Universe do we live in? Where are we going? Because we are confronting the limits of the Earth’s ecosystem to carry the burden of humanity, we are also confronting our assumptions about the nature of the Universe and our evolutionary journey. Do we continue our rapid march into materialism, grounded in the assumption that we live in a Universe that is indifferent to humanity and comprised mostly of dead matter and empty space? Or do we open to a transforming insight from the combined wisdom of science and the world’s spiritual traditions: The Universe is not dead at its foundations but is profoundly alive and we humans are an integral part of that larger aliveness? In the wo... posted on Apr 30 2018 (15,023 reads)

enough, that we will be happy if we have material goods, that material goods will keep us safe. None of these stories are true. What is true is that what we have is each other. MS. TIPPETT: And again, that's so — it's lovely and it's clearly true, and yet we don't… DR. REMEN: We don't live there. And this is why I see people with cancer and other people who have encountered very difficult experiences in their lives as teachers, teachers of wisdom. It's as if the wisdom to live well is — at the moment, the repository of this wisdom are the sick people in our culture, the ill people in our culture. [music: “Alice”... posted on Jan 15 2019 (13,885 reads)

time of crisis and chaos, the kind that a pandemic brings, is, among other things, a time to call on our ancestors for their deep wisdom. Not just knowledge but true wisdom is needed in a time of death and profound change, for at such times we are beckoned not simply to return to the immediate past, that which we remember fondly as “the normal,” but to reimagine a new future, a renewed humanity, a more just and therefore sustainable culture, and one even filled with joy. Julian of Norwich (1342–ca.1429) is one of those ancestors calling to us today. After all, she lived her entire life during the worst pandemic in European history—the Bubonic plague that killed 4... posted on Nov 13 2020 (10,429 reads)

follows is the syndicated transcript  of an On Being interview bewteen Krista Tippett and Suzanne Simard. You can listen to the audio of the interview here. Krista Tippett, host:She is the forest ecologist who has proven beyond doubt that trees communicate with each other, that a forest is a single organism, “wired,” Suzanne Simard says, “for wisdom” and for what it is hard to call anything other than care. She has shifted her field of science on its axis and was an inspiration for the central character in Richard Powers’s celebrated novel The Overstory. But it’s the understory of a forest that Suzanne Simard brought into the light. M... posted on Jun 1 2022 (3,824 reads)

we love horses or not, whether we have contact with horses or not, they can teach us a lot about wisdom, love, and beauty. How do we get close to an honest openness to the potential magic of horses? And what does it even mean? The horse as a mirror for the soul and a vehicle for the soul could show us our true nature, and carry us into sacred spaces, initiating us into transformational healing and insight. Horses could heal conquest consciousness and help us reindigenize. But, for that to happen, we would have to become initiates. How can we properly seek initiation into the great mystery of life?- Nikos Patedakis Nikos Patedakis himself has practiced m... posted on Oct 19 2022 (3,704 reads)

births as well as deaths. She serves the community as an obstetrician at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital, and as a medical director of Hive, a nonprofit organization of the San Francisco General Hospital Foundation that promotes reproductive and sexual wellness and pregnancy support for those living with HIV. In 2013, she underwent a double mastectomy, and a video of her and her surgical team dancing went viral. She went on to found the Foundation for Embodied Medicine to bring this wisdom to patients, caregivers, and healthcare professionals. She also teaches embodiment to the Bay Area Young Survivors Group of the Cancer Help Program at Commonweal, co-founded by Michael Lerner, ... posted on Apr 21 2023 (3,576 reads)

the effort to rise above or sink below or to drop all of our designs and simply accept our aliveness and trust it. I struggle with that. Everybody struggles with that. Is that making sense? TS: It is, and it actually reminds me of another quote that I took from the audio program. Really, as I said, you have such beautiful and original language. I really appreciate it Mark, deeply. Here’s the other quote: “Wisdom is the result of faith. Faith is not the result of wisdom.” I thought that was really interesting. MN: Well, thank you. You know, let me speak to the great Protestant theologian Paul Tillich. He defined faith as “an act of ultimate... posted on Dec 10 2016 (25,856 reads)

in a valley within the Green Mountains of Vermont is a place called Odali Utugi—The Sunray Peace Village. Odali Utugi means Hope Mountain. On this beautiful 27-acre site, Sunray Meditation Society has, since 1987, been creating a Peace Village for today’s world, modeled after the Cherokee Peace Villages of the last century. It is a place where people of all ages, walks of life, clans, and nations can experience the healing power of the Earth. Here one can study the wisdom of Native American and Tibetan Buddhist traditions and learn the skills of peacemaking. It is sacred land.  The Venerable Dhyani Ywahoo is Chief of the Green Mountain, Ani Yun Wiwa, and... posted on May 31 2018 (9,336 reads)

Grateful to be asked and curious about what it might be like to work in the land of the Millennials, I said yes, but realized quite quickly that being an elder today – especially in Silicon Valley – is less about reverence and more about relevance. In my five and a half years working with people mostly two generations younger than me, I’ve come to realize that a Modern Elder is both a mentor and an intern. While some of my accumulated knowledge might serve as timeless wisdom, much of it wasn’t relevant to this new home-sharing world. So, I realized I needed to strategically edit my knowledge and evolve my identity and take a beginner’s-mind approach to ... posted on Nov 14 2018 (6,178 reads)

