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"For brief periods, when life breaks our way, it can feel as if we are finally getting somewhere. We may feel that we are finally becoming someone who understands this crazy life. With this self-image securely in place, we may decide that we are good and life is good and that we can share this with others. But things change. A voice or relationship or job or health is lost."
One morning in 2018, writer and meditation teacher Tracy Cochran woke up with little audible voice and just a faint, breathy whisper. In a matter of hours, she was supposed to tell a story and teach mindfulness meditation at the Rubin Museum of Art in Manhattan. Concerned about how she would be able to lead on stage, the moment became another one for Tracy to take refuge in her practice of the past fifty years - to return home to the present moment with an open heart and mind through the sensation of breath. She accepted the circumstances, proceeding with the scheduled engagement. "I told people to lean in, as if I was on my deathbed and about to tell them the secret of life, and they did. All but one person stayed."
In her blog post "Speechless", Tracy reflects, "Meditation and spiritual practice have been called death in life. We die to the hope that our life is taking us somewhere. We let go and allow ourselves to open to a new life, a shared life."
In fact, Tracy learned to let go and open to new life many decades ago during her twenties, when a near-death experience turned into a pivotal turning point. While being mugged by three men on a deserted street in Manhattan one night, her heart opened to "a kind of feeling that cannot be created or destroyed by anyone, only received." "Behind the abandoned tenements, behind my attackers, behind all the appearances in this world, there was a gorgeous luminosity," Tracy wrote in "The Night I Died ". "It was clear to me that this light was the force that holds up the world, into which all separation dissolves."
In her recently released book Presence: The Art of Being at Home in Yourself , Tracy shares stories and suggested practices for taking refuge in moments of presence even in the midst of difficult challenges, thus illuminating deeper truths, grounding us, and making deeper connection possible. The book has been acclaimed by people as diverse as Martin Scorsese (famous Hollywood director who is a regular reader of Tracy's writings), to Sufi teacher Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, and including several meditation teachers like Ven. Bhikkhu Bodhi, Sharon Salzberg, and Jack Kornfield.
Tracy is the editorial director of Parabola, an acclaimed quarterly magazine that draws on the world's cultural and wisdom traditions to explore the deeper questions all humans share. She has taught and led workshops at the Getty Museum in addition to the Rubin Museum of Art, New York Insight Meditation Center, the Jacob Burns Film Center, and at corporations, schools, and medical facilities. She is the founder of the Hudson River Sangha, which is now online and open to all. She also offers one-on-one mindfulness mentoring and teaching. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Psychology Today, O Magazine, New York magazine, Boston Review, and many book anthologies and podcasts. Her essays and offerings can be found on parabola.org and tracycochran.org.
"One of the most liberating things that's happened is that I've gotten over the aspiration to be special. The more I embrace my common, flawed humanity, the happier I am. And the more awake and aware I am." Then she adds, with a laugh, "I've discovered that I love being totally average. Even in the slow end of average. I love it. I'm so happy."
Our upcoming guest believes that we all have within us, "an enormous capacity" to heal and open our lives, by tapping into presence - "the wellspring of our deepest wisdom and compassion". Join us for a dialogue with this presence activist, writer, and meditation teacher on July 6th, in conversation with Richard Whittaker and Rahul Brown . -
Victor Koo is a familiar face in China's tech industry. In the 90s, he was president of Sohu, China's second-largest search engine. Subsequently, he founded YouKu, China's largest online video platform with 500 million monthly users (commonly called the "YouTube of China" and later sold to Alibaba).
Surprisingly, his journey of scaling began to turn inwards at a tech conference in Sun Valley in 2016, when a networking conversation with a young entrepreneur soon turned towards meditation. Upon hearing that Victor had always wanted to try it, the young entrepreneur let go of the opportunity to network with others, instead guiding Victor to an hour-long meditation.
That was the first hour of meditation in Victor's life, a seed that he continues to cultivate through a daily practice now spanning several years. Along the way, on a trip to Thailand, he casually walked into a breathwork course without any context. That session, led by a teacher who had survived Stage-4 terminal cancer through breathwork practice, further opened up his inner world in a striking way. "If I never believed in chakras and energy body within each of us, that session blew all of that disbelief away based on direct experience that lasted over a day."
