effective thing you can do to reset your brain and body health each and every day,” -- Matt Walker, Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and Director of the Sleep and Neuroimaging Laboratory. Calling the global sleep-loss epidemic “the greatest public health challenge we now face in the 21st century,” Walker examines the impact of sleep on human brain function in healthy and clinical populations.  Through his work at UC Berkeley, he has been at the forefront of sleep research. He has linked sleep deprivation to psychiatric disorders, obesity, risky behavior, post-traumatic stress disorder, learning, and me... posted on May 31 2017 (58,764 reads)

actually be in pain. The grumpiness that I sometimes sense in people—maybe they’re suffering from back pain or something like that. So how prevalent is chronic pain in our society today? Peter Levine: To give you an idea of the scope of the problem, more people are suffering from chronic pain than from diabetes, cancer, and heart disease combined. So if you’re going through your day at a checkout line, at an [car] mechanics—and some of the people that are your coworkers, your colleagues, that you know—a significant proportion of those people are suffering, usually silently, from chronic pain. And unfortunately, most doctors don’t really have much ... posted on May 26 2018 (21,729 reads)

touch and feel the moment. Growing up in New York City the daughter of two photographers, Sarah was encouraged to “always look for the light.” Every day at school as a child, she would open up her lunchbox to a poem among her snacks, a small gift from her parents that taught her to pay attention to the world and find joy in it. At age 14, her heart bursting with poetry and chutzpah, she performed at the famous Bowery Poetry Club, uncertain of the work but compelled to share it anyway. It was a defining moment: in the dimly-lit space before a roomful of adults, she discovered the magic that happens when we listen to and share our... posted on Jun 17 2018 (10,656 reads)

restoring surgery, steer clear of fund-raising, and market to the people who couldn’t pay them. At the core of Aravind’s baffling success are radical principles and profound insights. They speak to the heart of Dr. V’s selfless vision and demonstrate how choices that seem quixotic, can, when executed with compassion and integrity, yield incredible results. Results that have lit the eyes of millions. **** Dr. V passed away in 2006, but his vision lives on through the work of Aravind and its 4000 person team, that today includes over 25 eye surgeons across three generations of Dr. V's family.  The following are edited excerpts from Infinite Vision:... posted on Oct 1 2018 (9,691 reads)

such as the motive to actualize our capacities to become more of what we truly are.  These inner experiences are wonderful; but they are not the final goal. The hope is, that if we immerse ourselves in these kinds of experiences, they will become part of our personality. The altered states will become altered traits. The peak experiences will become a more enduring plateau, a way of being and something we can share with others.     Aryae:  How does that actually work? lf I engage in a meditation, for example, and if I experience  an altered state, what is it that takes me from the altered state to the altered trait?   Roger: There are several th... posted on Jan 17 2019 (6,248 reads)

“the experience was an eye-opener for students — a powerful way to help them understand, at a visceral level, the nature of violence. And it also sparked Perlman’s lifelong professional and personal interest in the prison system.” What follows is the edited transcript of an in-depth Awakin Calls interview with Dr. Perlman. You can listen to the recording here. Preeta: I'm really pleased to be here in conversation with Lee today. I think the work that he is doing is so tremendous and remarkable. As you said, the ability to radically step into a different environment and be open and curious to the learnings we receive from that. He is a te... posted on Dec 28 2019 (6,885 reads)

more, or feel inspired to become a supporter, please visit soundstruefoundation.org. You're listening to Insights at the Edge, today my guest is James Clear. James Clear is the author of the New York Times bestselling book, Atomic Habits: An Easy and Proven Way to Build Good Habits and Break Bad Ones. He is also the creator of Habits Academy, which is a training platform for individuals and organizations that are interested in building better habits, in life and work. In this conversation with James, my own approach and the approach of Sounds True historically, which has been the depth of internal change and discovery, meets external behavior change, how they... posted on Jan 2 2020 (9,599 reads)

the past ten years, Sachi Maniar has nurtured breathing spaces for young people in the midst of profound intensity. When she first stumbled into the company of youth in conflict with the law, with runaway, orphaned and abandoned children, Sachi felt herself inexplicably at home. The work that blossomed from that feeling would eventually turn into a full-fledged organization that has now touched thousands of young lives, across three facilities in Mumbai as well as 18 other facilities in India. At its core Sachi's work reminds us of each person's fundamental belonging, of the beauty inherent in wholeness, and the power and freedom that come... posted on Jan 9 2023 (2,469 reads)

If you have an idea of what you want to make, what you were put here to do, then just go and do that. And that's much harder than it sounds and, sometimes in the end, so much easier than you might imagine. Because normally, there are things you have to do before you can get to the place you want to be. I wanted to write comics and novels and stories and films, so I became a journalist, because journalists are allowed to ask questions, and to simply go and find out how the world works, and besides, to do those things I needed to write and to write well, and I was being paid to learn how to write economically,  crisply, sometimes under adverse conditions, and on time. ... posted on May 21 2023 (4,488 reads)

brilliant in its entirety, but the part I find of especial importance and urgency is his meditation on social validation and the false merit metric of “prestige”: What you should not do, I think, is worry about the opinion of anyone beyond your friends. You shouldn’t worry about prestige. Prestige is the opinion of the rest of the world. […] Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you’d like to like. […] Prestige is just fossilized inspiration. If you do anything well enough, you’ll make it prestigious. Plenty o... posted on Apr 22 2012 (56,024 reads)