during a period of growing awareness—maybe even awakening—of the broader Australian culture to the richness of our First Nations people’s traditions and voices. Lydia has lived many lives in this one life. She is a Worimi woman, born on Bundjalung country, now living between the Kulin nations and Gubbi Gubbi country. From experiencing trauma in early life to an art-filled, soulful adult life as a mother, producer, executive, singer/songwriter and custodian of ancient wisdom, Lydia is the embodiment of compassionate resilience. Amongst the many things that moved me when we first met was her unique capacity to bridge the trauma that the Indigenous community ... posted on Dec 19 2020 (4,160 reads)

of complicated abstractions.  Palpable values of caring for infants and the aging, feeding the hungry, caring for the sick, nurturing the sources of intelligence found in explorations of bodily feeling and movement hold the lowest possible places on scales of values motivation actual social choices. Although muffled by the din of those dominant voices, there has been a steady resistance building among innovators who have devoted their lives to developing strategies for recovering the wisdom and creativity present in breathing, sensing, moving, and touching.  They worked quietly, wrote very little.  Typically, they spent their lives outside the vociferous worlds of univer... posted on Sep 17 2023 (2,305 reads)

be achieved. Andrew Zolli is thought leader and curator of a new idea, "resilience thinking," which is galvanizing scientists, governments, and social innovators. Resilience asks how to support people and create systems that know how to recover, persist, and even to thrive in the face of change. In our age, disruption is around every corner by way of globally connected economies, 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 disru... posted on Dec 5 2013 (22,702 reads)

punitive, false old/young binary. Everyone is terrified of being on the wrong side, and it segregates us and fills us with dread. This is completely unnecessary because you are always older than lots of people and younger than lots of other people. It is important to break down the old/young binary because binaries are not our friends. Pavi: I remember introducing another speaker and referring to her as an elder, which within a lot of indigenous communities are thought of as the keepers of wisdom, and it's meant as a term of honor and yet... Ashton: It's meant as an honorific, absolutely. Pavi: ...and yet the person receiving the term took it (good-naturedly) as being... posted on Feb 22 2018 (13,462 reads)

file, lán dóchais is grá / le súile gan solas, ciúineas gan crá... So you would throw that line of poetry into the people and they would all know this poetry, they would all recognize it. And in some of them, it would stir in them a feeling of interest and the interest generated the mind towards what the seanchai had to say. So I wrote it in that form, that the seanchai threw the poetry into the people. Those are the words which are the old words of wisdom that starts each of the 40 essays. And that technique has worked for thousands of years. I thought that technique would work in this book. CAMERON: I think it does. It works very beautifu... posted on Sep 12 2019 (6,776 reads)

aspects of trees, has written about them in leading books, and maintains gardens on her property that burst with flora. From a very young age, she understood she was the last voice to bring Celtic knowledge to the New World. Orphaned at age 11 in Ireland, she lived with elders who taught her the ways of the Celtic triad of mind, body and soul, all rooted in a vision of nature that saw trees and forests as fundamental to human survival and spirituality. What follows is a tender harvest of wisdom nuggets from an Awakin Call with Diana Beresford-Kroeger. You can access the recording of the call and the full-length transcript here. On beginning to acquire traditional Cel... posted on May 9 2020 (7,286 reads)

identify with the feeling life—passion, drama, intensity, compelling emotion—are qualities that in the ancient anatomical treatises were associated not with the heart but with the liver! They are signs of agitation and turbidity (an excess of bile!) rather than authentic feelingness. In fact, they are traditionally seen as the roadblocks to the authentic feeling life, the saboteurs that steal its energy and distort its true nature. And so before we can even begin to unlock the wisdom of these ancient texts, we need to gently set aside our contemporary fascination with emotivity as the royal road to spiritual authenticity and return to the classic understanding from which th... posted on Apr 10 2021 (8,754 reads)

begin by asking the audience the following question: “In your personal estimation, what is the life stage of the human family? When you look at the behavior of the whole human family, do you think we are behaving like toddlers, adolescents, adults or elders?” After asking the question there would often be a few moments of silence and then the room would explode into conversation. After a few minutes, I would then ask people to take a vote so we could learn from our collective wisdom. Invariably, a consistent response would come back: Whether it was schoolteachers in India, business leaders in Brazil, students in Europe and the US, a common response came back. Roughly three... posted on Jan 6 2021 (5,166 reads)

finish the moment, to find the journey’s end in every step of the road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom.” In contemplating the shortness of life, Seneca considered what it takes to live wide rather than long. Over the two millennia between his age and ours — one in which, caught in the cult of productivity, we continually forget that “how we spend our days is … how we spend our lives” — we’ve continued to tussle with the eternal question of how to fill life with more aliveness. And in a world awash with information but increasingly vacant of wisdom, navigating the maze of the human experience in the h... posted on Aug 3 2015 (1,554 reads)

finish the moment, to find the journey’s end in every step of the road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is wisdom.” In contemplating the shortness of life, Seneca considered what it takes to live wide rather than long. Over the two millennia between his age and ours — one in which, caught in the cult of productivity, we continually forget that “how we spend our days is … how we spend our lives” — we’ve continued to tussle with the eternal question of how to fill life with more aliveness. And in a world awash with information but increasingly vacant of wisdom, navigating the maze of the human experience in the hope of ar... posted on Aug 3 2015 (12,355 reads)

people in great numbers choose to practice, integrate, and embody gratitude, the cumulative force that is generated can help create the kind of world we all hope for and desire, for ourselves and for future generations. The application of multicultural wisdom—the shared values and the inherent positive beliefs of humanity—has become known as perennial wisdom. Perennial wisdom has been passed on from generation to generation since the birth of humankind.  It continues to surface among diverse peoples, unconnected by geography or language, yet inextricably linked to what is inherently important in our shared experience of what it means to be human.  Of all the uni... posted on Apr 8 2017 (21,507 reads)