and different times in the gospels. And at one point he says this prayer in words [The Lord’s Prayer].At another point, he just says, as I mentioned earlier, pray b’shemy – with my, or within my “atmosphere.” So that's a prayer without words. That just means "In Jesus's name," although there's nothing wrong with saying, "In Jesus's name," because that can be a powerful invocation for a person for whom it is, or protection. I don't want to downplay that at all.But he's really saying, “Pray within my atmosphere, within my feeling, yet within. Do like a spiritual gestalt with me and sit within me or let me sit within you. And then pray.” So that's prayer without words. And the word prayer itself in Aramaic, I'll just finish up with that, actually doesn't indicate — it doesn't mean saying words. It means just to open oneself, shalutah, open yourself, hollow yourself out, create space within yourself. And then Big Reality fills in.Join Pavi Mehta and Cynthia Li in continued conversation with this illuminating teacher of wisdom and peace.
"Pay attention to your attention."Amishi P. Jha came to her pathbreaking work studying the neuroscience of mindfulness and attention when, as a young professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania, she lost feeling in her teeth. She had been grinding them as a profound stress response to burnout from her responsibilities as a wife, mother, and tenure-track professor. Knowing from her academic work that the brain can change, she told herself at the start of summer, “before I quit my own career, let’s see if I can get my own brain to change.” She had just heard a talk about the power of meditation to change brain images from another neuroscientist. And although she had grown up in a Hindu family, born in the Indian city of Gandhi’s ashram – where meditation practice was “in the air” – she had never discussed it or practiced it (and her scientific mind had earlier dismissed some spiritual practices from her youth). But that summer, determined to see if she could change her brain, she bought a book by Jack Kornfield, Meditation for Beginners, with an accompanying CD. “I committed to reading a chapter each day and doing one of the practices, probably between eight and fifteen minutes. Within a couple of months, I was more present, more engaged. It got me thinking that there was something about doing this thing every day that was reacquainting me with my life. … Instead of being foggy and distracted, I was aware and connected. So I thought to myself, hey, wait a minute; I study attention. I need to figure out how this works.” She went to look at the scientific attention literature and found almost nothing. So she decided to “put mindfulness meditation to the test and research it rigorously in the lab.” This was in 2004, “before mindfulness was even a thing in our popular culture, and people in my department warned that I’d be committing career suicide by researching this topic,” she recalls. She launched the first-ever study to offer mindfulness training tools to active-duty military service members as they prepared for deployment. What she has discovered is that without intervention, attention is compromised, and attentional lapses increase. Yet, with mindfulness training, attention can be strengthened and protected. As one of the first scientists to research the links between mindfulness and attention, she is known for her pioneering mindfulness work with soldiers, firefighters, medical trainees, and others for whom attention is a matter of life and death. With her book, Peak Mind, she has started bringing her healthy-attention message to parents, CEOs, accountants, teachers, managers—essentially anyone whose work and decision-making feels like life and death.Jha studies how we pay attention: the process by which our brain decides what's important out of the constant stream of information it receives. Both external distractions (like stress) and internal ones (like mind-wandering) diminish our attention's power, Jha says -- but some simple techniques can boost it and train it for greater focus and less distractibility. "Pay attention to your attention," Jha says in a TEDx talk that has more than 5 million views.Jha is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Miami, and Director of Contemplative Neuroscience for the Mindfulness Research and Practice Initiative. Working with the U.S. Army and others in extremely high-stress occupations, Jha uses functional MRI, electroencephalography (EEG) and other neurobehavioral measures to study how the brain pays attention, the mental effects of stress, and ways to optimize attention. In addition to her own published body of research, her work has been featured in many outlets including TED.com, NPR, and Mindful Magazine. In addition, she has been invited to present her work to NATO, the UK Parliament, the Pentagon, and at the World Economic Forum. She received her PhD from the University of California–Davis, and received her postdoctoral training at the Brain Imaging and Analysis Center at Duke University in functional neuroimaging. She studies the neural bases of attention and the effects of mindfulness-based training programs on cognition, emotion and resilience. Acknowledging the tension between offering mindfulness tools (founded on Buddhist principles of nonviolence) to active military, Jha recalls her own Gandhian roots: “Nonviolence is part of my core philosophical thread. Yet nonviolence does not mean inaction. It doesn’t mean you do nothing. Sometimes what you do to reduce violence and suffering is take action. ,,, [I]f a soldier has a machine gun that can destroy an entire village, I want to make sure that person has the capacity to really know what they’re doing and have full control over their faculties, to be able to withhold as appropriate, not be reactive. So a super soldier in many ways is one that can control when to not pull the trigger, not to just pull the trigger.”Please join Stephanie Nash and Birju Pandya in conversation with this researcher using her gifted scientific mind for action to help reduce suffering.
**Please note the special day for this event — the call falls on Monday, instead of our usual Saturday time. “The key to creating health,” says Dr. Mark Hyman, “is figuring out the cause of the problem and then providing the right conditions for the body and soul to thrive. It isn’t taking another medication.”Whether he’s in a gray suit or hospital scrubs, Mark Hyman, MD, is often carrying in his pockets a pack of walnuts, coconut butter, turkey jerky, or some other nutrient-dense snack. A family physician, author, and public figure, Hyman has been transforming the landscape of Western medicine for the past 30 years. His latest book, Young Forever: The Secrets to Living Your Longest, Healthiest Life, aims to provide a prescription for healthy longevity, challenging the public to go beyond the status quo of the average lifespan riddled with “diseases of aging.” At 63, Hyman says he feels better than he did when he was half his age; by scientific methods, his biological age measures 20 years younger. He believes everyone has the same potential to thrive, and he is on a mission to make that an equal opportunity for all.For as long as he can remember, Hyman's life has been about mind-body wellness and personal growth. Born in New York, Hyman moved with his family to Spain, where his mother shopped in local markets and grew a backyard garden. In high school, he became a vegetarian for 10 years. At Cornell University, he studied nutrition and Buddhism. And before he pursued a calling in medicine, he spent time teaching yoga and wandering the mountains of Tibet and Nepal in search of meaning.As a young doctor, Hyman became disheartened by practicing medicine with conventional methods. “The way we were treating disease wasn’t working,” he says. “We can’t just cover up symptoms with medications. We have to understand the body as a biological system — an ecosystem.” This led him to research root causes of chronic disease — a paradigm called “functional medicine,” which focuses on each person’s unique genetic, biochemical, and lifestyle factors, as well as the social determinants of health. Teaching underserved and privileged communities alike to cook nutritious, delicious food – and likening foods such as Oreos and Coke to addictive drugs – has long topped his priority list.Hyman’s professional journey has also been shaped by his personal challenges. When he was a young doctor, he developed chronic fatigue syndrome and intense “brain fog,” ultimately leading him to functional medicine and a path to heal himself. In 2012, his younger sister died from biliary cancer and his marriage ended. In this raw state, he returned to the East for another pilgrimage, this time accompanied by his daughter, to the sacred mountain of Jomolhari in Bhutan and a Tibetan orphanage at Menri Monastery in the Himalayas. Then in 2017, he himself came very close to death with a severe illness, now understanding by direct experience, rather than only conceptually in his mind, some of life’s essential lessons — like surrender. Among Hyman’s many and varied roles is serving as the founder and director of The UltraWellness Center, Senior Advisor to the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine, and board president of the Institute for Functional Medicine. He is the author of 14 New York Times best-selling books, the host of a popular podcast, The Doctor’s Farmacy, and a regular medical contributor for several television shows and networks, including CBS This Morning, Today, Good Morning America, The View, and CNN. Equally dedicated to the health of our food systems and the planet as a whole, Hyman founded a nonprofit organization, the Food Fix Campaign, to “transform the dysfunctional policies” that shape our food and agricultural systems. “What we do to our bodies, we do to the planet. What we do to the planet, we do to our bodies.” Is there an inner compass that directs his outer work? A journal entry from Hyman’s pilgrimage to Bhutan and Tibet might give us a glimpse:I do not pretend to understand how this life works, my place in it, or how to arrive to a place that is settled, authentic, powerful, and clear, but I am trying….Being here, visiting the sacred places, in this sacred country where these Buddhist principles are their constitution, their declaration of interdependence and interconnection of all things, I am quieted and happy, but less certain than ever of how things should be – only open to how things might be if I relax, let go, be present, show up, pay attention, and listen for what is true in everything.Please join Pavi Mehta and Cynthia Li in conversation with this visionary doctor, changemaker, and student of life.
David Rothenberg is a writer, philosopher, ecologist, and musician, speaking out for nature in all aspects of his diverse work. He investigates the musicality of animals and the role of nature in philosophy, with a particular interest in understanding other species by making music with them. As a professor of philosophy and music at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, he “teaches engineers nonquantifiable things.” He is also an acclaimed composer and jazz clarinetist known for his integration of world music with improvisation and electronics.Originally intending to be a scientist, music pulled Rothenberg away during his high school years – ultimately becoming the modality through which he would explore nature and deep ecology. Looking back at those high school years of the 1970s, Rothenberg told The New York Times, "I was influenced by saxophonist Paul Winter's Common Ground album, which had his own compositions with whale and bird sounds mixed in. That got me interested in using music to learn more about the natural world."As an undergraduate at Harvard, Rothenberg created his own major to combine music with communication. He traveled in Europe after graduation, playing jazz clarinet. Listening to the recorded song of a hermit thrush, he heard structure that reminded him of a Miles Davis solo.Because of Rothenberg's study of animal song and his experimental interactions with animal music, he is often called an "interspecies musician." He is said to "explore the sounds of all manner of living things as both an environmental philosopher and jazz musician."Rothenberg's book Why Birds Sing: A Journey into the Mystery of Bird Song (Basic Books 2005) was inspired by an impromptu duet in March 2000 with a laughingthrush at the National Aviary in Pittsburgh. A CD accompanying the book also featured Rothenberg's duet with an Australian lyrebird. The book served as the basis for a 2006 feature-length BBC documentary of the same name.His next book, Thousand Mile Song (Basic Books 2008), reflects similar curiosity about whale sounds considered as music, from which both scientific and artistic insights emerge. It was turned into a film for French television. Philip Hoare of The London Telegraph said of the book, "while Rothenberg's madcap mission to play jazz to the whales seems as crazy as Captain Ahab's demented hunt for the great White Whale, it is sometimes such obsessions that reveal inner truths...I find myself more than a little sympathetic to the author's faintly bonkers but undoubtedly stimulating intent: to push at the barriers between human history and natural history."His book Survival of the Beautiful: Art, Science and Evolution (Bloomsbury Press 2011) was described by the journal Nature as exploring the theme that beauty is not random but is intrinsic to life—and that evolution proceeds by sumptuousness, not by utility alone. His remarkable output in books is matched by his creative output in other areas. As a composer and jazz clarinetist, Rothenberg has sixteen CDs out under his own name over the past 30 years. His 2020 releases include In the Wake of Memories and They Say Humans Exist, named best jazz album of the year by Stereo+ Magazine in Norway. He has performed or recorded with Peter Gabriel, Pauline Oliveros, Ray Phiri and Suzanne Vega. As a musician, Rothenberg tries to blend the indigenous energy of the world's primal music with the exploratory spirit of improvisation. He has studied jazz clarinet professionally, as well as Tibetan ritual wind music in Nepal and folk music in Norway.Since 2014, Rothenberg has been an Ambassador of the international non-governmental humanitarian mission, the Dolphin Embassy, participating in non-invasive research of the possibilities of free dolphins and whales – playing music for them. In 2017, the Dolphin Embassy released the full-length documentary Intraterrestrial, which received awards from international film festivals. The film's soundtrack features music by Rothenberg.Links to his extensive work, global press coverage, and extended recognition can be found on his website.Please join us in conversation with this remarkable philosopher and interspecies musician who combines art and science to make nature come alive in remarkable ways!
*** Please note the special day for this event -- the call falls on Sunday, instead of our usual Saturday time. When Zachary Shore was a sophomore at the University of Pennsylvania, he called his parents to tell them he was dropping out. Legally blind by age 16, his vision had continued to deteriorate, and he found himself socially isolated, fearful, and debilitated by eye strain. After an encounter on campus with a fellow blind student who had just returned from a solo excursion with seeming ease, Zach had a moment of awakening: “My problem wasn’t my blindness. It was my lack of skills and confidence.” He would indeed come to find a remarkable set of skills and confidence — eventually earning a doctorate from Oxford University, becoming a distinguished scholar of international conflict and an author of six books, and traveling to more than 30 countries, many of them as solo journeys.Zach credits his strong sense of self to the nurturance of his parents. But his ability to move freely about the world came through a rigorous and demanding training program at the Louisiana Center for the Blind (LCB) — where he made his way after his moment of awakening in college — whose requirements for graduation would challenge even the best of sighted students. Shop, prepare, and cook a meal for 40 people, all by yourself, and don’t forget the entire cleanup. Accomplish a “drop route”; that is, find your way back to the LCB after being dropped in an unfamiliar location, without asking anyone, using only environmental clues like the direction of the sun. And take a solo trip to a city you’ve never visited before, with an assigned checklist of to-dos.Armed with solid skills and having confronted many of his fears, Zach returned to finish his studies at U. Penn. He went on to receive a master's in history, a doctorate in modern European history, a postdoctoral research fellowship at Harvard, and a Fulbright Award, among other distinctions. His books, which have hard-hitting names like What Hitler Knew, A Sense of the Enemy, and Breeding Bin Ladens, examine themes like morality in war and “strategic empathy,” focusing on understanding the enemy. As a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Northern California, he is “doing his best to give back to the community by helping military leaders and others think more deeply about the choices they make and the causes of war.”Zach’s hard-hitting academic interests belie his gentle and modest demeanor. He has been described as “a historian of great humanity and insight” with analyses that are “penetrating yet sensitive.” He often shares stories of his personal failures and lessons learned, that “it is okay to fail as long as I try again.” Most recently, he has “tried again” and brought forth another book, This is Not Who We Are: America's Struggle Between Vengeance and Virtue. According to the esteemed historian Adam Hochschild, Zach “spotlights the moral quandaries that plagued Americans as their wartime thirst for vengeance wrestled with their loftier ideals.”As to whether his blindness sparked his broader interest in human judgment, Zach reflects, “I don’t think so… but being unable to read body language or facial expressions has certainly led me to think about how we read other people. I’m also obsessed with the general question of why people shoot themselves in the foot.”For more than three decades, he has been an advocate of improving opportunities for the blind. He has also written on why smart people make bad decisions and how to succeed in graduate school. Through his company UpWords, he serves as a writing coach for authors, professionals, and students.Please join Adam Hochschild and Rahul Brown in conversation with this insightful historian and courageous citizen of the world.
We are living with a global epidemic of injustice, but we've been choosing to ignore it. More than 25 years ago, Vivek Maru told his grandmother that he wanted to go to law school. “Grandma didn't pause,” he recounted. “She said to me, ‘Lawyer is liar.’” Though he went on to fulfill that desire, Vivek soon realized that his grandmother wasn’t entirely wrong.Vivek came to see that “something about law and lawyers has gone wrong.” Law is “supposed to be the language we use to translate our dreams about justice into living institutions that hold us together” – to honor the dignity of everyone, strong or weak. But as he told an audience on the TEDGlobal stage in 2017, lawyers are not only expensive and out of reach for most – worse, “our profession has shrouded law in a cloak of complexity. Law is like riot gear on a police officer. It's intimidating and impenetrable, and it's hard to tell there's something human underneath.”In 2011, Vivek founded Namati to demystify the law, facilitate global grassroots-led systems change, and to grow the movement for legal empowerment around the world. Namati and its partners have built cadres of grassroots legal advocates in eight countries. The advocates have worked with more than 65,000 people to protect community lands, enforce environmental law, and secure basic rights to health care and citizenship. Globally, Namati convenes the Legal Empowerment Network, made up of more than 3,000 groups from over 170 countries who are learning from one another and collaborating on common challenges. This community successfully advocated for the inclusion of justice in the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, and for the creation of the Legal Empowerment Fund, with a goal of putting $100 million into grassroots justice efforts worldwide.Though he nearly dropped out of law school after his first year because the law felt disconnected from the problems of ordinary people he had encountered in rural villages the year earlier, Vivek stuck with it and moved to Sierra Leone soon after he graduated, just after the end of a brutal 11-year civil war. Several years before Namati, he co-founded an organization called Timap (which means “stand up”) to help rural Sierra Leoneans address injustice and hold government accountable.Realizing that a conventional legal aid model would have been unworkable, as there were only 100 lawyers in Sierra Leone (more than 90 of which were in the capital rather than in rural areas), he instead focused on training a frontline of community paralegals in basic law and in tools like mediation, advocacy, education, and organizing. Just like a health care system relies on nurses, midwives, and community health workers in addition to physicians, he saw that justice required community paralegals (sometimes called “barefoot lawyers”) to serve as a bridge to serve the legal needs of communities and “to turn law from an abstraction or a threat into something that every single person can understand, use and shape.”As he later recounted, “We found that paralegals are often able to squeeze justice out of a broken system: stop a school master from beating children; negotiate child support payments from a derelict father; persuade the water authority to repair a well. In exceptionally intractable cases, as when a mining company in the southern province damaged six villages’ land and abandoned the region without paying compensation, a tiny corps of lawyers can resort to litigation and higher-level advocacy to obtain a remedy.”More significantly, he realized:Paralegals are from the communities they serve. They demystify law, break it down into simple terms, and then they help people look for a solution. They don't focus on the courts alone. They look everywhere: ministry departments, local government, an ombudsman's office. Lawyers sometimes say to their clients, "I'll handle it for you. I've got you." Paralegals have a different message, not "I'm going to solve it for you," but "We're going to solve it together, and in the process, we're both going to grow."And case by case and story by story, community paralegals help paint a portrait of the system as a whole, which can serve as the basis for systemic change efforts in laws and policy. “This is a different way of approaching reform. This is not a consultant flying into Myanmar with a template he's going to cut and paste from Macedonia, and this is not an angry tweet. This is about growing reforms from the experience of ordinary people trying to make the rules and systems work,” Vivek says. It’s ultimately “about forging a deeper version of democracy in which we the people, we don't just cast ballots every few years, we take part daily in the rules and institutions that hold us together, in which everyone, even the least powerful, can know law, use law and shape law.”Vivek was named a Social Entrepreneur of the Year by the World Economic Forum, a “legal rebel” by the American Bar Association, and an Ashoka Fellow. He received the Pioneer Award from the North American South Asian Bar Association in 2008. He, Namati, and the Global Legal Empowerment Network received the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship in 2016. He graduated from Harvard College, magna cum laude, and Yale Law School. His undergraduate thesis was called Mohandas, Martin, and Malcolm on Violence, Culture, and Meaning. Prior to starting Namati, he served as senior counsel in the Justice Reform Group of the World Bank. Vivek is co-author of Community Paralegals and the Pursuit of Justice (Cambridge University Press). His TED talk, “How to Put the Power of Law in People’s Hands,” has been viewed over a million times. He lives with his family in Washington, DC., and though he travels a lot, he tries to spend time in a forest or other natural place every week, wherever he is.Vivek studies capoeira, an Afro-Brazilian martial art that mixes dance with fighting techniques as a creative form of resistance, with Dale Marcelin at Universal Capoeira Angola Center. “There’s a mischievousness and soulfulness even though you’re engaging in a life-and-death struggle,” Maru says. “I like its lesson of smiling in the face of danger.”He is also deeply influenced by his Jain spiritual background and Gandhian principles. He is interested in a Jainism that balances an inward turn with an engagement in the outer world, citing a Jain monk who said “The test of true spirituality is in practice, not isolation . . . there is a need to strike the right balance between internal and external development.” Join us in conversation with this exceptional leader and warrior for justice!
***Please note the special time for this event, to accommodate the time zone of our guest and other Asia-based participants.“In order to let flowers live, we need to calm ourselves and empty our mind — otherwise, we cannot listen to what flowers tell us.” To Mayuka Yamazaki, a high-level business executive, ikebana — the ancient Japanese art of floral creations — is not just about arranging flowers. It is about attuning to the wisdom and beauty of nature and enriching our experience of being human. As a master of the art, she explains that ikebana is a word derived from the verb ikeru (to bring alive) and hana (flowers), or combined, “letting flowers live.” For over 20 years, Mayuka has been letting flowers live, and most recently, she has brought this practice to help restore wholeness to schools, international organizations, communities, and most notably, corporations.As a young child in Japan, Mayuka was drawn to “finding beauty in the small changes in nature and its seasons.” When she was 18, she began to learn ikebana as a hobby under Risen Kajikawa, a headmaster of ko-ryu shoreikai, one of the ikebana factions in Japan. After studying economics at Tokyo University and then working as a management consultant, her education took her to the United States, where she would graduate with honors at Georgetown University’s Graduate School of Foreign Service. On the outside, her life trajectory seemed clear. On the inside, however, Mayuka felt lost. Some years later, she found herself working at Harvard Business School (HBS) at a fortuitous time. HBS was trying to transform its education system and its new guiding principle was “Knowing, Doing, Being,” emphasizing the need to rebalance the head, hands, and heart. Mayuka realized that the heart, which ought to be her true inner compass, had been largely silenced by her focus on acquiring knowledge and skills. So she set about trying many things, from meditation practices to exploration circles with colleagues. What opened her heart the most was creating things — concrete things — like poems, stories, and paintings. This moved her from consumer to creator, from thinking to being. And one day, she had an epiphany that ikebana — which had begun as a beloved hobby but had over two decades become an art she would master — could be her career.Ikebana is an art of great subtlety and sophistication. Simple floral arrangements in Japan date back as early as the 7th century, beginning as simple Buddhist temple offerings that symbolized paradise. Today, it is a popular and innovative “living art” that continues to engage the ikebana artist in deep conversation with nature and her energies, equally incorporating the forms and empty space.In 2017, Mayuka launched an initiative called IKERU, with a vision of bringing the wisdom of ikebana into business and leadership development. Through IKERU, she offers individual and group sessions, inviting people to create harmony in themselves or their teams through practice of the art form. They also learn the challenge and beauty of creating something when they have no answers or directions.Mayuka sees herself more as a co-learner than a teacher: “While I acknowledge the value of the [traditional] apprenticeship model as a way of teaching, it may not be my way. For me, those who come to my lessons and workshops are not ‘apprentices’ to whom I transfer what I know. I have learned so much from them and they are ‘friends’ who explore the wisdom of ikebana together. And this is why I started IKERU — to let people simply enjoy ikebana itself outside the system, as well as why I have managed the IKERU community as openly and flatly as possible.”Prior to devoting herself to IKERU, Mayuka worked as Assistant Director of Harvard Business School Japan Research Center and visiting editor at the Harvard Business Review (Japan). With HBS professors, she co-authored over 30 HBS cases related to Japan, and played a critical role in designing and running the HBS immersive field course in the 3.11 disaster-affected Tohoku areas. She also worked as a management consultant at McKinsey & Company.Previously only having lived in big cities, she moved in 2020 to Karuizawa, a small and beautiful town in the mountains, where she now lives with her husband and six-year-old daughter. She currently sits the boards of directors of three Japanese public companies.Please join us in conversation with this artist and changemaker, and dare to allow beauty to open us up to transformation!
When he was ten years old, Balakrishnan Raghavan was moved to tears listening to a centuries-old Tamil hymn about Lord Shiva, sung by musician M S Subbulakshmi. “I was wailing. Subbulakshmi’s voice soaring high and low, calling out to that divine-beloved, the voice of the poet who lived hundreds of years before us, the fierceness of their devotion, the ultimate surrender of the devotee, the madness of love, the pathos of separation, and the anticipation of union; all of this is etched in my memory,” he recalls.From that experience, Indian classical music became a fount of his practice. Raghavan is a lifelong student of the arts, whose outlook on life and living is steeped “at the intersection of kindness, spirituality, sensuality, music, flow, and poetry.” The poems of the saints from the spiritual traditions of India have shaped “how I engage with, make sense of and access the world around me.” He strongly believes in the power of the collective kindness of humanity across time and space.Raghavan is particularly drawn to the classical verses of communities on the margins, on the fringes, the “other’” to the dominant. “They were the alternative, the undercurrent, the subversive,” he says. “This liminal space inhabited by the marginalized saint, the marginalized women from the hereditary artist community, and the marginalized sexual minorities are where my work finds solace, inspiration, and meaning.”He has been bringing forth the voices and contributions of women mystics, poets, and courtesans whose writings have rarely made their way into the mainstream classical tradition. He sets to music erotic poems by some of these silenced voices, and collaborates with dancers in the art form of Bharatanatyam to bring out visual imagery of their poems. One source describes Raghavan as “a passionate classical musician formally trained in Carnatic music, but highly proficient in other forms too, [who] is taking some steps in ensuring the voice of these amazing and daring women poets of our history does not fade off into oblivion.”As Raghavan says:“Through the verses and poems of the saints and the voices of women, I strive for a vanishing present. In 15th-century poet-saint Kabir’s words, I was wounded by the word. In my work, I bring together seemingly disparate idioms/poems/stories across time and space and place them beside each other. I enjoy this juxtaposition as it opens up space to consider a perennial philosophy that is beyond binaries, beyond the constraints of borders or boundaries.”Raghavan finds immense hope, resilience, love, kindness, and diversity in these voices. “As we grapple with global problems of hate and violence, we need to foreground the marginalized voices to find solutions and solidarity. I strive to be a medium of flowing kindness and desire to be surrounded by kindred spirits in this life pilgrimage.”An elder from Mumbai recently told him, “tum toh duniya ke ho” (you belong to the world). A friend’s mother said that in a world where people are busy creating boundaries, [Ragavan’s] work erases them and makes space for love. Indeed belonging to the world, he has found a home in Santa Cruz, California, while inhabiting spaces with beloved friends and family in India (Hyderabad, Punjab, Pune, Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore), London, Paris, Mexico City, Berlin, Xalapa, New York, New Jersey, North Carolina, and New Orleans.Raghavan is an accomplished musician, researcher, and educator. He is pursuing a Ph.D. with a Regents Fellowship at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC). His research encompasses Carnatic music, mystic traditions, poetry, translation, temple art, gender, caste, South Asian performance traditions, and the politics of spirituality.He trained from illustrious maestros in Carnatic music for over twenty years, including a two-year-long immersive full-time discipleship (gurukulam) with his guru, Carnatic musician and scholar, Dr. R. Vedavalli. Additionally, he has been training with Shri. Prahlad Tipaniya, the contemporary voice of the musician-poet saint Kabir. As a guest faculty of music at Snehadhara Foundation, and Spastics Society of Karnataka, he explored the healing powers of music within the context of autism.Prior to pursuing his passion for music full-time, he was a Business Intelligence and Analytics consultant in London. As an interdisciplinary artist, he continues to collaborate internationally and share his music across cities in India, the UK, Mexico, and the US. He is fluent in multiple languages, including written and spoken fluency in Tamil, Telugu, Hindi, and Kannada, and is conversant with Sanskrit, Urdu, Arabic, Malayalam, and Marathi.Please join us in conversation with this gifted artist erasing boundaries, as he brings forth the sacred.
"What's gone / is not quite gone, but lingers./ Not the language, but the bones / of the language. Not the beloved, / but the dark bed the beloved makes / inside our bodies." -- Danusha LamérisDanusha Laméris’s poems have been called “wise, direct, and fearless” (American poet Dorianne Laux). She began writing poetry, as she believes many people do, from a place of heartbreak, and not knowing what to do with it. Her first book of poems, The Moons of August (Autumn House, 2014), came on the heels of a rapid succession of deep losses in her early 30s. “I’ve buried a lover, a brother, a son,” she writes early on in the collection.Poetry allowed her to become “intimate with world and life, down to the marrow.” In the process, it enabled her to lay to bed some of the grief, freeing her to go to the edge of discovering joy and pleasure once again – at the place where grief and pleasure live together, in the body. Poet Naomi Shihab Nye says, “Her poems strike deeply, balancing profound loss and new finding, employing a clear eye, a way of being richly alive with appetite and gusto, and a gift of distilling experience to find its shining core.” Poetic explorations of the ecstatic joy of the body and of somatic experience helped Laméris to move beyond grief. “Poetry is the body’s bright wailing against its limits,” she wrote in the title poem of her second collection, Bonfire Opera (U. Pittsburgh Press 2020). According to Colleen J. McElroy, “there is something waiting to be said, something to be revealed, as each poem draws us onward like a bird trying ‘to escape… throwing itself, again and again, against the stained glass.’ The bird and the ‘ghost child’ call out to each of us to ‘begin again.’"And “begin again” Laméris seeks to do through her poetry. “There was something really powerful about how loss operated in my life …. And so the process of beginning again is really a daily process. […]How do I begin again, how do I in a way become innocent again. So I think that’s the ongoing life story.” She believes a poem isn’t done until it’s changed her somehow. “I don’t want to be exactly the same person I was when I start out to write the poem.” She might write and re-write a poem for 10 years, because she is dedicated “to seeing where the poems will bring me” in terms of actually changing her life.Laméris has said that all writers tend to have the same irritant in their life – an irritant that underlies multiple works. She describes her own irritant as grief – which she experienced again and again – leading her to contemplate: how do you deal with loss? She sees herself “as someone who lost my innocence early. Who faced the death of a child, my brother’s suicide, a difficult childhood.”Against that irritant of cascading grief is her solace – beauty, and being a creature in a body. “Now I put my faith in what is unfinished. Off-center. A kind of psycho-spiritual expression of Wabi-Sabi, the Japanese aesthetic concept of admiring that which is worn-in, imperfect, altered by time. If we can praise what is flawed and tattered and half-done, we can praise so many things.”“We live in a culture that is a very hungry culture because so many of the things that our souls crave are not what we are feeding ourselves,” she says. “What am I hungry for? Moving toward beautiful, complex, meaningful imagery. Trying to feed myself images that are meaningful. The erotic – expression of craving, wanting. Are we wanting the body or something else inside of or beyond that?”Laméris was born to a Dutch father and a Caribbean mother from the island of Barbados. She was raised in the California Bay Area, spending her early years in Mill Valley, then moving to Berkeley, where she attended The College Preparatory School. Since graduating with a degree in Art from The University of California at Santa Cruz, she has lived in Santa Cruz.The 2020 recipient of the Lucille Clifton Legacy Award, Laméris is a Poet Laureate emeritus of Santa Cruz County, California. She co-leads the Poetry of Resilience webinars and the HearthFire Writing Community with James Crews. She is on the faculty of Pacific University's low-residency MFA program. Her poems have been published in The Best American Poetry, The New York Times, The American Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, The SUN Magazine, Tin House, The Gettysburg Review, and Ploughshares.Her poem “Small Kindnesses” went viral during the pandemic, inspiring a follow-on collaborative poem by 1300 teenagers from around the world.Please join poet Haleh Liza Gafori and Pavi Mehta in conversation with this remarkable writer who uncovers not just the bones of language, but also the marrow of life.
“There’s no spiritual life that does not involve, does not start, intimately and inescapably, with the Earth.”The Rev. Fletcher Harper believes that he felt God while mourning his father’s death on a solo camping trip in Montana. A violent hailstorm struck one night, and he sought shelter in the lee of a rock. “At about three in the morning, I felt this deep sense of well-being,” he recalls. “I realized that I was going to be OK. I thought, ‘I can move on with my life now.’”Later in his life and career when interviewing hundreds of people from a broad spectrum of religious and non-religious backgrounds, he discovered that nearly all of them could recall an outdoor experience they perceived as spiritual or sublime. “Nature awakens a sense of awe at the mystery of life, a sense of wonder, a sense of humility in the face of something so much bigger than we are,” says Harper. “A sense of appreciation and of gratitude. Sometimes a sense of fear — a healthy recognition that we’re not the center of the universe.”Harper, an Episcopal priest, is Executive Director of GreenFaith, an international interfaith and multi-faith environmental organization that conducts education and advocacy, and provides environmental sustainability services, to faith-based groups. GreenFaith uses the power of religious networks to help people from diverse backgrounds put their belief into action for the Earth. It works with houses of worship, religious schools, and people of all faiths to help them become better environmental stewards. It believes in addressing environmental issues holistically and is committed to being a one-stop shop for the resources and tools religious institutions need to engage environmental issues and become religious-environmental leaders.An award-winning spiritual writer and nationally-recognized preacher on the environment, Harper teaches and speaks about the moral, spiritual basis for environmental stewardship and justice. He seeks to tap and activate the values base of the religious sector in ways profound and practical to curb wasteful consumerism and set faith-based communities on a track to environmental stewardship—in practice as well as in belief.And yet Harper resists the platitudes and bromides that some religious communities cite about generalized care for God’s creation. “Very powerful vested interests maintained the status quo,” he says, “and polite conversation and periodic references to the Bible were not going to dismantle the system. It was going to take people really confronting centers of power and calling them out in ways that a lot of religious people feel uncomfortable with.”Noting that specific targeted actions – rather than generalized moral exhortations – create change, he notes that “the only way that a status quo gets changed is through moral discomfort; [religious leaders have] got to be willing to be instruments of moral discomfort.” And so he writes about how to preach specifically on the issue, saying “I’m more concerned about [religious moderates] and a sense that religious institutions exist to help people remain comfortable and to help deal with the challenges and tragedies of their own lives, without looking at larger societal issues.” He personally lives the environmentally sustainable life that he preaches.Harper was named an Ashoka Fellow in 2011 and is the author of GreenFaith: Mobilizing God’s People to Protect the Earth (Abingdon Press, March 2015). In recent years, Harper coordinated the 2015 OurVoices campaign, which mobilized religious support globally for COP 21, led the organizing of faith communities for the People’s Climate Marches in NYC and Washington DC, helped lead the faith-based fossil fuel divestment movement, supported the launch of the global Interfaith Rainforest Initiative, and co-founded Shine, a faith-philanthropy-NGO campaign to end energy poverty with renewable energy by 2030. He helps lead GreenFaith’s new local organizing initiative, creating multi-faith GreenFaith Circles in local communities globally.He is a graduate of Princeton University and Union Theological Seminary, and served as a parish priest for ten years and in leadership positions in the Episcopal Church before becoming GreenFaith’s Executive Director.Join us in conversation with this powerful voice for environmental stewardship who walks the talk.
