or whatever—people who are often on the frontlines of suffering and bearing a burden that the rest of us are nicely avoiding in some way and often don’t even want to look at or acknowledge; and I just had such tremendous admiration for these people. They range, the people I got to be with, from domestic violence shelter workers, to hospice nurses, to international humanitarian aid workers, to parents, to people taking care of their parents, and to managers who were actually sort of caregiving their staff. Or even people who in friendships and relationships tend to take that role, the giver, the person who’s offering [and] sometimes having a hard time receiving. I j... posted on Apr 8 2022 (2,639 reads)

Brown: I could ask you as a parent and any other parent that's listening with a young child, you know, say a child over 3 but under 12. And if you just observe them and don't try and direct them and watch what it is they like to do in play, you often will see a key to their innate talents. And if those talents are given fairly free reign, then you see that there is a union between self and talent. And that this is nature's way of sort of saying this is who you are and what you are. And I'm sure if you go back and think about both of your children or yourself and go back to your earliest emotion-laden, visual, and visceral memories of what really gave you joy, you'l... posted on Jul 18 2014 (31,814 reads)

proud to know you and my life is richer because you came into it. When you were born, you know, the world became a better place and I'm proud to call you my son, even though," — and I don't know why I decided to add this part — "at times you can really be a huge pain in the ass [laughter]." And he looks up at me and he smiles and he says, "The feeling's mutual [laughter]." And, you know, suddenly kinship so quickly. You know, you're not sort of this delivery system, but maybe I return him to himself. But there is no doubt that he's returned me to myself. Ms. Tippett: I'm Krista Tippett, and this is On Being, from APM, Am... posted on May 4 2014 (20,278 reads)

a long decline after her mid-80s, she put it this way, poignantly: "We live too long and die too slowly." Partly as a result of accompanying her mother through these years, Jane Gross started, and still contributes to "The New Old Age" blog at The New York Times. Her hard-won wisdom on experiencing the new old age of our parents — and ourselves — is eloquent, practically useful, and blunt. JANE GROSS: It kicks up all the dust of childhood. Everybody sort of becomes who they were when they were 10. MS. TIPPETT: That's a terrible thought. MS. GROSS: I know. I know. I'm not even sure it's avoidable. You know, as a person who deals ... posted on Jul 2 2014 (27,987 reads)

rather than apart, um, what it means to change the world, which is something that can be done on a moment-by-moment basis, as well as in establishing organizations, uh, creating inventions, et cetera, et cetera. MS. TIPPETT: Courtney, what has rebellion come to mean for you, and where did you start with that? MS. MARTIN: Um, well, you know, I grew up in Colorado Springs, Colorado, which is a really religiously conservative town. But I grew up with these progressive parents who were sort of a product of that social movement era. I grew up with stories about my parents taking over the student union and getting beer in the student union, which to them seemed very important, in addi... posted on May 8 2015 (16,191 reads)

follows is the transcript of an On Being interview with Krista Tippett in conversation with Brian Greene. June 1, 2017 Mr. Brian Greene: To me, the question of whether there are three dimensions or 10 dimensions is so captivating that it does impact my desire to live. And again, I don’t mean that in some melodramatic sense. If tomorrow we established that there are three dimensions of space, I’m not going to sort of jump off the Empire State Building. But what I mean is that these questions about the rock bottom structure of reality do inform my life. They are not esoteric scientific issues that I leave in the office when I go home at night. Krista Tippett, ho... posted on Dec 3 2018 (5,753 reads)

inevitable superstorms, and technology's endless reinvention. And a new generation is seeking wisdom and health amidst this reality. Mr. Andrew Zolli: Failure is intrinsic, healthy, normal, and necessary to most complex systems. We need systems that are better at sensing emerging disruption that encourage cooperation, rather than division. We need systems where a failure in one component of the system doesn't bring down every other component of the system. Those are really sort of a design brief for the 21st century. Ms. Tippett: I'm Krista Tippett. This On Being from APM, American Public Media. (Sound bite of music) Ms. Tippett: Andrew ... posted on Dec 5 2013 (22,745 reads)

or if you're in a change of life where your passions are shifting or you're not certain, and somebody says, “Well, it's easy to solve your life, just follow your passion.” [laughs] I do think that they have harmed you because it just makes people feel more excluded, and more exiled, and sometimes like a failure. MS. TIPPETT: Yes, exactly. MS. GILBERT: And it's a little bit like — gosh, I mean, even the word “passion” has this sort of sexual connotation that there's — I'm much more interested in intimacy. [laughs] And in growing a relationship than everything has to be setting your head on fire. And curiosity ... posted on Sep 5 2016 (16,784 reads)

of mine had taken a swing, and the bat slipped out of his hands, kind of rotated helicopter-style through the air, and struck me right between the eyes. Broke my nose, broke my ethmoid bone—which is the bone behind your nose, fairly deep inside your skull—shattered both eye sockets. I looked down, I had blood on my clothes, a couple classmates ran over, one of them literally took the shirt off his back and gave it to me to kind of plug up the blood coming from my nose. I was sort of unaware of how seriously I had been injured, so a couple of my classmates gathered me up and sort of helped me back down into the school. We walked down, we were on this hill outside of the sc... posted on Jan 2 2020 (9,498 reads)

language is everywhere, right? This language of trauma and traumatic stress has made its way into culture, movie, TV scripts, the news, public policy discussions. I’ve read a few different accounts of how you stumbled into this field. How do you trace the beginnings of your research into traumatic stress? van der Kolk:Well, it starts in a very pedestrian way, I mean, coming from a generation that it was generally recommended that people have their own heads examined, which I think is sort of a good idea if you try to help other people. So psychoanalysis was the way to do that, back then, and the only program that paid for that was the VA. So I went to work for the VA for the same ... posted on Feb 10 2022 (7,252 reads)

roots that account for your becoming a journalist? Paul Van Slambrouck: It wasn’t a direct line, by any means. I think my first attraction to the world of journalism was via the images I saw, particularly in the Christian Science Monitor (The Monitor in the day was black and white.) They were not really news photos, per se. The stuff was just so beautiful—poetic images from around the world, particularly of an artist named Gordon Converse who was, in The Monitor tradition, sort of a legendary photographer. RW: The Monitor came into your home? PVS: Right. My parents subscribed. I was in high school and that’s when I remember looking at the images and ... posted on Apr 18 2014 (9,041 reads)

