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 (2,307 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 (22,711 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 (13,472 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 (7,289 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 (8,759 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 (5,171 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 (12,356 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 (21,522 reads)

of the Earth: Indian Voices on Nature Edited by Michael Oren Fitzgerald and Joseph A. Fitzgerald, Foreword by Joseph Bruchac. World Wisdom (www.worldwisdom.com), 2017. PP. 136. $14.95. Paper Reviewed by Samuel Bendeck Sotillos “[N]ot only men, but all things and all beings pray to Him (Wakan Tanka—the Great Spirit) continually in differing ways.” –Hehaka Sapa (Black Elk) As contemporary life becomes more and more fragmented and unsustainable, many individuals are left perplexed and searching for more complete and sustainable models to understand themselves and their place in the world around them. It is the spiritual crisis brought about by a desacralize... posted on Mar 12 2018 (10,735 reads)

part of our Community Anchors mobious and dynamic process we have engaged in different conversations during last months! Labour of Love Values, Holding Space, Nurturing Ripples, Laddering Journeys, Engagement Spectrum… All of it and so much more! Few weeks ago we had the joy of spiraling up together in the wisdom of circles, in an amazing conversation with our inspired elder John Malloy. This was the first time we had a guest speaker in last month’s calls and it was truly delightful, deep and natural! Here you have some of the main insights and reflections from John and others. John dives into the wisdom of circles, the role of anchors and ... posted on Jan 24 2019 (10,239 reads)

particularly my own traditions in the so-called “Celtic” countries of Ireland and Scotland, that our ancestors lived in a way that was very deeply connected with the natural world—just in the way that we think of other indigenous peoples now. Our old stories show us that that is our inheritance. So I wrote the book, really, to try to help people understand those old stories and reclaim that way of being in the world. We don’t have to look to other cultures for wisdom about how to live in balance and harmony with nature. Our own connection is right here under our feet, in our own stories, which spring directly out of this land. But we haven’t been taug... posted on Oct 17 2020 (7,564 reads)

only be found in silence and not in the raging intensity of my burning inner world. One distinguishing feature of this period of the time: I was sitting quietly, meditating on a daily basis, and making an active effort to maintain an awareness of myself during parts of the day. My wish to awaken was great. I tried to stay within my body, receive the silence—and listen within. This effort of attention felt like a “knocking on heaven’s door,” opening to a source of wisdom lying just beyond the threshold of my consciousness, that seemed to be waiting, wishing to reveal itself to me. This wisdom, this knowledge, I suspect, is always there—it is we that are a... posted on Aug 10 2021 (2,724 reads)

wisdom on how to live from James Baldwin, Ursula K. Le Guin, Leo Tolstoy, Seneca, Toni Morrison, Walt Whitman, Viktor Frankl, Rachel Carson, and Hannah Arendt. If we abide by the common definition of philosophy as the love of wisdom, and if Montaigne was right — he was — that philosophy is the art of learning to die, then living wisely is the art of learning how you will wish to have lived. A kind of resolution in reverse. This is where the wisdom of lives that have already been lived can be of immense aid — a source of forward-facing resolutions, borrowed from people who have long died, having lived, by any reasonable standard, honorable and generous live... posted on Jan 2 2022 (7,316 reads)

Talmudic turn of phrase, and she’d say, Where is it written that you’re supposed to be happy all the time? And I actually think it was the beginning of my spiritual practice that life is difficult. And then 40 years later, I learned that the Buddha said the same thing — that life is inevitably challenging, and how are we going to do it in a way that’s wise and doesn’t complicate it more than it is, just by itself? Tippett:So I want to talk tonight about that wisdom that you’ve learned and how it might apply to our lives as parents — not just the spiritual lives of our children, but how we nourish ourselves as we are present to them, and a... posted on May 8 2022 (4,283 reads)

has been lauded as a virtue in most world cultures and wisdom traditions. More recently, scientists have started to study humility, and they’re discovering its many benefits. “Psychologists have recently linked intellectual humility to a host of benefits: showing more persistence in the face of failure, holding less polarized beliefs and attitudes, and being received as warm and friendly by others,” writes Tyrone Sgambati in Greater Good. As a psychiatrist, I think humility springs from deep awareness that the world can only come through our own eyes, experiences, and insights. No matter how knowledgeable or skillful I might be, there... posted on Sep 13 2023 (5,275 reads)

greater good, inspiring us by their example. Gandhi. Mother Teresa. Ruby Bridges (the first black child to attend an all-white elementary school in 1960). It's amazing that our interpretation of experiences can generate such a visceral response. The fact that we get goosebumps when we are inspired or afraid is one of many everyday indicators of just how deeply and intricately connected our minds and bodies are. In fact, the mind and body are an intertwined whole -- and there is great wisdom in the totality of our mind-body experience. There are sparks of this recognition even in the world of technology. An increasing number of tools leverage something called "feedback loo... posted on Jul 12 2012 (16,629 reads)

child doesn’t mean love. It means something that comes from a machine. RW: Going back to your experience with the Gregorian chant and how after a few days, the words really came in. Can you say anything more about that? People might think, what’s the difference? Everything comes in. But there’s something different in what you’re saying, right? GN: Yes. And you see it in children where they’re just singing little children’s songs. There’s a lot of wisdom in these traditional children’s songs and games that have been passed on. I was thinking the other day about a children’s game called “Lemonade.” One child stands in ... posted on Jan 18 2015 (28,266 reads)

for Collective Wisdom - A network of people seeking to embody and radiate outward principles of collaboration, non violence, and wisdom necessary to address existential issues of life and be equipped with the tools, skills, and practices necessary to respond effectively in the world. FIVE CONDITIONS FOR THE EMERGENCE OF COLLECTIVE WISDOM 1. Deep Listening Listening with an intention that the other person feels heard and seen; creating the conditions and presence for the other to more fully come into their own highest being. Listening to what is said and unsaid. Listening with one's full self, with heart, mind, body, and soul. 2. Suspend Certainty Capacit... posted on Apr 29 2015 (23,417 reads)