“You are the cumulative expression of all your ancestors.”When Iya Affo meets someone, she instinctively looks for the best in that person, a seed in them that can be nurtured. To nurture others is a high calling for Iya, whose deepest identity is as Mother and Healer. Her African name, Wekenon, means Mother of the Universe, and her title, Iya, signifies Holy Mother. Both were bestowed on her in a traditional ceremony on the soil of her ancestral home in the Benin Republic of West Africa.Iya's passion is to cultivate intergenerational healing by connecting intuitive ancestral practices with modern neurobiology. A culturalist and historical trauma specialist certified in the western tradition, as well as a certified Adverse Childhood Experiences Trainer, she is a descendant of a long line of traditional healers from West Africa, a Chief in the Village of Ouidah, and a High Priestess in the Yoruba tradition.Iya’s search for her individual and cultural identity formed in her childhood while growing up in New York. She was deeply drawn to the rituals observed among her Jewish friends and neighbors – from their ceremonies and traditions, their holidays, to the Yiddish language spoken in their homes. She began to wonder why her Black community had such a different trajectory; why was the history of the Holocaust widely known, but not the stories of enslavement of her ancestors? She sensed that a connection to one’s history and to ancestral land would help communities be resilient and overcome adversity.Setting off to travel alone in her late teens, Iya visited more than 30 countries to understand other cultures. She has proceeded to live abroad in five countries and experienced different spiritual environments – from China, where she practiced Buddhist meditation in a Shaolin Temple; to Myanmar, India, where she stayed at a Hindu ashram; to the Navajo Nation and the Gila River Indian Community, where she engaged in service; and briefly to France.Significant immersion in her ancestral village of Ouidah, Benin Republic, also commenced then and deepened over nearly three decades. Iya relearned how to live as an indigenous woman and now practices the Yoruba tradition in her day-to-day life among the egalitarian, indigenous people of Arizona. “Relentlessly, I pursued the truth about our enslavement,” she has said. “I received my birthright of ritual, ceremony and initiation. My greatest gift has been relearning how to live as an indigenous woman, in egalitarian society, as a wife and mother.”Iya’s early travels led to studies of trauma and epigenetics, which inform her current work. Decades-long research shows that trauma persists in the human psyche and body from one generation to the next, up to 14 generations, via physical DNA. Living in Africa helped her understand the neurobiological dysregulation that is prevalent in the United States for BIPOC (Black Indigenous People of Color) communities. She came to realize that Western treatments – such as talk therapy or medication – are counter-productive or damaging for healing trauma in BIPOC individuals. Alternative healing practices – rituals, drumming, martial arts, and guided meditation – provide more sustaining solutions. Iya carefully says, “In communities where people have been traumatized, the best way for us to heal moving forward is to become self-healing communities. We must be healing ourselves.”Epigenetics also shows that benevolence and positive childhood experiences can be passed through generations. This knowledge gives new motivation for parents, teachers, and caregivers to practice self-regulating behaviors that foster healing, safety, and consistency, and most importantly, love. She hopes to facilitate reculturing and the subsequent healing of indigenous people all over the world. “If we, as a people, are to return to grace, we must go back to the soul of the [African] Continent,” she says. “Only in Her soil will we take root in ancestral land, fertilized by ritual, tradition, spirit and identity. Then we will blossom into a harvest of productive, happy, peaceful and evolved African people.”Through teaching about the importance of culture and neurobiology, Iya advocates for the harmonization of Traditional Medicine and Western Medicine to facilitate holistic healing. She recently stepped down from being an executive board member on the Arizona ACEs Consortium, but continues to serve as the Chair of the Historical Trauma committee. She is an Adjunct Faculty member at the Arizona Trauma Institute/Trauma Institute International, and the founder of Phoenix Rising to Resilience virtual community on the ACEs Connection platform. Please join us in conversation with this grounded ‘Mother of the Universe’ as we explore healing intergenerational collective, historical trauma.
“Wisdom is dangerous. Love and beauty are too. Our culture has kept us away from them, and must do so to perpetuate the insanity we see all around us.”Mankind has lost its way, which is why we now have plastic in our blood, lead in our bones, iron and mercury in our brains, says Nikos Patedakis, a philosopher on a mission to nudge us back onto the path of wisdom, where all of human endeavor is of service to life. The problem is that much human activity today serves narrow interests and agendas, not the common good. And while many of us pin our hopes on technology to solve the world’s problems, which we have largely caused, Nikos insists that “the solution to our problems is not a technological one, because … it’s a spiritual [issue].”To grow spiritually, we need to open ourselves up to learning, and Nikos embodies the drive to achieve such growth through meaningful experiences, an eco-literate mindset, and consistent practice. Wisdom is a practice, as is love, and both are forms of each other, and manifestations of true understanding. But today, he laments, we tend to seek knowledge, not wisdom. Yet by acquiring, clinging to, and then teaching such fragments of knowledge, “we marginalise and distance ourselves from the very thing we are ultimately chasing: wisdom, meaning, purpose, and learning that will reconnect us to the sacred.” Fragmented knowledge is dangerous. According to Nikos, it’s like “we’re running around with a torch and think we have the sun in our hand.”Nikos himself has practiced many things, having worked as a professional dance teacher and blackjack player, a negotiation trainer, a consultant for Fortune 500 companies, and an Alexander Technique teacher. Having pioneered wisdom-based learning at San Francisco State University and University of California, Santa Cruz, he left academia to become a consulting philosopher, educator, and Co-Director of the Haumea Ecoliteracy Programme. He also has a podcast called Dangerous Wisdom, the name inspired by Buddha’s advice to handle his teachings with the same care as a venomous snake.Today, Nikos works as a consulting philosopher rooted in the ancient Greek orientation – as well as a friendly, neighborhood soul doctor, mentor, permaculture designer, and artist – applying the most powerful, holistic teachings of the wisdom traditions that influenced people like Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. Quoting Epicurus, he says “Vain is the word of the philosopher that heals no suffering.” And so drawing from the arts and sciences, he helps professionals from all walks of life learn to think the way nature works and reconnect with the philosophical traditions of the world. Humility is a good starting point, knowing what you don’t know. In his experience, top performers are so committed, so hungry, they always want to learn more, from any source, and their willingness to learn makes them humble.Nikos, too, is humble, being a serious “student of horses,” which have a culture of the wild. In their sacred presence, horses defy conquest consciousness so profoundly that even those who love horses get a little nervous because horses present an existential--and potentially humiliating--threat to the dominant culture and the human ego. Nikos sees horses as “part of the magic and mystery of the world,” incarnating dangerous wisdom, which makes them great teachers. To experience the magic of the horse, we need to heal and re-indigenize, renouncing what doesn’t work and learning to live a culture rooted in wisdom, love, and beauty, in a manner attuned to ecological and spiritual realities.Nikos argues that Homo sapiens, a being originally rooted in wisdom, love, and beauty, has morphed into a destructive homo economicus, imposing a “conquest culture” intent on taming, shaping, and ultimately degrading our planet, creating “value” for ourselves at the expense of all other beings and our own interconnectedness with the cosmos. “This culture makes us into takers and the planet pays for our ignorance,” says Nikos. “The world can absorb a certain amount of ignorance. But things are now out of hand, so we need to think in a new way. We have become used to thinking in a certain way, but that way is out of sync with nature.”Drive by agendas, such as development, growth, and innovation, we practice “spiritual materialism,” disconnecting us from reality and distorting it through a narrow view of conquest consciousness. In this epoch of “endarkenment,” business and political “leaders” even insist that our need for a thriving, just world is not “realistic,” even though we—and they—all know that our well-being depends on ecological health, that we are mutually interdependent, that our true culture is about belonging and interconnectedness to a greater whole, and that we will succeed most profoundly by cooperating and collaborating, re-attuned to our wisdom and “re-indigenized.”Philosophy helps us paint an accurate picture of the cosmos and give us an awareness of our place in it. Education in the dominant conquest culture “protects” people from philosophy and art. As Nikos wryly comments: “It takes a dysfunctional education to have a dysfunctional culture. Otherwise, people wouldn’t put up with it.” We need to see the world with fresh eyes and an awakened heart. For Nikos, art and philosophy both foster this, offering insight and inspiration for the benefit of all citizens and the broader community of life.Join us in conversation with this philosopher and purveyor of “dangerous wisdom.”
Silence isn’t just the absence of noise. It’s a presence that brings us energy, clarity, and deeper connection. A few years ago, Leigh Marz, a leadership coach, dance teacher, and confessed naturalist, met Justin Talbot Zorn, a policymaker, meditation teacher, and writer, through the introduction of a mutual friend. Though their meetings were entirely online, they hit it off professionally right away, “geeking out on all sorts of things” that they wanted to do in the world. They decided to write an article together and pitched some ideas, the very last one being on silence. The editor of the Harvard Business Review wrote back and said, “Write about silence. Thanks.” So in 2017 they wrote an article called “The Busier You Are, The More You Need Quiet Time.” It went viral and became HBR’s most shared article in recent years, translated into a few languages.So Leigh and Justin stepped back and thought, “What is this telling us?” Though they still hadn't met in person, they decided to write a book together. “Golden: The Power of Silence in a World of Noise” is the result of that inspiration and five-year-long subsequent collaboration.In Golden, Justin and Leigh explore the meaning of silence in a wide range of contexts—from the West Wing of the White House to San Quentin’s death row; from Ivy League brain research laboratories to underground psychedelic circles; from the temperate rainforests of Olympic National Park to the main stage at a heavy metal festival. Though their original article focused largely on auditory silence, Golden looks more broadly at noise—auditory, informational, and internal—not just in our ears, but also on our screens and in our heads. The second part of the book is a field guide to getting beyond the noise. Drawing on lessons from neuroscience, business, spirituality, politics, and the arts, Justin and Leigh explore why auditory, informational, and internal silence is essential for physical health, mental clarity, ecological sustainability, and vibrant community.Justin and Leigh see “silence as a pathway to compassion, to empathy, and to insight as well. Stepping back into deep silence—even sharing that silence as we think through these issues—really allows for novel thinking to emerge.” Silence counteracts “the ethic of performing constantly, to be able to tune into what’s true,” Justin says. It allows for discernment. According to Justin:Sometimes the word silence can have a connotation of complicity or complacency around what’s wrong. Sometimes we hear culturally that even silence is violence. And we respect this notion: it’s something we write about with great appreciation in the book, but our contention is that so much of the apathy in the world right now isn’t born of silence—it’s born of noise. When we’re caught up in paying attention to Instagram “likes,” gossip, career jockeying, and whatever else it might be, all that noise makes it difficult to truly focus on living a life of empathy, to focus on hearing what’s necessary in our lives from the people around us, and to hear what’s necessary with respect to what’s happening in the broader world.And there’s a special alchemy that happens when we are quiet together, experiencing silence with others, Justin and Leigh found. “The power of silence is magnified when it’s shared,” they write. They believe we can repair our world by reclaiming the presence of silence in our lives through a variety of modalities (and not just through mindfulness practice alone).Leigh Marz is a collaboration and leadership coach for major universities, corporations, and federal agencies as well as a longtime student of pioneering researchers and practitioners of the ritualized use of psychedelic medicines in the West. She began her adult journey studying ecology and the interrelationship of things, having in her childhood spent “a lot of time alone and together in nature” with her sibling. “It’s a place of comfort, of magic, dreaming, and self-transcendence, which I think is really good for us humans to experience as much as possible. The self becomes smaller and vaster at the same time,” Leigh says. She also learned to revel time in her body through her lifelong practice of dance, later realizing that “there's some transmission—not verbal, quite ineffable—that takes place” in dance, and that dance choreography allows bodies to come together in relationship like a murmuration.Leigh has led training programs to promote an experimental mindset among teams at NASA and a decade-long cross-sector collaboration to reduce toxic chemicals in products, in partnership with leading corporations, universities, and policy institutes. She is the cofounder of Astrea Strategies, and lives in Berkeley, California, with her husband and daughter.Justin Talbot Zorn has served as both a strategist and a meditation teacher in the US Congress. On Capitol Hill, he served as Legislative Director to three Democratic Members of Congress. He helped to launch and lead a first-of-its-kind mindfulness program in the US House of Representatives, bringing together people from across the political spectrum to do the work of finding greater calmness and insight.A Harvard-and-Oxford-trained specialist in the economics and psychology of human thriving, he has written for the Washington Post, The Atlantic, Harvard Business Review, Foreign Policy, and other publications. Justin is cofounder of Astrea Strategies, a consultancy that bridges contemplation and action, helping leaders and teams envision and communicate solutions to complex challenges. Justin lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with his wife and three children.Please join us in conversation and discernment with Leigh and Justin!
“Post capitalist philanthropy is a paradox in terms. A paradox is the appropriate starting place for the complex, entangled, messy context we find ourselves in as a species.” This is how long-time activists, political strategists, and “accidental philanthropy advisors” Alnoor Ladha and Lynn Murphy start their forthcoming book on Post Capitalist Philanthropy.The authors take us on a journey from the history of wealth accumulation to the current logic of late-stage capitalism – and ultimately to the lived possibilities of other ways of knowing, sensing and being that can usher in life-centric models. This “ontological shift”, as they call it, into new possibilities is at the heart of their work. Creating new-ancient-emerging realities is not simply about how we redistribute wealth or “fight power”, but rather, how we perceive and embody our actions in relationship to a dynamic, animistic world and cosmos.Their book is a result of decades of deep personal inquiry and practice, as well as lifelong engagement with activists, philanthropists, philosophers, social scientists, cosmologists and wisdom keepers. Alnoor Ladha comes from a Sufi lineage and writes about the crossroads of politics and spirituality in troubled times. His work focuses on the intersection of political organizing, systems thinking, structural change and narrative work. He was the co-founder and Executive Director of The Rules, a global network of activists, organizers, designers, coders, researchers, writers and others focused on changing the rules that create inequality, poverty and climate change. TR started in 2012 as a time-bound project and an experiment in temporary organizational design, exploring new ways of how to work, play, and make trouble together.His work has been published in Al Jazeera, The Guardian, Truthout, Fast Company, Kosmos Journal, New Internationalist, and the Huffington Post among others. He is a board member of Culture Hack Labs, a co-operatively run advisory for social movements and progressive organizations. He holds an MSc in Philosophy and Public Policy from the London School of Economics.Lynn Murphy is a strategic advisor for foundations and NGOs working in the geopolitical South. She was a senior fellow and program officer at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation where she focused on international education and global development. She resigned as a “conscientious objector” to neocolonial philanthropy. She holds an MA and PhD in international comparative education from Stanford University. She is also a certified Laban/Bartenieff movement analyst. Lynn and Alnoor are co-directors of The Transition Resource Circle, a group focused on the broader transition from our current meta-crisis to adjacent possible futures. TRC seeks to work with resources and resource holders to alchemize and liberate capital to be in service to Life. They work through circle ways – “e.g. non-hierarchical, embodied cognition approaches, psycho-spiritual practices to move from a culture of entitlement to ways which honor the multiple entanglements of historical precedents, our respective lineages & karmic storylines, and what future beings (including ourselves) require for reconciliation and healing.” TRC focuses on philanthropy as it has the potential to play a critical role in rebalancing wealth, power and historical injustices.Join us in conversation with these heartful and soulful thinkers and doers.
“It is not what music does,” writes Christine Stevens, “it is what music undoes.”In July 2022, as a crimson supermoon lit up the sky in Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming, Christine Stevens sat afloat in a kayak, beholding the still, alpine waters of Jenny Lake and attuning to the wisdom offered by the natural world. When the time was ripe, she reached into her backpack, took out the wooden flute that usually accompanies her, and played a mesmerizing ode to the moon. A certified naturalist, poet, and music therapist who has worked globally with survivors of trauma, war, and disasters, Christine was now preparing for her annual vision quest—alone for four days, fasting, and silent.Deeply connected with music and nature since a young age, Christine grew up in an “outdoorsy family,” adored her grandfather’s tree farm, and learned to play the piano and saxophone. Up until high school, however, she felt alone whenever she performed music. Then one day, she volunteered in a classroom of autistic children. They joined her in playing music together. And it was there that she discovered her life calling, going on to receive two master's degrees—one in music therapy, the other in social work. Although her current work is comprised in large part by drumming (Upbeat Drum Circles), it wasn’t easy at first. “I thought I had no sense of rhythm at all,” Christine reflects. “I almost failed the percussion class in college.” But she stumbled into a drum circle while attending a music conference and immediately felt transformed by the energy. She learned to play congas and improvise freely. Inspired by the ease of handling drums, their spiritual depth, and historical significance, Christine became a “musical ambassador of peace,” bringing their healing potential to communities touched by significant trauma: Columbine High School, Ground Zero after 9/11, and Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. Most recently, she worked with Iraqi refugees and created the first drum circle training program in northern Iraq.As a member of an integrative research team, she has published multiple studies on the scientific benefits of group drumming, including research that showed an increase in immunity and T-cells in participants of drum circles. Her book, Music Medicine: The Science and Spirit of Healing Yourself With Sound, goes deeper into music as a healing modality and teaches a paradigm of music that integrates the four directions and four elements with the four dimensions of the human being. When it comes to spiritual background and beliefs, Christine is a self-described “smogasbordian.” She has been influenced by The Soul Saving Station for Every Nation, the Quakers, the Sufi lineage of Hazrat Inayat Khan, and the Agape International Spiritual Center in Los Angeles—the latter in which her co-leading of the Drum Ministry has “really helped [her] consciousness of positive thought and affirmative prayer.” In her forties, she was adopted into the Lakota people after a sweat lodge purification ceremony and elaborate offerings of song, feast, and gifts.In addition to grassroots communities, Christine has also worked with the Department of Defense and many Fortune 500 companies including DuPont, Disney, and Verizon. For the general public, she offers multiple YouTube videos teaching simple rhythms with drummers from around the world. Her other books include The Nature Sutras, The Healing Drum Kit, and The Art and Heart of Drum Circles. She is a contributing writer for magazines like US News and World Report, Fitness, and The Christian Science Monitor. Ultimately, she feels her mission is to embody, with or without instruments, the music that moves through her and to support others in realizing that they, too, are music.Please join Mina Lee in conversation with this musician and poet of Earth’s wild beauty, and learn with us some ways to awaken through rhythmic and playful expression.
“Music generates energy. If we attach music to our message, it will help create the interest and excitement that is necessary to move people out of inertia and into activism.”
How does an individual, moved by spirit and conscience, begin to stand up against systemic human rights violations around the world? For Jack Healey, a former Franciscan priest and pioneering head of the Washington, D.C.-based Human Rights Action Center, it is by harnessing the world’s leading musical talent to raise awareness and mobilize youth to engage in nonviolent action.
Called "Mr. Human Rights" by U.S. News and World Report, Jack for over 60 years has exponentially raised the visibility of human rights and inspired activism among youth and ordinary citizens. He has been described as having "helped move the topic of human rights from closed-door diplomatic negotiations to widespread awareness, public debate, and direct citizen action." Through creative use of media and enlistment of world-class rock performers, Jack has bridged art and activism with the ultimate mission to defend the rights of humanity everywhere.
Jack saw first-hand the power of music to inspire and galvanize while in South Africa during the freedom struggle. As director of the Peace Corps in Lesotho from 1977 to 1981, he witnessed people singing protest songs in the streets and was struck by the power of music to activate and empower a community. This vibrancy stayed with him long after the streets emptied, even past when the event details faded from memory. “The music brought the crowds together, and the music carried their message with more strength than words.” Jack came to the realization that artists – musicians, writers, performers – can be uniquely effective activists and activators, given their ability to reach wide audiences and to “capture and convey the emotional state of society and question what is right and what is wrong.”
Following his time with the Peace Corps, Jack became director of Amnesty International, USA, where he would lead the organization for twelve years through unprecedented growth and a complete overhaul. He experimented with and introduced to the world a new tool in human rights activism – organizing musical events to raise awareness about human rights, including concert tours with U2, The Police, Peter Gabriel, Bruce Springsteen, Tracy Chapman, and many other musicians. In the month following the first benefit concert tour that Jack produced with Amnesty, membership increased by 45,000. Concert-goers were asked to send appeals for freedom on behalf of six prisoners of conscience, and two were released soon after.
In 1994, Jack fulfilled his dream to create “a one-person organization that could be effective as a medium-sized human rights group with a lot less money,” with the Human Rights Action Center. HRAC devoted over a decade to supporting the pro-democracy movement in Burma and the release of leader Aung San Suu Kyi, through a variety of projects, including the benefit album For the Lady, a documentary film Douye!, and a 30-day YouTube campaign. It has long been Jack’s vision to have the Universal Declaration of Human Rights document printed in every passport; he has stressed that the wide recognition of a written pronouncement for rights can be the basis of innumerable movements for change. Another current HRAC effort is clemency for Leonard Peltier, a Native American activist.
Jack spent his young adulthood in seminary, training over a decade to become a Franciscan priest. Attending graduate school in Washington, D.C. during the height of the civil rights movement hugely influenced him; integration, inclusion, and equality would become central themes in his sermons and in his work at a college ministry center. Around the time of his ordination, Jack knew deep down that he would someday answer the call to be of service beyond the walls of the Catholic church.
In 1968, following four years as a Catholic priest, Jack left the priesthood to lead the youth division of the American Freedom from Hunger Foundation. Jack coordinated with local youth to produce over 300 “Walks for Development” across the nation – long before charity walks or races became commonplace in American culture – raising $12 million for national and international non-profits that help alleviate world hunger. Jack would later team up with comedian and activist Dick Gregory on his world hunger run from Los Angeles to New York City to raise awareness and funds.
Jack has spoken at over a thousand high schools and colleges, is the recipient of seven honorary doctorates, and is a contributor to Huffington Post, The New York Times, and independent blogs. He helped to start the Reebok Human Rights Foundation, which hands out the Reebok Human Rights Award each year, and two other non-profits, Witness (supporting citizen video documentation of human rights abuses) and Equality Now (supporting equality for women and girls).
Jack’s life is celebrated in the forthcoming documentary film, Keeper of the Flame. His memoir, Create Your Future, details his many innovative ideas on how to bring human rights into mainstream consciousness and effect positive change, as well as his adventures collaborating with rock musicians, actors, producers, and NGOs to make it all a reality.
Please join us in conversation with this innovative and tenacious activist and humanitarian.
“Haleh Liza Gafori’s ecstatic and piercing translation has lifted a veil, bringing Rumi closer into the quick of our present. Each poem is a divine invitation. Free your mind. Drown in love.” —V (formerly Eve Ensler)
With black curls twirling across her shoulders, Haleh Liza Gafori — a poet, translator, vocalist, and educator — stands on a stage, performs a poem of Rumi that she translated into English, then bursts into song in Persian. As her voice echoes across the room, she evokes the divine ecstasy and vision this great mystic poet is known for — expressing in an intimate manner entirely her own. For well over a decade, Gafori has inspirited and taught the poetry of Persian poets across various universities, festivals, museums, and institutions.
A bicultural woman of Persian descent raised in New York, Gafori’s ears are highly attuned to both American poetry and the Persian text. As a child, she listened to her parents recite Rumi’s Persian poetry. “It’s very common for Iranians to memorize poetry,” she explains, saying she would hear these words but not quite understand. But the energy the lines carried, and their effects on the listeners made an early, indelible imprint on her.
As an adult, she began reading Rumi in English. “It was interesting that American translators kind of pointed me back to my roots," she says. For Gafori, Rumi’s words offer ancient wisdom pertinent to our current time: What do his poems tell us about ego death, compassion, greed, generosity, selflessness, soul, and the cultivation of ecstasy? What is his liberating take on death?
Then she began singing in Persian, and eventually, translating these same poems. “As someone who can look at the Persian and look at the English,” she reflects, “one can see, oh, we don't have these lines here, we're missing these lines, or wow, this is a great, well done translation here, or oh my God, what in the world was happening here? It's a mixture. It's a mixed bag.”
Her new book, Gold, is a fresh selection and translation of Rumi’s poems — its title a reference to Rumi and other Sufi poets being alchemists, transforming mental states and feeling states into “the deepest love, the deepest generosity, the most expansive consciousness that we can touch, the ecstatic.” Former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets Marilyn Hacker describes Gold as “the work of someone who is at once an acute and enamored reader of the original Farsi text, a dedicated miner of context and backstory, and, best of all, a marvelous poet in English.”
Gafori explains that the book is a collection sourced from the Divan-e Shams-e Tabrizi, a sprawling text of over 40,000 verses. Each poem here had to be cut from this endless cloth, reshuffled, styled with modern enjambments, and, finally, translated. Perhaps it’s more accurate to think of Gold not as a translation of one medieval mystical poet by a modern poet, but as a collaboration between two equal poets that spans centuries.
I saw myself sharp as a thorn. I fled to the softness of petals.
I saw myself sour as vinegar. I mixed myself with sugar.
An aching eye seeing through pain, a stewing pot of poison, I was both.
Reaching for the antidote, I touched compassion. I touched mercy.
After a BS in Biological Sciences from Stanford University, Gafori received an MFA in creative writing from City College of New York. Her thesis — comprised of original poems, as well as translations of Persian poets like Sohrap Sepehri and Omran Salahi — earned her an Academy of American Poets Prize and the Goodman Grant for Poetry. She has been featured at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Fetzer Institute’s Gathering on Love and Forgiveness, Bowery Poetry Club, and Verses of Hope hosted by the Marginalian (formerly Brainpickings). For the poetry journal Rattapallax, Gafori served as a guest editor of the New Persian Poetry section.
In addition to her gifts as a poet, Gafori is also a musician. For current and past musical projects, including Haale (former spelling of her name, “Haleh”) and The Mast, Gafori toured across the US and Europe, including stops at One Note at Carnegie Hall, the Lincoln Center Out of Doors Festival, and the Bonnaroo Festival. Her albums have received critical acclaim, and her songs have appeared in the NBC’s series “Life” and the CWTV’s series “The Originals.” In 2018, she translated, composed, and performed in a collaborative multi-media project, “Ask Hafez,” supported by the Queens Council on the Arts.
Like the poems she translates, Gafori’s voice is timeless, and her offerings are perhaps best observed or listened to. We invite you to find a quiet space to sample one of them here.
Please join us in conversation with this gifted poet and musician who infuses new vitality into ancient love and wisdom.
“If your heart is broken, I urge you not to waste it.” – Sarika Jain
In 2012, Sarika Jain was living a life similar to that of her clients today: she was a “smart, professional, go-getter” woman on Wall Street seeking to find love. But after a broken engagement that left her heartbroken and disillusioned with life, she realized she needed deeper, spiritual healing. “It was time to let go of all the things I thought I knew about love, dating, and relationships, and begin a powerful new inner journey of profound healing and transformation,” she realized.
True to her later advice, she didn’t waste her heartbreak. She embarked on a journey of self-love and true self-acceptance. That journey took her through, among other things, Awakin meditation circles, where she would meet the man who eventually became her life partner, Krishan Patel. She didn’t stop at just marrying her life partner, but also crossed a bigger milestone: “marrying one’s own self.”
Through her work of self-transformation, she came across the great leaders of history. What was their relationship with self-doubt? “They take a leap of faith in themselves,” Sarika observed, leading her to do just that for herself. From a well settled career as a management consultant, Sarika Jain decided to take a leap of faith and follow her dream: inspiring women to live the lives they’ve dreamed of - experiencing profound love, success and fulfillment. Sarika is a love, relationship and dating coach and the author of an upcoming book, The 90 Day Soulmate Plan: Get Out of Your Own Way and Attract the Higher Love You Deserve.
While a quick reaction about love coaching may feel like it’s about making oneself more appealing to attract the partner of one’s dreams, Sarika’s entire focus is on inner transformation. She has applied a deeply psycho-spiritual lens in the realm of personal relationships. How do we cultivate ourselves to be joyful and complete? How do we heal the wounds of incompleteness and the grief of unresolved heartbreaks and past hurts? Instead of changing oneself to be attractive to another, she focuses on helping people stop getting in the way of their most authentic self. Her unique approach encompasses everything from uncovering relationship patterns and closing one’s “Ex Files” to practicing self-love and mindfulness in relationships. And although her primary early motivation was to help women, her work helps both women and men.
Sarika walks the edge of inner transformation, leaning into interpersonal struggles and mining the gold from them. The relatability of her approach, the clarity of her message, and the power of her values has led to some calling her a “Relationship Sorceress.”
In her personal life, Sarika focuses on creating a conscious, joyful partnership with Krishan and a healthy home for her two daughters (with a third on the way!) as well as building a sacred community around her, which she views as an extension of cultivating her Love Garden. Through the teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh and her involvement with various volunteer communities, she has evolved her understanding of love – centering around the concepts of interbeing, mindfulness and service. Her underlying passion is around healing the relationship between men and women and “creating a future of peace for the children of the world” by ending generational trauma and creating healthy family units.
Sarika’s professional journey includes 15 years in the corporate world. It has been more than a decade since she made the conscious decision to connect with the song of her heart. Sarika is a student of yoga, energy healing, psychology, feminine spirituality, and relationships and has studied Life Centered Therapy with licensed clinical psychologist Dr. Andy Hahn. She has an undergraduate degree in Computer Science & Engineering from University of Pennsylvania, an MBA from The Wharton School, and has worked at Bain & Co., Merrill Lynch and the World Bank. Sarika lives with her husband, Krishan, and two daughters in New Jersey, and leads a playful, passionate life.
Join us in conversation with this votary of healthy love -- a love that is enabled by self-acceptance and inner transformation.
Lissa Rankin, MD, describes herself as a skeptic. She is a Western-trained ob-gyn, linear thinker, and evidence-informed scientist. In the same breath, however, she also describes herself as a mystic — an open-hearted, spiritually alive, empathic healer who has witnessed countless “miracles” of healing and has also experienced them firsthand herself. “I’m sort of a unicorn,” she says. Her private inquiries and outer discoveries have made her an unusual expert in the sometimes opposing worlds of conventional Western medicine and alternative healing.
Rankin’s awakening began when she was thirty-six, only several years out from residency training. By this point, she was already disillusioned by her profession and “morally injured,” leaving the hospital where she worked, and eventually leaving clinical medicine altogether. Personally, she was taking seven prescription drugs for a variety of health conditions her doctors couldn’t cure, and she feared she wouldn’t live to forty. So she set off to learn what else might ease suffering when doctors say, “We’ve done all we can.”
Since then, Rankin has become a bestselling author, artist, activist, and thought leader in mind-body medicine, dedicated to “healing health care.” Having spent equal time practicing and studying in Western medicine as she has in complementary and alternative medicine (fourteen years in each), she is careful not to blindly praise one paradigm over another. “I found just as much shadow in that world [alternative medicine] as I did in the world of conventional medicine,” she writes. “You might say I’ve been a doe-eyed devotee of both camps, but I’ve also been disillusioned by both…both offer gems and garbage. Both can wow us with miracles or horrify us with malpractice….”
Her latest explorations, which spanned a decade of deep investigation and culminated in her most recent book, Sacred Medicine: A Doctor’s Quest to Unravel the Mysteries of Healing, took her from holy mountains, faith healers, and prayer circles to trauma experts, cutting-edge scientists, and leading psychologists. Guiding her were some of her fundamental questions: when it comes to healing from illness and injury, how is it that some people do everything right and stay sick, while others seem to do nothing extraordinary yet fully recover? How does faith healing work, or does it? Can we make ourselves miracle-prone, and if so, how?
In response to the need for more holistically trained doctors and healthcare professionals, Rankin founded the Whole Health Medicine Institute. She also founded the nonprofit organization Heal At Last, a trauma-informed, physician-designed community wellness program modeled after 12 Step programs, that seeks to provide equal access to spiritual practices, as well as the healing of trauma and the “epidemic of loneliness.”
She is the author of six books, including the New York Times bestseller, Mind Over Medicine. Her work has been featured across national media outlets, including O Magazine, The New York Times, CNN, Health, Women’s Health, and Cosmopolitan. Her TEDx talks have been viewed over 4M times, and she leads workshops online and at retreat centers around the US. She is currently consulting for a Biden task force on vaccine hesitancy as a trauma symptom. She resides in Northern California.
Please join Dr. Cynthia Li in conversation with this gifted and lively “unicorn” of a doctor as we explore the mysteries of healing together.
“The wound is the place where light enters you.” – Rumi
At 25, Chloe Zelkha, a community organizer, chaplain and educator for young adults, suddenly found herself in the role of a first-time caregiver. Her husband sustained a debilitating injury from a car accident. Soon thereafter, her hale-and-hearty father passed away from an aortic aneurysm. Facing sudden death and dis-ease in her family, everything Chloe had learned from her academic religious studies went from conceptual to lived. From this period of tremendous trial, she emerged with a guiding question: How do we stay wide awake to the precariousness of life in and around us, and also walk in the world unafraid?
Rather than running from grief, Chloe chose to lean into death and dying. She trained as a hospital chaplain at the University of California San Francisco hospitals, offering spiritual care to the ill, the dying, and their families. “Our death-denying culture,” she remarks, “insists that we look away from mortality, look away from pain.” Instead of the conventional chaplaincy response as “fixing” spiritual crises, she stepped into her role as “more of a student, sitting at the feet of the real masters,” and understood grieving as a “courageous act.”
During her chaplaincy, she realized the paucity of grief programs supporting young adults. So, with some friends, she put together ongoing events, like weekend sleepover retreats for young adults who lost a parent, friend or loved one, focusing on peer connection and community — circles of sharing stories, workshops, bonfires, song and silence — instead of clinical care. When the pandemic hit, Chloe responded similarly, cofounding the COVID Grief Network, a mutual aid organization that offers free community and grief support to young adults who lost someone to COVID-19, especially in hopes to heal the isolation.
From a young age, Chloe had been supported to feel that her ideas mattered — whether in rebounding from setbacks, or actualizing fresh and novel intentions. She attended Ohlone Elementary School in Palo Alto, California, where the project-based, participatory, mixed-age, whole-child pedagogy taught her to relate to her surroundings with curiosity. She kept a “teaching ideas journal” and often pitched creative curriculum ideas to her teachers (“usually unsuccessfully,” she adds with a chuckle). As she grew, the raucous discussions she initiated at her family’s dinner table on teaching and learning would come to incorporate how people unlearn, and eventually, “how learning spaces can be transformative, even sites of spiritual transformation.”