Rather than merely tolerate change, he says, we are all called now to rise to it. We are invited and stretched in whatever we do to be artists — to create in ways that matter to other people. And Seth Godin even sees marketing in this light: Mr. Godin: Marketing isn't advertising; marketing is the product we make, the service we offer, the life we live. And so the question as you go forward is, will you choose this ethical marketing that doesn't involve yelling at people, networking your way to the top, spamming people and lying. Right. But instead it involves weaving a story and weaving a tribe, and weaving a network that means something. Ms. Tippett: I'm Krista T... posted on Sep 27 2013 (29,143 reads)

of the Unwatched Life: A Conversation with Squeak Carnwath Squeak Carnwath is one of the Bay Area's best known artists. Her work has been widely exhibited and she has received numerous awards and grants. At the time of this interview, first published in 1993, Carnwath was a member of the art faculty at the University of California at Davis. In 1998, she moved to the art faculty at UC Berkeley. She is now retired from teaching. Her work can be seen at the Berggruen Gallery in San Francisco or the Dorothy Goldeen Gallery in Los Angeles.—Richard Whittaker, 2007 works: There are so many people who graduate with MFA’s, but after five years not many are... posted on Jul 17 2014 (15,302 reads)

when I met him, he was very prestigious, the most learned and prominent historian in the country. In his private library he had gathered all the primary and secondary documents, as much as that was possible, for studying the history of Venezuela. His house was large and he had a separate structure on the grounds which housed his library. I could talk a lot about this man, but it comes down to one conversation. We were alone in his library. He was expressing his personal feelings about his work and his life and so forth. He had been in Venezuela for thirty or forty years by this time, and he said to me, "You see my library, and you know what I’ve done. You see my life’s... posted on Feb 3 2015 (17,096 reads)

Kasls, of Minnesota, simplified family life by going tiny. Photo by Nichole Freiberger. Andrew and Gabriella Morrison live in Oregon and have two teenage kids, 18-year-old Paiute and 14-year-old Terra. They made the decision to downsize their home four years ago. They now live in a 207-square-foot house with an additional 110 square feet of sleeping lofts. Although their son, Paiute, no longer lives at home, Terra lives in the tiny house full time with her parents. The Morrisons both work in straw bale construction, and run the website Strawbale.com. Tiny house living probably isn’t outrageous to single twenty-somethings. But is it possible for a family? Across... posted on Feb 12 2015 (25,746 reads)

Some go as far as to claim that economic laws are as free from “metaphysics” or “values” as the law of gravitation. We need not, however, get involved in arguments of methodology. Instead, let us take some fundamentals and see what they look like when viewed by a modern economist and a Buddhist economist. There is universal agreement that a fundamental source of wealth is human labour. Now, the modern economist has been brought up to consider “labour” or work as little more than a necessary evil. From the point of view of the employer, it is in any case simply an item of cost, to be reduced to a minimum if it cannot be eliminated altogether, say, by a... posted on Mar 3 2018 (17,653 reads)

Havea on Bryan Stevenson The US has the highest incarceration rate in the world. One out of three black men aged 18 to 30 is in prison, on probation or parole. The US is the only country in the world that has life imprisonment without parole for minors. For every nine people who have been executed, one is later found to be innocent. Bryan Stevenson refers to these statistics when he speaks. It’s a reality that has driven him to devote almost 30 years to working with people on death row. At the time of our conversation, I am halfway through his book Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption. The pages contain story after story of injustice and I am filled ... posted on Mar 27 2018 (7,644 reads)

had over 11,000 screenings around the globe, all linked together in an online discussion about what it will take to move to a more gender-balanced world. In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Tiffany and I spoke about her unusual approach of using short films as a centerpiece to a social change strategy and movement. We talked about her short film, The Science of Character, and also the social science and neuroscience behind character, how you can embody different virtues by working on developing specific character strengths. We also talked about her discovery of the importance of a technology Shabbat, a 24-hour period that she takes once a week free from any screen ti... posted on Aug 11 2018 (6,010 reads)

a man who specializes in grief and sorrow, psychotherapist Francis Weller certainly seems joyful. When I arrived at his cabin in Forestville, California, he emerged with a smile and embraced me. His wife, Judith, headed off to garden while Francis led me into their home among the redwoods to talk. I had wanted to interview Weller ever since the publisher I work for, North Atlantic Books, had agreed to publish his new book, The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief. Over the previous few years my father, grandfather, grandmother, father-in-law, and sister-in-law had all died, and I’d also moved across the country and was missing the friends and... posted on Feb 26 2019 (61,395 reads)

actually something in us that longs to have some contact with, what you call apex predators. Even to the point—we have such a psychological need for this that we can even make up seeing, that we're seeing animals, big cats, because we long for this connection. So can you unpack that? Explain that to our listeners. MM: Sure, yes. That's something that George Monbiot writes about actually in his book, Feral, where he really gets into that side of rewilding, and his work is really exceptional. And what he was talking about was in Great Britain there have been hundreds of sightings of large cats, like mountain lions generally, basically. And so, he talks about how... posted on Jan 14 2020 (8,061 reads)

Judith Blackstone is the founder of the Realization Process, a contemporary method of spiritual awakening that includes embodied, psychological and relational healing. Over the past 40 years, she has developed and taught this process to thousands of people across the world. Among her thousands of clients and students are people from wide- ranging cultures, faiths and backgrounds. Her trainings are sought out by many who work in healing professions themselves, and she's worked extensively with survivors of trauma. Judith's explorations of Eastern traditions include studies in Tibetan Buddhism, a year in a Zen monastery and a 23-year connection to the ashram of a Hindu teacher... posted on Oct 19 2021 (3,056 reads)