resident Steve Elkins has spent most of his adult life as a musician and filmmaker. His first feature documentary “The Reach of Resonance,” which took him ten years to complete, won the prize for “Best Film Essay” at Montreal’s International Festival of Films On Art. Elkins has recently completed his latest film, “Echoes of the Invisible,” which took him literally around the world and into the lives of scientists, monks, artists, and journalists to explore the search for silence in an increasingly noisy world. Steve Elkins in Tuva. I caught up with Steve recently (before the coronavirus pushed us all indoors) at Dripp Coffee in do... posted on Jun 27 2021 (6,780 reads)

for Reawakening to the What Our Souls Know and Healing the World) Published by Harper One & Harper Collins UK (July 2021) We know things in the core of our being that we have not necessarily been taught. And some of this deep knowing may actually be at odds with what our culture or religion or nation has tried to teach us. This book is about reawakening to what we know in the depths of our being, that the earth is sacred, and that this sacredness is at the heart of every human being and life-form. To awaken again to this deep knowing is to be transformed in the ways we choose to live and relate and act. The problem is that we keep going back to sleep, or otherwise live in ways tha... posted on Jul 14 2021 (4,934 reads)

social justice, and here I was, a professional who was pursuing the most unjust act -- of taking knowledge from the people, making them anonymous, getting rent from that knowledge by sharing it and doing consultancy, writing papers and publishing them in the papers, getting invited to the conferences, getting consultancies and whatever have you. So then, a dilemma rose in the mind that, if I'm also an exploiter, then this is not right; life cannot go on like that. And this was a moment of great pain and trauma because I couldn't live with it any longer. So I did a review of ethical dilemma and value conflicts... posted on Sep 3 2021 (3,725 reads)

there an underlying spiritual dimension behind the myriad forms of Qigong that by its very nature, invites us to simply and directly access deeper levels of being, pure awareness and the experience of Presence in daily life? If this is the original intent of Qigong, in what way can this ancient art be practiced as a Portal to Presence? These questions and the perspective that informs them stem directly from many years of my personal and professional experience as a psychologist, student and teacher of Qigong and Tai Chi Chuan. My own journey through the complex and often confusing landscape of these disciplines and practices has led me to some of the insights and ideas I would like to ... posted on Nov 9 2021 (4,466 reads)

oldest indigenous healers, and also of our great religious and spiritual traditions: suffering is the soil in which wisdom and compassion grow; it is the school from which we graduate, committed to healing others’ hurt. Recent scientific studies on post-traumatic growth yield similar conclusions. This is what I know after fifty years of clinical work with traumatized people and from wrestling with and learning from the ordinary challenges and heartbreaking losses of my own long life. In medical school in the 1960s, I’d learned to enter the inner world of troubled children and older people struggling with life-threatening illness and also to listen to my own confusio... posted on Nov 30 2021 (4,628 reads)

and editor for the New York Times Book Review, the Forward, and Columbia Journalism Review. In The Quiet Before, he tells stories from the last five centuries that have not come down in bold, in history, but that incubated developments that we later experience as defining, from France to Rome, from Moscow to Ghana to Tahrir Square. So, you know, I’m always interested in where the inquiries and passions that you hold, that you follow, were planted in your early life, in your childhood. And, you know, I see you as much as a historian as a journalist. And I know, for example, that you are a grandchild of Holocaust survivors. So I don’t know if that is a ... posted on Apr 18 2022 (6,520 reads)

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 th... posted on Nov 17 2022 (1,902 reads)

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... posted on Dec 15 2022 (1,961 reads)

longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love — whether we call it friendship or family or romance — is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other’s light. Gentle work. Steadfast work. Life-saving work in those moments when life and shame and sorrow occlude our own light from our view, but there is still a clear-eyed loving person to beam it back. In our best moments, we are that person for another. In learning this afresh — as we must learn all the great and obvious truths, over and over — I was reminded of a passage by James Baldwin (August 2, 1924–December 1, 1987) from Nothing Personal (public library) — his 1... posted on Feb 19 2023 (6,346 reads)

is the sunshine of life — the quiet radiance that makes our lives not only livable but worth living. (This is why we must use the utmost care in how we wield the word friend.) In my own life, friendship has been the lifeline for my darkest hours of despair, the magnifying lens for my brightest joys, the quiet pulse-beat beneath the daily task of living. You can glean a great deal about a person from the constellation of friends around the gravitational pull of their personhood. “Whatever our degree of friends may be, we come more under their influence than we are aware,” the trailblazing astronomer Maria Mitchell observed as she contemplated how we... posted on Mar 27 2023 (5,309 reads)

anxiety as the avoidant thing you do after unrest stirs you, when you are trying to distract yourself or fix the physical discomfort in your body. Anxiety lets us fantasize that we can control outcomes—the futile “if only” and “what if’s” we often linger upon. Unfortunately, our anxiety lies to us, amplifying (in my experience) our uncomfortable bodily sensations. Fear, meanwhile, is the core emotion that warns us of immediate threat to life and limb, directing us to fight or flee. Quickened reactions, strengthened muscles, and enhanced lung capacity are lifesaving. In these instances, our physical reactions are not a problem; they a... posted on Apr 5 2023 (5,995 reads)