Chloe’s parents also helped nurture her enterprising spirit. Her father, an Iraqi Jew raised in Iran, emigrated alone to the U.S. when he was 16. An entrepreneur, he would embrace with equal joy the failures and successes of his ventures. Her mother was a labor and delivery nurse who, having supported and witnessed countless mothers giving birth, became adept at “midwifing new ideas.” Although their family didn’t observe the religious dimensions of their Jewish culture, Chloe was enrolled in Hebrew School for becoming a bat mitsvah. It was then that she began identifying with the spiritual practices of Judaism, and for the first time in public, she sang. In St. Augustine’s words, “Those who sing pray twice,” and Chloe’s voice became one of her favorite expressions in liturgical contexts.
Beyond grief work, Chloe’s work also focuses on community and healing in other sectors. Even before her chaplaincy training, she had helped design transformative group experiences for young adults (from retreats to DIY rituals to performance arts). She was an organizer with The Food Project, a youth employment program that gathers a diversity of teens to grow food, learn about oppression and liberation, and bridge differences. She also served as Fellowship Director at Urban Adamah, a Jewish farm in Berkeley, where she integrated spirituality, farming, mindfulness and social justice.
Chloe's social justice interests at a young age had inspired her to study religion at Carleton College, because it “helped me understand the ways people make meaning.” Her diverse coursework included offerings like Religion and the Black Freedom Struggle; Taoism; Religious and Moral Issues in the Holocaust; and a study abroad program in Mexico on Catholic Liberation Theology. She then trained as a community organizer through the JOIN for Justice Fellowship in Boston. At Harvard University, she earned a Masters in Education, focusing on transformative experiences. Currently, she is studying toward rabbinic ordination at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in Philadelphia.
Her guided offerings draw from her widely inclusive approach to faith — combining song, Buddhist insight meditation, and Jewish scripture and spirituality. For anyone interested in more singing or contemplative prayer videos, she offers a whole playlist!
Join us in a conversation with this experimental educator helping to transform grief into wisdom, and designing powerful spaces for collective learning and unlearning.
"Peacemaking is not about making a political commitment, it’s a commitment to a deep healing of deep traumas. Until we do that we can never do peacemaking.”
When Sami was just 16, his uncle Mubarak Awad was permanently exiled for taking a leading role in the Palestinian nonviolent resistance movement during the first Intifada. “That is how dangerous non-violence is,” says Sami. His parents were refugees, displaced by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and Sami watched his own father abused by Israeli authorities. Though Sami “had every excuse and justification to hate Israelis,” he did not. In spite of the violence, his mother emphasized the Christian teachings of “loving your enemies” and forgiveness, while his uncle exposed him to the messages of non-violence from Jesus to Mahatma Gandhi to Martin Luther King Jr.
In the late 90s, Sami founded Holy Land Trust (HLT), a non-profit organization in Bethlehem, whose mission is to find peace, justice and understanding for people in this land that is sacred to faith communities the world over. HLT seeks to uncover the root causes and real reasons that people are not seeking and finding peace. The organization engages in deep healing work for the trauma—of both Palestinians and Israelis—from the existential fears and violence that mark their lives in the Holy Land. For Sami and HLT, healing the collective traumas that prevent peace is an intense and spiritual process focused on personal transformation and commitment to community. In seeking to create a Holy Land for all, Sami asks: "Can I make a decision that is motivated by the future that I seek—not the past that I experience?"
In one word, Sami describes himself as an “activist.” He is continually plumbing the depths of how real change happens and how true healing occurs. He defines sacred activism as not just sitting and meditating, but engaging in direct action--stopping the violence—in a way that is infused by the mindfulness work and spiritual practices peacebuilders have been engaging in over the past decades.
"I now believe that my own liberation as a Palestinian is not only about ending the Israeli military occupation, but also about addressing all aspects of violence—be they political, social, economic or environmental. Nonviolence is not a tactic to be taken out of the box when it seems fit to use. It is a way of life."
Recently, he has been exploring the connection to nature as a peacebuilder’s guide and a comfort—to find the sacred understanding and messages that come through the elements of water and land. Sami and HLT are working with other partners to explore the intersections of environmental justice, non-violent resistance to the Israeli occupation, and sacred activism.
Sami lives outside Bethlehem in the West Bank. He holds a Doctoral Degree in Divinity from the Chicago Theological Seminary, a Master’s Degree in International Relations from the American University in Washington D.C., and an undergraduate degree in Political Science from the University of Kansas. Sami’s courage to be among the first activists to see Israelis not as “the Other” but as brothers and sisters together in this land—and his willingness to engage in the trauma work in both communities—inspired the Euphrates Institute to create the Visionary of the Year award in order to honor his unique vision. Today, as the director of programs at Holy Land Trust, Sami travels widely and is a frequent speaker, and leads intensive trainings and retreats for Palestinians and Israelis.
Please join us in conversation with this visionary peacebuilder to kindle our own commitment to peace, justice, sacred activism, and connection to nature.
“Surrendering reminds me that my way is always inferior to the way of life.” – Anna-Zoë Herr
University was about to start and Anna-Zoë Herr had exhausted her last option for arranging living quarters. Where to turn? For weeks, she had searched the inventory of apartments only to find they had already been filled. Her last option was a listing in a rural area far outside the city limits (and far from the university). After an exhausting trip navigating public transportation, Zoë was dismayed to discover that the apartment was once again no longer available. When she got to the bus stop to head back home, she realized the last bus of the day had already left.
“God, just tell me what to do,” she cried, breaking down in tears. “Thy will be done. I just want what you want for me.” After a few moments, the thought came to her, “Go and hitchhike.” Obedient to the command, she stuck out her thumb and was picked up by a man on his way back into town, who said he could give her a ride. They got to chatting and it turned out this man was a plumber and knew of an apartment that would soon be vacated. It was located right next to the university and the landlord was a friend of his. The man drove Zoë straight to the apartment so she could take a look and meet the landlord and she signed the contract right then.
Such surrender – and trust in God and in humankind – manifests in the diverse threads of her life as an artist, sustainability researcher, and spiritual seeker. “Surrendering reminds me that my way is always inferior to the way of life,” she says, as she describes a broken heart that sent her on a 10-month solo adventure of a lifetime hitchhiking through South America at age 19, which experientially confirmed something of humankind's fundamental kindness.
Zoë’s creative endeavors, primarily painting and photography, are embodied experiences of surrender and trust. The creative process is “a language that speaks to our hearts in a way in which it can listen intently, if we surrender to the process. I try to get to a place of whole-hearted surrender of what I think something should be and allow what wants to come, to emerge.” The output of her surrender has resulted in solo exhibitions of her work throughout the world.
Surrender is also a quality linked to the cultivation of hope in her work as a researcher and public educator on the climate crisis. Confronted with the often-overwhelming data of despair that depicts the current ecological situation, we face an imperative to acknowledge the bleak outlook while at the same time letting go of the inevitability that this be our future--in order to imagine a different one. Imagination is the key to finding hope and shifting the narrative of an us vs. them approach to nature (and to humanity) to an interconnected, interdependent reality, says Zoë. Just as Zoë practices surrender when standing before a blank canvas, there is an invitation for humanity to practice whole-hearted surrender and “allow what wants to come to emerge” and find answers to seemingly unsolvable problems in a new narrative of hope.
Along with her older brother, Zoë was raised in Hamburg, Germany in a loving and deeply spiritual family environment steeped in the practice of Christian Science, a religion and philosophy which emphasizes God as an all-powerful Divine Love and the laws of God as governing a deeper, ordered reality than that which is visible only to the material senses. Her mother, Anette Kreutziger-Herr, was a professor and author of several books, who left academia to become a spiritual healer. Her father was a Christian Science lecturer and teacher.
When Zoë’s father passed four years ago, she grappled with almost unbearable pain and grief and was finding it difficult to find hope. One night, she had a dream in which her father appeared, sitting opposite her. “I came back because you have a question for me,” he said. Zoë was taken aback and then said quickly, “Yes, I do. How do I overcome your death?”
“You don’t overcome my death,” her father replied. “You just love.” Taking this injunction to heart, Zoë’s path deepened towards love, towards hope and imagination even amidst despair. She was healed of depression and expanded into a deeper sense of trust and joy. Her father's loss led her more powerfully and experimentally to her art and more committed to understanding how we relate to nature. These became more important to her because they were important to her father and immersing herself in them became a way of connecting to and honoring her father.
Even in the face of loss, whether on the global scale or personal, can we each take cues from Zoë to surrender—and trust—and love?
Join us in conversation with this open-hearted spiritual seeker as we explore spiritual practices to kindle the imagination and spark hope to the problems we face in today’s world.
On March 3, 2002, Robi Damelin’s world shattered. A Palestinian sniper shot and killed ten Israelis, including several soldiers, at a checkpoint near the Palestinian occupied territories. Among those killed was her 28-year-old son, David, an active member of the peace movement. Her heart raw and weeping, Robi’s first words were: “Do not take revenge in the name of my son.” Somewhere below the grief, the values of coexistence and tolerance, with which she’d raised her two sons, had been summoned, and she knew even in the acuity of that moment that exacting vengeance would merely fuel the cycle of violence. With the same clear-sightedness, she graced David's grave with a quotation by the Lebanese-American poet Khalil Gibran: "The whole earth is my birthplace and all humans are my brothers.” These words foretold the mission that would soon become her life.
Born in South Africa during apartheid, Robi was raised in a fiercely progressive family who vocally opposed the government’s policies (she described an uncle who defended Nelson Mandela during his first treason trial, and a distant cousin who marched with Mahatma Gandhi against discriminatory policies in South Africa). In 1967, Robi moved to Israel with the hope of “saving Israel” during the Six-Day War. But the war had ended, so she volunteered to work in a kibbutz and learned Hebrew. She worked for The Jerusalem Post, got married, and had two sons — Eran and David. She dreaded that they would eventually have to serve time in the army, as was mandatory for anyone in Israel who turned 18.
As Robi ran a public relations firm that worked with companies like National Geographic, the History Channel, and Unilever, David was called to the reserves, which is when tragedy struck. In the wake of David’s death, Robi couldn’t bear “business as usual” and closed down her office. “It is impossible to describe what it is to lose a child,” she said. “Your whole life is totally changed forever. It’s not that I’m not the same person I was. I’m the same person with a lot of pain. Wherever I go, I carry this with me.”
This same pain, she realized, was shared by victims’ families on both sides of the conflict and could be a powerful catalyst for healing together. Three months after David’s death, Robi attended a demonstration and spoke to more than 60,000 people about her son and her hope for Israel to vacate the Palestinian occupied territories. She made an impression upon the Parents Circle – Families Forum, or PCFF, a grassroots organization of some 600 Israeli and Palestinian families who lost loved ones to the conflict, fostering dialogue, mutual understanding, and reconciliation.
“It took me time to understand,” she reflected, “to look at the differences in temperament and culture, and become much less judgmental. I think David was a much more tolerant person than me. I learned a lot of lessons from him, and the pain of his loss created a space in me that was less egocentric -- that I know what's best for everybody.” The PCFF would soon become Robi’s refuge and her path to a lifelong journey of self-discovery and activism. She would become the spokesperson of the PCFF and their Director of International Relations, speaking worldwide with a Palestinian partner.
A little over two years after David was killed, Robi learned that David’s killer had been captured. Robi was aware that her role in communal reconciliation work would lack credibility unless she could walk the talk. After much soul-searching she wrote a letter to the sniper’s family, seeking dialogue as a first step toward forgiveness. Her carefully drafted letter presented David as she knew him, as a deep thinker, a compassionate student leader, an advocate of peace, an opponent of Israeli settlements, and a reluctant soldier. It also presented the work and objectives of the PCFF. Her hopes of receiving a swift, constructive reply, however, were dashed. The scathing reply she eventually received two and a half years later merely sought to justify the killing. Clearly, the sniper, like so many perpetrators of violence, was still trapped in a spiral of hatred.
Undeterred, Robi traveled back to her homeland of South Africa to learn and seek inspiration from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s efforts after apartheid, wondering if similar tactics could move Israel toward a just resolution to the Middle East conflict. In 2012, this story of her journey into her past to work toward a better future was movingly told in the documentary One Day After Peace.
Robi has received numerous awards, including being one of four Women PeaceMakers of the Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice and the Woman of Impact award by Women in the World. She has regularly contributed to The Forward, Haaretz, and the Huffington Post, and she is a regular speaker to thousands of Israelis and Palestinians at various universities, parliaments, and numerous international events.
“Nothing is easy in this journey,” Robi says. But she remains tenacious in her personal pursuit. “Peace means human dignity, I think. I would sense a state of peace if I lived in a moral country where people are equal and respect other people's humanity.” The stories, Robi believes, are what will change society for both groups. "Narratives and personal stories are the basis of most of the work that we do. In fact, it's always a factor in whatever we do, and you'd be amazed how even the hardest of hearts are affected by hearing a story."
Please join Aryae Coopersmith in conversation with this courageous mother, peacemaker, and humanitarian.
Many years ago, Ethan Hughes and his wife, Sarah, launched a wild experiment in radical simplicity that continues to this day: no electricity, no computers, no use of anything they don’t make by hand. They use an outhouse, grow their own food, cook in solar ovens, store their canned food in root cellars, and read to their two young daughters by beeswax candlelight. “There’s just no reason to do anything that doesn’t add to your life force,” Ethan says.
What started as a personal experiment has evolved into the Possibility Alliance, an educational and service community free from fossil fuels that was created by Ethan and his family to welcome anybody and everybody interested in experiencing how to live according to practices vital to personal and planetary well-being: radical simplicity, agenda-less service, social activism, inner work and gratitude. For Ethan's family, living with radical simplicity is a means for helping unleash their own and others' gifts, to reach their spiritual potential and inspire others to do so as well, and to become the most magnanimous vessel of love they can be. Living simply is a way of embodying the deep life force possible to all.
Located first in La Plata, Missouri and then in Belfast, Maine, the Possibility Alliance to date has hosted more than fourteen thousand visitors from around the globe, from Congolese refugees to a West Coast rock band, all inspired by their mission. For Ethan, “The Possibility Alliance is about freeing us from fear’s grip, about creating resilience and pumping our fists in the air when people say, ‘I have this crazy dream.’”
Ethan’s crazy dream started when he was 13, after his father was killed in a car accident by a drunk driver, causing Ethan to question everything. In college, he witnessed firsthand the devastation of an oil spill in Ecuador, watching indigenous people scooping dead animals out of the sludge. Vowing to give up cars and travel only by bike or public transportation, he says, “My amount of joy, wonder, and love of being alive increased.”
Soon after college, Ethan unexpectedly inherited $150,000, every penny of which he promptly gave away. After he married Sarah, whom he claims is even more radical than he is, the couple spent 18 months living at the Community of the Ark, a petrol-free activist center in La Borie Noble, France. They concluded that to really embody their dream, to whole-heartedly live out their vision, they would have to create a community from scratch, and even to choose to live well under the poverty line – which they continue to choose to do, in order to be exempt from contributing to the war machine via taxation.
The Possibility Alliance was established as a 110-acre intentional community in La Plata, Missouri. For 11 years, the Alliance gave free classes in subjects including straw bale building, homesteading, wild edibles, tree pruning, permaculture, organic gardening, and civil disobedience. Everyone was welcome. Initially anticipating perhaps 200 or so visitors a year, the Alliance ended up hosting more than 10,000; and when the visitors showed up for free classes, they were met at the train station by a horse and buggy. All was offered in the spirit of gift, including the first by-donation permaculture certification in the U.S.
In 2018, Ethan and Sarah moved the Possibility Alliance to Belfast, Maine, where they serve in their local community and also work on indigenous reparations, anti-oppression, and what may be the most important pillar of their mission: gratitude and celebration. “Our biggest question has always been, ‘How do we enjoy the revolution?’,” Ethan says. “We live off the grid but we live like kings. We play music, do puppet shows, swim in the ponds, host sledding Olympics.”
The Possibility Alliance has given away $130,000 for reparations to indigenous and black causes over the past 15 years, tithing 20 percent to BIPOC groups. In the spirit of enjoying the revolution, the Alliance also serves as International Superhero Headquarters that, among other things, organizes Superhero bike rides where Zing (Ethan’s superhero name) and some 1,200 comrades with names like “The Love Ninja” and “Radiant X” spend a month swooping into towns dressed like superheroes to offer free community service. Zing’s superheroes, whom he calls a “peace service army,” have built a library, bucked hay, cleaned city parks, and given away goats, fruit bushes, seeds, soil, and compost. At last count, they’ve donated some 70,000 hours of free community service.
Join us in conversation with this peacefully disruptive, pragmatic builder -- both of dreams and of live-off-the-land communities alike!
Rajeev is the CEO of Stewardship Asia Centre in Singapore, and Founder President of the Leadership Energy Consulting (LEC) Company in Seattle, WA.
Author of the Wall Street Journal and Amazon best seller Open Source Leadership (McGraw Hill 2017), Too Many Bosses, Too Few Leaders (Simon & Schuster 2011), co-author of Be the Change (McGraw Hill 2014) and a regular writer for Forbes, he is an out-of-the-box thought leader on leadership, change management and corporate governance. He has extensive global experience in leadership and organizational consulting, with a particular focus on uncovering personal and organizational “leadership energy.”
Rajeev’s professional roots are in industry. Prior to starting LEC, he was CEO of the Iclif Leadership & Governance Centre based in Malaysia. Formerly, he has been Chief Learning Officer of both Coca-Cola and Morgan Stanley, and has held senior positions at American Express, HSBC and Goldman Sachs. At Goldman, Rajeev helped found Pine Street – the firm’s acclaimed leadership academy – and headed Pine Street for Europe and Asia. Before embarking on a career in Executive Development, he was a banker and currency trader. Today, he is a sought-after international speaker and has been widely featured in international media platforms from Bloomberg to CNN to Harvard Business Review.
THE BACK STORY
After a high-flying start in a coveted investment banking career, Rajeev felt disillusioned by the prevalent greed and erosion of values in the business world. He noticed the idealism and enthusiasm of hundreds of starry-eyed young professionals quickly give way to cynicism and hopelessness. For him, the inspiration for transformation arrived in the most unusual place -- his father's funeral.
At the funeral, I noticed that entire town had come for my parents' funeral. Thousands and thousands of people pouring in. I couldn't understand. My father was an accountant, an ordinary citizen, not a very rich person. Why did the whole town come? He's not a leader in the traditional sense -- he's not a Neta, he's not a public servant, he's not ... so why? For the funeral, there was a traffic jam. Nobody could get in. Everyone wanted to pay their respects.
In my grief at the time, I looked around and saw people I hadn't seen for years. I remember seeing an elderly gentleman who carried me in his arms when I was a baby. "Uncle, you came all the way?" I asked him. He replied, "I have come to salute your father. He never had much, but whenever anybody asked him for anything, whatever he had, he gave. There are not many people like that, son." I asked another person the same question. He said, "In the sea of corruption that taxation is, your father was one beacon of honesty. Never took a bribe, never gave a bribe, never did anything wrong and I've come to salute him." I asked a third person and heard a similar response. "Well, he had the courage to fight against injustice. Never ever was he scared. He had so many powerful people wanting to shut him down and even life threats because he was creating havoc for corrupt people, but he was not scared. I've come to salute him."
Years later as I was sitting down in deep reflection, I realized what leadership was because I was reminded of this funeral and realized that to be a leader you don't have to be big, you don't have to be famous, you don't have to be a genius. You have to have a heart full of gold. And you know the kind of gold I'm talking about! A gold made of grace. You need a heart full of grace and a burning desire to create a better future. That's what my father was embodied -- change the world through his own example. Be the change. That was him.
His father's example deepend his understanding of about leaders like Gandhi and Mandela, who even after most testing circumstances, never allowed hatred, pride and greed to come in their way and always stood-up for the wellbeing of ALL. That made him realize, that world doesn't need more "bosses". What we needed, were true "Leaders." Leaders who can truly listen to the music of their inner voice and their values, . Leaders who can truly dance to a large purpose, beyond simply money, power or fame. And Leaders who are truly "Stewards" for a more beautiful and sustainable future for ALL.
That inspired Rajeev to devote himself to the work of planting seeds for more purposeful and values-oriented business and leadership.
In 2014 and 2017 he was named one of Top 100 Global Thought Leaders for Trustworthy Business by ‘Trust Across America.’ Rajeev and his family have lived in fifteen cities in eight countries, and he currently splits his time between Singapore and USA. You can learn more about Rajeev through this website.
In this conversation, we will listen to some powerful stories from Rajeev's life which led him to transition out of a highly rewarding financial services career, and to explore a life more deeply aligned to his true values, purpose and love. We will also learn from his insights on how to unlock the "leadership energy" in our own lives so that we may become stewards for a more beautiful and sacred future for all!
To join, simply RSVP below!
At the age of 21, on a pilgrimage to Israel, Chelan (Shuh-LANNE) Harkin found herself sitting alone in the same cell that some 140 years earlier had confined Baha'u'llah, the founder of the Baha'i faith. The quietude of the barred room was suddenly broken by a voice she took to be the Persian prophet's spirit saying, "Let us dance." This unexpected invitation cracked her heart wide open and next thing she remembers was her own voice filling the resonant chamber with joyful song.
A decade later, those three words Harkin heard in that Israeli citadel, would serve as the title of her second collection of mystical poetry, marking just the latest in an on-going series of events which have confirmed for her a playful benevolence at the heart of the universe.
Your smarts, your talents, your good looks – take off these impediments and let us dance!
Born and raised in scenic Hood River, Oregon, Harkin's experiments with poetry began early in life. Prior to learning how to write, she would periodically commission her mother to commit her mystical musings to paper. Throughout Harkin's adolescence, a connection with life's big questions, and the crafting of poetry around them, were to come in and out of focus.
Then, an introduction to free verse in high school, and – during a therapy session – her first exposure to the work of the 14th-century Sufi poet Hafez fueled her interest in the power of poetry to transform and alchemize old painful conditioning into beautiful medicine.
Let your words reek of sweat and light and carry hints of the toil and deep breath of your ancestors and the notes of any song they stored away to pass down to you. A poem is where the flint of soul strikes the stone of trauma and makes a spark. The world needs your voice. Un-sheath your knowing. You have permission to say anything.
Harkin's subsequent pursuit of a degree in consciousness studies at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, was interrupted by the surprise discovery of a brain aneurysm requiring immediate surgery. Rather than shrink from the jarring diagnosis, she welcomed it as a means to accelerate her own encounter with past trauma.
Some weeks after successful surgery, with a shaved head starting to sprout hair again, Harkin committed to writing and sharing a poem every day for a month – regardless of quality. On just the second day, an entire poem came pouring through her without effort or in need of editing. Thereafter, all of her poems have been co-created with an unseen and sometimes overly-prodigious muse.
...each morning before we wrestle the world and our hearts into the shape of our brains, look around and say, ''Wow!'' Feed yourself fire. Scoop up the day entire like a planet-sized bouquet of marvel sent by the Universe directly into your arms and say ''Wow!''...
Thereafter, Harkin continued for a number of years to post poems to Facebook, where most of them collected a handful of shares and a few dozen likes. But one morning she woke up to discover "The Worst Thing We Ever Did" had gone viral and been shared 30,000 times.
Encouraged by the poem's reception, Harkin directly appealed to Hafez and his friends to help guide her in the publishing and promotion of her first book. Thus petitioned, this "dead poets society" readily obliged by connecting her (in the most playful of ways) with popular Hafez interpreter Daniel Ladinsky, and award-winning writer Mary Reed.
...The worst thing we ever did was take the dance and the song out of prayer made it sit up straight and cross its legs removed it of rejoicing wiped clean its hip sway, its questions, its ecstatic yowl, its tears...
Often compared to Rumi's poetry, Harkin's offerings invite readers to embrace the fullness of their being, by "inviting the fumbling, suffering parts of our nature and our divinity to meet for tea in the heart, to have a great laugh, and share a big hug." She is a tireless cheerleader for everyone she encounters to pursue their heart's passion unreservedly and allow the resulting delight to bless others on the path.
Join Mark Peters and Pavi Mehta in conversation with this modern-day mystic and poet, and let us dance!
Anthony Siracusa arrived at First Congregational UCC in Memphis in 2002 as a tattooed, legally emancipated 17-year-old high-school dropout, seeking to establish a free community bike repair shop at the church. He could hardly have imagined then that he would – over the course of the next two decades – help transform the lives of countless youth and community members; spark a sustained community movement to transform Tennessee into one of the most bike-friendly (and clean transportation) states in the US South; go on to college and complete a master’s and doctorate degree; write a pre-eminent intellectual history tracing the origins of nonviolence in the American civil rights movement; and create curriculum and strategies for helping students and organizations recognize their inherent transformative power.
And yet that's how his trajectory as a change agent unfolded. Author of Nonviolence before King: The Politics of Being and the Black Freedom Struggle (2021), Siracusa studies the power of successful and enduring social movements from the grist of deep life experience. He has spent his life practicing – and then studying and teaching – how ordinary people find courage and the “in-dwelling light” that compels them to assert their power and humanity in the face of deprivation, dehumanization and injustice – not principally as a form of protest, advocacy or activism, but first and foremost as a way of being and living in the world with integrity, of asserting their full humanity. The “politics of being” – rather than strategy or activist tactics – has, according to Siracusa, animated the most enduring and transformative social movements in history.
Siracusa’s focus on ordinary people simply asserting their humanity to live according to their inner light – rather than setting out to change the world – is true to his deeply rooted life experience. “We have to be careful not to get focused on the big things,” he says. “That was not my ambition when I started. As things evolve, your imagination expands.”
The way he started was as a 15-year-old bike enthusiast walking into a repair shop, excited by the vibrant community scene and people assembled there. He soon got a job at the shop to be part of it, but felt the limits of having to charge kids, watching them have to turn away. He realized there must be a better way to support people in pursuing their passion and to further the community’s health. He happened to come across a how-to guide for starting a community bicycle program, and realized he could do it: all he would need would be “free space, a bunch of bikes and parts, and someone who is silly enough to work on all bikes for free.”
Once First Congregational Church offered him the free space, he opened Revolutions Community Bicycle Shop in June 2002. Living in an anarchist commune when he started the shop (and later above the shop at the church), Siracusa imagined his bike shop as a place to bring diverse groups of people together. He saw cycling as one way to help people take care of themselves and the environment. And because cycling had inspired within him a deep passion and connected him to supportive relationships, he wanted to connect with local kids, teaching them about cycling and bike maintenance and giving them a place to belong. He didn’t simply want to repair bikes in a transactional way; he wanted to build deep 1:1 community relationships where people took the time to learn from and teach one another how to do their own repairs. Siracusa called his work a kind of radical reciprocity. “Generous giving is a challenge; receiving out of life’s abundance is also a challenge. Giving and receiving freely – it’s the way we all grow together into the best self, the best community, we can be.”
The policy at Revolutions was simple: just come. And come they did. Within months there was a steady stream of visitors entering the church basement to repair and build bikes together. The shop remains open to this day under new leadership, and while it has donated more than 4,000 bikes since it opened, its primary purpose is to provide opportunities, education, and support for the cycling community. As one writer recently observed, “Walking down the concrete stairs to the basement shop is walking into a world where potential cyclists can get more than a good bike: they can improve their skills, learn new ones, and become a part of a community.”
While Siracusa initially felt no draw to the spiritual mission of the church, he eventually decided to give it a chance, and soon the church community became his life. With the pastor’s encouragement and support, he earned his GED, set goals for his life, and applied for admission to college. In 2009, Siracusa graduated with honors from Rhodes College and was awarded the Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, which allowed him to travel over four continents to study the ways cycling serves as a catalyst for building community.
As his traveling fellowship was winding up, Memphis elected a new mayor, and the cycling community mobilized to ensure the city would use available federal funds to create bike lanes, including connecting to low-income parts of the community. Siracusa returned to help mobilize the community, successfully engaging in direct action to convince city, state, and national actors to turn Memphis into one of the most bike-friendly and environment-friendly transportation cities in the nation.
Intrigued by Memphis’s role in the history of the civil rights movement (including being the place where Dr. King was assassinated), Siracusa went on to receive a master’s and doctorate in history, focusing especially on the history of the American civil rights movement. He came to distinguish the tactics and strategies of nonviolent direct action from the theological underpinnings of nonviolence as a philosophy, or the “politics of being,” as he termed it. What led individuals to pursue nonviolence at great personal risk to themselves, Siracusa pondered, when it was not at all clear that their efforts would change laws, policies, or customs? He concluded that “for a critical cohort of activists and intellectuals, this decision to take nonviolent direct action was a choice about how to be in the world.” Refusing cooperation with the disfiguring demands of a racist and sexist society, these choices were made not as a form of protest, but to stand for the basic humanity of Black Americans. This assertion of the simple “right to be” often provoked violence from white bystanders. “But in responding to this violence with mercy, kindness, and forgiveness, nonviolent demonstrators patented a method designed carefully to contrast with and transform the cruel structure of domestic American politics.”
Siracusa now is a teacher, facilitator, researcher, author and university administrator with years of experience envisioning, developing, implementing and evaluating programs for students, staff, faculty, and community partners. He is Senior Director of Inclusive Culture and Initiatives at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and lives in Colorado with his wife and their two dogs.
Join us in conversation with this ordinary hero bringing about various revolutions, one cycle (and bicycle) at a time.
*Please note the special time for this call, to accommodate Teacher Wei in China in honor of the vernal equinox.
“Through pure consciousness practice — Mingjue — we can reach a harmonious and stable mind state, balance the energy of the whole body, and clear away all kinds of illnesses.” — Teacher Wei
In 2006, Wei Qifeng, an already esteemed qigong teacher and healer in China, found himself in a small, rented room near a legendary mountain west of Beijing called Xiangshan, alone in deep suffering. His life’s dream had seemingly ended several years earlier when the Huaxia Center (a.k.a, “Medicineless Qigong Hospital”) was closed down. He had returned to his family’s countryside home to serve the youth and the disabled, then onto Beijing to practice acupuncture and massage. But without the steady guidance of his teacher, Grandmaster Pang, and his community nearby, Wei felt adrift and empty. Now in the mountains, he wanted to resolve this dilemma, to find inner peace and freedom. The more he tried, however, the heavier his heart and mind became. Three months passed. So one day, he hiked up a tall peak, laid himself under the big, blue sky, and completely surrendered his practice of Zhineng Qigong, which was the very foundation of his life.
In this state of surrender, Teacher Wei traveled southward to Hainan, where he encountered a woman practicing Zhineng Qigong in the park. They spoke. She learned of his background — that he had gone through the two-year master training program with Grandmaster Pang, served as an editor at the center, advanced to a high level of healing abilities, and also guided some 500-600 hospital staff members in morning and evening practices — and she promptly invited him to lead a practice for her group. To his surprise, the same practices he had cultivated for over a decade felt different now. Something had shifted on the mountain, and the oneness of the universe felt clearer and simpler. “I enjoy this!” he realized. “It’s so playful!”
Born in the northwestern Gansu province to a family of farmers, Teacher Wei was given the name chosen by his older sister: Qifeng. “Feng means ‘pioneer,’” Teacher Wei explained. “Feng was also the name of a fictional character my sister had read about in school. This character was a very good man, always showing unconditional love to others.” As it turned out, English came easily to Teacher Wei, and he would become a pioneer in bringing Zhineng Qigong to the West, with students across Europe, Australia and New Zealand, South America, and America. As for the unconditional love of his namesake, his whole body exudes compassion and joy as he guides others to the depths of the cosmos with a lightness and clarity that is, at once, disarming and commanding.
Since his realization on the mountain in 2006, Teacher Wei has been highlighting the development of the pure consciousness state — or Mingjue — as his foundational teaching, with the qigong movements guided from this expanded mindset to amplify healing and awakening. This highest level of practice, he says, from a collective field where practitioners connect heart to heart in a state of pure consciousness, has the greatest potential for deep transformation, personal and global.
Qigong (qi, pronounced “chi,” means life energy, gong means cultivation) is an embodied consciousness practice developed in China over the past 5,000 years, more recently revitalized through quantum science and integrative medicine. It is the foundation of martial arts, tai chi, and Traditional Chinese Medicine.
The lineage of Zhineng Qigong (zhi means wisdom, neng means capability) was founded by Grandmaster Dr. Pang Ming who trained under many different grandmasters, studied both Western and Eastern medicine, and also mastered several forms of martial arts. His theories and practices aim to describe the laws of the universe and human life, informed by Confucianism, Daoism, Buddhism, medical qigong, martial arts, folk qigong, contemporary science, medicine, and philosophy. At its core is a sense of universal oneness. Through consciousness training, integrated movement, visualization, sound, and scientific theory, Zhineng Qigong offers a system through which healing and awakening to extrasensory perceptions can arise.
At the Medicineless Hospital, there were no so-called “patients.” Instead, everyone was a “student,” which shifted the mindset from helpless to empowered, from passive to participatory. Countless people from all over China came to the hospital, more than 400,000 experiencing healing from terminal or debilitating conditions, most deemed incurable by their doctors and healers. Teacher Wei discovered he had the gift of healing, too. On his first trip home to his family, he found his mother afflicted with leg and knee pain, so much so that her posture was unnatural and she had to use the wall for support. At the end of the first day of his energy healing practices, she walked without assistance. “It’s not a miracle,” Teacher Wei says, matter-of-factly. “In Zhineng Qigong, we have a different reference framework.”
In 2018, Teacher Wei co-founded the World Consciousness Community to build a worldwide consciousness field — “to connect practitioners heart to heart in the Mingjue state, to support each other and to enhance a higher consciousness for peace, freedom, healing, love, happiness, and harmony for each individual as well as the whole world.” He is the founder and organizer of Harmonious Big Family and the Mingjue Academy. And he has also translated several of Grandmaster Pang's books into English.
Please join Cynthia Li, MD for a special vernal equinox session with Teacher Wei — part conversation, part qigong consciousness practice.
“There is a lot of talking going on in the world right now. There is not a whole lot of listening. If we switched it around – more listening and less talking – we would see miracles.” – Kay Lindahl
In a social zeitgeist that emphasizes talking, verbalizing, and presenting one’s self, Kay Lindahl has steadfastly worked to reverse this equation: since the early 1990s, she has been teaching people how to listen – a composite form of inner and outer listening with a deeply spiritual grain.
Kay’s mission began around 1991 when she founded The Alliance for Spiritual Community (ASC), a grassroots interfaith organization creating dialogue among people of diverse faiths, cultures, and spiritual practices. Having recently relocated to a new community with her husband, she started ASC from their living room to bring a “strong spiritual presence” to her new community.
