are one part, but only one, of the forest's mind." Can you explain what you mean by that?  David: Yes, so what we have learned over the last few decades from ecological, evolutionary, and plant physiology studies is that when we walk into a forest we're not walking into a place that is full of separate interacting individuals.That was the old view of ecology. Instead, we now know that we're walking into a living network, a place where every creature exists only through relationships with others. For example, a tree is not just one species or one individual but a living community. Every leaf on a tree has hundreds of species of bacteria and fungi living on it. Withou... posted on Mar 22 2019 (4,917 reads)

are both set in childhood. Does that mean we’re stuck with ourselves? No, suggest two studies published this year. When caregivers are available to respond to children’s needs, attachment theory says, children develop a secure attachment style: They trust others and feel comfortable relying on loved ones. However, when caregivers fail to meet children’s needs, they can develop insecure attachment—which makes it harder to sustain relationships in adulthood. However, a study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology suggests that people can actually start to change their atta... posted on Jun 21 2018 (18,617 reads)

from Elegant Simplicity by Satish Kumar, New Society Publishers, 2019 Elegant simplicity can only be built on the firm foun­dation of right relationships. Our crises-mental, personal, social, economic, environmental, political, cultural, and re­ligious -- have their origin in disconnection and separation. The moment we see that all things are connected, that we are all related, that everything depends on everything else, we start to see solutions. Why do we have crises between Palestine and Israel, between Sunni and Shia, between America and Russia, India and Pakistan, Christians and Muslims? Because we see ourselves as being separate from others. When all our inter... posted on Apr 4 2019 (7,371 reads)

all belong to the world in concentric circles of relationship — some more distant and others close, some with people different from us and others with people more similar. Living within this web of connectedness can bring us the greatest of joys and the deepest of challenges. The preferences, patterns, and habits we have learned can both build relational bridges and create great divides. Much of how we operate in our relationships can be unconscious and beneath our awareness, and so we go through life feeling perpetually “at the effect of” others, rather than intentional and effectual. Our lives and our relationships are well-served when we can lift our unconscious pa... posted on Aug 2 2019 (8,384 reads)

profound way, even though the physical makeup of the “thing” has not changed. A wooly knit hat that you purchase at the store will keep you warm regardless of its origin, but if it was hand knit by your favorite auntie, then you are in relationship to that “thing” in a very different way: you are responsible for it, and your gratitude has motive force in the world. You’re likely to take much better care of the gift hat than the commodity hat, because it is knit of relationships. This is the power of gift thinking. I imagine if we acknowledged that everything we consume is the gift of Mother Earth, we would take better care of what we are given. Mistreating a gi... posted on Jan 19 2021 (10,466 reads)

documented the havoc that loneliness wreaks on individuals, showing that lonely and isolated people have poorer immune function, experience higher levels of inflammation, and are at greater risk for heart disease, cancer and diabetes. While everybody’s vulnerability to loneliness and social isolation differs, we all need social connection. (Shutterstock) Perhaps just as importantly, Harvard research from the longest-running cohort study ever conducted suggests that warm social relationships are the most important predictor of happiness across the life course. In other words, people who are disconnected lead sicker, sadder and shorter lives. Public health guidelines ... posted on Jun 29 2023 (4,542 reads)

its sounds were telling me about how people and trees were interconnected. … So what we have learned over the last few decades from ecological science and evolutionary science and studies of the physiology of plants, is that when we walk into a forest, we're not walking into a place that is full of separate interacting individuals.That was the old view of of ecology. Instead we now know that we're walking into a living network, a place where every creature exists only through relationships with others. And so for example, a tree is not just one species, one individual, but a tree is a living community. Every leaf on a tree has hundreds of species of bacteria and fungi livi... posted on Jan 7 2024 (4,704 reads)

movement in education to foster social and emotional learning. And it cultivates the knowledge, empathy, and action required for practicing sustainable living. To help educators foster socially and emotionally engaged ecoliteracy, we have identified the following five practices. These are, of course, not the only ways to do so. But we believe that educators who cultivate these practices offer a strong foundation for becoming ecoliterate, helping themselves and their students build healthier relationships with other people and the planet. Each can be nurtured in age-appropriate ways for students, ranging from pre-kindergarten through adulthood, and help promote the cognitive and affective... posted on Sep 26 2013 (30,536 reads)

mind exist?” asks neuroscientist Daniel Siegel, as he opens a two-day conference on his favorite subject, interpersonal neurobiology. Siegel is on a mission to tell the world that by working to make changes in your mind you can reorganize the neural pathways in your brain. He insists that if you work at it, you can spend more time in “Beginner’s Mind” and improve your personal relationships. Unsatisfied by the old scientific definition that the mind is what the brain does, he says that “such a view essentially reduces the mind to an MRI.” As he sketches an upside-down triangle with mind and brain at the top two corners and relationships at the ... posted on Dec 10 2015 (25,277 reads)

world of complex systems and turbulence is no place for disabling and dispiriting mechanistic thinking. We are confronted daily by events and outcomes that shock us and for which we have no answers. The complexity of modern systems cannot be understood by our old ways of separating problems, or scapegoating individuals, or rearranging the boxes on an org chart. In a complex system, it is impossible to find simple causes that explain our problems, or to know who to blame. A messy tangle of relationships has given rise to these unending crises. To understand this new world of continuous change and intimately connected systems, we need new ways of understanding. Fortunately, life and its ... posted on Feb 26 2018 (11,724 reads)

