manipulations of those who foment that disconnection for their own short-term gains. Deep down, somewhere below the roots of consciousness, I sense we all know that in gratitude, in nature itself, we are more powerful than those forces of disconnection. By coming together in gratitude, we rediscover enough shared loving strength to outlast and transcend those negative forces. And we do so in a way not motivated by mere resistance, but by becoming re-centered in the fundamental beauty of life. How does The Nature of Gratitude inspire gratefulness and related actions (love, kindness, compassion, etc.)? How do you think art brings gratitude to life? Tom: Participation with ar... posted on Mar 5 2020 (5,912 reads)

most radical thing any of us can do at this time is to be fully present to what is happening in the world.” For me, the price of admission into that present was allowing my heart to break. But then I saw how, in the face of overwhelming social and ecological crises, despair transforms into clarity of vision, then into constructive, collaborative action. “It brings a new way of seeing the world, freeing us from the assumptions and attitudes that now threaten the continuity of life on earth,” Joanna said. Her lifelong body of work encompasses the psychological and spiritual issues of living in the nuclear age and is grounded in a deepening of ecological awareness t... posted on May 22 2020 (5,222 reads)

what the underlying needs of his father might be, that were leading to this long-held strategy of criticism. This inquiry allowed him to shift the momentum of the discussion with a simple question, "Dad are you concerned and just want me to benefit from your experience? Seeing into his father's needs allowed Thom to halt the patterns of judgment in that moment. To shift from seeing his father as a didactic, know-it-all to a caring parent who wanted to contribute to his son's life, and help trouble-shoot his problems. "It was instantaneous for me, and the thing I noticed was -- he didn't have to change, but I got to hear him differently. Right after that I was hoo... posted on Jul 11 2020 (7,832 reads)

public lexicon the concepts of “othering and belonging.” For powell, "othering" hurts not only people of color, but whites, women, animals and the planet itself, because certain people are not seen in their full humanity. Belonging is much more profound than access; “it’s about co-creating the thing you are joining” rather than having to conform to rules already set. Born in Detroit the fourth son of a minister and sharecroppers, powell has focused his life’s work on how a belonging paradigm can reshape our world for the better. What follows is the edited transcript of an Awakin Calls interview with powell. You can listen to the call in its... posted on Jul 18 2020 (5,621 reads)

following piece has been adapted from Thrive Global I first met Master Mingtong Gu 8 years ago. A friend had invited me to his studio in Petaluma, CA, for a qigong workshop. Qi (“chee”) means life-force energy, gong means cultivation. Slow, easy movements. Low risk enough. And evidence-based. I was a doctor of internal medicine, trained to think critically and methodically, cautious of anything that might fall into the realm of “miracles.”  But I was also desperate. I had suffered for years with complex autoimmune illnesses, including Hashimoto’s thyroiditis and chronic fatigue syndrome—the shadow conditions of Western medicine. Despite conv... posted on Aug 3 2020 (13,450 reads)

For You, Tomorrow For Me.” This is the meaning behind ayni, a living Andean philosophy and practice that awakens a balanced and harmonious relationship between nature and man.  In Andean cosmology, this is expressed through complementary opposites such as male/female; sun/moon; gold/silver. Their interaction is a form of reciprocity called ayni.  One of the guiding principles of the way of life of the Quechua and Aymara people, this equilibrium of exchange and mutuality, which has been practiced since ancient times (since before the Incas), creates a cycle of connectivity and support essential to social and spiritual wellbeing. Anthropologist Catherine Allen... posted on Sep 4 2020 (4,933 reads)

was looking to buy a horse that could be a backyard buddy, a friend to their current quarter horse mare and new member of the family. She didn't want to spend a lot of money, so I suggested we go to the local monthly horse auction to see if we might rescue one of the horses from a potential death sentence. For those of you who are unfamiliar with horse auctions, many times the meat buyers end up taking the unwanted animals at low prices. There are always horses there who have plenty of life left and just need someone to show up and recognize their value, see their heart, and offer them a space where they can just be a loved horse. We found a few older horses who seemed to be dump... posted on Nov 24 2020 (11,698 reads)

your responsibility or the way of showing your gratitude. And so the simple technique that I teach my students is: “When your mouth drops open, click the shutter?” And it is this shock of recognition, this joy,  this wonder that shows itself in great art. To me photography is a way to do just that;  to call out in a moment of awe: “Will you look at that! Will you look at that!” Getting people to receive…to see the gifts they’ve been given.. life itself!  Life along the roadside, with the flowers and the weeds, and the pebbles and the trees, and the sounds of birds! And looking up and seeing the clouds, the light and the shadows. We&... posted on Dec 14 2020 (9,609 reads)

are open to us, we can take responsibility for and help to protect the land that we occupy. The land which in a sense we personify. In modern Western society, we want to preserve everything and we want to live forever. We wage war on old age and write songs about being forever young. Because death is seen as no more, no less than the end of the line—something to be held off and resisted—we live in constant fear of it. But to the Celts, death was inextricably intertwined with life. Every month the moon died and was reborn. Every winter the Sun died and was reborn. The tide came in and the tide receded. To think that you could avoid these natural cycles was not only unthink... posted on Mar 9 2021 (11,042 reads)

alchemical journey into the heart of things was just an old story our fathers, groping in the thicket of their own obliviousness, told their children to get them to sit still. Now, we had fire—we had the tale of an uneasy tryst between a man, a woman, and an apple to help us understand our unflattering origins. Thanks to science, to true knowledge, we had the account of an inexplicable explosion at the beginning of time, the explosion that began this feverish rush of madness we call life. In the grand scheme of things, there was no room for Obatala and his golden rope. There was no room for my people. There was no room for me. I must have understood my teachers supremely well ... posted on Apr 25 2021 (6,491 reads)