Her decade-long work with ASC underscored for her that building peace and diversity in a true sense requires a reformation in how we communicate – beyond words, and through channels of our attention. And so unfolded the next chapter of her journey: supporting listening as a critical exercise not only across diverse faith, cultural, and other traditions but also as a sacred art in itself – a spiritual exercise that an individual undertakes in the interior of their being.
To Kay, the inner and outer pieces of listening incorporate each other into what she terms an embodied “listening presence”. This kind of listening is a multi-dimensional practice that operates through listening to one’s body, soul, silence, life, heart, mind, emotions, and the earth. “Listening encompasses more than words,” she says. “It is a way of being in the world.” To Kay, sacred listening is an interface, a conduit between community and faith in its diverse forms.
For the past twenty-four years, Kay has been working on stretching the collective and individual imagination about “listening” – what it offers when viewed as a spiritual art form, how it might re-shape community dialogue, and how best people might “prepare” to listen. This has been her marching orders, her living manifesto. In 1997, she started The Listening Center (TLC). She conducts workshops and retreats around the world on the art form of listening for religious, spiritual, community, campus, and business groups. Kay has authored several books including The Sacred Art of Listening, Practicing the Sacred Art of Listening and How Does God Listen?
The premise of her work and TLC is that listening is a creative force. It is at the heart of transforming relationships. Listening requires practice and teaching. But it goes beyond the mechanics and modalities. Listening is a form of “beingness” for Kay, an attuning with the present moment that arrives when space is prepared for it. This “listening presence” significantly differs from effective and performative types of listening – responsible, inter-cultural, productive, interdisciplinary types. Spiritual listening emerges from an inward-facing stillness and attentiveness that creates space from which we can listen across our differences. Listening is a choice. When one chooses to listen deeply, it sets in motion a recognition of the life force of another, and we find ourselves able to understand even those opining differently.
Born into a community-oriented family of Scandinavian immigrants, Kay’s hands-on exposure to paying attention to and heeding the calls of the world outside of her began from within her family. As a child she witnessed her father in community leadership roles in fraternal organizations, and later serving on the city council in Jamestown, New York. He also hosted a weekly radio program in Swedish, serving the local immigrant population. The founding elements of her work and way of life lay also in her deep spiritual grounding. “Ever since I was a little girl I have had this sense of knowing. I felt connected to something I couldn’t describe.”
The essence of her origin – a predisposition to serving and leading community – kept reappearing in myriad forms throughout her adult life. Her own journey has been a testament to her listening to the opportunities that showed up in her non-linear path. It took her from the role of a registered nurse, to running her own financial consultancy for seventeen years, to being a regional leader for La League Leche.
In 1993 she attended the Parliament of the World's Religions in Chicago and heard theologian Hans Kung's statement – that there will be no peace among nations until there is peace among religions. She realized that there will be no peace among religions until there's dialogue among religions and that listening – to one another and to Source – is a key component of building a world of peace and harmony.
A long-time member of the Episcopal Church, Kay became an ordained interfaith minister and a board member of The Interfaith Observer, the Rumi Educational Center, and Women of Spirituality and Faith (to bring more female voices into the spiritual community). She is a past Ambassador for the Parliament of the World's Religions, a past (founding) trustee of the Global Council for the United Religions Initiative, and Past Chair of the North American Interfaith Network. She also is a member of the Forge Guild for Spiritual Leaders and The International Listening Association.
The ongoing Covid-19 pandemic is expanding her own understanding and practice of spiritual listening. The isolation and enhanced need for connection put the sacredness of listening in a unique context for Kay. She sees the inability to gather in person as an extension of the ongoing need for “finding ways to communicate differently”. Even while recognizing the hardships of the pandemic, she views this struggle as a fountainhead of opportunity for “learning to tune in to the hive – where we connect telepathically, without depending on time and space”. This is “a season of not knowing” -- when the answer to so many questions is I don’t know. She believes new grounds are opening to practice being present in the moment, to listen with patience.
Kay lives in Long Beach, California, and enjoys keeping in touch with her seven children and ten grandchildren.
Please join us in conversation with this gifted practitioner of the creative force of listening.
In the year 2000, Mauricio Lim Miller – now a leading social entrepreneur, public speaker and author focusing on peer-driven social change and economic empowerment – received a phone call from Jerry Brown, the then-mayor of Oakland, California. Miller had spent decades in community development and was heading Asian Neighborhood Design, a local organization that had grown into a nationally recognized model. The previous year, Miller was one of the honorees, along with Rosa Parks, invited by President Bill Clinton to attend the State of the Union address.
And yet then-Mayor Brown was apoplectic. He was incredulous that a youth program in which Miller was involved was requesting over $10 million in funding to ensure the employment of 120 caseworkers, while guaranteeing no jobs for client-participants. Brown accused Miller of being "a poverty pimp." Miller didn’t exactly disagree. He had long harbored doubts about existing programmatic approaches to addressing poverty. Year after year he saw the same people walk through his doors; a generation later, he saw their children. And so with Brown’s urging, Miller began thinking about how social service policies and programs could be re-designed to help break the cycle of economic dependency.
Miller realized he didn’t know the answers. But he sensed that the families did, and that they could lift themselves and one another up if entrusted and supported to make their own decisions – rather than being “saved” from themselves or directed what to do with the financial assistance they received. The son of a single mother who immigrated from Mexico, Miller realized that though she struggled constantly, she had figured out how to enable her children to escape poverty. He sensed that designing programs powered from the bottom up, rather than from the top down – focusing on the wisdom, talents and resilience of people in low-income communities, rather than on their perceived failings or weakness, and connecting them with one another – could yield new insights and promise. Miller viewed this as a huge opportunity to recognize the ability of low-income families to contribute to society, becoming “makers,” not “takers.” Their strengths, initiative, resourcefulness, talents, and determination – qualities shown by countless waves of US immigrants – were all hiding in plain sight.
So four weeks after the phone call, Miller resigned from Asian Neighborhood Design and, with start-up money from Brown, started the Family Independence Initiative (FII) as a research project. Now called UpTogether, FII gave low-income families laptops with data-tracking software and a platform that enabled them to record each action they took to improve their situations – whether related to savings, debt reduction, skills training or their children's grades. Quarterly, they received cash payments for tracking their behavior and documenting those actions. Instead of relying on professional caseworkers, FII encouraged families to set their own goals, provided cash incentives if they achieved them, and fostered relationships among families so they could turn to one another for support.
Crucially, Miller and FII staff members did not provide advice or direction; they simply created peer support among the families and audited the data. Miller wanted a window into how low-income families functioned if they were nudged and trusted to set and pursue their own goals – and with the mutual support of one another within a peer network, the kind his mother lost when she immigrated to the United States. As The New York Times reported in 2017:
The initiative is grounded in the premise that a paternalistic conceit has hindered the development of poor families …. Lim Miller’s organization provides no services or advice directly. What it offers are a structure and a platform within which families can strengthen their social networks, along with small payments for tracking their own behaviors and reporting them on a monthly basis. With these assets, they can discover what works for themselves and their peers, share or emulate their successes and assist one another.
Ringing in Miller’s ears were shrewd observations made by his late mother, who had lamented that charitable programs took away their intended beneficiaries’ pride and overlooked their hard work and talents (she herself had been an accomplished dress designer and seamstress). “They never ask me about what I’m good at doing. We would be so much better off if they just gave us a fraction of what they spend trying to help us,” she had said.
Miller sees a bigger picture, too – an opportunity for a fundamental shift toward social justice. Government and philanthropic services for low-income communities often inadvertently punish progress, because as people earn more, they quickly lose benefits. So, to help the working poor, FII rolled out low-interest loans for families that pay their rent and utilities on time. It now connects families in different parts of the country to share resources and guide one another and offers no-strings fellowships and scholarships. It has reached more than 100,000 households across the US, and their income on average rises by nearly 25 percent after two years with a corresponding decline in public subsidies. Many FII families have launched businesses, amassed more savings, and lowered their debt, and their homeownership has increased. These are all undeniable, measurable results.
Miller says it’s a good start, but not nearly enough to truly break the cycle of poverty. UpTogether is now committed to sharing its data with any policymakers open to peer-driven change, leveraging the recognition of its bottom-up approach and fostering organic expansion via what Miller calls “ripple” growth. He also envisions setting up an association to catalyze cross-class mutual support and community building; a leadership academy for organizations and communities that want to implement FII’s philosophies; and is intent on pushing a policy agenda that incentivizes progress and supports economic mobility for low-income people.
Miller could have looked the other way and lived a comfortable life, thanks to degrees in engineering and product design from Berkeley and all that came with them through his mother’s struggles and resourcefulness. Yet his mother’s words rang in his ears: “You can’t let what our family is going through happen to others.” Soon after his mother’s death in 1973, he abandoned his early engineering career and dedicated his career to the fight against poverty.
Miller has been an Ashoka Fellow and received a MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant, a Harmony with Hope Award, a Prime Mover Fellowship, and a Purpose Prize for Financial Inclusion. In 2017 he published The Alternative: Most of what You Believe about Poverty is Wrong, and in 2019-2020 he was a James Wei Visiting Professor in Entrepreneurship at Princeton. He also sits on various boards, including the Board of Directors of the National Cooperative Bank, Development Corporation; the board of the Corporation for Enterprise Development; the Board of Public/Private Ventures; California Endowment and The Hitachi Foundation, and has launched several small businesses. He lives in Oakland and has two children.
Join David Bonbright in conversation with this remarkable and innovative changemaker!
Alicia Doyle once thought of boxing as a male-dominated, violent sport representing “the dark side” – that is, until “boxing found her” as a tool to conquer some of her own dark shadows. In her late twenties, while a rising journalist, Alicia carried forward a reporting assignment into a life-transforming journey in the ring as one of a few hundred women competitive boxers in America, a winner of several championship titles, and a healer of self.
Alicia’s boxing career began unexpectedly. Late one night, she was working alone in a newsroom when the phone rang. The caller was an activist seeking help for the Kid Gloves boxing gym in Simi Valley, California. An influx of heavy rain had destroyed the facility. Because this gym was a haven for troubled and at-risk youth, the caller was anxious to draw media attention to the gym’s mission of service so it could reopen and continue the good work.
Alicia became curious: why was this gym so valuable to children? How did it make them better people? She agreed to do the story and connected with the owner, the coaches, and trainers. In them, she found some of the most incredible gentlemen with the biggest hearts she had ever met. She covered the gym for about a year, and eventually, the gym reopened.
Initially, Alicia was just an observer of boxers and boxing at the gym. But then a bad break-up with a violent boyfriend inspired her to put on her first pair of boxing gloves. “He punched me in the face,” she said. “I was ashamed, humiliated, angry… and I just wanted to hit something really hard.”
Alicia began training. She trained for hours every day and found that boxing took her mind off her shame as it focused her on the present moment. Ultimately the experts at Kid Gloves encouraged her to box competitively. With much inner and outer work, she boxed for two years, winning two Golden Gloves championship titles and earning three wins by knockout. Her pro debut at age thirty in 2000 was named The California Female Fight of the Year.
As she recovered physically from her first pro fight, a more profound healing journey began. She began an internal inquiry about what others often asked her, and what she sometimes wondered herself, which was why she boxed anyway, “and, above all, why I exposed myself to a world of hurt.” She began to uncover, confront, and process her buried rage and pain from a volatile childhood. As she addressed the fear, triumph, anguish, and exhilaration she experienced both inside and outside the boxing ring, she came to realize that “after all the battles survived as a child, I immersed myself in the fight again as an adult, making the deliberate choice to expose myself to pain, once again. ... It was as though I was recreating the pain I endured in childhood through boxing, which gave me a place to express my rage, overpower my opponent, and command the control I never had when I was young.”
And as she started unearthing her unprocessed childhood pain, she realized she no longer was drawn to experience pain or inflict it on others through boxing. So her initial pro boxing match became her last competitive match, and she took off her gloves. She also shifted from being a cut-throat journalist to an award-winning freelance reporter of good news stories. She began to write about people who overcame great odds and managed to harness peace in their own lives—including Holocaust survivors, women who overcame heinous acts of domestic violence, and children with special needs who faced the world head-on despite their limitations. “Their vulnerability brought me comfort, and during the brief time I spent with them, their stories revealed the most beautiful aspect of human nature—vulnerability—the commonality we all share, a great equalizer that connects us on the deepest level.”
Twenty years after Alicia took off her gloves and returned to a full-time journalism career, she felt ready, following decades-long introspection, to use her writing skills to share her own story. Her award-winning book, Fighting Chance, tells how Alicia’s life changed through boxing – how boxing was both “a welcome distraction from what I needed to confront” and a “catalyst for transformation.” The sport gave her a fighting chance to be strong and “find a cure for my darkness.”
“Every time I got in the ring, it looked like I was fighting my opponent. But I was always only fighting myself.” Perhaps this is a metaphor for all of us: the things that seem to oppose us are mirrors of our own fears. And maybe there’s a way to overcome by letting in, being with, and radically accepting what we once called “the dark side.”
Please join Rev. Bonnie Rose in conversation with this remarkable journalist as Alicia describes her journey of acceptance.
Nipun Mehta is the founder of ServiceSpace, an incubator of projects that works at the intersection of volunteerism, technology and gift-economy. What started as an experiment with four friends in the Silicon Valley has now grown to a global ecosystem of over 500,000 members that has delivered millions of dollars in service for free. Most recently, ServiceSpace's pandemic response has showcased the unique emergent beauty of its global ecosystem.
Nipun has received many awards, including the Jefferson Award for Public Service, Dalai Lama's Unsung Hero of Compassion, Goi Peace Award in 2019. Few years ago, President Barack Obama appointed him to a council on poverty and inequality. Nipun is routinely invited to share his message of "giftivism" to wide ranging audiences, from inner city youth in Memphis to academics in London to international dignitaries at the United Nations; his speech at UPenn commencement in May 2012 was read by millions. He serves on the advisory boards of the Seva Foundation, the Dalai Lama Foundation, and Greater Good Science Center.
Nipun's high-school goal was to either become a tennis-pro or a Himalayan Yogi. Instead, by the third year of his Computer Science and Philosophy degree at UC Berkeley, he started his software career at Sun Microsystems. Dissatisfied by the dot-com greed of the late 90s, Nipun went to a homeless shelter with three friends to "give with absolutely no strings attached." They ended up creating a website, and also an organization named ServiceSpace. Over the years, they built thousands of websites for nonprofits but also started incubating a diverse set of projects that included online portals DailyGood and KarmaTube, offline movements like Smile Cards, a pay-it-forward rickshaw in India, and Karma Kitchen restaurants in three cities across the US. In 2001, at the age of 25, Nipun quit his job to become a "full time volunteer." He didn't have a plan of survival beyond six months, but so far, so good.
In January 2005, Nipun and Guri, his wife of six months, put everything aside to embark on an open-ended, unscripted walking pilgrimage in India, to "use our hands to do random acts of kindness, our heads to profile inspiring people, and our hearts to cultivate truth." Living on a dollar a day, eating wherever food was offered, sleeping wherever a flat surface was found, the couple walked 1000 kilometers before ending up at a retreat center, where they meditated for three months. Today, both Nipun and Guri live in Berkeley and stay rooted in a practice of small acts of service. The journey continues.
Nipun's mission statement in life now reads: "Bring smiles in the world and stillness in my heart."
You can read more about Nipun here.
As a young girl, Alexie Torres climbed atop the radiator underneath her ninth floor window in the Bronx River Public Housing Projects, watching fires burn through her borough. Torres didn’t understand that these fires were a result of “planned shrinkage” and “urban renewal” in the 1960s and 70s -- which meant, in theory, that municipal authorities could close down public services with the intention of redesigning and rebuilding better. For the residents of the South Bronx, though, it didn’t turn out “better." Fire stations were shut down even as fire emergencies rose, and residents, who had no voice in the rebuilding of their own communities, were increasingly displaced.
These early impressions would lead Torres to social and environmental justice, locally and nationally. By her early 20s, she founded Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice (YMPJ) where she labored with young people on issues from policing to education and environmental justice. A cornerstone of her work was the reclamation of the Bronx River, which was highly industrialized and inaccessible to her community. She co-founded the Bronx River Alliance, which today continues the work of protecting the river.
As an urban planner, activist for environmental justice, and community organizer, Torres has lived into the full meaning of her given name, Alexie: “Defender of Humankind.” Torres’s mother and father were immigrants who came to the U.S. from Puerto Rico as teenagers. After being homeless for a while, her father got a job as a deli man, a dishwasher, and ultimately moved up to become a maintenance man in the public housing projects in which she was raised. As Torres grew up, despite how much she loved her family and community, she learned that the rest of the world would define her success by how far away she could escape from them.
So in her 20s, she left the Bronx for Manhattan. Working a corporate career, she became “a conscientious objector to [her] own story,” But during that time, she also became involved with the Williamsburg activist group, El Puente, her introduction to the power of grassroots organizing. In 1992, Torres returned to the South Bronx to participate in Holy Cross parish’s anti-drug rally. When local drug dealers attempted to burn down the church and intimidate them, twelve hundred neighbors -- those the world might deem powerless -- came forward to march. “[To have] people coming from the margins and into the center,” Torres reflected, “… that's where the heart of my planning heart was born.”
She went on to found YMPJ, with the mission to prepare young people to become prophetic voices for peace and justice, and served as its executive director for 17 years. Through YMPJ and affiliate projects, Torres has helped create new parks, provide access to the Bronx River, and clean up brownfields. Despite these external achievements, she recognizes that it is “even more important that I contribute to leaving a legacy of a community that understands its own power.”
In 2013, Torres was awarded the prestigious Loeb Fellowship through Harvard University. Her service on the national stage has included the White House Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, which aimed to reduce poverty and inequality and create opportunity for all. She is the Managing Director of Jubilee Gift, board member of Fr. Richard Rohr’s Center for Action and Contemplation, and most recently, co-creator of the Soul of the Movement Fund to connect healers and wisdom keepers to social movements. For her body of work, she has been named one of "50 Visionaries Changing Our World."
A mother of two, Torres has inspired a new generation of young leaders dedicated to promoting peace and justice in their communities. Her vision for change in the face of daunting obstacles has led to success in her efforts to effect positive change within public spaces and marginalized communities. She is a national voice on issues of faith, community organizing, and the sacred work of social justice.
Please join us in conversation with this dynamic grassroots activist and defender of humankind.
Note special duration time of 2.5 hours
Watch Sarah’s prior Awakin Call: Audio Recording (or read Call Transcript)
“Commitment and contribution are very important and life-serving when they do not cost us everything. … We need everyone’s joy in order to be able to transform our world into a relational place, where we notice and act swiftly, both personally and systemically, to right wrongs, to change systems, and to save and restore our beautiful planet and ecosystems.” – Sarah Peyton
Please join past Awakin Call guest Sarah Peyton for a special 2.5-hour New Year’s session and interactive workshop on releasing the contracts that block us from experiencing joy in our lives. “We use unconscious contracts to help us function in a world where we have not really been accompanied, and to make up for our brains not getting to grow the way that they were supposed to,” Sarah says.
In this workshop, we will work to dissolve these contracts and celebrate the resonance skills that support the feeling and expression of joy. We will also look at what Sarah terms “false” Bodhisattva vows, and how to distinguish such false vows involving unhealthy self-sacrifice from those of joyful service.
A long-time senior trainer of non-violent communication, Sarah’s work explores tools of relational neuroscience that help one turn inward with kindness, warmth, and curiosity and create opportunities for self-healing. In this workshop, Sarah will take us into the world of relational neuroscience, exploring how our brains, nervous systems, and bodies react to ourselves and others. Sarah’s workshop focuses on the question, “Have we made an unconscious contract with ourselves, such as a False Bodhisattva Vow, that sabotages our ability for healthy self-care?”
Sarah will show us how we can use resonant-language practice, meditations, and journaling as healing strategies to uncover and rewrite these contracts:
How trauma can cause us to loyally be carrying out unconscious sacred vows that we undertook at a younger age to protect ourselves or others; How we sometimes carry out these vows without regard to the cost to ourselves and others; How we can check to see if we are ready to release the vow and, if so, how to do so.
For most of her own life, Sarah struggled with brutal depression … deadening, heavy sadness that made it hard to muster the energy to take a shower or even brush her teeth. She came to this work because she needed to heal. Sarah has now published three books: Your Resonant Self: Guided Meditations and Exercises to Engage Your Brain’s Capacity for Healing (2017), Your Resonant Self Workbook; From Self-sabotage to Self-care (2021), and Affirmations for Turbulent Times (2021). She teaches and speaks internationally about the ways that relationship and language transform the brain, and how they prevent and heal trauma. By applying complex neuroscience concepts to real life – with stories, role plays of research, meditations, and engaging dialogues – participants leave Sarah’s presentations with more wisdom and self-compassion, often making sense to themselves for the first time.
In these challenging and polarized times, please join this gifted 2.5-hour workshop for our Awakin Calls Community, in order to work with Sarah to deepen joy and sense of joyful service!
In a retreat center in Suzhou, China, Mina Lee can be found sitting in the center of a dozen executives, a shawl draped over her shoulders and a metal drum at her lap, immersing the room in a “sound bath.” On another day, she's commanding the stage in front of hundreds of female business leaders in America, presenting on authentic leadership or conscious entrepreneurship. On yet another day, she's standing at the head of a long, wooden table in a redwood forest of Northern California, a teacup raised to her forehead, co-leading a traditional Chinese tea ceremony.
As a facilitator, executive coach, and strategist for culture change, Mina lives as fluidly in the ancient mountains of Washington state as she does the contemporary high-rises of San Francisco or Shanghai, all of which she currently calls home. Through Mina’s eyes, though the external settings may vary, our inner worlds are the “greatest lever for systems change.” One of the primary vehicles she uses for inner transformation is the business sector.
At the heart of Mina’s life and work is the permission to be stretched by love. She is guided by the question of how to bridge cultural and intergenerational divides — the ways in which we dehumanize each other through misunderstanding, whether between investors and investees, business and non-business sectors, people living in the East and those in the West, and more specifically, China and the United States. “On a deeper level,” reflects Mina, “this is the healing of my own rift, from when my father said, ‘You’ll never be able to understand me — you, raised in America, versus me, in China.’”
So, how can we let go of the stories that keep us separate? How can we relate more authentically to one another? What is the new aspirational story where self-awareness becomes the cultural norm? Mina’s questions go beyond geographical and political, and into the core of the personal realm: How do the constructs of our minds keep us separated from and in judgment of ourselves?
After her self-described “wild self” graduated from New York University with a BS in Economics and Finance with a focus on Social Entrepreneurship, Mina served in a series of positions — management consultant at the Boston Consulting Group, Innovation and Economic Development Consultant at the World Bank, founder of an events company in New York City, and COO and Chief of Staff of Xiaomi Southeast Asia. The different organizational structures, whether for-profit or nonprofit, Western, Eastern or global, increasingly affirmed her realization that systemic and social dysfunctions stemmed from a disconnection to oneself. She began seeing her role in connecting leaders more intimately with their core selves, thereby repairing the ecosystems of their relationships, organizations, or companies.
In 2018, Mina founded the East West Bridge, which she currently hosts, “an advisory firm that helps conscious leaders and companies grow.” During its inception, the East West Bridge organized a retreat of 28 leaders from China’s healing and wellbeing sector to meet their peers in the United States for the first time. From millennial to elder, the group ranged from teachers of psychology and mindfulness to entrepreneurs, corporate coaches, technology investors, philanthropists, systems change experts, and neuroscientists. Collectively, their platforms in China reached 25M+ people. Over the course of the week, the immersive exchange of skills and strategies, as well as the co-creation of a heart-centered field, manifested the holistic, inside-out transformation that Mina embodies and catalyzes.
Mina weaves skill as well as playful creativity throughout her professional projects, like coaching American, European, and Asian venture-backed CEOs, or advising the CEO of Innerland, a “Disneyland for Zen,” a still-in-development cultural ecotourism experience park in China to help make accessible the ancient wisdom of Chan (Zen). She has also conducted extensive research and mapping studies, from the philanthropic funding of consciousness to the underfunding of mindfulness teacher training for BIPOC and economically underserved communities.
In her personal life, she mirrors the same combination of creativity and contemplation, whether practicing yoga on a lone pier over a lake — or writing poetry about the romance of a cup of tea or the sensuality of a lychee fruit. She is fluent in Mandarin, as well as the language of the wooden flute, Kalimba (thumb piano), drums, and shakers. She is a certified Music Medicine Facilitator through the UCLA Arts & Healing program. Each year, she spends time in deep monastic study.
To try to encapsulate Mina’s person and mission? As one client shared, "What's unique about Mina is that she can work with all parts of me — the CEO, mother, wife, daughter, sister, and inner two-year-old and teenager. She helps me integrate these roles, experience deeper vulnerability, and relate to the one beneath the roles, without a mask. I'm able to balance serious execution with relaxation, rest, and joy."
Please join Cynthia Li and Nicolas Boillot in conversation with this gifted weaver of inner and outer, business and beauty, strategy and consciousness.
Chuck Collins’ first job out of college was to work with mobile homeowners in New England to help them organize and buy their parks as resident-owned cooperatives, to escape the cycle of ever-rising rents. While working in Western Massachusetts with a group of 30 mobile homeowners struggling to raise the necessary resources, Chuck was holding on to a “dirty little secret”: as the great-grandson of the Chicago meatpacker Oscar Mayer (an iconic brand in the US renowned for its catchy advertising jingles and Weinermobile), Chuck, still pimply faced at the time, was a multi-millionaire who single-handedly could write a check to make it possible for the 30 families to buy the park – with only a negligible impact on his personal finances.
Chuck was seriously (and silently) considering doing just that, when the group gifted him something much more valuable: they taught him the power of solidarity and community. At that moment, they heroically dug deeper and supported one another (oftentimes anonymously) to come up with the necessary down payment in a way that preserved the dignity of each.
At age 26, this powerful experience defined Chuck’s path. Realizing that “there was no rationale that could justify this disparity” whereby his inherited wealth was increasing through no sweat of his own, but wages were going down for so many, he decided to give away his wealth. “I wrote my parents a letter thanking them for the tremendous opportunities this wealth made possible. And I explained that while having the money was a boost in helping pay for my education, it was now a barrier to my making my own way in the world. I intended to ‘pass the wealth on.’” Chuck signed the paperwork to transfer all the funds in his name to four grant-making foundations, maintaining no financial cushion or “rainy day” fund for himself.
That this decision was not a whimsical flight of idealistic fancy has been born out over the decades: Chuck has been working diligently and strategically against economic inequality for his entire adult life. Decades after he gave away his wealth, Chuck wrote, “I have no regrets. If anything, I feel liberated. My decision enabled me to live my life more aligned to my values. It opened up a source of energy.”
Chuck is a storyteller, writer, researcher, and campaigner working to reverse the extreme inequalities of wealth and power – and heal the social and ecological harms resulting from societal inequities. Since 2006, he has been Director of the Program on Inequality and the Common Good at the Institute for Policy Studies where he co-edits Inequality.org.
His most recent book, The Wealth Hoarders: How Billionaires Pay Millions to Hide Trillions (Polity Books) examines the global hidden wealth system and the role of enablers and gatekeepers, such as tax attorneys, wealth managers, and family offices. In a YES Magazine article about wealth advisors that “help the rich let go,” Collins urged families to redirect “their wealth to heal the harms created by the initial extraction of that wealth.”
Collins worked to brief foreign reporters about US wealth hiding systems in advance of the recent publication of the Pandora Papers. He has worked since 1999 on various efforts to organize wealthy people to advocate for progressive tax policies and preserve the federal estate tax, the only tax on inherited wealth. He was co-author, with Bill Gates Sr., of Wealth and Our Commonwealth: Why America Should Tax Accumulated Wealth (Beacon Press).
His perspectives about wealth and inheritance are discussed in his popular book, Born on Third Base (Chelsea Green). He has been featured in many interviews, including an NPR Fresh Air interview with Terry Gross and in Sun Magazine.
Chuck is co-founder of Wealth for the Common Good, a network of business leaders, high-income households and partners working together to promote shared prosperity and fair taxation. This network merged in 2015 with the Patriotic Millionaires, a national network of high net worth individuals advocating for higher taxes on the wealthy, a living wage, and campaign finance reform. Between 1983 and 1992, Collins worked for the Institute for Community Economics, helping grassroots housing cooperatives and community land trusts built and preserve affordable housing. Thereafter, from 1993 to 2006, he worked on issues of tax fairness and inequality, co-founding United for a Fair Economy.
Currently living near Brattleboro, Vermont, Collins is co-author of several reports including “The Road To Zero Wealth: How the Racial Wealth Divide is Hollowing Out America’s Middle Class,” “Billionaire Bonanza: The Forbes 400 and the Rest of Us” and “Gilded Giving: Top Heavy Philanthropy in an Age of Extreme Inequality.” Other books include: Is Inequality in America Irreversible? (published by the Oxford, UK-based Polity Press); and 99 to 1: How Wealth Inequality is Wrecking the World and What We Can Do About It. He is co-author with Mary Wright of The Moral Measure of the Economy, a book about Christian ethics and economic life.
Please join us in conversation with this principled advocate for justice and equality who has uniquely walked – and is walking – his talk!
Trauma comes to all of us, and its consequences can be terrible. That’s the truth and the bad news. The good news is that all of us can use tools of self-awareness and self-care to heal our trauma and, indeed, to become healthier and more whole than we’ve ever been. If we accept the pain that trauma inflicts, it can open our minds and bodies to healing change. -- Dr. James Gordon
As a second-year psychiatric medical student at Harvard University, Dr. James Gordon hit a wall. Although both his father and grandfather had been physicians before him, he was no longer sure why he was there. He was troubled by the way he saw patients being treated, feeling the focus too cut and dried, and missing the loving approach that he had envisioned and hoped for in medicine. But he was graced at this time to meet a kind and compassionate professor and psychotherapist in Robert Coles, who offered Gordon the opportunity to discover and embrace parts of himself that he had forgotten or not even known. Further, Coles shared his work with kids stricken by poverty and racism in New Orleans, kindling the flame of Gordon’s own life-long passion for taking trauma healing to all walks of life – especially the world’s most troubled areas. “Suffering is the soil in which wisdom and compassion grow; it is the school from which we graduate, committed to healing others’ hurt.”
This pivotal time in Dr. Gordon’s life, and the healing journey that called him to serve others, set him on the road to becoming a world-renowned expert on healing population-wide psychological trauma, anxiety, and depression. His approach marries Western medical knowledge with alternative medicine methods and those of the world’s indigenous and spiritual traditions.
A proponent of “self-care as the true primary-care,” Dr. Gordon founded the nonprofit Center for Mind-Body Medicine (CMBM) in 1991, in Washington, D.C., with an initial mission “to make self-awareness, self-care, and group support central to all healthcare” by training health care professionals with the tools of stress- and trauma-relief. But similar to his experience hitting a wall in medical school, he soon recognized the limits of the medical establishment in embracing holistic modalities – and so he extended his work and offerings beyond the walls of traditional health care practice, going directly out to communities and creating a version of medicine for the people, by the people.
Through the CMBM, Dr. Gordon has created training programs of mind-body healing that extend far and wide – not just for health professionals, but for traumatized populations in the world’s hot spots such as the Balkans, the Middle East, Haiti, and Africa; for teachers and families in Broward County, FL after the Parkland school shootings; for victims of Hurricanes Katrina and Harvey; for U.S. vets returning from Iraq and Afghanistan; and even for the U.S. Capitol police. He and the CMBM faculty have traveled worldwide, embracing a model of creating healing communities by training the trainers, or “Teaching Thousands to Heal Millions.” Dr. Gordon leads an international faculty of 130 who have trained more than 6,000 clinicians, educators, and community leaders. In turn, these trainers have brought CMBM’s therapeutic and educational program to many hundreds of thousands of traumatized and stressed adults and children, as well as people confronting the challenges of anxiety, depression, and chronic and life-threatening illnesses.
An early pioneer in using mind-body medicine to heal, Dr. Gordon contends that we are all, in the end, affected by trauma. (Never more true than today, he adds.) But he also believes that “all of us, regardless of age or educational level, have a great and largely untapped capacity to help and heal ourselves and one another…We may think we don’t have the answers, but each of us has a part inside us that knows.” His experience serving the world’s many traumatized populations has reinforced his commitment to supporting individuals’ own inherent capacities for self-healing. “Going through difficult situations myself, and coming out the other side has taught me that I could be a midwife to this process [in others]; I’m not there to fix people.”
Regular meditation on the breath, as an antidote to “flight or fight” mode, is a critical component of Gordon’s three-fold approach to trauma self-healing work – all sessions, groups, and meetings begin and end with this important component. Another key component, sourced from indigenous forms of healing, is sharing in community. “As we bring parts of ourselves online that have been suppressed or ignored, we become more complete and whole human beings – part of that is wanting to share ourselves with others. It’s built into our DNA.”
Characterizing himself as “a free spirit and a bit of a troublemaker,” Dr. Gordon volunteered, after his Harvard training, at the Haight-Ashbury Free Medical Clinic in the 60s, attended Woodstock as a volunteer physician, and then spent 10 years as a National Institutes of Mental Health (NIMH) researcher, where he developed the first national program for runaway and homeless kids.
In 1973 he had a powerful encounter with a London-based osteopath, acupuncturist, naturopath, and meditation master of East Indian background who “opened universes” to him, most importantly the value of “expressive meditations” that Dr. Gordon incorporates as high energy “Shaking & Dancing” to fast, rhythmic music in his Mind-Body Skills trainings. “These were the tools of the shamans of Siberia and of ancient healers and traditions around the world -- archaic techniques of ecstasy.” They also have proven value for reestablishing equilibrium for stressed and trauma-frozen bodies.
Bringing his healing work to populations from the Eastern and indigenous traditions that seeded many of his initial explorations, Gordon has shared Shaking and Dancing with a group of recent Tibetan refugees in Dharamsala, India, the home of the Dalai Lama. He also has worked closely with tribal elders, teachers, and clinicians on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservations in South Dakota to create a program that has joined Mind-Body Medicine with traditional Lakota healing, effectively addressing youth suicide.
