Please join us for a special dialogue between James O'Dea and Nipun Mehta -- both of whom have dedicated their lives to service as conscious activists as well as active agents for the awakening of consciousness.
James will open with an invocation that will mirror the arc of their conversation -- "soul awakening, heart opening, light shining, love flowing, wounds dissolving, peace radiating." Given his own journey with front-line activism in violent conflict zones (Amnesty International), to running a foundation that supports impactful service (Seva Foundation), to then leading an institute aiming to bridge science and spirituality, James' dialogue with Nipun will explore the inevitable flow of inner transformation into external service and change, touching upon the integration of inner and outer work. Both speakers are story-tellers, with profound personal stories and encounters with saints and mystics across numerous traditions.
Both an activist and a mystic, James O'Dea is a former President of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, Washington office director of Amnesty International, and CEO of the Seva Foundation. He worked with the Middle East Council of Churches in Beirut during a time of war and massacre and lived in Turkey for five years during civil upheaval and coup d’etat.
He has taught peacebuilding to over a thousand students in 30 countries. He has also conducted frontline social healing dialogues around the world. A mentor of emerging leaders, James is an Honorary Fellow of the Laszlo New Paradigm Institute. He is also a member of The Evolutionary Leaders group and on the Advisory Board of The Peace Alliance and Kosmos Journal. James is author of several books, including The Conscious Activist, Cultivating Peace, Soul Awakening Practice (June 2017), and Creative Stress.
Nipun Mehta is the founder of ServiceSpace, a global community at the intersection of technology, volunteerism and gift-economy. Most recently, Nipun has designed, created, and gifted a new pod technology to support collective learning and intelligence, awakening of spirit, and emergence. ServiceSpace's pandemic response has showcased the unique beauty of its global ecosystem.
Nipun has catalyzed a global social movement of community builders grounded in their localities, connected by unique non-commercial, labor-of-love technology, and rooted in practices for cultivating love, nonviolence, selfless service, and compassion. The ecosystem has reached millions, attracted thousands of volunteers, and mushroomed into numerous community-based service projects as well as inspiring content portals. ServiceSpace harnesses the collective power of external networks and our deep, inner resources and interconnectedness to create a distributed social movement founded on small, local individual acts of kindness, generosity and service that ignite shifts in individual and collective consciousness. Nipun was honored as an "unsung hero of compassion" by the Dalai Lama, not long before former U.S. President Obama appointed him to a council for addressing poverty and inequality in the US. Yet the core of what strikes anyone who meets him is the way his life is an attempt to bring smiles in the world and silence in his heart: “I want to live simply, love purely, and give fearlessly. That's me.”