of that, that idea of surrender. I don’t help him, I don’t make up the images with him, I may be guilty of that sometimes, but I can’t think of one right now. TS: You mentioned that you didn’t even hear Rumi’s name until you were in your late 30s. I’m curious, when you heard his name or you read your first Rumi poem, did you immediately go up into flames or something like that? CB: [Laughs] TS: I mean, the karma of your life was about to be forever changed. CB: That’s certainly true, but not exactly the first one. That was a Robert Bly conference, where he thought it would be a great afternoon writi... posted on May 29 2021 (5,291 reads)

resident Steve Elkins has spent most of his adult life as a musician and filmmaker. His first feature documentary “The Reach of Resonance,” which took him ten years to complete, won the prize for “Best Film Essay” at Montreal’s International Festival of Films On Art. Elkins has recently completed his latest film, “Echoes of the Invisible,” which took him literally around the world and into the lives of scientists, monks, artists, and journalists to explore the search for silence in an increasingly noisy world. Steve Elkins in Tuva. I caught up with Steve recently (before the coronavirus pushed us all indoors) at Dripp Coffee in do... posted on Jun 27 2021 (6,783 reads)

for Reawakening to the What Our Souls Know and Healing the World) Published by Harper One & Harper Collins UK (July 2021) We know things in the core of our being that we have not necessarily been taught. And some of this deep knowing may actually be at odds with what our culture or religion or nation has tried to teach us. This book is about reawakening to what we know in the depths of our being, that the earth is sacred, and that this sacredness is at the heart of every human being and life-form. To awaken again to this deep knowing is to be transformed in the ways we choose to live and relate and act. The problem is that we keep going back to sleep, or otherwise live in ways tha... posted on Jul 14 2021 (4,941 reads)

social justice, and here I was, a professional who was pursuing the most unjust act -- of taking knowledge from the people, making them anonymous, getting rent from that knowledge by sharing it and doing consultancy, writing papers and publishing them in the papers, getting invited to the conferences, getting consultancies and whatever have you. So then, a dilemma rose in the mind that, if I'm also an exploiter, then this is not right; life cannot go on like that. And this was a moment of great pain and trauma because I couldn't live with it any longer. So I did a review of ethical dilemma and value conflicts... posted on Sep 3 2021 (3,734 reads)

there an underlying spiritual dimension behind the myriad forms of Qigong that by its very nature, invites us to simply and directly access deeper levels of being, pure awareness and the experience of Presence in daily life? If this is the original intent of Qigong, in what way can this ancient art be practiced as a Portal to Presence? These questions and the perspective that informs them stem directly from many years of my personal and professional experience as a psychologist, student and teacher of Qigong and Tai Chi Chuan. My own journey through the complex and often confusing landscape of these disciplines and practices has led me to some of the insights and ideas I would like to ... posted on Nov 9 2021 (4,468 reads)

oldest indigenous healers, and also of our great religious and spiritual traditions: suffering is the soil in which wisdom and compassion grow; it is the school from which we graduate, committed to healing others’ hurt. Recent scientific studies on post-traumatic growth yield similar conclusions. This is what I know after fifty years of clinical work with traumatized people and from wrestling with and learning from the ordinary challenges and heartbreaking losses of my own long life. In medical school in the 1960s, I’d learned to enter the inner world of troubled children and older people struggling with life-threatening illness and also to listen to my own confusio... posted on Nov 30 2021 (4,639 reads)

and editor for the New York Times Book Review, the Forward, and Columbia Journalism Review. In The Quiet Before, he tells stories from the last five centuries that have not come down in bold, in history, but that incubated developments that we later experience as defining, from France to Rome, from Moscow to Ghana to Tahrir Square. So, you know, I’m always interested in where the inquiries and passions that you hold, that you follow, were planted in your early life, in your childhood. And, you know, I see you as much as a historian as a journalist. And I know, for example, that you are a grandchild of Holocaust survivors. So I don’t know if that is a ... posted on Apr 18 2022 (6,525 reads)

no spiritual life that does not involve, does not start, intimately and inescapably, with the Earth.” The Rev. Fletcher Harper believes that he felt God while mourning his father’s death on a solo camping trip in Montana. A violent hailstorm struck one night, and he sought shelter in the lee of a rock. “At about three in the morning, I felt this deep sense of well-being,” he recalls. “I realized that I was going to be OK. I thought, ‘I can move on with my life now.’” Later in his life and career when interviewing hundreds of people from a broad spectrum of religious and non-religious backgrounds, he discovered th... posted on Nov 17 2022 (1,903 reads)

M S Subbulakshmi.  “I was wailing. Subbulakshmi’s voice soaring high and low, calling out to that divine-beloved, the voice of the poet who lived hundreds of years before us, the fierceness of their devotion, the ultimate surrender of the devotee, the madness of love, the pathos of separation, and the anticipation of union; all of this is etched in my memory,” he recalls. From that experience, Indian classical music became a fount of his practice. Raghavan is a lifelong student of the arts, whose outlook on life and living is steeped “at the intersection of kindness, spirituality, sensuality, music, flow, and poetry.” The poems of the saints from... posted on Dec 15 2022 (1,963 reads)

longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love — whether we call it friendship or family or romance — is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other’s light. Gentle work. Steadfast work. Life-saving work in those moments when life and shame and sorrow occlude our own light from our view, but there is still a clear-eyed loving person to beam it back. In our best moments, we are that person for another. In learning this afresh — as we must learn all the great and obvious truths, over and over — I was reminded of a passage by James Baldwin (August 2, 1924–December 1, 1987) from Nothing Personal (public library) — his 1... posted on Feb 19 2023 (6,374 reads)