In addition to his work with the CMBM program, Dr. Gordon has been Director of Mind-Body Studies and clinical professor in the departments of psychiatry and family medicine at Georgetown Medical School and Georgetown University since 1980. He chaired the White House Commission on Complementary and Alternative Medicine Policy under Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush. He publishes widely, having authored several books including his latest, The Transformation: Discovering Wholeness and Healing After Trauma, as well as many articles. He has recently conducted a series of interviews with a broad spectrum of individuals who are benefiting from his trauma healing work, ranging from a Black human rights lawyer and activist campaigning for reparations, to an Islamic jihadist who was jailed for his role in terrorist plots, to Buddhist meditation teacher Tara Brach, to a Michigan Democrat facing “Congressional trauma.”
Join us in conversation with this devoted practitioner of a medicine truly based on compassion for self and all beings.
“Most people live their lives, most people go to their graves, with their music still inside them.”
As a master voice coach, author, speaker, singer and songwriter, Barbara McAfee describes her work of more than 25 years as “midwiving voices across thresholds.” Whether it is an individual seeking to express his/her deepest truth, or a group looking to embrace its own power, Barbara guides them on an intimate journey to find their unique voice, sound by primal sound.
As Barbara says, “Your voice is how you get the gift inside of you out. Nothing much happens in the world until someone gives it voice.” That’s why the words “voice” and “vocation” share a common Latin root (meaning to “call, invoke or name”), she says. Her work merges lessons from 12 years in organization development with the transformative power of sound, aiming to foster awareness of unconscious vocal habits we carry that interfere with us doing our best work.
Barbara believes that the gifts uniquely expressed through our voices are not ours alone, but part of a shared destiny across humanity. So when individual voices are more fully and truthfully expressed, communities become stronger as well.
Barbara’s journey with voice began in her 20’s, when she found herself, while in a voice workshop, introduced to the full potential of her singing voice. As the range of her voice expanded, so did her life, and the stage fear that had permeated her identity up until that point as an amateur theater and musical performer gradually dissolved. Not only did Barbara feel her soul healing, it was as if the healing transcended the boundaries of time, reaching across past generations. Having experienced the healing power of a fully expressed voice, she went on to incorporate additional aspects of Jungian philosophy and yoga to develop a five-elemental approach to voice -- fire, air, metal, wood, water -- in order to help others experience the full range of their aliveness, too.
As an oral tradition song leader of many decades, Barbara uses chants and poems to open groups of people to the direct experience of mystery and wonder, as well as the power of human connection. She has witnessed how, when neither script nor leader is present, individual voices inevitably harmonize into a coherent whole. She demonstrated this in her TEDx talk where, in just under 10 minutes, Barbara catalysed the audience (numbering in the hundreds) to sing the words of the Sufi master Hafiz, discovering their innate collective wisdom.
Beyond the emergence of aliveness, Barbara also serves as a midwife to those on the edge of life. As the founder of Morning Star Singers, a volunteer hospice choir in the Twin Cities, Barbara and singers from all walks of life and professions sing songs of comfort and healing for those in the last few months, hours and minutes of their lives. Compassionately holding space for whatever is meant to unfold, Morning Star Singers offer the simple gift of presence, beauty, and meaning to those “who are often experiencing professionals and family members ‘doing things to them’.”
Her book Full Voice: The Art and Practice of Vocal Presence is based on her 25+ years as a voice coach supporting people from many professions to find their voice, whatever that means to them. Barbara invites readers to reflect on questions such as: Are you willing to be alive? For what did we trade our raw messy human voices? What is so frightening about the possibility of authentic expression? What might be more important and interesting than your fears? The book concludes with Barbara’s original song “Brain Rats” where, with healing humor, she speaks to the common human foible of ruminating on “wicked thoughts that prove my every flaw.”
Barbara has produced eight CDs of mostly original music. She lives up the street from the wild and scenic St Croix River in St Croix Falls, Wisconsin.
Please join us in conversation with this midwife of voices, and accept her invitation to find and express your own.
“A ‘Portal to Presence’ is exactly what it says,” writes Gunther Weil, “a simple doorway that points to the realm of Consciousness or Presence. It would be stretching the meaning of the word 'technique' or 'method' to apply it to this idea. One just walks through the portal as one becomes aware of its existence…. The portal opens, and Presence arises spontaneously.”
Weil is a Harvard-trained psychologist, executive coach, and lifelong student of consciousness. His diverse and colorful life includes working as a music business executive and being instrumental in the production of Aerosmith’s first album; teaching at Brandeis University, recruited and mentored by psychologist Abraham Maslow; coaching international executives in leadership, wellness, organizational development, and conflict resolution in the private and public sectors; studying and teaching Tai Chi and becoming a recognized master teacher of Qigong; and perhaps most famously, pioneering the mass consciousness movement that began in the 1960s with Dr. Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert (a.k.a., Ram Dass), Ralph Metzner and others that popularized the field of psychedelic therapies.
As a young child, Weil and his parents fled the Holocaust “on one of the last boats leaving for America.” They settled in Nebraska, then Milwaukee, with psychology, philosophy, and classical music infusing their family culture. His father was an internationally regarded psychologist and pioneering researcher in Europe on synesthesia, the phenomenon of crossed senses, like smelling colors or seeing music. Education was of paramount importance; it was his father’s academic work that was their ticket to the US.
Weil went on to study psychology and philosophy at Kenyon College, receiving a Fulbright scholarship to study in Norway. While there, he often visited Paris in his free time, inspired by the expat beatniks, literati, and jazz musicians who preceded the hippie generation. Upon returning to the States, he earned his doctorate in psychology at Harvard University. His assigned faculty advisor was a prominent researcher in the field of personality — Dr. Timothy Leary. Among their research studies was the Concord Prison Experiment, a randomized, controlled study designed to evaluate whether psilocybin mushrooms, combined with psychotherapy, could have a healing effect on young adults convicted of felonies in a maximum-security prison. In addition to improved recidivism rates (the degree of which has been debated), personality tests before and after these interventions showed positive changes.
In the 1970s, Weil worked in the music industry, as CEO at Intermedia Recording Corporation and senior vice president of Intermedia Systems Corporation, a publicly held multi-media production firm. Two of his numerous music projects were the 1973 debut album, “Aerosmith,” and the 1978 recording of the song “Jet Airliner,” by the Steve Miller Band, which hit both gold and platinum for sales exceeding two million.
The bulk of Weil’s life work sits at the intersection of his formative influences of psychology, philosophy, and spirituality, bringing others to what he calls a Portal to Presence — a simple doorway that effortlessly opens to an expansive awareness. He has conducted personal growth seminars in leadership, creativity, emotional intelligence and wellness for executives and their organizations throughout the world. He is certified in the HeartMath Inner Quality Management Program, Cultural Transformation Tools (CTT), and Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP), and is a Master Values Mentor of the Minessence Group. In 2001, he was personally invited by Eckhart Tolle, bestselling author of The Power of Now, to teach and facilitate the Practice of Presence.
An important Portal to Presence for Weil has been the internal arts of Tai Chi and Qigong. Fifty years ago, Weil began his studies in New York City in the Yang Style Cheng Man-Ching lineage, followed by the Dong Family Yang style and Chen Beijing style lineages. He deepened his experience of Qigong by traveling the world co-teaching with Master Mantak Chia, a renowned teacher of Taoist Inner Alchemy who, Weil recounts, “would scribble down Qigong practices like the microcosmic orbit onto scraps of paper,” with Weil scrambling to pick them up and study them. In 1996, Weil became the founding chairman of the National Qigong Association and has studied or taught with direct lineage holders in the wisdom traditions of Taoism, Buddhism, Advaita, and The Gurdjieff Work.
Please join David Bonbright and Cynthia Li in conversation with this quintessential student of life and consciousness.
“When you change the way you see people, your experience of people changes.”
Nic Askew’s life took an unexpected turn in 2005 when a lucid daydream to pick up a film camera and use it in a profound fashion consumed him and dissolved any internal doubt. He describes this moment as one of “knowing” what he just had to do, as opposed to “believing” or "wanting” something. He describes this pathfinding shift – from being an eclectic explorer and Managing Director in business, to filmmaker – in a poem he wrote, The Tree of Dreams.
Since that day, Nic has used this camera to capture bare human presence, taking his film subjects beyond the experience of mind – and into their inner, wiser, more intuitive and intelligent world. Through a nearly two-decade journey in explorative film, he has discovered that there is a profoundly simple way to be together with someone and begin to capture them – which is not an interview, but an Inner View.
The Inner View Method, though ostensibly a camera method, is something more profound. With or without the camera, it involves sitting in the experience of an unyielding awareness. “People hide behind words,” Nic says. So Nic doesn’t get in the way of a subject’s words – he just waits and listens, “because those [initial words] aren’t the words. Those are the things that need to come out, almost like the words need to finish before that which is meant to come out would be said.” Then comes “the horrible silence. Mostly people are looking to me say something, to ask a question, to steer it off an uncomfortable place. But that’s no good. You’ll never see anyone. So there’s this space between us. Usually there are some big things in the way” that obscure truly seeing the other – an opinion, a judgment, or a need. “So the only thing to do is witness. Give enough space in no direction at all about where this is going to go.”
Space in no direction. As Nic shared in a TEDx talk that modelled a similar practice of agenda-less sharing, when people don’t know where they are going to start, or how they will finish once they start, and when there’s no agenda or point to a conversation, what you get back is “really extraordinary” as their soul starts to speak. “There’s a space between people, and if there’s nothing in between you and them, there’s no need for the person to perform or be any different whatsoever to exactly what you see there. When that happens, everything changes, and the self-consciousness which is usually there in conversations fades, and fades completely.”
The key is for there to be nothing in that space between. No-thing. He describes the directions for the journey as including: “No Map. No Usual Working Compass. No-One We Must Become. Nowhere We Must Get To. Nothing We Must Achieve. For Now.” For Nic, this agenda-less witnessing and space “leads to an increased capacity for the seeing of others without judgment and beyond all differences. Simultaneously we develop our capacity to reveal ourselves without the defenses that have for so long kept us hidden. Essentially, being seen. And, we develop our capacity to become aware of ourselves without judgment or condition. Essentially, the seeing of ourselves.”
Nic’s Inner View Method has given rise to his acclaimed Soul Biographies Film Series, an experience of human presence viewed by millions. His subjects as well as viewers describe the Soul Biographies as an experience into full-spectrum awareness – a meditation of sorts. From those who have experienced his film portraits, Nic gets asked the very same question consistently: “where do you find these people?” What he has come to understand is that what most are really saying is, “This is not how I experience people.” And so it has become clear to him “that the contribution here was to show people how to see an Inner View of another. How to see beyond all differences. In doing so they would also catch sight of themselves in a way that might change everything.”
So Nic now offers in-person and online immersions in the Inner View Method, as well as retreat and solo Inner View Expeditions.
Join us in conversation with this filmmaker who has been described more poetically as an itinerant confessor, a disruptive influence, a monk independent of any religion and an explorer of the Inner World.
When academic, best-selling author, and filmmaker Raj Patel and physician, musician, and activist Rupa Marya joined to write a book together, the result was a deep dive into how our economic, political, and social structures fan disease, often invisibly. “Inflammation is the body’s appropriate response to damage, or the threat of damage,” says Marya. “We’re learning that the social, environmental, and political structures around us are tuning the immune system to sound out the full range of inflammation.”
Patel adds, “Capitalism primes our bodies for sickness.”
In Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice, released in August 2021, Marya and Patel arrive at a new systems level of diagnosis that incorporates history and the pathologies of power, offering treatment options to heal people and the planet.
Rupa Marya, MD, is an associate professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, where she practices and teaches internal medicine. She’s co-founder of the Do No Harm Coalition, a collective of healthcare workers committed to changing social structures that impede health and wellbeing for different groups of people; and the founder and executive director of Deep Medicine Circle, a worker-directed nonprofit committed to “healing the wounds of colonialism through food, medicine, story, learning and restoration.” Working with her husband, the agroecological farmer Benjamin Fahrer, and the Association of Ramaytush Ohlone in their ancestral territory, she is a part of the Farming Is Medicine project, where farmers are recast as ecological stewards of rematriated land and food is liberated from the market economy.
Her work in social advocacy has earned her trust from indigenous communities where she lives, in Ohlone territory and in places where she has served, such as Lakota territory. In 2016, she was invited to Standing Rock to assist with medical response to increasing state violence toward indigenous people protecting their sovereign land in the face of the Dakota Access Pipeline.
Outside of her medical work, Marya is a gifted guitarist, singer, and composer. Her band, Rupa and the April Fishes, mixes styles -- from jazz to punk to reggae -- and spans multiple languages. Her music explores themes of climate justice, ecology, politics, culture, and the impact of violence and racism on people of color. She lives with her husband and two sons in the Bay Area where, at the invitation of Lakota elders, she is helping to develop a clinic to “decolonize food and medicine” at the Mni Wiconi Health Clinic and Farm.
Raj Patel, PhD, is an author six times over, a filmmaker, and an academic. He is a research professor at the University of Texas at Austin’s Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, a professor in the university’s department of nutrition, and a research associate at Rhodes University, South Africa. Patel credits an upsetting encounter witnessing an adolescent girl carrying a crying infant while begging on the roadside during a family trip to Mumbai in his early childhood as a formative experience that led to the big questions that shaped his life.
Those questions never left him, and prior to his writing and academic work, he worked for the UN, the World Bank, and the WTO to explore possible solutions to poverty, hunger, and inequity. Later, he would become a fierce critic of those very same multilateral institutions, and has been tear-gassed on four continents protesting against them. Yet today, he serves on the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems and has advised governments worldwide on the causes of and solutions to crises of sustainability.
Among Patel’s books are Stuffed and Starved, which examines the inequities of the world food system wherein a billion are obese even as another billion starve; the New York Times bestselling The Value of Nothing, which critiques the free market’s notions of value, especially with regard to fundamental needs like clean water, housing, and health care; A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, which details how capitalistic distortion of environmental, social, and health costs of goods has devastated society and the planet.
As a filmmaker, Patel recently co-directed a documentary on climate change and the global food system called The Ants and the Grasshopper, which follows Malawian women impacted by climate change as they travel the United States and attempt to convince Americans of the reality of the global threat.
Please join Rahul Brown and Andrew Kim for this illuminating conversation with two trailblazers dedicated to deep consciousness and deep medicine for healing the earth and all her people.
There's no time Kate Munger can remember that her mother wasn't singing. Every night, Kate and her four siblings would be graced with lullabies at their bedsides. The physical proximity of the vibrations of her mother’s body would activate the cells in Kate.
Now, Kate brings that gift of voice and vibration in service to those at the threshold of the other end of life – singing songs as lullabies at bedside to those near death. In 2000, she founded Threshold Choir, a decentralized, distributed community of more than 1300 volunteer singers now comprising more than 180 locally-formed Threshold Choirs around the world. The organization’s vision is to spark a movement for “a world where all at life’s thresholds may be honored with compassion shared through song.” The organization furthers this vision by supporting local voices who come together to offer gentle a capella singing to people in their communities who are dying in hospitals and hospices.
For Kate, the voice, as the original human instrument, is a true and gracious vehicle for compassion and comfort. She speaks of a “tribal inheritance” of singing together and a “lineage and legacy of women singing for millennia”. She describes singing at the bedside as “more a prayer than a performance” -- soothing and calming to the dying as well as their family and caregivers. As The Washington Post recently wrote, Threshold Choirs “seems to have tapped into something both primal and much-needed: a growing desire not to recoil from death or abandon the dying but to face that ultimate truth and figure out how to help ease the isolation of those near the end.”
The seed for the Threshold Choir was planted in June of 1990 when Kate sang for her friend Larry as he lay in a coma, dying of HIV/AIDS. She did housework all morning and was terrified when the time came to sit by his bedside. He was agitated, thrashing under the sheets. So Kate did what she always did when she felt afraid—she began to sing:
“There’s a moon / There’s a star in the sky / There’s a cloud / There’s a tear in my eye / There’s a light / There’s a night that is long / There’s a friend / There’s a pain that is gone.”
Kate repeated the lyrics over and over, singing for two and a half hours. “I felt as if I had given generously of my essence to my dear friend while I sang to him. I also found that I felt deeply comforted myself, which in turn was comforting to him.”
Several years later, while driving home from Montana, she committed herself to sing for any animals she encountered that had been killed on the road. “It felt good, and I continued long after that trip was over. It is still my practice. I stop whatever I am doing (except driving), turn off the radio, and sing a small song I wrote that begins ‘May your spirit rise safely...’"
From these seeds, Threshold Choir was born. Each Threshold Choir chapter is firmly rooted in its local community while also being an important part of a shared community as an international organization. The various chapters sing from the same repertoire of about 300 songs, many written by Kate and other choir members specifically to convey presence, peace, and comfort. “We sing very softly and quite close,” says Kate. “We’re trying to re-create the distance between a mother’s mouth and a baby’s ear.”
Kate is a gifted songwriter whose songs are simple and repetitive with gentle harmonies and an open feeling. These songs can be integrated by those approaching death as well as those in deep grieving. “A song is a bridge between what we know, what we can feel, and the big mystery,” she says. “We consider our songs this weightless evanescent, shimmering, ephemeral, yet substantive bridge. So how we choose the songs and how we sing, the words we use and whether we use words at all, all of those things are decisions we make in the moment.”
Threshold Choirs mostly use a repertoire with pieces limited to just a few words, and sung without accompaniment in three-part harmony. The idea is to keep things simple and not tied to any spiritual tradition. Complicated verses could intrude on the process of dying, Kate says. All song choices are made with deep listening to and observation of the person facing death: “It's about offering them attentive silence. Because what we find is that … it's between the songs that they can actually integrate and use our singing. [Their response] can be teeny tiny, a flicker of an eyelash. So we're watching really carefully.”
Kate has recently retired from directing the larger Threshold Choir and has returned to her passion of singing for people who are dying or in coma. She also loves to bring singing community to the incarcerated and to persons released from prison.
Please join Aryae Coopersmith and Sally Mahe in conversation with this extraordinary musician and compassionate visionary.
Jayanti Ravi is a scientist, civil servant, writer, speaker, teacher, and thinker. Formally, she holds a Master’s degree in nuclear physics from Madras University, MPA from Harvard University, a Ph.D. in e-governance and is an IAS officer.
Having worked in sectors like education, administration, health, family welfare & national strategy, for state (Gujarat) & center (PM’s office), she has had rich & diverse experiences. In her own words, she describes her life & her job as, “A civil servant who deals with just about anything - from riots and rallies to floods or famines, from industrial policy to inclusive education and so on. Some of the most interesting moments that I have spent with villagers, citizens, government staff, women and students have given me some amazing insights, almost seeming like moments of truth.”
She has been a key influencer in turning around Gujarat’s education system by introducing quality educational reforms. She also personally championed the Swachh Bharat Mission literally picking up brooms & cleaning toilets in schools and civil blocks. She writes in her book, 'Sanity in sanitation' -- ”Holding brooms and brushes, equipped with toilet cleaners and phenyl, all our office members set out to clean the squat-toilets, urinals, or latrines. It is instances like these that help sow the seeds of courage to espouse a cause or a challenge that seems important to you, even if this makes people deride or ridicule you.”
For three years in between, she was also supporting the National Advisory Council as a Director. Post which, she handled the covid planning, management & media in Gujarat. When she joined the department, the state ranked 17th in SDG 3 of good health. And now the state ranks 1st, after a concerted effort to improve maternal mortality, infant mortality and mortality of children in under five years.
Her work keeps her in close touch with many forms of mass suffering in the society, to which she says “Often, we feel agitated and sad at the complexity & magnitude of the problems of society. Looked at from another angle, these experiences are a series of immersions in a spiritual journey of engaging, attaching and un-attaching oneself. Nevertheless, these moments too, strengthen our faith & forbearance, gently nudging us towards relishing the endless reservoir of strength at the core of each human being!”
As the next step in her journey, she has moved on to bring “The Mother’s vision” to reality in her role as a secretary of the Auroville Foundation. And in tune with the person she is, she describes her role as “The development of Auroville has to be wholly community-driven. I see my role as more of a facilitator.”
She is an author who has been published nationally & internationally, and weaves her experiences to paint an exquisite picture of our country and our people.Those closer to home, also know her as a classical vocalist who has sometimes sung in even five languages. She has performed tributes with her children for icons like M.S. Subalakshmi and Dr. V, the founder of Aravind Eye Care System. In her books & interviews, she often cites anecdotes from Gita & Ramayana. And thus, it’s not a wonder that she has also translated Ramayana into Tamil with her friend & her mother. In one of her interviews, she proudly said, “I also got the chance to present a paper on Ram Paadukas in the presence of Moraribapu.”
Deeply inspired by Gandhi, true to his spirit of trusteeship and humility, her book preface disclaims - “If there are parts of the book readers do not like, it would be, I believe, a reflection of my incompetence or inability. On the other hand, if there are parts of the book that readers like, it is due to the people who in the stories, as also in my life have made them nice!”
Join us in conversation with this inspiring public servant, visionary, heartist and changemaker!
Vallabh Bhanshali is a visionary, a businessman, a devoted Vipassana meditator and a philanthropist. He co-founded ENAM securities, a highly reputed investment banking and investment group. ENAM has played a critical role in the growth story of multiple Indian corporations which went on to become the crown jewels of Indian economy -- such as Infosys, Reliance, Sterlite, Zee, Inox, Jindal, Thermax, etc. For his unique ability to solve complex problems, he came to be known as “investment banker of the first and the last resort”.
For Vallabh-bhai, however, the real jewel was never his wealth or even his fame, but it was his search for the “truth” within. At 19, he chanced upon Acharya Vinoba Bhave’s Talks on Gita, and in his own words “half-way through the book, my life was completely changed.” He decided to live by a clear set of principles: Be passionate about what you do, embrace change and stand firm when the going gets tough. “I was practicing as an accountant and I realized that I may be academically brilliant, but my heart was not in it. So, I just walked out of my practice not knowing what I was going to do next.” Illustrating his dedication to stand firm and show up for a client even in troubled times, Bhanshali recalls the IPO of Air Deccan, India’s first low-cost airline. “Captain Gopinath, the founder of the new airlines, appointed five bankers to raise capital in order to make Air Deccan fly. Three of them scooted when they realized that things were not as solid as they appeared. The other two couldn’t help because they had invested in the company. But I said, ‘Captain, I will hold your hand. I am not going to leave you’. Had I also left, the airline would have stopped in the next seven days.”
In the world of finance which is often associated with greed and selfishness, Mr. Bhanshali is a beacon of integrity who leads with values, clarity, modesty and sincere concern for the wellbeing of others. But how did a “shy and diffident kid” – that’s how he describes himself as a child – become this immensely successful and highly renowned entrepreneur who constantly strives to make this world a better place? Gladly, Mr. Bhanshali is excited to share his ‘secret sauce’: Inner Transformation.
His 30 year long spiritual journey took him to many shores, from Eastern Philosophy to Western Philosophy. Another pivotal point in his search was when he found Vipassana Meditation. In 1989, at the age of 37, he attended his first course and ever since it has been “one blissful journey”. Vipassana, which means to see things as they really are, is one of India's most ancient techniques of meditation. It was rediscovered by the Buddha more than 2500 years ago. Vipassana is a way of self-transformation through self-observation. It focuses on the deep interconnection between mind and body, which can be experienced by disciplined attention to your own breath. Once the transformation is complete, you are liberated from mental impurity, resulting in a balanced mind full of love and compassion.
Mr. Bhanshali sees meditation as an evolutionary process for mankind. “Having explored the external world and reaching its threshold, people are looking for greater peace, greater meaning, greater understanding.” Through ardently practicing Vipassana for many years, he became deeply transformed. He sees his body and his consciousness as part of a bigger system and feels aligned with the universe. “Once you are aligned, all the happiness just flows. You don’t worry too much, you just do what you think is right. Life becomes so easy, it’s wonderful.”
Strongly committed to support the Vipassana movement, he has not only encouraged his family, friends and colleagues to meditate regularly but he is also Trustee and former Chairman of the Global Vipassana Foundation.
He was a Trustee of the Bombay Stock Exchange and has served on several policy making & advisory committees of the Government and other regulatory bodies. He is also the founder Director of FLAME University – India’s innovative Liberal Arts University. He is the founder and chief mentor of Desh Apnayen Sahayog Foundation which is focused on instilling a sense of active citizenship amongst school and college students. The Foundation has also launched TRUTHtalks, an innovative initiative to inspire people to raise the Truth Quotient in their lives and make our society more happy, trustworthy and productive.
Join us in conversation with this inspiring visionary, truth-seeker and changemaker!
“Hope is a luxury we cannot afford losing. Especially women, if we lose hope, we lose the future of our children.” – Huda Abu Arquob
Born in Jerusalem to respected Palestinian scholars and educators, Huda Abu Arquob’s great-grandfather was one of the many Muslim Palestinians who took in and protected Jewish residents of Hebron during the 1929 massacre. “That story has not been properly documented,” Huda says, “perhaps because it challenges the simplistic narrative of Palestinians and Israelis fighting for 3,000 years. I’ve felt throughout my life that is it important to challenge these false narratives and to try and change the way we look at the ‘Other’.”
And that’s precisely what she’s now doing as an adult. Based in Hebron, Huda Abu Arquob is the Regional Director of the Alliance for Middle East Peace (ALLMEP), a coalition and network of more than 130 civil society organizations working in Palestine and in Israel on conflict transformation, peacebuilding and nonviolent direct actions. She is also a recognized leader in grassroots initiatives focused on Feminist Inclusive Political Activism (FIPA), and an advocate of UN 1325 seeking to increase women participation in decision making levels in Palestine and Israel. In 2017, Huda received the first-ever Laudato Si’ Award from the Catholic Pope in the Vatican for her lifelong commitment to peacebuilding and conflict transformation.
A teacher turned peacebuilder, she believes that the world has a wrong perception of Palestinians as an inherently violent, militant people and that this stereotype needs to change. “Palestinians are not violent by nature,” she says. “Most of us are determined to work together and we are determined to live together with Israelis. We’re the majority but we aren’t reported about in the media." While she admits that "not all Palestinians are eager to see the humanity in Israelis,” she insists that many grassroots organizations are using “the power of nonviolent resistance to regain our humanity. If we are a people fighting for our rights we should not in the process lose our humanity.”
For Huda, a sustainable peace solution to the current Israel-Palestine conflict lies not with political leadership at the top, but with internal people-to-people dialogues, particularly among women. Her life work revolves around building strong grassroots Israeli-Palestinian relationships as a foundation for lasting peace.
But she learned early on that simply fostering contact among people alone, without more collective healing work and social change education, does not transform conflict. A Fulbright scholarship brought Huda to U.S. in the early 2000s, where she did a graduate degree in conflict transformation and peace studies. While living in the U.S., she teamed up with a Jewish man to form Abraham’s Vision, a San Francisco-based nonprofit that brought together Palestinian and Jewish university students in comparative conflict analysis for a summer of experiential learning, including a four-week visit to the conflict-ridden former Yugoslavia.
“Unlike some programs that mix Israelis and Palestinian young people, we don’t believe that just having contact with each other is transformative—we don’t sweep our differences under the rug,” said Huda of the approach she and her co-founder took at Abraham’s Vision. “We believe it is important to understand social-identity and power dynamics of people in conflict. We put a huge amount of effort into healing collective and individual traumas before we position people to work together to resolve their conflicts.”
Upon returning to Palestine, Huda began to forge connections between Jewish and Palestinian people. Her goal is to tear down stereotypes and create a new language and imagination of new possibilities based on "sincere curiosity that strives to reveal what we share and what is possible." According to Huda, women, in particular, have a unique contribution to make in the peacebuilding process. "Women don’t have the ego-centric proposition for peace," she has said. Unlike some narrow-minded politicians, women “put their eyes on the goal and not competition."
Reflecting on life amid a longstanding and violent conflict, Huda says, “I refuse to be either an enemy or a victim. The helplessness that comes from feeling yourself to be a victim is paralysing but it was not in the nature of the women I grew up with; they were always fighting, adapting and progressing.”
Huda is the oldest of twelve children, and an aunt to twenty-eight (and counting!) nieces and nephews. Now residing in Hebron, she lived for eight years in the U.S. and has traveled extensively in Europe and the Middle East.
Join Aryae Coopersmith and Janessa Wilder in conversation with this extraordinary feminist peacebuilder.
"Just because I take everything in my stride, smile through everything, doesn’t mean I don’t feel pain, loss or get hurt, it just means that every day I make a choice to transcend the negative and use every moment there is breath in this body to positively impact the world around me." -- Preethi Srinivasan
Born in 1979, Preethi was a very gifted and hard working child. She became the captain of the under-19 Tamil Nadu women's cricket team, and led the state team to the national championships in 1997 at the age of 17. She was also a gold-medalist national level swimmer. She excelled academically in her school life which spanned 9 countries across 3 continents, due to the frequent transfers involved in her father’s profession. In Standard 12th, she was among the top 2% of merit students in the United States.
It was the perfect life that any teenager or their parents would dream of. And then, a moment of unimaginable misfortune turned her life upside down.
She was returning to Chennai from a wonderful college trip to Pondicherry, when she and her friends stopped by to spend some time at a beach. Playfully jumping the waves in what was only thigh deep water, a receding wave churned up the sand from under her feet, she tripped. She stumbled a bit and fell face forward into the water. There was no impact, she didn’t hit any rock or anything hard at all. Not a drop of blood, just a split-second of a shock like sensation through the body, and she could no longer move her body at all. A champion athlete, now a quadriplegic, paralyzed below the neck, and now a wheelchair user for the rest of her life. All in a split second.
Her identity was completely disrupted. “Is it from birth or did it happen recently? Is this a boy or a girl? Can she talk?” were questions she could hear well intending guests ask her parents. For the following two years, she could not bring herself up to come out of the house -- due to stigma and fear of being ridiculed. A child prodigy destined for Ivy leagues, now being denied admission even in correspondence course for graduation. Many friends and relatives who loved and adored her till yesterday no longer wished to be in her sight. And in her heart, she was asking herself -- I have not changed. It’s my body that has changed. I didn’t have any control over it. Am “I” still not the same?
It was the unconditional love from her parents that helped her spirit stand back. Her father N. Srinivasan, had eyes to still see the Preethi which had not changed. Lovingly, he would tell her -- ”Why are you so worried about this body? Body and mind are limited, seek the truth within which can not be destroyed. Seek yourself.” Her mother Vijayalakshmi, wouldn’t sleep for 8 hours straight for the next 20 years, so that she can help turn her daughter twice every night in bed, so that she doesn’t contract bed sores.
With this unconditional love and support, Preethi has rebuilt her life with grit and dignity. From being denied admission to a correspondence course, she is now pursuing her Ph.D. from one of the world’s most prestigious institutes, IIT Chennai -- perhaps the first person with a severe 90% disability to achieve this feat. She uses voice technology, which some strangers gifted her and jokingly challenges people around her that she can type faster than anybody else on computers. She secured a full time job writing film reviews online. From being afraid to be seen to giving multiple Ted talks and speaking at some largest corporations and inspiring thousands. She taught herself to mouth paint and has created many stunning pieces of art. She became the first disabled woman to receive the Kalpana Chawla Award and many other awards too. This is the story of grit, the “never give up” side of her life.
At the same time, she has connected to a deeper reflective spiritual side of herself - discovering the power of one and the power of “oneness”. While being physically disabled brings a lot of exclusion and “othering” in the society today, she says that this kind of othering and rejection is much more prevalent and not just limited to people with disability. If you aren’t good enough as per societal yardstick, you are left out. If you are too good, then also you are left out. She calls for a world of belonging where we can look past our surface level differences and be connected in our common humanity. “I and disabled people don’t need pity, they just need friendships, like pretty much everyone else”, she says.
Her relationship to her own disability has also transformed from complaining “Why me” to questioning “Why not me”? “The only real disability is a closed mind” she now says, and reminds us that we are all impaired at some level.
“I feel that for every tangible I have lost, I've gained a lot of intangibles, but society has no yardstick to judge these, because collectively as a society we don’t yet know much about the value of intangibles.” From feeling that she “deserved” and had earned all her success in her teen years, her vision has shifted to one of unearned grace. “I feel really blessed. Everything that comes your way is a blessing. I take it as that,” she now says.
With her cup of gratitude overflowing, she has done some remarkable work to support others going through similar challenges. When two girls she knew with similar disabilities died by suicide because of the social stigma and challenges, Preethi could just not ignore the suffering of others. She researched and found that in a country of 1/6th population of the world, there was not even one long term rehabilitation facility for women patients of spinal cord injury.
Without any background in running organizations, and with the encouragement of her mother, whom she considers a Goddess in her life, she started Soulfree - a non profit organization to support people with spinal cord injuries. Soulfree today offers a broad spectrum of support from preventive awareness campaigns, to mobility aids, medical treatment, vocational support and quality of life counselling.
With a heart full of grace, Preethi’s purpose in life is to add love, light and laughter everyday in the world, or as she puts it even more profoundly "Love others not because they deserve your love but because you deserve to have love in your heart."
We are inspired and grateful to Preethi for her courage and compassion. Join us this Sunday for a special conversation with her moderated by Arun Sreekumar and Drishti Trivedi.
Till then, soak-in these beautiful glimpses into Preethi's inner life --
“The seeds of peace come from the ground.”
“You don’t begin by going to library. Theology begins on the street. Go to understand what Scripture and tradition have to say about those questions [on the street], and new questions will arise.”
Growing up Christian and attending seminary at a time of heightening tensions between Buddhists and Hindus in his native Sri Lanka, Shanta Premawardhana realized early in his life that received theology – deriving from text, scripture and tradition – could have a limited role in guiding how to live, compared to the theology arising from the contexts of people’s daily lives. “What shall I eat tomorrow? How shall I find health care for my child? How shall I find a job? Those are in the end theological questions,” Premawardhana says. “At that point, it doesn’t matter what is your faith.”
Now, several decades later, Premawardhana has combined his extensive theological training with deep experience in grassroots organizing to be a global interfaith peacebuilder in some of the most conflict-ridden places of the world. He is President of the OMNIA Institute for Contextual Leadership, a Chicago-based organization which trains faith leaders – clergy and lay – to counter religious extremism and religion-based oppression, domination and violence. OMNIA trains people of faith to deconstruct theologies of exclusivism and superiority and reconstruct theologies of pluralism. It has trained over 3500 peacemakers around the world, who are organized into 158 Interfaith Peacemaker Teams in Nigeria, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. Each Interfaith Peacemaker Team has about 20 faith leaders who collaborate across identity barriers, build power by organizing people and organizing money, and act collaboratively to address critical issues that arise from the ground.