As Victor's inner journey took root, it has also decidedly altered the course of his work in the world. After transitioning from his role at Youku, Victor shifted his focus to inner-purpose-driven service and investing. In late 2016, he co-founded Tianren Culture - a social platform based out of Hong Kong that aims to promote "One Wisdom, One Health" by encouraging and enabling contemplative practices and healthy lifestyles. It focuses especially on those practices and lifestyles with roots in spiritual and natural wisdom and non-dualistic philosophies, positing that human physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health and wellness is interconnected with the health of the broader environment and ecosystem.
Tianren Culture partners with foundations, NGOs, and businesses to put in place effective social innovation initiatives to improve physical wellness through overall food system transformation, as well as mental, emotional, and spiritual wellness by supporting scientific research and promoting meditation and breathwork practices. The Tianren team is actively volunteering time for Servicespace's AI-related initiatives, including CompassionGPT. Related to Tianren's work, Victor is also a board director of Good Food Fund and on the advisory board of Global Wellness Institute.
Victor's exposure to multiple cultures has been formative in his journey - he was born in Hong Kong, and apart from twenty-five years in China, he has lived extensively in Australia, US, and Japan - with Japan being his current home since the pandemic. He received his BS degree from University of California, Berkeley, where he was also a Regent's scholar and MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he currently serves on the Advisory Council. Victor's professional experience lies mostly at the intersection of the technology and media sectors, as well as private equity and venture capital investments. He continues to serve as Chairman of Heyi (his company that incubated Youku), which now focuses on disruptive innovation and social impact investments in areas such as health, genome, and new protein. He is also a senior advisor of Texas Pacific Group and a business advisor of DeCheng Capital.
"If there was one thing I wish I had known before I started my company, it is meditation (by far!) because of the calm and equanimity that it brings you, and really helps you question the purpose of why you're doing what you're doing." It's a piece of advice that Victor can often be found paying forward now to b-school students and young founders.
Join us in conversation with this founder-turned-server, as we learn more about his journey of scaling inwards, or as he loves to quote Bruce Lee, to "be like water". The call will be hosted by Xue Devand and Birju Pandya. Xue formerly founded one of the "50 most innovative companies of the world" and now currently runs The Space Between, a venture capital fund aiming to be a "sacred hospitality" company that helps inspire wealthholders to transition their consciousness from being owners of money to being the stewards of money. Birju is Chief Mindfulness Officer/Managing Director at Mobius.life, an integrated capital family office, and a long-time volunteer with Servicespace. -
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I believe humanity is undergoing a profound transformation in consciousness. What the world needs most is for each of us to shine our light, love and genius into the realms we inhabit...and to share stories, examples, discovery and practices that will support humanity in taking its next evolutionary step. -- Stacey Lawson
Sitting in a corporate board meeting and planning quarterly targets nearly 20 years ago, Stacey Lawson recalls a strange vision: "We were talking about the next quarter of -- 300 million or 500 million or a billion, and all of a sudden I had this vision of this cascading series of quarter ends, that just never ended. And I thought -- that's the exact illusion, the sort of matrix that we're living in right now and this can't be the true reality."
She quit her job, "stopped everything" and planned a trip to India. On the eve of the trip, she serendipitously attended a talk by a visiting spiritual teacher from India. When meditating under his guidance, she had a sensation of "I've done this many times before." As she recounts, "All of a sudden, even though my eyes were closed, I could see all of the people in the room and I saw them not as bodies, but this absolutely gorgeous, luminous light. I could literally see each light in the room where everyone was sitting -- the bodies of pure essence, pure source, pure love. In an instant, my body and the bodies in that room, the fullness of that light collapsed into one. This little grain of sand that was Stacey kind of just melted into the distance."
She then visited the teacher's ashram while on her planned trip to India -- serendipitously on the date of a great gathering there -- and by the end, realized that she had studied with this teacher before, perhaps in a prior life.
A lifelong student of the world's wisdom and mystical traditions, Stacey is crafting deep bridges between her inner practice and her outer work. As an entrepreneur and agent of change, she is also building bridges between heart intelligence and the corporate business world.
Her belief that humanity is facing an unprecedented time of transformation (accelerating AI innovation, climate disruption, and social/political conflict) has led to her most recent passion project -- The Human Evolution Project (THE Project). Drawing from 20+ years as a speaker and teacher of meditation, inner transformation, and self-realization practices, THE Project aims to bridge ancient science with modern technology to foster a transformative community dedicated to the upliftment of humanity.