I was cleaning out my dresser, I found a small red, blue, and green hand-woven pouch, with a silver zipper on top. Ms. Macias, an English teacher I had in my Senior year of high school had given it to me fifteen years before I ever visited Guatemala, the country in which it was made. I remember sitting near Ms. Macias’ desk every day to the right side of the classroom, near my best friend Tia. We would both bombard her with questions about life and all that is important to a teenager. She would willingly engage in many conversations with us. One day she took out this little woven bag from her desk, walked over to my desk and asked if I liked it. I told her it was beautiful. ... posted on Dec 22 2014 (22,322 reads)

go and learning to follow my inner wisdom instead of an agenda. This is the common thread of my life. Until the age of 33, it was a bumpy road, full of painful  and deep potholes. I did not understand the meaning of all that was happening to me and felt lost. I fought tooth and nail for my right to exist in many ways. And ended up in burnout. There I lay at the bottom. In retrospect, the greatest gift of all in shuddering packaging. The chance for a new beginning. I had no choice but to move through the darkness. And asked myself for the first time in my life the questions: Who am I? Why am I here? Beyond al... posted on May 9 2023 (2,884 reads)

said no to editorial jobs on magazines, proper jobs that would have paid proper money because I knew that, attractive though they were, for me they would have been walking away from the mountain. And if those job offers had come along earlier I might have taken them, because they still would have been closer to the mountain than I was at the time. I learned to write by writing. I tended to do anything as long as it felt like an adventure, and to stop when it felt like work, which meant that life did not feel like work. Thirdly, When you start off, you have to deal with the problems of failure. You need to be thickskinned, to learn that not every project will survive. A freelance life,... posted on May 21 2023 (4,304 reads)

are part of the extended community here and have been shining lights for me for more than a decade now. Above all, warmest Congratulations to all of you in the Class of 2023. And to the families, friends, ancestors, and loved ones – near and far – who have set in motion and nurtured the ripples that allow us to be here today. It’s customary, I realize, for the person standing here to pretend or at least attempt to share with you stories of wisdom gleaned from a lifetime of experience. It is true that I have both toiled and found tremendous joy and reward in various material realms of our society – from public service, to the global financial and corpor... posted on May 30 2023 (2,655 reads)

1940, Bill Wilson, co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, a man who knew sin and failure like he knew the back of his hand, was living with his wife, Lois, in a tiny room at the Alcoholics Anonymous “clubhouse” in downtown Manhattan. Wilson was in despair, unsure of the state of his soul, of his role in life, and of the future of A.A. Just then, at his nadir, a Jesuit priest from S. Louis, Father Edward Dowling, who knew of Bill’s work, came calling…. —The Editors n chapter 4 of Not-God, Ernest Kurtz’s magisterial history of Alcoholics Anonymous, the author relates “how Bill Wilson habitually recalled that moment” when he met Father... posted on Aug 2 2023 (6,212 reads)

the restructuring and outsourcing of leadership development and learning initiatives. She lost her job. You might experience disappointment at work in many ways: a long-term project does not come to fruition, a new position opens up and you don’t get it, or your hard work does not pay off. Faced with a sense of loss and disappointment, we have no choice but to respond. In his famous work Man’s Search for Meaning, psychiatrist Viktor Frankl wrote that every person is questioned by life and can only answer to life by being responsible. In each of us, he proposed, we have a responsibility—or the ability to respond. Whether you are a leader who lost a job or an opportun... posted on Apr 3 2024 (3,276 reads)

be reached, granted you persevere through the middle part with full sincerity. After the longest day of the entire walk -- 38 kilometers -- my feet finally touch what the Romans thought was the end of the world. It’s been a long and interesting journey from St. Jean Pied de Port in France to Cape Finisterre, the western-most tip of Spain. One can never imagine the impact of such pilgrimages on our lives. Sitting on a rock by the lighthouse watching the most glorious sunset of my life, it seems like a perfect ending to a journey of 900 kilometers. There’s so much that I’ve learned from walking the thirty-seven days. I’ve learned that if you take the first ... posted on Jun 7 2011 (22,804 reads)

is something you can easily avoid by saying nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing.” ~Aristotle At the end of the day, when I feel completely exhausted, oftentimes it has nothing to do with all the things I’ve done. It’s not a consequence of juggling multiple responsibilities and projects. It’s not my body’s way of punishing me for becoming a late-life jogger after a period of cardiovascular laziness. It’s not even about getting too little sleep. When I’m exhausted, you can be sure I’ve bent over backwards trying to win everyone’s approval. I’ve obsessed over what people think of me, I’ve assigned ... posted on Jun 17 2011 (36,409 reads)

of both parties are met––which, fortunately, usually happens in share situations, according to Paul Zak––trust will naturally develop. This experience of trust leads to more personal happiness, according to John F. Helliwell, Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of British Columbia. Helliwell, who studies the social contexts of happiness, has found that “trustworthiness and trust…appear independently and robustly related to happiness and life satisfaction”, and as we experience trust in more domains in our lives, the happier we are. In fact, trust is so important for happiness that when researchers at the University of Cambridge... posted on May 21 2013 (26,058 reads)