Inspired by the critical pedagogy of philosopher Paulo Freire, Premawardhana first cut his teeth in community organizing with the renowned Sarvodaya Shramadana movement of Sri Lanka, which was founded in 1958 and remains one of the world’s largest community organizing networks. Later Premawardhana did some Gandhian organizing while in further seminary studies in Madhurai, India, and then got engaged with Saul Alinsky-style organizing in the South Side of Chicago, which also inspired young community organizer Barack Obama.
At the same time, he was involved in interreligious dialogue, believing that the work of interfaith relations must move beyond theological conversations, and sought to bring seminary students to do theology differently. “Seminaries teach from the top down (received theology). But the theology we want students to take away is contextual theology. Theology must begin with the questions and struggles of people on the ground, … and we should seek scripture and tradition to respond to that,” Premawardhana has said.
OMNIA's method of contextual learning, L3M, "Listening to, Learning from, and Living in Deep Solidarity with those in Margins," equips leaders to dismantle top-down "received" theologies of exclusivity and superiority, and build bottom-up "contextual" theologies. OMNIA is the off-spring of SCUPE (Seminary Consortium of Urban Pastoral Education), which for 40 years trained seminary students in Chicago to take the context of the city seriously, and to build a theology from questions on the streets. In 2018, OMNIA received the prestigious Paul Carus Award for excellence in interfaith action by the Parliament of the World's Religions.
Prior to OMNIA, Premawardhana served as the Director for Interreligious Dialogue and Cooperation at the World Council of Churches in Geneva, Switzerland. He was also the Associate General Secretary for Interfaith Relations at the National Council of Churches, USA, where he initiated and co-led a dialogue table of senior Jewish and Christian leaders in the United States addressing critical questions of theology and justice, and also initiated a similar dialogue table with senior Muslim and Christian leaders. While serving as pastor of Ellis Avenue Church in Chicago for fourteen years, he engaged in community organizing in the South Side of Chicago. He is an emeritus trustee of the Parliament of the World’s Religions, National Council of Churches, USA, and Common Cause Illinois. He earned his MA and Ph.D. in Religion at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, having attended seminary in Sri Lanka as well as in India prior to arriving in the United States in 1981. After his doctoral studies, he stayed in Chicago and founded the Chicago Ashram of Jesus Christ, a Christian community with an outreach to South Asian immigrants.
For Premawardhana, whose Christianity was informed by Buddhism to be always one of a disciplined journey rather than an arrived-at salvation, the “missional” mindset of many religions leads them to want to teach, not continue to learn. Premawardhana seeks to turn the mission paradigm upside down where those on the margins teach those in the privileged center: “Those who are hungry today have something important to teach us about economic justice, about faith, about resilience. When we get that, our questions are different, our answers are different. What’s wrong with our theology? How can we engage with those in the margins? Those in the margins will missionize us, will teach us, will convert us.”
Join us in conversation with this inspiring bridge- and peace-builder!
On a chilly morning in November, 2013, Deborah Cohan, MD, a clinical professor and program director at the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine, walked into an operating suite, her curly hair tucked under a cap, not to perform surgery but to undergo a double mastectomy for breast cancer. Within minutes, the sterile room began to enliven with R&B drumbeats, and the entire surgical team erupted into dance to Beyoncé’s “Get Me Bodied,” with Cohan in the center of it all.
This flash mob video, captured by the anesthesiologist, went viral — with over eight million views to date — and even Beyoncé herself posted it on her Facebook page. “What better time to celebrate life,” said Cohan, “than when you’re facing death?” To be clear, for Cohan, dancing wasn’t about glossing over suffering with a forced smile, but about leaning into the body, literally dancing with fear and grief. Dancing was her way to optimize her body before surgery, to connect with the surgical team, and to embrace friends and family dancing virtually in solidarity with her.
As an obstetrician-gynecologist who has performed thousands of ultrasounds and witnessed babies dancing in their mothers’ wombs, Cohan imagines that she, too, was dancing long before she was born. When she was three, she began learning highly choreographed methods like ballet and jazz. Then in 2011, she happened upon Dance Journey, a conscious practice where people danced freely, effortlessly, and, as she observed, ecstatically; these movements opened up in her a deep listening to her body and an awareness of the healing power within. It was in this spirit that she danced in the surgical suite. And in 2014, a year after her surgery, Cohan founded Foundation for Embodied Medicine (FEM), a nonprofit organization to bring this embodied wisdom to patients, caregivers, and healthcare professionals.
A Harvard-trained physician, Cohan is an obstetrician who attends births at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and serves as the medical director of HIVE, caring for pregnant people living with HIV and promoting reproductive and sexual wellness for those living with and affected by HIV. Since 2005, there have been no babies born with HIV in San Francisco.
In addition to her medical degree, Cohan holds a masters in public health from the University of California at Berkeley, and a fellowship in reproductive infectious diseases at San Francisco General Hospital. She also served as a member of the Department of Health and Human Services Panel on Antiretroviral Guidelines for Adults and Adolescents.
For Cohan, medicine and movement are deeply interwoven. She has studied with Anna Halprin of Life/Art Process, Tina Stromsted of Authentic Movement, and Valerie Chafograck of Dance Sanctuary and Movement Liberation. With an embodied approach that honors the inherent wisdom of our bodies and nature, she has served as a doula for those who are giving birth and those who are dying.
The flash mob video landed Cohan interviews on multiple mainstream media outlets, including Good Morning America and the Ellen DeGeneres Show, and inspired others to dance before their surgeries. She lives in Berkeley, California, with her two children and their dog. In her free time, she can be found causing mischief, singing to her plants, and spreading messages of love, joy, and interconnectedness.
Join us with this compassionate physician and expressive dancer in a call that will be part-conversation, part-workshop, with an invitation to explore body awareness, conscious movement, and embodied presence in a collective field.
[Note from Curators -- Call just closed. To continue the dialogue post-call with the speakers and other listeners, join here.]
In 1985, when Prof. Anil Gupta was invited by the Bangladeshi government to help restructure their agricultural sector, a moral dilemma gripped him. He noticed how the marginalized farmers were being paid poorly for their otherwise unmatched knowledge. As a consultant, for merely compiling the innovations of the villagers, he was being paid in huge multiples of what was being offered to the villagers. The gross injustice of this imbalance led him to found a resounding social and ethical movement— the Honey Bee Network— bringing together and elevating thousands of grassroots innovators.
"When the knowledge of people is collected and compiled, people should not feel exploited just as flowers don’t complain when Honey Bee collects pollen" - This was the first founding principle of the Honey Bee Network. Cross pollination of ideas, overcoming anonymity of creative people and sharing of benefits are its key founding principles, which it adheres to even 3 decades after its inception. For over three decades, Professor Gupta has traveled through rural lands unearthing innovations by the ranks—from the famed “Mitti Cool” refrigerator to the living root bridges of Meghalaya. He insists that to fight the largest and most persistent problems of the world we must eschew expensive research labs and instead, look towards ordinary folk. Over the years, the Honey Bee Network has mapped creativity of scattered communities all over the country and in more than 50 countries. The realization that anyone can create an outstanding piece of work or discover a solution to a niggling problem is the idea that lies at the heart of the Honey Bee Network.
This khadi clad socialist whose life’s work lies among indigenous rural people makes for unlikely coupling in one of India’s most premiere management schools (Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad) seeped in capitalist principles and with students gunning for jobs with the top MNCs and global consultancies. That said, one of his most popular courses included shodh yatra, under which he walks with management students to different parts of the country to learn from local communities and study their knowledge systems. Two shodh yatras are conducted during the year – the summer edition takes off to the hottest places in India and the winter one, to its coldest regions - this helps weed out tourism motive. During shodh yatras, the invitation is to learn from four teachers viz., the teacher within, among peers, in nature and among common people.
[Professor Anil Gupta with IIMA students during a Shodh Yatra. Photo credits: DNAIndia]
The interactions en route with the locals open up avenues of inquiry among the students. Prof Gupta revels in the culture of sharing – the hallmark of a community of innovators - that is so visible in the country side amongst the indigenous artisans. Here is a story he shares, “During a shodh yatra, we came across a Purulia village where beautiful life size terra cotta horses were installed under a tree. We asked the potters as to why were these beautiful horses kept under the tree – someone may crash into them, harming your creations or steal them. The potters replied, “These are not just our most beautiful creations, but these are our best creations. When our children walk along this street to their schools, they would know what is the current benchmark of the best is, and also know that they must do better.” The horses were kept there as proofs of open source standards of excellence. Being a management professor, I had read but never expected to see it this practices in a rural setting – that if you offer your best to the commons, then your next gen will do better than you.”
Triggering children’s creativity is another area that excites the Professor. It is his belief is that when children from mixed backgrounds, well-endowed and disadvantaged together, research on social problems, they can come out with strikingly original ideas which adults, conditioned in a uniform way of thinking often miss. Children, he says, are often treated as a sink of advice and assistance rather than a source of new ideas. He reminds us of the fact that real innovative ideas come from the most unexpected places. For facilitating this emergence, we need to bridge the gap between formal and informal schools of learning and that the focus should be on corroborative learning and not on competition alone.
In his TED and other such talks, Prof Gupta tells us that majority of grassroots innovations are borne out of “samavedana” – understanding the pain of someone else, as our own. He often calls upon his audience to think about the ladies on the tea farms picking tea leaves - balancing a heavy basket on their heads, or the women labour bending inconveniently to transplant paddy in plantations with knee high water levels. His tryst with those with scientific temper bring him insights into the minds of innovators. He says, “I do not agree with Abraham Maslow's hierarchical model of human needs theory that proposes that in order to achieve self-actualization, one's basic requirements first need to be met. I have met many innovators, who without even knowing where their next meal would come from, have persisted and created stunning artwork or provided a solution to the problems of a community.”
An evangelist for the grass-root innovator, Prof Gupta believes in crafting a public policy that encourages such inclusive frugal and grassroots innovation. Born to Gandhian parents, and always dressed in khaadi, Prof Gupta believes that such an innovation environment must also be rooted in the Gandhian values of compassion, collaboration and co-creation. For an innovator, he balances inner work with outer work, asking, “Can grassroots innovations trigger humility, harmony and healthy reciprocity?”
Anil Kumar Gupta is the founder of the Honey Bee Network, SRISTI, NIFand GIAN . He is a visiting faculty at IIM Ahmedabad & IIT Bombay, a Padma Shri winner, and an independent thinker, activist for the cause of creative communities and individuals at grassroots, tech institutions and any other walk of life committed to make this world a more creative, compassionate and collaborative place.
Prof Gupta is a prolific artist, both as a poet and a painter. His haiku-s talk about an invitation to celebrate the present, of surrender, and of sublime longing. One of his poems is appended below.
His daily personal practice of samavedana (compassion for all sentient beings) is to feed sparrows at his balcony each day before he has his own meals.
Escaping is not an answer
Where will you go? It is here that you belong
This Teachers' Day, on September 5, 2021 at 10 am IST, Professor Anil Gupta will converse with his students Shobhana Madhavan and Ravi Gulati.
As a surgeon based in eastern Nebraska, Demetrio Aguila, MD, has drawn patients from 34 states, 6 countries, and 4 continents, not only because of his innovative, life-changing surgeries for people suffering with chronic pain, but because of the compassionate payment option he offers: in lieu of dollars, patients can donate community service hours for their procedures. For example, if a patient needs a surgery with an insurance fee of $5,000, a donation of 250 hours of community service can cover the cost. “In my heart of hearts,” says Aguila, who served for over 20 years in medical missions for the US Air Force, “I had this hope that we would rekindle in our neighbors, and in ourselves, a sense of volunteerism.”
From its inception, the vision Aguila had for Healing Hands of Nebraska, the clinic he founded, has been to offer “world-class health care to all comers in a way that’s compassionate, innovative, forward-thinking, affordable, and fair.” The pricing options are transparent; by not contracting with commercial insurance, patients know exactly what their charges are. For those at risk of significant medical debt or bankruptcy — the vast majority of whom face such risks even though they actually have medical insurance — Aguila devised the M25 program, a reference to Matthew 25:40 in the Bible, which calls humanity to serve one another with dignity and equity. Through M25, patients can either fulfill the volunteer hours themselves, or they can invite friends, family, neighbors, and even strangers to contribute to their total hours. As one patient noted of a nursing program that donated some 180 hours to his total, “It was the kindness of strangers that got this accomplished for me.”
It’s not the first time Aguila has found himself in such a role of great weight and responsibility. During his senior year at Boston University, he joined the US Air Force and, between active duty and reserve time, would spend a total of 21 years in diplomatic and combat missions across Japan, South Korea, eastern Europe, and the Washington, D.C., area. For a time during his deployment to Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan, Aguila was the only head and neck surgeon, and the large majority of the surgeries performed were on civilians.
More recently, Aguila’s unique combination of skills and creativity led to “Sober Surgery,” or surgery that doesn’t involve narcotics or benzodiazepines, two notoriously addictive classes of drugs. Having studied pain medicine and medical acupuncture, Aguila realized that, while he could use a combination of nerve blocks and non-narcotic drugs to control surgical and post-surgical pain, many of his patients, having endured years of chronic pain, were coming to him already addicted to such medications. “I didn’t know what to do with the addiction,” Aguila said. Then Rise Recovery stepped in as a perfect complement — an organization that offered treatment and support for addictions, but didn’t know how to treat the underlying pain. “It was a match made in heaven,” says Aguila.
In addition to comprehensive nerve surgery for chronic pain, Aguila performs reconstructive and cosmetic plastic surgery. He is a diplomate of the American Board of Plastic Surgery, as well as the American Board of Otolaryngology (Ear, Nose, Throat, or ENT). Aguila has received training at various institutions, including Johns Hopkins Hospital, University of Maryland, and Mount Sinai School of Medicine. Among his numerous awards, he was awarded the Air Force District of Washington Surgical Excellence Award, NATO Medal, and Surgeon of the Year.
Aguila is also a doting husband and the father of four children. He is proficient in multiple languages, including Tagalog and Spanish. For the past four years, he has pursued an MA in Theology from The Augustine Institute.
Please join Ameeta Martin and Cynthia Li in conversation with this inspiring humanitarian, skilled surgeon, and innovative thinker.
Born in Chennai to Mrs. Visalakshi and Mr. Narayanaswamy into a musical and dance family, Bindhumalini has at once been embracing tradition and playing with its boundaries.
She imbibed Carnatic music from the family, especially her grandmother Seetha Doraiswamy, a well known Jal Tarang instrumentalist. And went on to immerse herself in Hindustani music with Ustad Abdul Rashid Khan when he was 99.
A dual degree in Music and Arts, and post-graduation in Graphic Arts from the National Institute of Design added more dimensions to her evolution as an artist.
In 2009, Bindhumalini married Vasu Dixit, a vocalist and guitarist who also specialized in Film and Video Communication at the National Institute of Design. Apart from acting, film-making and singing jingles, Vasu is a pillar of the folk-rock fusion music band Swarathma.
Bindhumalini is deeply influenced by the poems of saint Kabir. In her words “What attracted me was that Kabir touches every aspect of life. Happiness, bliss, renunciation. He becomes the ultimate being, the guru, the formless one that speaks. And his special poems, called ‘Ulat Bansi’, really made me fall in love with him. He is abstract no doubt, but somewhere something will catch you and the insight hits hard. Kabir’s songs started becoming meditative and helped break all the conditioning in my head. I started realising that the bhakti poets sang what they sang at that moment. Saint poets like Dikshitar or Thyagaraja did not plan to sing a verse, but it just happened out of that spiritual experience. That’s exactly what I feel with Kabir.” Her presence at Kabir Yatra and the Malwa Yatra is something she and her fraternity of artists look forward to.
Bindhumalini’s paintings are also an extension of her joyful dipping into the essence of life in the moment.
She is enthusiastic about collaborating with other artists. Along with her two kindred sisters Archana Sundararajan, a classical dancer from Madurai; and Jaya Madhavan, a writer from Chennai, Bindhumalini has performed a unique presentation on the Kabir, entitled ‘Ankath Kahani’, which translates as ‘Unsaid Story’. Along with Pallavi MD, Bindhumalini created the music and literary performance The Threshold that premiered at the Kochi Biennale. Bindhumalini's album ‛Suno Bhai’, a collection of Saint Kabir's poems, was another collaboration with with good friend Vedanth Bharadwaj. She has also scored music for the 2016 Tamil movie Aruvi with him. In Kannada, she first collaborated with Ananya Kasaravalli and scored music for the movie ‛Harikatha Prasanga’ which won Best Film award at the 9th edition of Bangalore International Film Festival, 2017. In 2018, Bindumalini composed music for the movie Naathicharami which brought her a National award.
Bindhumalini relishes the power of telling stories from fresh perspectives and breaking through boundaries with the presentation of it. The spirit is reflected in her lending voice to theatre productions like The Chakras and the musical narrative of Amir Khusrao, Khusrau Ke Rang.
In a radical response to the Covid second wave of 2021 in India, she started offering music and silence every day to be “Here for You”. She has also been actively volunteering at Ashiyana children's home and Snehadhara Foundation.
As one of her friends at another inclusive space for special children puts it, “Bindhumalini is what the doctor prescribes for our souls!”.
As a 12-year-old Croatian-American girl in the anti-Soviet climate of the 1960s, Marilyn Turkovich boldly subscribed to the magazine ‘Soviet Life’ without her parents’ knowledge. Postal deliveries weren’t covered in brown paper at the time, which meant that the magazine was no secret to the postal delivery person as well as the neighbors. Upon learning of the subscription, her parents worried what neighbors might interpret of the family’s political allegiance. But their daughter reasoned that she wasn’t defying anyone but simply acting on the premise that one must appreciate and learn from other people’s perspectives, however diverse their origin – and that this practice grows from the intimate spaces of our homes and neighborhood.
This was one of Marilyn Turkovich’s early acts of courage in her journey to becoming a teacher and organizer for compassion. Turkovich has dedicated herself to cultivating appreciation and understanding of diverse cultures, faiths and ways of life that exist around the world. She has worked since 2013 with the International Charter for Compassion (CFC), an organization founded to support the movement initiated by Karen Armstrong’s Charter of Compassion, and founded on “the fundamental principles of universal justice and respect” underlying the world’s religions and wisdom traditions. CFC aims to provide an umbrella for people to engage in collaborative partnerships worldwide designed to bring to life through concrete, practical action in a myriad of sectors the principles articulated in the Charter for Compassion.
Stepping into a diversity of roles – from educator, instruction and curriculum designer, facilitator, author and advocate, Turkovich presently is the Executive Director for CFC. She has helped bring 114 cities as signatories of the Charter, with about 300 more displaying readiness to plunge in. The Charter puts the golden rule – do unto others as you would to yourself – into practice through local communities around the world working across faiths, colors and ethnicities.
For Marilyn, “compassion is acting in solidarity with other people. And when you act in solidarity with others, you take the lead from them, don’t you? You don’t come in and say, ‘I have the solution!’ Rather, you explore collectively what that solution might be.” She says that oftentimes “our own personal wisdom gets in the way of really being effective,” since compassionate action often flows from compassionate questioning and compassionate listening to those most proximate to an issue.
Speaking from her home in Washington state at an International Inter-faith Peace Conference, she remarks on the subtle differences between empathy and compassion, “Empathy is defined as the feeling that arises within you when you are faced with another person’s suffering (hunger for instance), and you feel motivated to relieve that suffering. But compassion is not the same as empathy. Though the concepts are very much related. Empathy is our ability to feel the emotions of another person. Compassion is when those feeling and thoughts include the desire to help but more than that you do help. Research shows that when we feel compassion our heart rates slow down, we secrete the bonding hormone oxytocin, parts of our brain which get us to care for others light up. We care more for others – animals, people and environment. And as importantly ourselves.”
Marilyn bases her work on building compassion in communities on scientific assessment that reckons that compassion may even be vital to the survival of our species. Communities with compassionate members will more likely thrive. Bit by bit over the course of last very many decades she has designed hundreds of curricula, training materials, and workshops custom-made to instill compassion rooted in the local needs and knowledge.
Marilyn’s hyphenated existence as a Croatian-American in an immigrant neighborhood of Pennsylvania gave her a first-hand understanding of making of a community, melding differences and caring for each other. Her grandparents’ way of life made a formidable mark in teaching her how to interact with others, how the boundaries between personal and civic responsibility blend, how to share responsibilities in a community – all of which predisposed her for linking community building and compassion in her later life.
In her own journey into appreciating otherness, she has spent extensive time in India and Mexico, beginning during her Fulbright scholarship days. Professionally, Marilyn has worked with Independent Broadcasting Associates on National Public Radio, the BBC and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, and in organizational development, specializing in instructional design work, strategic planning and leadership. She has especially focused on developing training content on race and social justice initiatives.
Join us in conversation with this builder of compassionate communities.
“We all need a reason to wake up,” says Dr. Miller. “For me, it just took 11,000 volts.”
BJ Miller, MD, is a public figure and palliative care physician who has brought a singular presence — often described by his colleagues and patients as a certain “magic” without an ounce of pretense — to the field of death and dying for the past twenty years. A triple amputee, Miller’s humanity invites others to examine their own suffering, to start with empathy, and to de-pathologize death. Whether as executive director at San Francisco’s Zen Hospice Project or assistant clinical professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, patients would take one look and know he’d stood at the edge of the abyss himself. By bringing intention, design thinking, and creativity to the experience of dying and serious illness, Miller hopes to reduce or eliminate unnecessary suffering and reframe our relationships to crises, both personal and global.
Miller’s pivotal encounter with death came during his sophomore year at Princeton University, while he and some friends were “horsing around” after midnight one night. He climbed a parked commuter train and, in a flash, the electricity from the overhead wires arced to his metal watch and coursed through his limbs, throwing his body some 30 feet away. When his friends reached him, smoke was rising from his body. He would lose both legs below the knee and half of one arm.
Somehow, Miller never had a “Why me?” moment. While he credits this to having grown up watching his mother live gracefully and fully with post-polio syndrome — a progressive condition that left her in a wheelchair — this orientation to life illumines Miller’s humility and continuous self-examination. Even as he was moving through tremendous grief and shame, he resolved not to believe that his life was extra difficult, rather only uniquely difficult, as all lives are; and not to allow his accident to isolate him, but to heighten his connection to others.
When he returned to college, he studied art history; and in the images of ancient sculptures with missing arms or noses or ears, Miller recognized exquisite beauty, thus beginning to heal his relationship with his own body. He went on to study medicine, then palliative care, bringing poise, presence, and a disarming playfulness to those on life’s edge.
Miller’s calling has taken him from academics, as associate clinical professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, to the community, as executive director of the Zen Hospice Project (now Zen Caregiving Project). His latest venture, Mettle Health, which he co-founded last year during the Covid-19 pandemic, offers coaching and counseling to patients, families, and caregivers facing serious illness. Mettle Health, he describes, “is a kind of hotline” where he hopes to shift the dependency model in health care to one of self-empowerment and community.
With regard to the global events of the past year, from the pandemic to political upheavals and global warming, Miller hopes we don’t just return to life-as-usual. “What a big waste if we don’t learn something, if we don’t adapt and change and grow from these good existential crises.” The word “proportionality” comes up for him a lot, parsing out the important distinction between things that happen to us and how we respond to them. "I can yield to Mother Nature,” says Miller, “and I can yield to 11,000 volts. That’s a very different prospect than is shutting down your imagination or rolling over altogether.” When parts of us die, personally or as a community or society, these are ripe opportunities to redesign our lives.
Miller’s profiles and interviews have been featured in The New York Times Magazine, Oprah's "Super Soul Sunday", Fresh Air with Terry Gross, and Krista Tippett’s On Being. His TED talk, “What Really Matters at the End,” has been viewed over 11 million times. He is also the co-author of A Beginner’s Guide to the End: Practical Advice for Living Life and Facing Death, published in 2019.
Based in the Bay Area, Miller lives his personal life with as much zest as his work life. He can be found mountain biking, taking aimless road trips with his dog, riding his custom-built motorcycle — a sleek, black Aprilia — and practicing the art of doing nothing. Often, he’s wearing shorts and short-sleeved shirts. “These prosthetics are made with the same carbon fiber as the finish used on expensive sports cars, so why not tear that stuff off and delight in what actually is?” His biggest take-home lesson from his patients and their families: “To enjoy this big, huge, mystical, crazy, beautiful, wacky world.”
Please join us in conversation with this remarkable doctor of the body and soul, to explore the wisdom and love that can be discovered in the most unlikely of places.
Vinod Sreedhar is a Goa-based social entrepreneur and environmental educator working in the realm of Systems Thinking.
In 1996, he decided to walk out of college -- he was studying Commerce in Bombay -- and started composing and producing music for the advertising industry. India's newly liberalized economy was seeing massive growth in new television and radio channels. A few years later, somewhat disillusioned by the purely commercial focus of the ad industry, he co-founded and ran a social enterprise, Phase Five, between 2000 and 2007 with friends. Phase Five facilitated workshops and projects on Active Citizenship, Democracy, and Waste Management for some of India's top colleges and organizations like the British Council, the World Bank, and Praja Foundation, a Mumbai-based NGO working on building participation among the citizens of Mumbai.
In 2006, an encounter with a climate change-driven event - a massive cloudburst in Ladakh - helped birth his next venture, Journeys with Meaning (JwM). With highways washed away and closed, he used the time to understand why a high-altitude desert region was facing rainfall of such intensity. His conversations with the local community revealed the extent of the changes due to climate change and increased human action in cities. In these events, he started to see larger disconnects as the root causes; the disconnects between humans and nature, between different human cultures, between head and heart, and between our actions and their consequences. Since he had prioritized learning by doing for himself and found it very helpful, Vinod felt it would be a powerful learning experience for people to travel across India to better understand these disconnects and see how they were directly or indirectly leading to the vital issues of the day.
JwM operated on the Gift Economy model for six years. Participants could pay whatever they wanted or nothing, apart from costs, instead of being charged a fixed fee. JwM built its reputation for immersive and responsible travel in this period. Due to challenging personal circumstances, Vinod had to drop the full-time Gift Economy model in 2012 for a more conventional pricing model. Since then, JwM has made a place for supporting Gift Economy by reserving some seats in every learning journey or workshop, for people with financial constraints. They are encouraged to pay what they can or supported through external sponsorships. Many have also chosen to volunteer their time or skills in exchange for their costs being waived entirely or partially.
In 2015, JwM started offering learning journeys to schools through its JwM Juniors program. This was conceptualized and designed by Neha, Vinod's partner, who had recently joined the team. These learning journeys for schools have become a mainstay and they now focus on working mostly with students. Students have loved their experiences and the trips to Ladakh, in particular, have helped JwM win the GOLD award in the Best Experiential Travel category in the Indian Responsible Tourism Awards 2019.
With COVID affecting travel-based organizations hugely, JwM has been put on the back-burner while Vinod works on his new venture, All Systems Reboot (ASR).
His intent with ASR is to integrate three seemingly disconnected areas -- the personal, the professional, and the planetary -- so that people can take their cue from Nature -- an interconnected whole -- and bring conscious wholeness into their lives once again, by rebooting, and redesigning what life and work mean to us, while also giving energy and time to the only planet we can call home.
Vinod's journey has been about learning, and sharing, what disconnects we live with and relearning how we can live and grow in communities that nurture us and our home.
“Unlike Greek, Aramaic presents a fluid and holistic view of the cosmos. The arbitrary borders found in Greek between ‘mind,’ ‘body,’ and ‘spirit’ fall away.” —Neil Douglas-Klotz, Prayers of the Cosmos
Neil Douglas-Klotz, a world-renowned scholar in religious studies and psychology, defies easy categorization. He is a poet. Musician. Teacher of embodied prayers. Citizen diplomat. A Sufi. Linguist fluent in Aramaic, Hebrew, Arabic, German, among other languages. Author of eleven books, best known for his translations of the Aramaic words of Jesus and of the Arabic of the Qur’an. Thought leader and philosopher.
Matthew Fox wrote of Douglas-Klotz’s book Prayers of the Cosmos, “Reader beware: though this book is brief, it contains the seeds of a revolution.” This particular revolution began in 1977 when Douglas-Klotz, as a young man, received a transliteration in English phonetics of the Lord’s Prayer in Aramaic. He was curious to explore something that his teacher, Samuel L. Lewis—an American mystic, horticultural scientist, Zen master, and Sufi murshid (senior teacher)—had hoped to complete before his death, but hadn’t: to learn to pray the Lord’s Prayer in the original words spoken by Jesus.
Douglas-Klotz began to recite the words, then chant the sounds over and over again. “My body began to feel feelings I hadn’t felt before,” Douglas-Klotz recounted. “It was a visionary experience, a hal [or an expanded state, in Arabic].” He thought either he was going crazy and hearing voices in his head, or these body prayers might be something to try out with others.
Since then, Douglas-Klotz has become a pioneer in the radical translation and transliteration of the Lord’s Prayer and other teachings of Jesus. Two of his books, Prayers of the Cosmos: Reflections on the Original Meaning of Jesus's Words and The Hidden Gospel: Decoding the Spiritual Message of the Aramaic Jesus, reveal a mystical, feminist, and cosmic Christ. Douglas-Klotz teaches not only in concept, but by direct experience through body prayers and chants, how Aramaic differs from the better known Greek and English versions of the Christian Gospels. He explains how Arabic, Aramaic, and Hebrew all share the same roots. These Semitic languages emanate direction, color, and movement of a universe that is holistic, fluid, and conscious. He created a website, www.abwoon.org, with audio and video resources, so anyone can learn these prayers from anywhere in the world.
Douglas-Klotz was raised in Chicago by a multicultural family. Both sets of his grandparents were refugees from Europe of mixed German, Jewish, Russian, and Polish blood. His father was a chiropractor, and his mother was a student of healer and mystic Edgar Cayce. They were devout Christians, telling him stories of Jesus’s miracles and cultivating a sense of reverence and awe; they also taught him to question everything that challenged the greatest law to “love your neighbor as yourself." Douglas-Klotz was also impacted by Rachel Carson’s book, Silent Spring, and the importance of caring for the environment.
After graduating from college and working as a journalist in social justice, environmental issues, and consumer protection, he began to study with the early students of the mystic and scientist Samuel L. Lewis, through whom Douglas-Klotz was introduced to the spiritual practice involving Dances of Universal Peace. He then began a deep exploration of the body, mystical and expanded states of consciousness, and the early pre-religious ways of the three Abrahamic faiths—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
In addition to academic studies at various universities, where he received a master’s degree in somatic psychology and a doctorate in religious studies with an emphasis in ancient Semitic language hermeneutics, he studied with teachers from the native traditions of the Middle East, Pakistan, and India. In 1982, together with the Rev. Tasnim Fernandez, he co-founded the International Network for the Dances of Universal Peace. Several years later, he led a multinational group of dancers for peace on a citizen diplomacy trip to the Soviet Union, where they “demonstrated peace” in many public places with hundreds of local people joining them.
Douglas-Klotz’s other books include The Sufi Book of Life: 99 Pathways of the Heart for the Modern Dervish, Kahlil Gibran’s Little Book of Wisdom, Desert Wisdom: A Nomad’s Guide to Life’s Big Questions from the Heart of the Native Middle East, The Little Book of Sufi Stories and a historical mystery called A Murder at Armageddon. He has served as faculty at the Institute in Culture and Creation Spirituality, begun by theologian Matthew Fox, which in the 1990s gathered scientists, artists, educators, and students across different cultures and races.
Douglas-Klotz and his partner live in Fife, Scotland, where in 2007 he co-founded the Edinburgh International Centre for Spirituality and Peace with Neill Walker. He lectures worldwide. Under his Sufi name, Saadi Shakur Chishti, he also offers spiritual retreats combining his work with Native Middle Eastern spirituality with the lineage of Chishti Sufism.
Please join Cynthia Li and Pavi Mehta in conversation with this illuminating teacher of wisdom and peace.
“Where do you see the company 10 years from now?” -- this is a question which perhaps every corporate leader has heard and dedicated much of their time and energies in predicting and shaping.
It was 2016 and Mekin Maheshwari, then Chief-people-officer of Flipkart, the largest ecommerce company in India, sat in the board-room with few other leaders as this question was tabled.
He had joined Flipkart in 2009, just two years after humble beginnings of the company. Fast forward to this day 7 years later, Flipkart was a household name in India and had soared to a valuation of over 10Bn$. And Mekin had played a critical role in this massive growth story. From being President of Engineering for the company in its initial years and then heading the people function helping manage a team of over 30,000 employees.
Flipkart had emerged as a homegrown behemoth of India’s ecommerce space, yet most experts predicted that this was just a tip of the iceberg, in terms of the opportunity ahead.
It was in this backdrop, Mekin found himself reflecting “Where do you see the company 10 years from now?”. An unusual thought came to his mind “I realized I couldn't see myself in it. More so, I realized that I don’t know myself.”
Looking back now, he reflects “I was shocked. I realized I couldn’t even talk to my wife about such a thing, for the fear of hearing -- If you don't know yourself, then who did I marry?"
2-3 months of further holding those questions sincerely in his consciousness, and a little bit of serendipitous encouragement from the universe (as always tends to happen with such events) , gave him the courage to move on, and let go of his position. And began a deeper search for knowing himself and serving others became his pathway. Like Gandhi would have affirmed “The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in service of others”.
“I realised that there are more critical problems for people in India that stay unsolved, some of which can not be solved with a for-profit mindset.” Mekin says.
He realized that rather than optimizing profits, what he really cared for is to help others rise to their full potential, and he was drawn to the field of education to do that.
He took a gap year where travelled across the country, visiting schools which admitted more challenging student populations and he met 100s of social entrepreneurs in this space. That subsequently converged into him founding Udhyam Learning Foundation, a non-profit which aims to serve the potential in each child by developing entrepreneurial and leadership skills in them.
“Entrepreneurial people are able to solve more problems, operate with higher grit, try new things, and continuously understand and improve themselves.” explains Mekin. “Grit,” Independence”, “Self-awareness” and “Self-belief” are the 4 behavioural traits which Udhyam aims to nurture among students. To this effect, an “Entrepreneurship Mindset Curriculum” - an initiative of Delhi Government in partnership with Udhyam Shiksha and others is currently being implemented in over 1,000 schools in just in Delhi itself, in collaboration with the government. 750,000+ students in Delhi have been exposed to this program in last couple years, which also has included interactions with 1,500+ real life entrepreneurs. The program has seen many remarkable stories of youngsters break through outer and inner barriers and innovate and launch successful enterprises. In addition to Delhi, Udhyam is active in many other Indian states too.