As part of this effort, Stacey recently co-created the Benevolent AI Future coalition with leading developers and voices in Artificial Intelligence (AI). The coalition focuses on Wisdom + AI, bringing together builders and funders of AI solutions that incorporate deeper levels of wisdom in service to the public good -- solutions that may not be naturally addressed by commercial markets but are crucial and necessary for a positive future.
Stacey grew up in a rural logging town in Washington state. Unsure what she wanted to do in life, she earned a B.S. in Chemical Engineering, and began working in Silicon Valley. A "big picture" thinker, Stacey quickly realized engineering was not her calling. Her father, a truck-driver-turned-entrepreneur, may be credited for her "entrepreneurial inklings." Stacey made her way to Harvard Business School where she earned an MBA and then spent 15 years as a senior executive in the high-tech industry.
To balance the dominant paradigms of efficiency and scale found in the corporate world, Stacey has taken several sabbaticals for meditation and spiritual exploration. From 2004 and 2011, she spent about six months of the year with her spiritual community in India -- a balance that allowed her to dedicate time to deep inner work while continuing her journey as a leading California businesswoman and conscious leader.
In 2012, Stacey ran for the U.S. Congress in California's 2nd congressional district where she advocated for critical economic, environmental, and social justice initiatives. Then, in 2018, shortly before her 48th birthday, Stacey learned she had breast cancer. While moving through the emotions of fear and dread, she also felt it was "a wake-up call from the universe." Stacey decided against conventional treatment, instead opting to work with her care team to design a personalized plan that ultimately healed her from cancer.
A deep interest in energy healing and biofield research has led to advisory positions with Agastiya Biotech and Siddha Bioscience. She has won multiple awards including being named "one of the most influential women in business" by San Francisco Business Times and recognized as a "California Visionary Leader" by the California Endowment and California Vision 2020.
Today, Stacey continues to work at the intersection of entrepreneurship, sustainability, and conscious leadership, most recently as co-founder, Vice Chairman and CEO of Ygrene Energy Fund, a clean energy finance company which has deployed over $1B in financing for 120,000+ renewable energy and climate resiliency projects. She also currently holds advisory roles with SDG Impact Fund, Second Time Founders, SRM University (India), and Pillai Center for Mind Science. She is an active board member of The Shift Network, Institute for Noetic Sciences (IONS), and Tripura Foundation.
"At heart, I'm a change agent and believe every one of us can make positive change. A change agent is someone who can see others as whole and perfect and powerful. I believe those who recognize and call forth the greatness in others will be the architects of our future," said Stacey.
Join us in conversation with this heart-centered pioneer of change on June 8, in conversation with Kimberly Daniel. -
Traversing through time and space, and through humanness to the beyond, listening is a powerful and underrated practice. So says author, educator, and cultural activist Christian McEwen. She prefers to use the word "listening" not simply for the work of our ears, but as an extended metaphor for openness and receptivity - less actual than symbolic, less physical than metaphysical - rippling out from the self-centered human to the farthest reaches of the non-human world.In her latest work, In Praise of Listening (2023), she offers many accounts of listening as a pathway to realities forgotten and hidden, ranging from intimate anecdotes about family and friends to transformational social narratives from researchers, healers, activists, and more. The book tracks the endangered practice of listening through literature, Buddhism, nature writing, science, and sociology, including interviews with writers and therapists, naturalists, storytellers, and musicians.Christian's latest work might be seen as a cousin to her earlier, popular book, World Enough & Time: On Creativity and Slowing Down (2011), now in its second edition. "From the beginning, I was concerned with how slowness might intersect with happiness, and then again with creativity," Christian writes in World Enough. "Like the English composer Brian Eno, I wanted to find a way of living in 'a Big Here and a Long Now.' It was obvious from the start that this would not be easy."Strewn with a delicious assortment of quotes on slowing down - ranging from Lily Tomlin to Gandhi to Rumi - World Enough also gave rise to a separate book of quotes celebrating slowness, aptly titled The Tortoise Diaries.Growing up in the Scottish countryside, perhaps it was the quietude of her childhood - or its contrast with the fast-paced life in New York she witnessed as a young adult - that drew her life to dedicate her life to listening. Even in her early work as a poet, listening was key to expressing what is experienced beyond the immediately visible. Her writing draws