Meditation: A Compass and a Path
"When I started meditation in the 1970s, people like my parents would say that 'Meditation is staring at your navel. It's self absorbed.' I'd been through medical school and I'd say that when you're in medical school, you go in a room, you close the door and you don't come out for four years. But no one says that's selfish. Everyone knows that it is preparation to do something valuable for society... posted on Mar 20 2012, 34,682 reads

From Selling to Serving
"The topic for this week's meeting was: 'What are you doing to keep your business going in these crazy-making economic times?' Several people said they have upped the number of cold calls they're making; others talked about creative ways they're using social networking to market themselves. Some are revamping their web sites and blogs; a few are exploring new business ideas, as they worry that the... posted on Mar 19 2012, 40,959 reads

Broken Bodies, Broken Minds, Amazing Spirits
"Yesterday I went to the nursing home to visit my step mom's grandma. She just got out of the hospital recently where she underwent some serious operations. I wanted to surprise her after work so I stopped by for a quick visit. When I got there she was happy to see me. We hugged, kissed and exchanged greetings. Then I heard a woman crying. It was my great grandma's roommate. The curtain was drawn ... posted on Mar 18 2012, 5,808 reads

A Lost 5-yr-old Finds Family 25 Years Later
One day in 1987, 5-year-old Saroo Brierley spent the afternoon begging for change with his brother at a local train station. When it was time to go home, the boys boarded what they thought was the correct train. They were wrong. Exhausted, the young brothers fell asleep, only to wake up 10 hours later on the other side of India, hundreds of miles away from their family. 25 years later, using littl... posted on Mar 17 2012, 17,749 reads

How to Be Alone
This charming and chirpy video pays tribute to the happy wholesomeness of being alone. Tanya Davis recites her poem about the ways of solitude, gently cataloging all the places where aloneness can bring freedom and healing. Whether at a lunch counter, park bench, mountain trail, or on the edge of a dance floor -- all we have to do is love ourselves enough, to love being alone.... posted on Mar 16 2012, 10,309 reads

9 year old Autistic Social Entrepreneur
Kent Melville's father was skeptical when his son first said that he wanted to use the profits from his successful summer lemonade stand to start his own soda company. Aaron Melville, who teaches business classes at a local college, did not believe his 9-year-old autistic son was ready to run his own business. He told Kent to wait until he was older. His son's response brought tears to his eyes a... posted on Mar 15 2012, 26,626 reads

Jeff Skoll on Story-telling & Social Change
One of Jeff Skoll's passions is storytelling. It stems from his youth, when he hoped to be a writer and inspire people to help solve the world's biggest problems. Skoll took a detour on that path when he met Pierre Omidyar and became eBay's first employee and president. Ultimately that detour enabled him to tackle his early passions on a scale that he could only have dreamed of before. He is famed... posted on Mar 14 2012, 7,148 reads

3 Little Monks and a Moment of Truth
"This is Ankur," our host Sachi had said, with the catching enthusiasm she's known and loved for, "He's an amazing photographer and has recently gone totally 'gift economy'." Meaning that he offers his photography unconditionally as a gift, inviting recipients to 'pay it forward.' I look over at the young man seated in front of me. An unguarded face lit now by a smile both shy and warm. "What's yo... posted on Mar 13 2012, 39,717 reads

Office Workers Raise 5 Day Old Kitten
"He was all soaking wet. The house had been power washed earlier but no one knew there was a baby kitty over in the bushes or that he had gotten wet. I cleaned him off with paper towels in case he had offensive tasting soap on him and put him back down and went back inside so the mama could get her baby. After much sitting there watching him cry, she walked away and didn't come back. I ran over... posted on Mar 12 2012, 19,495 reads

How Language Enabled Innovation and Evolution
"How did 'culture' develop, exactly? Language, says evolutionary biologist Mark Pagel, was instrumental in enabling social learning -- our ability to acquire evolutionarily beneficial new behaviors by watching and imitating others, which in turn accelerated our species on a trajectory of what anthropologists call 'cumulative cultural evolution,' a bustling of ideas successively building and improv... posted on Mar 11 2012, 34,128 reads