The other significant part of Udhyam’s work is to support nano-entrepreneurs (“vyapaaris”) - informal, unorganized small businesses . Thanks to Udhyam Vyapaar’s one-on-one mentoring and group sessions, many street side chai wallahs (tea vendors), istri-valas (ironing services), etc have been able to improve their incomes by by better customer outreach, adding new product lines etc.
Apart from Udhyam, Mekin has also co-founded GAME (Global Alliance for Mass Entrepreneurship), which has outlined an audacious vision of creating 10Million micro entrepreneurs in India by seeding a culture of entrepreneurship which can in turn create around 50Million new jobs.
In the past 15 months of Covid crisis in India, Mekin also played a pivotal role through ACT Grants in mobilizing the Indian start-up ecosystem to step-up their efforts to support the country to manage the pandemic. This has led to many companies and their leaders have come forward and generously contributed money, time and connections to incubate innovative solutions at scale to many pandemic related problems.
One of the signature traits in Mekin’s journey is his trust in people and his courage to let go the paths of predictable success, in search of and in surrender to a deeper unknown. He picked a lesser ranked engineering college - PESIT over RVCE, as he felt PESIT director had a more progressive mindset. He left a secure job and joined Flipkart, an obscure startup at that time, basis one conversation with the founders when none of the “experts” took the opportunity seriously. And when his career was starting to peak and shine, he left Flipkart to find his “true self” and also support underprivileged students across the country in this journey. As he started working with these children, a profound shift he went through is from seeing his role as a “teacher” to a “co-learner” along with those students. “Ya probably I understand how business works better than these children, but I am nobody to teach grit to these children. These children have far more grit than me or the people I know. And it allows me to be able to learn from them.” he shared after a powerful reflection circle with some of his students.
He lives in Bengaluru with his family, and loves playing sports especially Cricket and Tennis.
We are delighted to be in conversation this Sunday 10AM IST, with Mekin Maheshwari, moderated by Nipun Mehta and pilgrim hearted educator Swara Pandya.
When the photographer/artist husband of renowned immigration lawyer Sheela Murthy suggested more than 25 years ago that she should freely give away detailed information about navigating the immigration laws and system on the then-nascent World Wide Web, Murthy was skeptical. Legal information, after all, was the stock in trade of immigration lawyers. “If I didn’t love this man, I’d think he wants to bankrupt me,” she thought. But she had also learned over many years to heed and listen deeply to his instincts.
Her husband persisted: Knowledge is free, he told her, or at least it should be. “Life has been good to us. Let’s pass on the goodness to those who need it. What you do as a lawyer is something that no amount of information can replace. Giving people information will never get in the way of that. It will only empower people to fulfill their dreams a little more easily.”
And so Murthy Law Firm, of which Sheela is Founder, President & CEO, began pouring informational resources freely onto the web, at a time when few law firms recognized the reach, much less impact, of the Internet.
Sheela began by answering hundreds of questions online from immigrants to familiarize herself with daily, real-life issues which would not necessarily reach the stage of requiring professional legal advice. She started the weekly Murthy Bulletin, an e-mail newsletter, which lawyers weren’t really doing then, and which now has a massive global audience. She attracted an online immigrant community of hundreds of thousands and supported their peer-to-peer sharing of information and knowledge via a moderated bulletin board, with no hard sell — its priority not being to bring in clients “but to help. We clarify the most complicated laws, using tools like teleconferences, podcasts and blogging” where senior attorneys explain immigration law and processes.
Having been so frustrated by her own experience navigating the system and in obtaining legal status following her own arrival in the US, Sheela reveled in the opportunity to help people feel empowered and respected. And she soon discovered that her husband, Vasant, had been right: the firm’s website at one point became the most visited law firm website in the world. Yet even then, Murthy declined opportunities to monetize the site through paid subscriptions or even advertising. “We’ve been approached by insurance companies, travel agencies and airlines about doing ads,” Sheela told The New York Times in 2013. “While we like the idea of getting $5,000 a month with no effort, we don’t want clients wasting time looking at a bunch of ads before they get the information they need.”
This opportunity to freely offer information to the world was, in many ways, the culmination of a dream and a drive for service. As a young girl in India, Murthy read To Kill a Mockingbird, with little thought that she would someday travel to, much less live in, America. Though the world portrayed in the book was beyond her full comprehension at the time, she connected deeply, even at her young age, with the drive to right injustice that the book so powerfully captured. Having been raised by middle-class parents with a somewhat complicated marriage in India, Murthy had felt propelled from an early age to stand on her own and to serve others.
She now runs, out of Maryland, what has become the world’s pre-eminent U.S. immigration law firm, with a satellite office in Seattle and affiliate offices in Chennai, Hyderabad, and Mumbai, India. The Murthy Law Firm represents a wide range of clients, including large corporations and mid-size and small companies, entertainers, entrepreneurs, physicians, researchers, and others, pursuing both employment-based and family-based immigration options.
Murthy has skillfully and compassionately guided clients through the massive and often disruptive changes in the US immigration system following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and then in the aftermath of the 2016 Presidential election. Guiding her throughout has been a commitment to offering deep hospitality for her clients, building trusted relationships with all players in the immigration system, serving the legitimate needs of her adopted nation, and working tirelessly to help meet her clients’ needs creatively in multiple ways.
The success of her firm allowed Murthy and her husband, Vasant Nayak, to co-found the MurthyNAYAK Foundation in 2001, a nonprofit organization dedicated to working on socially transformative projects designed to improve the lives of women, children, and immigrants, both in her birth country, India, and in her adopted country, the United States. Her life story has been captured in a biography recently released, Being Sheela: The Life Journey of an Immigration Lawyer (2020).
Murthy was born in Baroda, India, and attended University Law College in Bangalore, where she took first among law students from all over India in the Jessup Moot Court competition, organized by the American Society of International Law. She then was selected to represent India at the world level competition in New York City, and demonstrated her formidable advocacy skills even before the trip by persuading the state government to fund her and her partner's travel to the US!
Sheela met her husband, a photographer and digital artist, in Bangalore while he temporarily exhibited some of his photos there. He was leaving to study in the United States and encouraged her to apply for additional schooling there as well. She graduated with a further one-year LLM (Master of Laws) degree from Harvard Law School in 1987, worked for big firms in New York and Baltimore, before she started her own firm in 1994.
Join us in a fascinating and far-reaching conversation with this remarkable entrepreneur, attorney, and philanthropist – a conversation about the meaning of home, extending hospitality to newcomers, overcoming childhood obstacles, and stories of immigrants. Underlying all is a remarkable love story and a heart of love.
“In almost every area of life, humanity is being invited to turn its attention to reestablishing our original unity with the earth.” – John Philip Newell
"Life’s essential harmony is within each of us. So also is life’s brokenness. To be part of transformation is to look falseness in the face, to passionately name it and denounce it in our world, and at the same time to clearly identify its shadow within our own hearts and do battle with it there." – JPN
John Philip Newell is a modern-day Celtic bard and spiritual teacher in the prophetic tradition who communicates across the boundaries of religion and race, following in the footsteps of other “wandering” teachers from the Celtic diaspora scattered across the centuries. He writes and speaks eloquently and passionately on behalf of a “New-Ancient” way of seeing with the heart, of a cosmology in harmony – relating the parts to the whole, the heavens to the earth, all opposites seen as One. He stresses that what we do to a part, we do to the whole, whether in family, state, or natural world, advocating for a wellness that is founded not in isolation, but in relationship with each other and with the earth.
As part of his calling, and with an increasing sense of his own spiritual exile as an ordained member of the Christian church, Newell in 2020 relinquished his ordination as minister of the Church of Scotland. In a recent talk addressing his decision, he invoked the inspiration of Gandhi’s “No” to oppression, alongside his “No” to the Christian church’s denial of the sacredness of the earth and of all peoples, while invoking a “Yes” to the wonder and Unity of life. “Yes to the sacred essence of the earth, and of every human being,” he says. “Yes to the wisdom of other spiritual traditions. Yes to the Divine Feminine within us and among us. Yes, yes, yes!”
“The spiritual yearnings that have led us into exile hold within themselves seeds of a new vision stirring in the human soul,” he writes, referring to forms of exile faced by many of his teachers, including St. Brigid of Kildaire in 4th century Ireland—who as embodiment of the sacred feminine dwelt in the liminal realms between birth and death, human and divine, crafting a wholeness of the opposites and an inclusion of all; 19th century Scottish minister and prophet of the awakening soul, Alexander John Scott, who championed the Imagination as primary tool for moving into transformation and new ways of being; and 20th century French scientist and priest, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who taught, “the deeper we go into matter, the closer we come to the heart of God.”
In a new book released this month, Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul, Newell weaves together the powerful teachings of these and five other teachers from his “School of Earth and Soul,” stressing the need for us to awaken to, and reimagine new beginnings. From the book:
There is a groundswell of waking up to the dignity of every human being and every race. There is a reawakened awareness of the sacred feminine. There is a sharpened scientific understanding of the single flow of life that courses through the body of the universe. There is a rediscovery of the power of native song and story to help inspire our rituals and narratives of sacredness today. There is a new openness to the intuitive and the imaginative as essential tools in discerning the way forward in our lives and world. There is an explosion of earth awareness in our human consciousness, the likes of which we have never known before…There is a growing mindfulness of compassion and how to embody it in our lives and relationships. And there is an ever-awakening realization that humanity must journey forward into a new reverence for the earth, if the world as we know it is to survive
Seminal in his own life’s journey was his first trip to India in his mid-30s, when Newell was taken by a friend to visit the Benedictine monk Bede Griffiths at his Tamil Nadu ashram. Several powerful dreams and experiences there served to help overturn his suspicion of what he framed as the “subjectivity” of Indian mysticism. Having been trained that truth was outside of himself, accessed through the intellect and propositional truths, encountering India’s unforgotten knowledge that “God is immanent” was a breakthrough. “I had not even begun to imagine that the East and the realm of the unconscious were also part of my inheritance.” His own daughter soon afterwards travelled to study Indian dance in India, and later married an Indian and moved there.
As with his vocation and that of his spiritual forebears, Newell’s own life has not been spared struggle and brokenness. His parents’ political and religious heritage bridged difficult divides – his atheist Socialist grandfather and his devout Protestant grandmother emigrated from Belfast to Canada. The echoes of the religious struggle between his parents as well as that of the Irish Civil War, and World War II, lingered in his cell memory as breakages to grapple with.
In his own married family life, one of his two sons in his late teens suffered a severe mental breakdown, which has left him living in fear and paranoia. Newell writes, “the longer we have lived with mental illness within us as a family, the more I have come to believe that Brendan’s illness is not his, in a limited sense… And I have come to believe that Brendan will not be truly well until we are well, and that we will not be truly well until Brendan and others like him are well. Our healing belongs inextricably together.”
Canadian by birth, Newell is a citizen also of Scotland, where he resides with his wife and family in Edinburgh. In 2016 he began the School of Earth and Soul (originally called the School of Celtic Consciousness). He teaches regularly in the United States and Canada, and leads international pilgrimage weeks on Iona in the Western Isles of Scotland. He received his PhD from the University of Edinburgh and has authored over fifteen books, including Sounds of the Eternal, and The Rebirthing of God, and his major forthcoming publication, Sacred Earth Sacred Soul.
Join Diana Badger and Owen O Suilleabhain as they come together with this teacher of depth, heart, and soul, as well as far-reaching mind, to discuss the journey from separation to wholeness, from dismemberment to remembering, of deep humility and interconnectedness in the name of the sacred that embraces us all.
Our longings are a unique manifestation of the universe’s longings. In listening to the depths of life, within our lives and within every life, we will hear the longings of the One that are deeper than the fears that divide us. – John Philip Newell
When Jonathan Gustin was around 12 years of age, he was enthralled by a 1970s’ television show that featured a blind Buddhist priest teaching a boy his age about enlightenment and duty. “I would live for these scenes where the priest gave the boy spiritual instruction!” he recounts. That early fascination with enlightenment led him to meditation, and travels through China and India in search of a master. Then, at age 20, he found himself on a solo meditation retreat for three weeks in a log cabin in Northern Ontario, Canada – “alone in wild nature” with “no human company, no distractions, just wild nature and meditation practice.”
During the self-retreat, between periods seeking transcendence through meditation, he slipped into another more worldly, but equally profound, contemplation: “What is my place in the world?” he asked. “All at once, an image arose, like the scratchings on an ancient wood block, I saw a scene of a person (me) supporting the birth of a person’s full self,” he later wrote. “The two words that arose alongside this image were, Whole-person midwifery.”
Through decades of study and practice, Jonathan eventually learned how to become the image that was revealed to his 20-year-old self. He now is a purpose guide, psychotherapist, meditation teacher, and integral mentor in private practice in the San Francisco Bay Area for over 25 years, helping midwife the birth of a person's full self.
He combines all three disciplines – meditation, psychotherapy, and purpose guiding – to support individuals seeking to answer the question that came to him in that Canadian log cabin: "what is mine to do in the world?" He helps navigate them in the journey toward wholeness through what he calls the “three worlds” of the human experience – the “upper world” of spirit seeking transcendence and enlightenment through practices such as meditation (“waking up”); the “middle world” of personality and ego seeking emotional healing through practices such as psychotherapy (“growing up”), and the “lower world” of soul seeking embodiment and offering gifts to others through soul work practices (“showing up”).
He has been referred to by a luminary peer as a “rare example of a seasoned meditation teacher who understands the spiritual necessity of the descent to soul and sacred darkness — as well as the ascent to the light and the One. He guides his students in both directions, down as well as up.”
Jonathan teaches that Purpose Guiding breaks the spell of our default purposes of safety, security, comfort and outward success, and orients us towards our true purpose, which is to embody our unique calling within. He passionately and skillfully invites his students to this contemporary Koan, “Where do I belong in the ecology of life?” – or, as Frederick Buechner famously wrote about life’s calling: “Where does my deep gladness and the world’s hunger meet?”
Jonathan writes that finding our purpose is not a choice. It’s a discovery. We can co-create the expression of our purpose, which is where originality and joy happen, but the core of purpose is that we receive it. It is a spiritual revelation from the soul – not a stated desire of the ego – and arrived at largely by subtraction of all that is non-essential, not through formulation or addition of goals and desired impact. It is the “deepest conversation you can have with life,” he says.
Jonathan is the founder and lead teacher of the Purpose Guides Institute and Green Sangha, and co-author of Purpose Rising: A Global Movement of Transformation and Meaning with Ken Wilber, Erwin Laszlo, Bill Plotkin and others. He also serves as adjunct faculty at John F. Kennedy University in the Consciousness and Transformation Studies program. He has taught at the California Institute Of Integral Studies, Green Gulch Zen Center, Spirit Rock Meditation Center, Open Circle, Bay Area Integral, The Nondual Wisdom & Mental Health Conference, iEvolve, San Quentin State Penitentiary, Marina Counseling Center, and iRest Institute.
Jonathan says, “When we all have the opportunity to live our calling, we can support our collective true purpose: to become co-creators of our species’ evolution. We may, thus, give birth to more beauty, truth and goodness into the world.”
Join us in conversation with this teacher and guide!
Hang Mai is a green, social entrepreneur from Vietnam. She runs Xanh Shop, which connects produce of farmers and interested urban citizens. She recently transformed the business to foster gift ecology in the associated communities. She believes that "large is small, many times over.'' So she focuses her energy on growing people and encourages them to start their own projects. In many cases, she even gives the seed capital needed as a gift.
Hang was instrumental in getting "One Straw Revolution", the iconic book of Masanobu Fukuoka, translated into Vietnamese. It's been a best seller that has set off a "Back to the Land" revolution, especially among youth.
After marrying Chau Duong, she moved to a two hectare farm an hour away from Ho Chi Minh city. Together, they built a couple of homes mostly from material that nobody wanted. Homesteaded here, they nurture many ponds, many fruit trees and cultivate deeper relationships with neighbors.
The farm has become the center of their hearts and the base of their training programs in Permaculture offered as a gift.
Here are Hang's responses to the "5 Questions" we asked her :
What makes you come alive?
Living simply on our farm.
What event/moment has been a pivotal turning point in your life?
Transforming is a slow process. There are many turning points in my life actually:
Practice Qigong Dr. Tho Ha Vinh with his teachings about self-leadership, about mindfulness & compassion, about social & emotional learning. Nipun and other ServiceSpace volunteers who walk their talk of laddership & giftivism. The jungle of love
An act of kindness you'll never forget?
Audrey Lin of ServiceSpace with her question: how can I make your day?
One thing on your bucket list?
Have no-expectation but welcome any emergence.
Your one-line message for the world?
My life is my message!
Chau Duong is a true son of the soil. He trained with Bill Mollison, considered the father of Permaculture, three decades ago.
And he was inspired to live for twenty years with indigenous communities learning their ways of being aligned with nature. As part of his work in the non-profit world, he was instrumental in changing government policy so the land that belonged to these ethnic minorities can not be taken away by other entities.
Chau also anchored the ripples of the Vietnamese version of One Straw Revolution, by holding training sessions on Permaculture Design. And he has always offered these highly priced courses as a gift!
He believes that communities that work together, stay together. Whenever he travels, he connects all the neighbors who know him but may not know one other through work of common purpose. He is always ready to share his knowledge about farming, forestry, building homes, creating water harvesting structures etc in a hands-on, demonstrative way.
Chau is a hands-on trainer and never fails to add lasting value and lift spirits in that process, wherever he is.
Together with Hang, he is constantly focused on the journey back to the source while living an extra-ordinary life on his farm.
Here are Chau's responses to the "5 Questions" :
What makes you come alive?
Learning and practicing a lifestyle relying on nature (through forest-based garden practices including inner and outer forest-based garden). That is what we call 'Journey towards citizens of the Sun' (trying to make the most of the sun's energy, minimizing the use of non-renewable resources.
Being an useful actor in the community by sharing and exchanging different resources (experience and skills and social resources)
Living in a joy and happiness in garden basically requires 3V (Vietnamese): * Vườn: Garden; * Vốn: Capital (resources - including skills capital, social capital and financial capital); * Vợ: Wife or partner
What event/moment has been a pivotal turning point in your life?
20 years of learning and working with indigenous people who are ethnic minorities in Vietnam, who have relied on forests (nature) for centuries. The most important lesson that made me irrevocably changed from a 'own and control' mindset of nature to a 'relying' mindset on nature (the garden);
An act of kindness you'll never forget?
Sincere and non-profit sharing of the ethnic minorities, who i have been working with last 20 years
One thing on your bucket list?
Promoting a lifestyle relying on nature by forest-based garden practices (inner forest-based garden lifestyle and physical forest-based garden).
Your one-line message for the world?
Adapting to and relying on nature instead of controlling it.
A blind man runs alone through Death Valley. Journalist Paul Salopek walks 21,000 miles across the world to retrace our ancestor's migration, manifesting “slow journalism”. Scientists try to detect dark matter in an abandoned 19th century iron mine in Minnesota. Ethiopian monks free climb up nearly vertical mountain cliffs to get to rock-hewn prayer caves. Science writer Anil Ananthaswamy seeks out the silent places on earth where "extreme physics" is being done both by cosmologists and monks. Photographer Rachel Sussman struggles to capture the oldest living organisms on the planet, while astronomers and physicists -- from the Atacama Desert in Chile to the Hadron Supercollider on the Swiss/French border -- attempt to penetrate the furthest depths of space and time.
These ambitious explorers journeying to the Earth's furthest reaches – seeking in part to uncover their deepest inner reaches – are connected by a tireless search to touch the deep silence of the human heart in a world of noise and division. Such are among the mosaic of profound quests interwoven in the film, Echoes of the Invisible, a stunning new documentary that is as much a meditation and prayer as it is a film. It is that rare kind of viewing experience that has the capacity to penetrate to the core of our being and find resonance in a wordless place within.
Echoes of the Invisible manifests Director Steve Elkins’ vision of turning his lens onto explorers who are pushing the human body and technology beyond known limits in the most extreme environments on Earth to find the connective tissue between all things, seen and unseen. “Slowing down enough … to see something that was previously invisible … is what connects all of the people in the film,” Elkin says. “Stillness and silence allow us to see things that were previously invisible, regardless of your walk of life.”
The film (see teaser) was ten years in the making. It has its theatrical premiere in Southern California on July 1, 2021, and is also available for streaming. It premiered at SXSW 2020 and received, despite the festival’s cancellation due to the coronavirus pandemic, the ZEISS Cinematography Award for “the very best imagery in storytelling.” The film, according to Elkins, is “about people devoting their lives to studying either the largest imaginable things or the smallest imaginable things. It contrasts people using either the most expensive and complicated technology we can build, or their own bodies, to observe things at these scales. It’s about the seemingly mundane daily rituals and habits we create for ourselves that actually affect how we perceive the world, and also what we don’t see.” Elkins aims for the audience to “experience a gradual shift in perspective, in which the extraordinary people in this film eventually become perceived not so much as exceptional individuals, but as mirror reflections of each viewer and what they already carry within them.”
Elkins’ previous feature documentary, “The Reach of Resonance” (2010), won the prize for “Best Film Essay” at Montreal’s International Festival of Films On Art. The Reach of Resonance juxtaposed the creative paths of four musicians cultivating a deeper sensitivity to the world around them by searching for music in plants, riots, insects, sports, fences, military technology, the U.S./Mexico border, the northern lights, and other unlikely places.
Steve Elkins has spent most of his adult life as a musician and filmmaker of ambitious globe-spanning documentaries, including an eclectic background as a private investigator, Venetian gondolier and touring musician. His photography, music and documentary filmmaking have been presented in over 20 countries via television, radio, film festivals, universities and art galleries, including a permanent exhibition of his work with Western Arrernte Aborigines at the National Museum of Australia in Canberra. Elkins’ account of being asked to lead a riot in the largest slum of India, The Grammar Of Fire, was published by Ad Astra Books in 2007.
Elkins also serves as a film production mentor for at-risk youth in southern California public schools, through the Youth Cinema Project founded by Edward James Olmos. A passion for rare and under-appreciated cinema from countries typically excluded from film history led Elkins to found the Hibbleton Film Series, where he introduces and moderates community discussion about cinema from regions such as Iran, Mongolia, Mali, Uruguay, Kazakhstan, Tunisia and El Salvador.
Join us for a special dialogue with the director of Echoes of the Invisible, Steve Elkins, and other extraordinary voices from the film.
Forgiveness is centered inside of you, just like love. In prison, you see all different versions of unforgivingness. And being a firefighter in prison, you understand the unforgiving nature of nature. Forgiveness occurs in the earth—just the way nature balances itself, you learn how to balance yourself. Forgiveness is just a wonderful thing…it feels like a superpower.
- Ra Avis
Ra Avis didn't call herself a writer till she was accused of the crime that would eventually result in 437 days of incarceration. In the four years between the accusation and the handcuffs, after a friendly push from her husband—a writer himself—she started a blog and named it Rarasaur (frightfully wondrous things happen here). It became a space for writing about love and grace and grief, and won many awards for being gentle-spoken and insistently hopeful.
In May of 2015, she wrote a goodbye post on the blog, for the first time alluding to the case that had followed her around for years. She was in jail just a few days later. Shockingly to her, the blog followed. She received letters every single day and wrote posts when she could. Some writings were about topics she had covered before, some about the newness of this world. She traveled to the country's largest women's prison. She became a firefighter.
In May of 2016, with just a few months of a sentence left to serve, Ra's beloved husband, Dave, passed away.
“We often forget about how the [prison] system impacts people. One thing I try to highlight in my poetry is that I lost my husband while I was inside. And that’s obviously important on a personal level, probably the most important thing that’s happened to me in my life—the biggest thing—but it’s also important on a level when we’re speaking to mass incarceration. Because a year with his only person in jail killed a man. It does harm to the families who aren’t serving time. The people who are out there while pieces of their hearts are locked away. And there is a lot of healing that the world needs and the first step of any type of healing is to find the wounds.”
The blog came to Dave’s funeral, too—in the form of strangers who had been reading for some time, and in the form of stories written in support.
With that support behind her, Ra has since published three books. Sack Nasty: Prison Poetry, is a compilation of poetry and prose centered around her 437 days of incarceration. These true stories are about the illusion of dignity, the malleability of justice, and the fluidity (and fluids) of the human condition. Dinosaur-Hearted is decorated with sign board images and handscribed doodles constantly reaffirming the message that you are loved. Flowers and Stars is about inevitable transitions. Within its pages a little flower and a big star learn how to gently say goodbye. It is a reminder that some things stay still, and others move forward, and all things do both. In essence, Ra’s books—all three of them—are about love, and grace, and grief.
Sometimes that grief is about the death-kind, sometimes it is the failed-systems-kind, and sometimes it is the kind that fluctuates between desperately wanting to remember and desperately wanting to forget.
In 2019, Ra had another experience with forgetting, and this one without the grace of want. A prison injury followed her outside into the world. What began as unhappy blood gathered by a hip injury exploded like tiny stars into her brain, and caused what the doctors call mini-strokes. She lost her ability to read or recognize written language in any way.
“This isn’t the first time that prison took my words away from me. In jail, they give you pencils that are too small to use and they only keep the lights on for a certain amount of time. When I got to prison, the library was close to me and they wouldn’t deliver the books that my friends and family were sending in. And as a reader and a writer and somebody who’s so in love with my community, having those connections taken away was really, really heartbreaking. And to come back out, rebuild them slowly, and then have strokes that were ultimately caused from my time in prison take those things away again was frustrating on multiple levels.”
She learned to see out of the sides of her eyes again. She learned to read and write again. She learned to walk as if she had never ever fallen so hard.
On April 4th, 2021 Ra began a job as the Communications Manager for Initiate Justice, a non-profit organization in California that fights to end mass incarceration by activating the power of the people directly impacted by it.
People like her.
Initiate Justice sends updates to the prisons. It trains organizers inside. It helps family members and formerly incarcerated people get trained outside. It creates and passes bills. It talks to legislatures. It runs an educational program called The Institute of Impacted Leaders that Ra graduates from this June. It’s a 12-week program that educates system-impacted people on how to affect policy change.
Ra is also the creative force behind Silver Star Lab Press and Silver Star Apparel. She writes regularly at rarasaur.com.
This July, Ra will have been home six years, and after all those many experiences, she finds herself blessed to be here. Writing about love, and grace, and grief.
“It’s a really common thing for people to think that we come out of our terrible experiences stronger or braver. I actually think we come out of them more fragile, softer, and a little slower and a little bit more cautious of things because we’ve been a little broken. And usually, when people hear that barrage of words, they think of it as a negative thing. But that’s only because our society values speed and toughness.
There’s so much joy to be felt in slowness and softness.”
Join Pavi Mehta and Maria Jain in conversation with this remarkable once-upon-a-time inmate, reluctantly-optimistic widow, and generational storyteller.
Over the last two decades, Ravi Gulati has built and nurtured a dynamic learning community of across-age learners. As the Co-Founder and Chief Executive Volunteer of Manzil - a not for profit organization in Delhi, Ravi thrives on his work with children, adolescents and youth from low-income families by facilitating the discovery of their potential and passion for self and society.
In the last few years, Manzil has evolved into a youth-led initiative where all of their core team comprises of their own students and where youth are at once learners and teachers. Manzil has and continues to spawn and spin-off numerous other social entrepreneurial & intrapreneurial youth initiatives.
Beyond Manzil, Ravi often engages with youth, particularly social entrepreneurs through several leading academic institutions and non-profits. Ravi also co-leads Creatnet Education which has been facilitating the learning and development of all the 1000+ Delhi Government School Principals for Effective School Leadership.
Ravi is also co-founder of other non-profits viz ComMutiny-The Youth Collective and Safe inIndia Foundation. He has also served on the boards of non-profits like Pravah and Saher that focus on youth leadership. He is an MBA from IIM, Ahmedabad.
A heart-led person that he is, nurturing learning communities and fostering people seems like the perfect fit for a Ravi who was otherwise trained to manage business.
Ravi currently lives in New Delhi with his inspiration, his 86 year young mother Indira Gulati (Co-Founder Manzil), the happiness expert - his special sister Sonia, his wife Neha and his new found love, their 6 month old daughter Alaya :)
Here are Ravi Gulati's responses to "5 Questions" we asked him :
What makes you come alive? Being able to touch people deeply so they can discover themselves, find meaning, and become enthusiastic about and good at sharing the Gift that they are to the world, no holds barred.
The tangible context that literally fell in my lap as a gift for me to practice this, is Manzil - an open learning community of mostly children and youth from low income families that I've nurtured, that in turn has nurtured me in equal measure, for the last 24 years, which is practically all of my adult life.
Over the years, this intense work has further led to so many enriching extensions to contribute to others beyond Manzil in similar ways.
What event/moment has been a pivotal turning point in your life?* Meeting my teacher Prof Anil Gupta and how he gave direction & support to a strong untested feeling of mine. In my first year of MBA at IIM Ahmedabad, and all of 21, I was inspired by a senior of mine who was taking the guidance of Prof. Gupta for a job in an NGO (I had just recently learned of this term then). So I thought, why wait for one year to do so, why not seek Prof’s help for me to get placed with an NGO for our mandated summer training after the first year. I approached him, half fearing a grilling so he could be sure that I was serious. After all, it was such an unusual request coming from an MBA student then. Instead, I sensed an immense trust & belief in me.
He laid out so many choices before me that I had a tough time deciding. I finally picked one and landed up in a region called the Ghad Kshetra, located in the foothills of the Shivaliks. I spent a month there, hoping to be useful to an NGO called Vikalp. Visibly an outsider, I was a curiosity for the locals. Upon finding out that I was visiting to ‘learn’, they would invite me to their villages to stay at their homes. I rarely refused, and so through the month I ended up sleeping in a new home every couple of days in maybe 10 different villages.
I had two big takeaways from my most interesting time there, which is why I consider it a pivotal turning point in my life. First, I realized that all knowledge is contextual. People were curious about what I was doing back in the city. The first time this happened, thinking that they wouldn’t know about MBA back in 1990, I told them that I was pursuing MA. “What class is that?” they said, “Over here we count classes as 1, 2, 3 and so on”. I did some quick mental math and said, “16. I’m in class 16”. I still recall vividly the response I got, “16??? What’s there to learn so much in school? Our children here study till class 4-5 max, and it’s quite sufficient as they turn out fine”. I had a hard time convincing them of the relevance of what I was learning; all I got were polite nods.
Although they didn't say this to me, I’m sure they must have wondered about all the time I ‘wasted’ learning ‘useless things’ at school, when I didn’t possess the basic real world knowledge that even an eight-year-old village lad who has never been to school had. For instance, I couldn’t even identify the crops that were growing in farms all around me; all the knowledge I was supposedly receiving in the best of institutions had not prepared me to be able to do that. The experience taught me to stop looking at people through the lens of the impressive degrees they had acquired and the pedigree of educational institutions they had studied at.
My second takeaway was that it was really quite needless to worry too much about the future. The care and hospitality that I received from complete strangers - that was a totally new experience for me. I spent hardly any of the money I had carried from Delhi - they just wouldn't let me. I realized that just as there are many things that can go wrong in life, there's unexpected help and support just waiting to come into our lives if only we trust the world and its people.
I came back to IIM Ahmedabad a changed young man, ready to venture into unexplored vistas of my dreams, and bold enough, to my peers’ utter amazement, to opt out of the final placement for a job. I knew I had ‘let school interfere with my education’ (thank you Mark Twain), and was ready to stop operating out of fear of the future. Instead, travel during my summer training had served my learning well, and I was determined to take that route. It was for that reason that when I got an opportunity to work for 8 months in Canada, I grabbed at it. While over there I saved almost 70% of my salary every month, to finance my travel & social explorations back in India. Once back, I managed to travel extensively for 3-4 years which changed my entire life perspective. Manzil wouldn’t have been the kind of learning community it is today without my travel experience across our truly ‘Incredible India’.
An act of kindness you'll never forget?* It was the year 2000, and I was only three years into initiating Manzil. I got an unexpected phone call from a batchmate of mine from IIM Ahmedabad. It was Shridhar Sethuram. Delighted to be in touch after nine years, we exchanged notes in great detail. He was in Pune working with a Startup founded by other batchmates.
Those were the days when long-distance calls were expensive and billed by seconds, and we used to feel hurried and anxious on the inside when on such calls. Instinctively, I tried to keep my responses short, but Shridhar urged me to continue to recount in great detail the stories I was so excited to share about my new young friends in Manzil. I spoke about Manzil passionately for over an hour. He kept asking me more and more questions. When we were finally done, he asked me how he could contribute to my work.
At that time, I had very strong views against the dominant narrative that money is necessary to do social good. So I told him, the only thing we need is time, but unfortunately, we can't have yours since you are based in Pune. Shridhar insisted that I must have some use for money, and that he would like to donate some. My response? “Why do we need money when all we need is a place to sit for the learner and the teacher - and that is my home. It costs me nothing to run Manzil. So no, we don't need your money”.
He kept insisting that I think a bit more about how money could be useful. But I had very strong views back then that money is a double-edged sword. It’s helpful, but the edge facing us is dangerous & destroys the purity of intention behind work for social good. So I kept stonewalling his request.
Finally exhausted, he said that he and his wife Binaifer will fly down to Delhi every weekend and spend 2 days with the Manzil students, offering their time in whichever way I felt useful. That’s when it dawned on me that Shridhar was really really serious about contributing to my work in one way or another, and it was silly of me to parry this purity of intention.
I remembered that just the year before, we had gotten a wonderful opportunity to take manzillions to a village in Uttarakhand where a friend of mine - Yogeshwar Kumar - had tapped a small water stream to set up a 20 kW micro-hydro power unit to generate electricity for the community there. Just like Mohan Bhargav in the film Swades! Ever since I had met Yogeshwar, I had been excited about this small scale appropriate technology, and had wanted my students to experience it.
To travel to the location Budhakedar, we had put together small contributions from the students themselves then, but found after that that we still had a deficit of 5000 rupees, which Yogeshwar had very kindly gotten us from some other nonprofit. It was an amazing educational trip, full of fun and learning for all, as it wasn’t just about the technology but also about rural life and local economy and governance and all sorts of interconnected things that learning ought to be about.