attention to minute everyday subtleties and deeply felt personal experiences. Pausing to listen to a snail as it munches on a leaf, or to a hyacinth growing loudly in its pot, she brings together many different stories of people who've learned to listen and attune.Her work grapples with a range of topics, including gender. In 2004, she co-produced a video documentary titled Tomboys! that celebrates "tomboys of all ages" - highlighting real-life stories of feisty girls who grew up to be spirited women. At the start of the documentary, you can hear Christian's crisp, enchanting voice, "When I was a child, I was what people called a tomboy. The word itself seemed magical to me: fiery, disobedient, gloriously untidy." She's also written a play Legal Tender: Women & the Secret Life of Money (2014), based upon personal interviews with more than fifty women about their relationship with money - intended as a creative catalyst, modeling courage and honesty for its listening audience, both through the play itself and through a linked project known as "The Money Stories" workshops.Christian's thesis as a writer and producer is simple: stories give rise to other stories, and courage and clarity inspire more of the same. She has edited four anthologies, including The Alphabet of the Trees: A Guide to Nature Writing and Sparks from the Anvil: The Smith College Poetry Interviews, based on a series of interviews she conducted with visiting poets. She has written for The Nation, The Village Voice, and numerous other journals, including The Edinburgh Review of Books and the Shambhala Sun.Growing up in the Borders of Scotland "in a big old-fashioned house" with "beautiful shabby rooms and scented gardens" and "a perpetual drone of adult anxiety about school fees and taxes and the latest heating bill," Christian first came to the United States on a Fulbright Scholarship. She has taught poetry and creative writing at a number of venues, including Williams College in Massachusetts, the Zen Mountain Monastery in Upstate New York, and the Scottish Poetry Library in Edinburgh. She has also worked as a writer-in-the-schools for ALPS and the Teachers & Writers Collaborative. Christian has been a fellow, several times, both at the MacDowell Colony, and at Yaddo. In 2011, she received a grant in playwriting from the MA Cultural Council.In all her work, she continues to encourage the reader to take a moment to stop and listen. "In a world of racket and distraction, generous, expansive listening is increasingly under siege. But it remains a skill worth honoring, worth passing on...Many an old story begins with the words, 'Long ago, when animals could speak....' Perhaps the corollary would be just as good an opening.... 'Long ago, when people could listen.'"Join us for a slow conversation with this ardent listener, as we co-create a circle to reclaim this ancient medicinal practice.
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After an inspiring Awakin Call with Madhu Anziani last month, Reinaldo, Madhu and a few more heartful artists are coming back for a unique experiment -- A musical immersion into the three worlds of shamanic journey, through singing, chanting and drumming. About Three Worlds: As per Inca mythology, we inhabit three worlds simultaneously, and many other spiritual practices discuss the “middle path” in a similar way. These worlds are said to exist within us and all around us:Ukhupacha: the “lower world,” that of our unconscious and house of psychological wounds, ancestral baggage, past life influences, and as-yet-realized potential (snake energy)Kaypacha: the “middle world,” which might define the tapestry for our everyday experiences; the primal energy of this world is survival, but when balanced and secure, we can focus on mindfulness and present-moment awareness (puma power).Hanaqpacha: the “upper world,” also known as the world of our becoming, future potential, and possibilities; this may also be a link to where our destiny or purpose feels in alignment with our actions, as if we are “divinely inspired” (condor symbolism).Our hope is co-create a vibrational field for a deeper integration of the three worlds, within and without and we welcome you to join the experiment. Please note that this will be a 75-minute call, including some space for open-mic chants. About Reinaldo: Reinaldo Pamponet is a Brazilian social entrepreneur and an Ashoka fellow. After working with Microsoft for seven years in Sao Paulo, at the age of thirty, he founded “Eletrocooperativa” in 2004 in Salvador, an impoverished northeastern region of Brazil, to offer an innovative learning atmosphere to youth that better prepares them to be active members of society. After educating on themes related to sustainable development, they were challenged to engage their dormant creativity (like singing!) to produce digital multimedia content to drive social awareness, while also promoting their cultural arts and generating income. The project went viral and was later adopted by the government of Brazil. Building on that, he founded ItsNoon in 2009, a social network to connect people at opposite ends of the economic pyramid, helping those at the bottom earn income using digital technology. He’s recently moved to the