TORRES: Pretty much towards the end of college and the beginning of my teaching career, I had actually never run more than a mile. I hated running. I was always really bad at it. It always made my chest hurt. I actually left soccer, which made my Mexican father really sad, because I told him it was too much running, and I didn’t like it. I was the kid that would beg my parents to give me a doctor’s note so I wouldn’t have to run the mile. Running was always sort of associated with things I wasn’t good at, with shame. I was one of maybe a handful of Mexican kids in my school, and I was chubbier than a lot of other kids. And so I was picked on &lsquo... posted on Aug 30 2016 (10,721 reads)

our voice forward, our gifts forward, in service to other people. Let's just jump right in and begin with this idea of spiritual awakening. I hosted at one point a series called Waking Up: What Does it Really Mean? And one of the things I realized is that different spiritual teachers meet a lot of different things when they use this term, "spiritual awakening." Let's start right there. What does spiritual awakening mean to you? Albert DeSilver:Yes, it's sort of like defining God, isn't it? How do you do that? I think for me, spiritual awakening has to do with transcending this sense of separation and difference. It means waking up to the vitality... posted on Sep 20 2018 (10,453 reads)

of my clients, they describe that the scariest time of the day is when they're going to bed at night, and after the devices, if they are ever OFF, when they turn off and it's just them there. That feels like a death now. It's an interesting time because you see now people are not processing their own experience inside themselves. For example, you might be, I don't know, walking on the street and a woman has a stroller, and you open the door for her, and you have that just sort of that shared sweetness of an act of kindness, and pre- our addiction to technology, we might have walked down the rest of that street and processed that with ourselves. We would have owned it&m... posted on Feb 8 2018 (18,047 reads)

exciting to be talking about an important subject in an important place in a room surrounded by books. And actually, where I’d like to start is just with you, just a little bit about your background. And I’m curious, specifically, whether you would find traces or roots of not just your interest in morality, but in a sense, your passion for morality, in the religious or spiritual background of your childhood. Mr. Haidt: Well, my religious and spiritual background is sort of stereotypical for my generation — born in 1963 to parents who were first generation. All four of my grandparents were born in Russia and Poland, came to New York, worked in the garment i... posted on Sep 21 2018 (17,298 reads)

Theory. Deb Dana: All right, let’s give this a try. And I appreciate your kind words, because it is what I love doing. I love talking about the nervous system in just everyday language. So if we talk about the three states of our nervous system, we have dorsal, sympathetic, and ventral. And so those three terms are terms that I hope everybody will begin to use. And so dorsal is the place of when it’s in its survival energy, it’s that place where we feel sort of not really here, going through the motions but we don’t have a lot of energy to really care about it. I like to think we sort of disappear in some way, sort of take a step back, I’... posted on Nov 12 2023 (5,167 reads)

religious and spiritual background of your childhood there. Mr. Martínez Celaya: Cuba was probably the least religious country in Latin America, even before the revolution. And by 1964, when I was born, there were no churches. Our churches were not really part of the community. My parents, though, held onto their Catholic God, even though it played very little role into our lives. Most of the Cubans I knew were into Santería or Espiritismo, which were other traditions. And sort of the magic of that made the challenges of communism, the migration, and all of that, more — in some ways, more manageable for people. But then after that, I went to Spain, which is a litt... posted on Nov 12 2017 (9,260 reads)

So we were very well organized, we could get the pressure on really quickly. One technique I would use when our campaign financing bill was in trouble I looked at the list of donors of some of the people that were on the fence. And I just called them. I found people like a president of a bank who is in the district of the guy that we were trying to move and I called them one-on-one and tried to convince them of our issue. Sometimes those guys would then call up. It is just a lot of… sort of like “leaving no stone unturned” is part of the process. Preeta: Wow. So as you were doing all this, you mentioned that part of your soul was not being fed - the more monastic c... posted on Dec 28 2019 (6,831 reads)

nest syndrome. It’s common to all of us. I felt it myself when my last child left and I had to say to myself, now, what would you say to someone who’s in this similar position? I would say, look, where you invested your energy is good. Notice they’re off living their journey. It would be far worse if they weren’t. But that energy now has come back to you. What are you going to do with that? That energy has come back to you in a way that brings something to you to sort of consider: where does my life need to go next after this? We can’t depend entirely upon outer structures. One of the side effects of the pandemic is so many folks were pulled out of th... posted on Oct 1 2022 (4,282 reads)

is a thrill to be here at a conference that's devoted to "Inspired by Nature" -- you can imagine. And I'm also thrilled to be in the foreplay section. Did you notice this section is foreplay? Because I get to talk about one of my favorite critters, which is the Western Grebe. You haven't lived until you've seen these guys do their courtship dance. I was on Bowman Lake in Glacier National Park, which is a long, skinny lake with sort of mountains upside down in it, and my partner and I have a rowing shell. And so we were rowing, and one of these Western Grebes came along. And what they do for their courtship dance is, they go together, the two of them, the two mate... posted on Aug 19 2015 (9,719 reads)