As I remembered this incredible learning experience from the previous year and also remembering all of my growth from traveling myself that no school had ever given me, I suggested to Shridhar that he donate 5000 rupees to us so we could organise another trip like that. He immediately said he would send us 20000 rupees, which was a considerable sum in those days. I thought we would still use the money sparingly and stretch it over 4 trips, and so I accepted his offer.
Completely coincidentally, that same year 2000, we got an opportunity to go to Ladakh, stay at SECMOL, and experience a very different culture and way of life there. And because it’s much farther away and costly to travel, there was a budget deficit of exactly 20000 rupees. Serendipitous, as Shridhar would say, whose very timely appearance back in my life made possible for manzillions that wonderful educational trip to Ladakh that left much food for thought for all of us!
This act of kindness, and what it set in motion - continuing support to Manzil for the last 21 years by Shridhar - is something I will never ever forget.
One thing on your bucket list?* I really want to put together a group of trusted people to properly apply that part of my estate that I wish to leave behind for social good. That’s the only thing on my bucket list.
Your one-line message for the world:* The abiding source of happiness is in finding meaning. Practice being of service to others - that's one place of meaning that works, always and for everyone.
,,,,,
Here are some ripples from Manzil's natural scaling--
In 2013, Shay Beider accompanied an anxious little boy into the office of Dr. Fayez Ghishan, the Physician in Chief and a pediatric gastroenterologist at Diamond Children’s Hospital in Tucson, Arizona. The boy was soon to undergo an endoscopy, an invasive scope to examine the digestive tract. Such procedures could be traumatic for children because they required an IV placement; nurses often had to chase children down the hall and administer a shot to sedate them. So Beider asked Dr. Ghishan if she might try “Integrative Touch Therapy” on the boy, one of the many services she was pioneering through the nonprofit organization she founded, Integrative Touch for Kids (ITK). Within minutes, the boy was calm. Nearly asleep, in fact. “Oh my God,” Dr. Ghishan remarked, “you need to do whatever you do for all of my patients!”
Several years earlier, ITK was born from a moment of clarity when Beider was still a college student at UCLA. A pre-med major at the time, she was shadowing doctors at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles and watched a girl tremble with fear before surgery. Feeling compassion and a desire to help, Beider suddenly awakened: “It doesn’t have to look like this.” She could serve children and their families with something she’d already been delivering—healing touch. To put herself through college, Beider had been working as a massage therapist. Why not bring gentle, caring touch directly into healthcare?
Beider would eventually create a new therapeutic approach called Integrative Touch Therapy. ITK would, in addition to providing hands-on therapies for kids, organize large scale retreats, playdates, community events, and support groups at little or no cost to the families. “When a child has special needs,” says Beider, “the whole family has special needs—period.” The organization operates by the generosity of its donors and its volunteers, including young children and teenagers. During Covid-19, the TeleFriend and TeleWellness programs have continued to serve children, parents and healthcare providers internationally.
Since its founding in 2005, ITK has become a leader in pediatric integrative medicine. Beider hopes to expand its existing programs, develop new wellness models to be replicated nationally, and create a first of its kind healing center in Tucson, AZ, with a model called “Health-Caring.” The future of healthcare, according to Beider, is where “high tech and high touch meet.”
ITK has been featured in the Washington Post and on ABC, NBC, and PBS, among other media outlets. ITK’s impacts have been measured to show significant decreases in pain, fear, and anxiety, as well as increases in overall well-being, self-efficacy, and relationships. When she’s not speaking or teaching around the US and abroad, Beider hosts a popular podcast, Conversations on Healing featuring guests such as Daniel Goleman and Kristin Neff. Among her recognitions are the Women’s Studies Achievement Award from UCLA, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation as a Pioneer for Children’s Wellbeing, and most recently, the 2020 Civic Leadership Award from the Community Foundation for Southern Arizona.
“If I can help to create mechanisms that enable people in our communities to rise up and meet suffering with love, more fully, more completely, with more opportunity,” Beider says, “then that’s enough.”
Join us in conversation with this compassionate visionary and healer.
What stands out in Hansa ji's life is that her life in the service of Yoga has been lived almost entirely within the confines of suburban Mumbai, and not as some may deem necessary, in the Himalayas. Hansa ji is the Director of The Yoga Institute– the oldest organized centre of Yoga in the world.
Hansa ji represents a lineage of yogic Gurus, starting from Paramhans Madhavdas who was born in the last decade of the 18th century and onwards to the Yogendra family into which she was married into through her union with Dr Jayadeva Yogendra. The asceticism of Shri Yogendra - a householder Yogi, his wife Sita Devi – the first householder woman yogi in modern India, Dr Jayadeva Yogendra who inspired thousands with his simplicity and erudition alike; onwards to the smiling motherly persona of Hansa ji.
This multi generation yoga immersion has inspired several third generation yoga practitioners. Says one, “My grandfather learnt yoga from the founder, my parents from Dr Jayadev and I have learnt from Hansaji and other senior gurus. We are typical householders, and doing yoga for two-three hours doesn’t fit our schedule. Here, we learn to incorporate yoga in our daily activities such as stretches after waking up in the morning. It also helps us with our frame of mind in difficult situations and dealing with family and peer pressure. What draws me in is that in spite of being in the heart of city, is that the institute is calm, peaceful and it teaches yoga as a way of life.”
In the yogic etymology, Hansa means symbol of the soul, and stands for the virtue of discrimination. As Hansa ji expands upon the meaning of life, that there is a “C” between “B” (birth) and “D” (death) and this “C” stands for the power of choice, which means that even as pain is inevitable in life, suffering is not.
Given her early education at a school based on Gandhian principles, she was influenced by the philosophy of Gandhiji. Swadhyaaya (self study) and self discipline were a part of her growing up. From the age of twelve, it came natural to her to sit in yogic postures for long periods of time without external distraction. Sometimes she would stay for many hours a day in Swadhyaaya, observing her breath, synchronizing it with heart rhythms and controlling the mind. She began to practice awareness of her emotions throughout the whole day realizing that this was crucial to mental stability. If she perceived any deterioration in her mental or emotional balance she would recite a Mantra or prayer, or hum a song. To Hansa ji, to put a genuine effort to see the joy in every difficult situation is key to a yoga seeker. Hansa ji pays special attention to Isvarapranidhaana (surrender to the will of God), which allows the individual to carry on regardless, even when complete understanding of events is not available. Ultimately, the whole purpose of life converges to living the eternal values. Says Hansa ji, “The purpose of a strong body and a healthy mind is to do one’s duty with love and compassion.”
Her emphasis on spreading Yoga education to impact the lives of women led to the expansion of the Institute into starting programs for women : Pregnancy, Pre-natal and Post-natal camps, and the Menopause Women’s Camp. The Yoga Institute has been at the forefront of creating a frontline team of yoga teachers through various Teachers' Training Courses (TTCs) since 1954. The TTCs have provided a major thrust to the spread of the message of yoga across the globe. The Yoga Institute also engages in "Anna Brahm", distribution of food wherein almost 10 million meals have been distributed so far.
She was also involved in the mammoth project of ‘Caring Heart’ where patients undergo intensive Yoga Lifestyle Training for a year and evaluation is done to see regression of coronary artery disease.
Hansa ji is also a television personality – she featured as a yoga expert in the popular television series 'Yoga for Better Living’. The Yog Institute and Hansa ji herself have a thriving web presence. A science and law graduate by education, Hansa ji has also trained herself in classical singing, kathak and playing the sitar - also she is a kabaddi player.
“Whether we realize it or not, the heart is what we most carefully guard and most want to open.”
John J. Prendergast, Ph.D., likens the investigation of the heart to “an archaeological dig.” Helping people excavate layers of the heart is a culmination of his life’s work weaving together the threads of his various professional disciplines – as a psychotherapist, professor of psychology, somatic healer and nondual spiritual teacher – with the glittery strands of his own deep self-inquiry.
Prendergast believes that combining the “critically important service that mature, kind, and relatively clear psychotherapists offer” with spiritual insight can help people with what he terms “unfolding.” “I can often sense an essential dimension of being within my clients and students and help them attune with it.”
“The deeper you go, the more tender the layers,” says Prendergast. “We abandon ourselves when it feels too painful to remain intimate with our essential nature.”
Author of The Deep Heart (2019) and In Touch (2015), Prendergast is a retired Adjunct Professor of Psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies and a very soon-to-retire psychotherapist in private practice in the Bay Area. He offers online and in-person (when possible) retreats in the U.S. and Europe. He has studied extensively with leading spiritual masters of our age.
By his early adulthood, Prendergast was already a meditation guide to others – and himself was able to reach a profound silence. And yet he hungered for treasures buried much deeper, prompting him to fervently seek ever deeper inner truths. In his twenties, he completed a six-month meditation retreat and a year of law school, spent time in an ashram in South India, and eventually began graduate school. These experiences created a foundation for his next many years during which he became a licensed psychotherapist and continued to immerse himself in meditation and self-inquiry.
Then, unexpectedly, Prendergast had an unanticipated dream involving an Indian guru of non-dualism, Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj, with whom he had been unfamiliar. This inspired him to read Maharaj’s famous dialogues in I am That. This was a life-changing event for Prendergast, which he says turned his compass decidedly towards self-inquiry.
Prendergast thereafter met Jean Klein, a European medical doctor and musicologist, who was a master of Advaita Vedanta and Tantric Shaivism, and Prendergast studied with Klein for fifteen years until Klein’s death in 1998. Passionately curious “to understand how psychology and spirituality intersected,” Prendergast eventually realized “that the apparent division between them was only in my mind.…I couldn’t find any human experience that was not essentially spiritual.”
After Klein’s passing, Prendergast began studying with Adyashanti, a trained Zen Buddhist teacher who is a self-described “teacher of enlightenment.” Prendergast had “a number of profound openings” with Adyashanti and began leading self-inquiry groups and co-leading retreats for psychotherapists, with Adyashanti's blessing.
Prendergast was also founder and editor-in-chief of Undivided: The Online Journal of Nonduality and Psychology which launched in October 2011 as a free, peer-reviewed, multimedia and interactive journal that published original works by cutting-edge therapists and spiritual teachers exploring the interface of nondual teachings and psychology. He also was co-editor of two collected volumes of essays at the intersection of psychotherapy and nondualism, The Sacred Mirror (2003) and Listening from the Heart of Silence (2007). Previously, for 23 years, he supervised masters’ level counseling students at the California Institute of Integral Studies (where he had earned his Master’s and PhD degrees).
Always driven by a desire to discover his own truest nature, Prendergast emphasizes the importance of uncovering the heart by shedding the false conditioning imposed by the ego’s sense of self and by the social tendency to prize the mind over all else. He delivers his teachings at a meditative, thoughtful pace (many are found online) coming from a clear mind and a compassionate heart.
His latest book, The Deep Heart: Our Portal to Presence, focuses specifically on the heart’s role as our most “easily accessible portal to true nature,” building from his renowned book on somatics, In Touch: How to Tune In to the Inner Guidance of Your Body and Trust Yourself. While In Touch details “subtle portals” or “primary entry points leading to the essential,” Deep Heart, and his latest teachings, explore the heart as the place from which a “sense of meaning springs, as does our sense of oneness or communion with the whole of life.” He explains that in the “deepest dimension of the heart – what I call the Great Heart – you can feel yourself at one with the ground of being.”
Prendergast himself is indeed of great heart. He reminds us that the heart, “deep, vast and loving … is where we feel most affected … both emotionally and spiritually.”
Join us in conversation with this practical, gifted and compassionate master teacher – and explore how to become an archaeologist of your own heart.
Wakanyi Hoffman is an artist of life who paints the shades of each day as a storyteller, author, mother, global citizen, journalist, and keeper of indigenous wisdom. While serving in a refugee camp in Northern Kenya in her early twenties, she came to a profound insight: "Compassion is a two-way act of service. The more you give of yourself, the more you receive of someone else." Wakanyi's life is a vibrant ode in that spirit.
Wakanyi is nurturing the African Folktales Project, an ongoing open-sourced resource of indigenous wisdom and knowledge for school children. Currently based in the Netherlands, she teaches the art of oral storytelling to promote a values-based education for young children and diversify the knowledge base of global citizenship education.
A "global nomad" with strong African roots, Wakanyi and her husband have been raising their four multicultural and mixed race children across seven countries, three continents, on a mission to teach them to embrace the whole world as their home. They have called Kenya, United States, Nepal, Philippines, Ethiopia, Thailand and now the Netherlands home. Along the way, Wakanyi's educator's heart has found her initiating a children's library in Kathmandu and holding "ubuntu circles" to hold space for deepening awareness for youth.
Wakanyi recalls childhood school breaks among coffee trees in the backdrop of snow-capped Mount Kenya, listening to grandmothers share palpable folk tales while grinding corn on a hand-carved wooden mortar. Returning to school outside of Nairobi, she recollects, "During unbearably long school days, or when friendships failed, these stories transported me into a boundless world filled with unlimited possibilities."
Today, she harnesses the ancient wisdom of those cultural roots for today's globalized and internet inundated youth through African Folktales Project. “Throughout our travels, it became apparent just how little literature exists about most of the world,” she says. “In many of the schools that our children have attended so far, most of the books that they learned to love were all English or American tales, detailing lifestyles that were quite foreign to my children and to many other children that went to these international schools. As a storyteller, I am aware of how important it is to see oneself or hear familiar voices in stories, books and film.” Guided by the African Ubuntu philosophy, Wakanyi reflects on new cultural values and practices that she encounters as “an opportunity to learn about the many ways that we express being and becoming more human.”
Formerly a journalist with Kenya’s largest newspaper, The Daily Nation, Wakanyi's writings have been published in Dutch News, The Northern Times, and on the International Organization of Migration's (IOM) web blog of global migration stories. She holds a Masters in Global Education from University College London (UCL), where her thesis focused on how to embed indigenous knowledge and wisdom into formal school curriculum in Africa. She continues to actively research cross-cultural identity narratives, and their impact on global citizenship. She also sits on the board of the Kenya Education Fund, an NGO that provides gifted children from low-income backgrounds in Kenya with access to a fully-funded high school education and life skills. With her characteristic spark of creativity, in December 2020, she authored a captivating children's book set amid the vast landscapes and enchanting folktales of her birth country: The Twelve Days of Christmas Safari.
“Every human encounter that I make anywhere in the world is an encounter with my own humanity,” Wakanyi describes. Indeed, an encounter with her inevitably infuses one with a sense of possibility, a spirit of solidarity, and a heart that suddenly remembers its inextricable connection to the human spirit, of our infinite Ubuntu -- the African ethos of oneness and togetherness. Join Audrey Lin and Brian Conroy in conversation with a keeper of stories, weaver of culture, and convener of Ubuntu.
“Bowing…can be considered a technology for changing one’s consciousness. How will the world be better if I don’t change myself?”
About a year after being ordained a Buddhist monk at the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas in Talmage, California in 1976, Reverend Heng Sure undertook a walking pilgrimage along virtually the entire length of California’s coast, together with then-fellow Buddhist monastic Dr. Martin Verhoeven (formerly Heng Ch’au). The walking pilgrimage the pair embarked on consisted of taking “Three Steps, One Bow” throughout the 800-mile coastal journey on California's Highway 1, progressing at the pace of one mile per day. Maintaining a vow of total silence and eating only one meal a day, Rev. Heng Sure’s knees endured more than a million bends in the 2 years and 9 months of the journey, even bowing to gun-wielding men in three separate instances.
Much like the California landscape he encountered, the inner terrain traversed included both defilement and divine insight. The pilgrimage opened a humbling space of vulnerability and sensitivity where Heng Sure could closely observe how the microcosm of the self influences the macrocosm of the world, leading to a heightened awareness of how what he generated in the mind directly led to what manifested in the world -- how the more peaceful he became inside, the more peaceful the treatment he received from people on the outside.
Yet the pilgrimage never ended, initially extending for 3+ subsequent years of silent circumambulation of the Buddha Hall at the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas in the same three-steps-and-a-bow format, and then becoming a template and compass for a lifelong practice of inner and outer transformation that radiates through all he does -- across music, interfaith dialogue, vegan advocacy, Buddhist text translation, and lectures, seminars, and retreats around the world.
His monastic name could be translated as “Constantly Real” or “Fruition of Truth”, and it's impossible to meet Rev. Heng Sure without feeling the living vibrancy of its meaning. Whether humbly and disarmingly sharing how his teacher chose his name, or strumming his guitar to a folk ballad he composed, his words often land as simultaneously light and deep, both precise and expansive at the same time. Now more than 45 years in robes, he’s the most senior western monastic disciple of the late Venerable Chan Master Hsuan Hua, though his journey to Buddhism began much earlier.
Rev. Heng Sure was born Chistopher Russell Clowery to a Scotch-Irish Methodist family in Columbus, Ohio, growing up squarely in mainstream American culture "playing baseball and watching Mickey Mouse Club and gunfighter shows on television." At age 13, his aunt gave him a catalog of a Chinese painter’s exhibit, and the Chinese characters caught his eye, almost as if he’d seen them before. This sparked an interest in the Chinese language, which he was fortunate to learn in high school through one of the three such language programs in the country at public schools, which happened to be in Toledo where he lived. He soon happened upon the Sixth Patriarch’s Dharma-jewel, Platform Sutra in bilingual, Chinese-English translation, and realized that his heart was tuned to a Far Eastern faith tradition, not the Middle Eastern, Abrahamic stories of his parents’ generation.
Following the Chinese language all the way through university, he received his Master’s degree from UC Berkeley in Oriental languages, which set the stage for meeting his teacher after a short collegiate career as a theater actor. A fortuitous call from a former college roommate encouraged him to cross the Bay Bridge to Gold Mountain Monastery in San Francisco where the abbot was lecturing on the Avatamsaka Sutra. Passing the threshold of the monastery doors, his doubts and fears about his political anti-war activism, academic career, and folk musical inclinations all melted away. He distinctly heard a quiet voice saying, “You’re back. Go to work. You’re home.”
Master Hua, his eventual teacher, was a strict disciplinarian who taught Buddhism from its ethical foundations, emphasizing the importance of how you are as a person is equally important and in fact the very source of how you practice meditation. Inspired by the clarity and rigor of the teachings, as well as the example of other teachers in Master Hua’s lineage, Heng Sure asked for permission to go on a bowing and walking pilgrimage. Master Hua assented, but asked him to wait until his ‘dharma protector’ arrived. A year later, a martial artist named Martin Verhoeven arrived. Heng Sure recognized Martin’s desire and affinity to the pilgrimage, and took novice precepts and vows as a monastic to fulfill his role, armed only with the four weapons of a Bodhisattva: kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity. “If either of you fights -- or even indulges in anger -- you will no longer be my disciples,” said their teacher before they began.
Thus encouraged by his teacher to see everything as a test, Heng Sure recognized that if he could transform his own greed, anger, and delusions, then perhaps he could do something to make the world more peaceful. In essence, the bowing practice boiled down to cleaning up the part of the unpeaceful world that he could control: his own thoughts and words. It was a pilgrimage for world peace, starting with his own mind. The pilgrims maintained a written correspondence with their teacher where they intimately shared their experiences and insights, which were later compiled and published as Highway Dharma Letters: Two Buddhist Pilgrims Write to Their Teacher, a remarkable spiritual diary of the modern era.
Rev. Heng Sure is the Managing Director of Berkeley Buddhist Monastery and an adjunct professor at Dharma Realm Buddhist University. He lectures worldwide on Buddhism, Buddhist texts, translation, meditation, interfaith dialogue, and plant-based eating. He serves as President of both Dharma Realm Buddhist Association and the Buddhist Text Translation Society. He’s fluent in Mandarin Chinese, French, and Japanese, and regularly leads lectures, seminars, and retreats around the globe including at the Parliament of World Religions. He’s a founding Trustee of the United Religions Initiative, a long-time trustee for the Interfaith Center at the Presidio, and on the core faculty of the Institute for World Religions. He also teaches Buddhist Philosophy at Bond University in Queensland, Australia. He earned a Ph.D. from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley.
A folk singer and guitarist who integrates his penetrating insights of reality with his “mainstream American” roots through the vehicle of song, Rev. Heng Sure has published three albums of original Buddhist folk music. His music and podcasts can be found at Dharma Radio, with his lectures available at DharmaRealm Live. His photography of the natural world can be found on his SmugMug site and Instagram @Rev.Heng Sure. A monk with many far-reaching talents, Rev. Heng Sure has been known to draw upon his puppeteering ability as skillful means to drive home fine points of the dharma.
Join Nipun Mehta in a special conversation with this remarkably humble and insightful pilgrim.
He has cycled down the East Coast of the US in winter and ridden a motorcycle across East Timor; it’s clear that Navin Amarasuriya isn’t one for staying in his comfort zone. This is probably why, despite being one of the fifth-generation owners of the Singaporean jewelry company BP de Silva Group – Navin has eschewed a cushy job in his family’s company to embrace the unknown, the path of "true luxury" of cultivating one's own mind and heart.
“Cultivating wisdom and compassion in the next generation of leaders is something that I hope to contribute to,” he says. It was with this mission in mind that he joined the Contentment Foundation, an education non-profit that offers wellbeing practices that promote safe, loving, and healthy school climates across the globe. Opting out of the corporate treadmill allowed Navin the liberty to state the three golden words : "I don't know!" - It meant ... not being worried if his non profit does not have an answer to everything .. or if his organization's goals evolve over time versus knowing them now! ... or being happy to plant seeds for trees under whose shade we may never sit ... and constantly holding means over ends.
Perhaps the seeds of this journey into education were planted by Navin's grandmother, a teacher who "like the root who does not get to see the flower" taught 5-days a week for 50 years. Her work was almost invisible in a family which celebrated business success but had limited language to fathom the depths of service and volunteering. At Contentment Foundation, the belief is that education of the heart starts with heartful teachers. That, instead of solving problems, Contentment's attempt is to deeply listen and hold space for teachers who are naturally altruistic people and giving them tools to cultivate practices of well being.
In this age of attention poverty, Navin believes that true luxury is having the time to train the mind on these Four Pillars of Well being viz. mindfulness, self curiosity, cultivation of balance and community development skills. That, "only by understanding how we relate to ourselves, and explore the inner world of feelings, we can empathize with those around us.”
The interconnected wholeness of phenomena around us continues to amaze Navin. He quotes his frustrated environmentalist friend, “If people realize that the only reason they are able to breathe is because the trees are filtering the carbon dioxide into oxygen, they would realize they are part of an interconnected whole.” If indeed this mind-blowing inter -connectedness ethos of trees as a part of our lungs, was enshrined in the design of educational courses across the globe, the world may have a glimpse of contentment.
He is a thinker, a blogger, an artist and above all someone who is deeply moved by the altruistic ideals of love and compassion for all.
On May 30, 2021 at 10 am India time (convert to your timezone), Navin Amarasuriya will be in conversation with Parag Shah and Audrey Lin
What is True Luxury? How may we plant seeds for trees under whose shade we know we’ll never sit? Is Education of the Heart possible?
Vijaya Nagarajan is an Associate Professor and former Chair in the Department of Theology/Religious Studies and in the Program of Environmental Studies at the University of San Francisco. She is also a contributor to the American Academy of Religion, an environmental activist, and has written extensively on Hinduism, gender, ritual, ecology and the commons.
Vijaya wrote the first in-depth publication in English on the kolam. Kolam, the Tamil word for beauty, is the name given to the intricate rice flour designs that are created by women at dawn on the thresholds of millions of homes in South India. Her book, Feeding a Thousand Souls: Women, Ritual, and Ecology in India, An Exploration of the Kolam, explores this 1000-year-old (at least) art form and its multifaceted significance through the lenses of history, anthropology, mathematics, ecology and more. The book is the manifestation of a lifetime quest -- a quest in which intellectual rigor is blended with embodied ethics. In Vijaya's work, personal history and particularities of place intertwine with universal constants. Assumptions are tested, interpretations are multiplied, and the boundaries between disciplines begin to shimmer and shift.
Born the eldest of three daughters in rural Tamil Nadu, Vijaya’s was a distinctly bicultural upbringing. During her formative years, the family triangulated between her ancestral village, New Delhi and Washington D.C. The early exposure to profound contrasts in landscape and culture perhaps seeded in her deep questions on economics, ecology, gender and religion that she would pursue with such vibrancy in adulthood.
In the late 1970s, her innate affinity with the natural world led Vijaya to spend two and a half years as an engineering student at the University of Maryland. She was eager to explore the impact of engineering design on social equity and the environment, and the influence of social equity and the environment on engineering design. Her enthusiasm was ahead of her times. Such interests, she was told, lay outside the engineering discipline. Partway through the program, she transferred to UC Berkeley’s College of Natural Resources, and later traveled to India to study the energy efficiency of cow dung and biogas plants. The experience was deeply transformative and laid a foundation for what was to follow.
Soon after graduating from Berkeley, Vijaya began alternating manual labor stints (including working at a yeast factory, in a furniture-making business, and as a house painter,) with research jobs for environmental organizations. One of her roles, with the non-profit Friends of the Ganges, involved raising public awareness about the pollution of one of India’s most revered rivers. It was in this period that she began inquiring deeply into the contradictions that exist between religion and ecology, and recognized that when a religion frames the environment as sacred, this does not always extrapolate to environmentalism in the culture. “The materiality of the river couldn’t be protected by that mythic layer,” she says,"The mythic belief [of the river as goddess, in fact] often prevented confronting the intense pollution.”
In 1984, inspired by their friend and mentor Ivan Illich, Vijaya and her husband, Lee Swenson, founded a non-profit called the Recovery of the Commons Project. Their vision was to create a community space for exploratory conversations on ecology, literature and power. Over a period of twenty years, they hosted a slew of workshops, seminars, international learning trips, and intimate circles. Their work brought together dazzling environmental writers like Barry Lopez and Terry Tempest Williams with renowned activists like Vandana Shiva from India and Gustavo Esteva from Mexico. In 1986, the couple founded the Institute for the Study of Natural and Cultural Resources. Founded while Vijaya was between undergraduate and graduate school, the work of these two organizations continued throughout her graduate program, and beyond. “I was always working two jobs,” she remarks. "It is the energy of youth, I suppose, where working over a hundred hours a week felt as nothing special."
Feeding A Thousand Souls, Vijaya’s book on kolam published in 2018, is a shining example of that brand of dedication. The title refers to the belief in Hindu mythology that householders have a karmic obligation to “feed a thousand souls.” By creating the kolam out of rice flour, a woman provides food for birds, ants and other tiny life forms. In this way, each day is greeted with “a ritual of generosity.” Traditionally created on the ground outside of the home, kolam are implicitly a dual offering to Mother Earth and the commons. Created by hand with a combination of skilled artistry, mathematical precision, and spontaneity, the kolam is a deliberately transient form of art. Each day’s kolam disappears underfoot, and by the next dawn a new one will take its place. Today an estimated 20 million women across Tamil Nadu keep this daily, devotional art form alive. Vijaya’s book surfaces thought-provoking belief systems and questions:
"In a context where suffering, death, illness, and poverty are everyday realities, a woman's positive intentionalities are believed to actually make a difference in people's lives. The power of her hands is fluid, and the female personification of energy, or shakti, moves from the women's active, creative hands to the kolam, to be picked up by the feet and transported throughout the day. The kolam appears on the streets day after day - the visual signs of a woman's blessings in the vicinity, "fluid signs." In this world, women's blessings are believed to have an effect. I often wonder: are women's blessings themselves a kind of commons?”
Join us in conversation with this interdisciplinary thinker, teacher, author and activist!
With a unique combination of researcher, doctor, and Buddhist practitioner, Dr. Emeran Mayer has been leading the movement to “bring the brain back into medicine” for the past 40 years. His work at the David Geffen School of Medicine has illumined the mysterious connection between the mind and the gut, which Mayer understands to be the body's "second brain". “The gut contains wisdom,” Mayer says, and we’d do well to pay attention to it.
In his best-selling book, The Mind-Gut Connection: How the Astonishing Dialogue Taking Place in Our Bodies Impacts Health, Weight, and Mood, Mayer explains how microbes in the human gut outnumber human cells 10:1. Imagine a world of darkness, nearly void of oxygen, where 100 trillion microbe inhabitants have been learning the art of peaceful coexistence and perfecting the science of wordless communication for billions of years. This is the mysterious ecosystem of the gut. So when the brain sends signals to the gut and the gut sends signals to the brain in a two-way conversation, occurring 24-7 and even when we’re sleeping, this micro-ecosystem—influenced by what we eat, drink, think, feel, and inherit—functions as the most sophisticated information gathering organ in our bodies. It influences our overall health, moods, appetites, and personalities.
Mayer grew up in the Bavarian Alps in a line of four generations of German confectionery storeowners. Until he was 17, he worked in the family business and made pastries and cakes for all sorts of occasions. He recounts: ”I started to associate the sweet aromas of chocolate and vanilla and other ingredients with the seasons and the major holidays, without conscious awareness that I was laying the blueprints for my future career studying the complex interactions between food, the mind, and the gut.”
When it was time for Mayer to go to college, he agonized over the decision to follow in the family tradition or pursue other interests. Pro-and-con lists proving futile, he chose to follow his “gut feeling.” He studied science at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich and went on to Ludwig Maximilian University Medical School. Upon graduating, Mayer followed his passion in documentary filmmaking and traveled the world to study and film native healers in the Yanoama tribes of the Amazon rainforest and the Asmat people in current-day Papua New Guinea in Indonesia. Across cultures, he explored his interest in the gut-brain connection.
At UCLA, Mayer runs the G. Oppenheimer Center for Neurobiology of Stress and Resilience and co-directs the Digestive Diseases Research Center (CURE). He has published more than 370 scientific papers, co-edited 3 scientific books, and received numerous awards, including the 2016 David McLean Award from the American Psychosomatic Society. His current research focuses on the role of brain-gut interactions in Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s, autism, obesity, and inflammatory bowel disease.
Mayer co-produced the award-winning documentary “In Search of Balance,” an exploration of a new paradigm of health, science, and medicine, based on the interconnections between us and Nature. He is currently working on a new documentary, “Interconnected Planet,” and a forthcoming book, The Gut-Immune Connection.
In addition to his intellectual pursuits, Mayer is a deep student of Buddhism. He was a member of the UCLA Zen Center for several years, and he and his wife were married by Choekyi Nyima Rinpoche in a Tibetan monastery in Kathmandu. He has also practiced other mind-based strategies like Ericksonian hypnosis and autogenic training, a relaxation-desensitization technique.
Please join Andrew Kim and Cynthia Li in conversation with this pioneering doctor, scientist, and teacher.
“Father, my life is in your hands.” pleaded the young 18 year old girl to the principal of St. Xavier's College Mumbai. She begged him that she be admitted 3 months after all admissions were closed.
She was born in Mumbai, in circumstances of privilege, and had lived in 5 different countries already by that age. She had come to India for a couple weeks to meet her grandparents during the summer break. However, a chance encounter with some street children at a traffic light in Mumbai, stirred her heart deeply, and she decided she had to stay back.
As destiny willed, the principal agreed and the girl stayed back. Her work since last 30 years and counting, has led to two phenomenal institutions -- Akanksha Foundation and TeachForIndia. This is the story of Shaheen Mistri, a story of dreams, hope and magic. She founded the first Akanksha (meaning aspiration) Center in 1989, enrolling 15 children and employing college friends as volunteers. The center eventually evolved into the Akanksha Foundation, a non-profit project that provides after-school (and school) tutoring to children from low-income communities. Over the past 30 years, the Akanksha Foundation has expanded to 9,800 children in 21 schools across Mumbai and Pune.
As the recognition of Akanksha’s work grew, Shaheen saw an opportunity to expand her reach even further and work for more transformative changes when she met Wendy Kopp, the founder of Teach For America. Along with five colleagues, Shaheen launched Teach For India in 2008. In last 13 years, more than 120,000 among India’s brightest and promising youth have applied for the 2 year fellowship program. 3,400+ Fellows have spent 2 years of their life teaching in low income schools across India. Directly, they have impacted 1million+ children and the Fellow Alumni base through their subsequent initiatives, reaches an estimated 33million children (1 in every 10 children in India).
Shaheen has also created projects like the Maya Musical, the Kid's Education Revolution which explore student leadership, creating platforms for student voice and partnership, and TFIx, which is a year-long incubator program for passionate entrepreneurs who are willing to adapt Teach For India’s model to their context and region in rural areas.
Seeing the stark inequities due to difference of opportunity everyday, has led Shaheen to seed this huge movement and yet has also brought her humility. “It taught me that there really is very little that you can change. But it also taught me at the same time that what I really can change is myself and there is a lot of power in doing that. And there is a ripple effect.”
As she set-out as a teacher, some of her most transformative life- lessons came from her children, like Lateef who taught her about depth of human generosity. In between all the compelling responsibilities of strategy, funding, talent management, etc. that come with building and managing organization of such scale, the most important thing for Shaheen still remains staying close to children. “What do children need? What can we do to support their dreams, hope and magic” is a question which she holds closest to her heart.
Her vision for education is one where children are not only provided quality education, but we create “safe spaces for their voice” by deeply listening to them, to engage “kids and educators as partners” by seeing them as equals and ultimately, to support young “kids as change-makers” to help them rise to their potential in service to the society. That way, instead of seeing a seemingly impossible task ahead of educating 320 million Indian children, she sees it as a magical opportunity of 320 million partners to create the “greatest show on Earth”.
In this long and audacious movement, Shaheen wisely remarks that the biggest challenges are not funding, staff etc, but we ourselves. “Inner work is most challenging in staying on the path. External challenges are always there. As you solve a few, more and more will keep coming. To keep going, to find the strength and love in my heart a little bit better each day is the bigger challenge.”
For this inner work, she emphasizes on the importance of little things to transform ourselves and to keep love at the centre of leadership. “If we are grounded in love, we can figure out the rest” whether it is quietly arranging everyone’s slippers outside a classroom or whether it is mobilizing a country to transform education.
Shaheen is an Ashoka Fellow (2001), a Global Leader for Tomorrow at the World Economic Forum (2002), and an Asia Society 21 Leader (2006). Recently, she was awarded the Jamnalal Bajaj Award for promoting Gandhian values, community service and social development. Shaheen also serves on the board of Akanksha Foundation and Museum of Solutions (advisory board). She is the author of the book, Redrawing India and the Miss Muglee Children's Books. She has a Bachelor’s Degree from St. Xavier's College, Mumbai and a Master’s Degree from the University of Manchester.
Also see, 5 questions we asked Shaheen.