Adrienne Rich argued in her magnificent meditation on love, refine our truths. But they also, it turns out, refine our immune systems. That’s what pioneering immunologist Esther Sternberg examines in The Balance Within: The Science Connecting Health and Emotions (public library) — a revelatory inquiry into how emotional stress affects our susceptibility to burnout and disease. As just about every socialized human being can attest, interpersonal relationships play a significant role in our experience of stress — either contributing to it and or alleviating it. And the way we connect — something psychologist Barbara Fredrickson has... posted on Mar 2 2020 (6,341 reads)

resource of older adults with the unmet needs of our nation’s youth. I’ve seen intergenerational connection help children learn to read, graduate from high school, and go on to accomplish their dreams. But I’ve only recently come to realize some of the biggest benefits of bringing old and young together. As I recount in my new book,  How to Live Forever: The Enduring Power of Connecting the Generations, when younger and older connect, the intergenerational relationships built are a route to success in early life and a key to happiness and well-being in our later years. The benefits of intergenerational connections Forty years ago, the eminent Corn... posted on Jul 14 2019 (6,910 reads)

actually had no end and didn't lead to more happiness or even a feeling of success as was promised to him. And so, while many of his peers were becoming full-time workaholics, he became a full-time volunteer, and has stayed that way ever since. Nipun was honored an "unsung hero of compassion" by the Dalai Lama, not long before President Obama appointed him to a council for addressing poverty and inequality in the US. He talks frequently on the topic of giftivism, and how relationships in this current economic paradigm have been reduced to a very deadening, singular kind of transaction. His role is to bring an abundant mindset back into our communities, where giving mi... posted on Nov 19 2019 (7,461 reads)

sitters are apparently watching for what they’re looking for before they just start flying around. And in rhesus monkey macaques—Steven Sumi did research on them and he called them “uptight” and “laid back, ” because the uptight ones were more anxious. But he also found that, when you took the uptight ones and gave them to particularly skilled mothers to mother, they became the leaders of the troops. I imagine because they were good at observing the power relationships and the best way to get what they wanted. So I think that brings us to the subject of differential susceptibility, which is that we keep finding with humans—and with animals, to... posted on Nov 17 2020 (9,179 reads)

you grateful for your partner’s household labor? Him: Uh, yeah, I guess so. Q: How do you express it? Him: She just knows. —From a focus group conducted by the authors The division of household labor is one of the most frequent sources of conflict in romantic relationships. As couples researchers Philip and Carolyn Cowan have shown, when partners feel that the division of labor (a combination of housework and paid work) in their relationship is unfair, they are more dissatisfied with their marriage and more likely to think they would be better off divorced. However, even an equitable division of labor may not be enough to ensure that partners are s... posted on Apr 24 2011 (15,230 reads)

permission to stop and connect with that part of themselves that makes them human—a good reminder given that schools are in the business of developing human beings! For a fun and light way to introduce this practice, try playing Holly Near’s Uh Huh (many thanks toPamela Seigle from Open Circle and Leading Together for introducing me to this song). If you want to build trust and collegial support, you might try… Active Listening. Scientists have found thatstrong relationships are key to a healthy school environment—and it’s not just the teachers who need to feel supported. For example, one study found that the principals who had the highest levels... posted on Nov 11 2015 (13,612 reads)

empathize with these students: I graduated from a large, traditional public high school where I remember feeling painfully bored and tired, and constantly looking at the clock. My intellectual passions seemed strangely divorced from my time in the classroom. I was good at memorizing facts for 24 hours and filling out scantron tests, but the work felt meaningless to me. On top of not developing a love of learning, I was certainly not learning much about life outside of school. I had few real relationships with my teachers. When it came time to think about college, I felt very intense pressure to go to a “good school,” but I did not understand why that was so important. My only... posted on Feb 1 2016 (10,925 reads)

thought—that we tend towards negative thinking. It could be that there's like a layer of self-reprimand a lot in our speech. It could be that we use mixed messages a lot. We're a little bit maybe anxious to say something really straightforward like for fear of how the other person's going to respond. And you might say just the negative patterning is also something that gets laid down really early. It has enormous impacts on our well-being later on in life. It affects our relationships. It affects how we see ourselves in the world. And so, in order to change our communication style, we actually have to become aware of those patterns. When we talk about mindful commu... posted on Oct 29 2017 (14,866 reads)

empathize with these students: I graduated from a large, traditional public high school where I remember feeling painfully bored and tired, and constantly looking at the clock. My intellectual passions seemed strangely divorced from my time in the classroom. I was good at memorizing facts for 24 hours and filling out scantron tests, but the work felt meaningless to me. On top of not developing a love of learning, I was certainly not learning much about life outside of school. I had few real relationships with my teachers. When it came time to think about college, I felt very intense pressure to go to a “good school,” but I did not understand why that was so important. My only... posted on Dec 12 2017 (46,665 reads)

approaches. In recent surveys, CEOS report that up to 75% of their organizational change efforts do not yield the promised results. These change efforts fail to produce what had been hoped for, yet always produce a stream of unintended and unhelpful consequences. Leaders end up managing the impact of unwanted effects rather than the planned results that didn't materialize. Instead of enjoying the fruits of a redesigned production unit, the leader must manage the hostility and broken relationships created by the redesign. Instead of glorying in the new efficiencies produced by restructuring, the leader must face a burned out and demoralized group of survivors. Instead of basking i... posted on Apr 11 2018 (13,671 reads)