United States with his wife and two children. Music has always been a integral part of Reinaldo’s life – spiritually, professionally and in community. He calls himself “a terrible musician, a good singer” and one who can play almost any instrument, with his favourite being Afro drums.About Madhu: Madhu is a gifted musician, composer, and sound healer. At the age of 23, a few months short of graduating with a degree in jazz and world music from San Francisco State University, a serious accident left him paralyzed from the neck down, incontinent, and unable to breathe on his own. From his hospital bed, he began to apply sound and energy healing practices, together with his family, discovering the true power of vibration to restore health. A few months later, he walked out of the hospital on his own two legs, an extraordinary healing journey featured in a book on energy medicine. Since his recovery, Madhu has been bringing harmony, vibration, and healing to the world as a vocal looping artist, hypnotherapist, sound healer, and ceremonialist. He is certified in sound, voice, and music from the California Institute of Integral Studies. He has also studied with elders and masters in multiple traditions, including the Pachakuti Mesa tradition of Ancestral Peruvian Healing Arts and Wisdom Healing Qigong. The many ancient languages in which he chants include Sanskrit, Tibetan, Shipibo, Quechua, and Hebrew. For his full bio and recent Awakin Call conversation/toning workshop, please click here. To join, simply RSVP below. You'll be able to see the Zoom link on screen, and it will also be emailed to you.In service,Awakin Call Volunteers P.S. Meanwhile, you can soak in a couple of recent clips from our guests - here and here.
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"As a Westerner, my heart was lifted in the 1980s when I heard about Sarvodaya. It answered my longing for a way to transform our very individualistic and materialistic culture. Thus began my own 40-year journey to translate Dr. Ari's principles into American cities." - Richard FlyerA disciple of the late, recently deceased Dr. A.T. Ariyaratne, who was informally revered as the Gandhi of Sri Lanka, Richard Flyer has dedicated his life to integrating embodied spirituality and the building of community-based ecosystem networks.Author of Birthing the Symbiotic Age: An Ancient Blueprint for a New Creation (2023), he synthesizes his learnings from five decades of experiments and explorations across different nations, wisdom traditions, and organizational structures, seeking a shift from a culture of separation to a culture of connection. The book provides his autobiographical and historical roadmap outlining "how we can emerge from our fragmented and conflicted social networks/silos and create sustainable, interconnected ecosystem networks consisting of local leaders, organizations, businesses, and local government -- in parallel to our already established systems." He concludes that a new culture of connection can only be created from the bottom up by connecting and amplifying the positive work of local communities. Realizing that every crisis in the world is at its root a spiritual crisis, he writes that we must first cultivate "spiritual climate change" within ourselves and practice it daily "in the context of a down-to-earth, face-to-face, local community" rather than "trying to reform, fix, or tear down the systems by which society operates."Birthing the Symbiotic Age is partly based upon Richard's first-hand experiences with Sarvodaya Shramadana, an ongoing grassroots movement in Sri Lanka, founded in 1958 by the late Dr. Ariyaratne. The movement has mobilized millions of poor across 15,000 villages in Sri Lanka to build tens of thousands of small businesses, preschools, health centers, village banks, etc., without any government support -- restoring to the poorest people "control over their own lives and destinies.""Meanwhile, I've gotten to experience Sarvodaya's wise theme and motto time and time again: We build the road, and the road builds us," says Richard. In addition to his decades-long involvement in various regenerative projects in Sri Lanka, Richard has been engaged with a syntropic food forest project in Big Island, Hawaii, and a Local Food System Network in Oahu. He is also the visionary behind Symbiotic Culture Lab, which aims to activate 50,000 micro-bioregional villages, towns, and cities as community networks by 2033.In reflecting on Dr. Ariyaratne's unique impact flowing from the blend of personal spirituality with community-based practice --which inspired Richard's own desire to develop and embody spirit in his community-building work in the West -- Richard writes, "Dr. Ari is an example of living a spiritual life wherein one does not have to make the ego smaller by beating it into submission. Rather, by living a daily, engaged Spiritual AND community life -- being of service to others, with all its challenges and egos involved, and by seeing everyone as sisters and brothers -- our ego identification with everyone keeps growing until it disappears!"Born into a middle-class Jewish family in the 1960s, Flyer enjoyed a typical American childhood until he had his first spiritual experience at the age of twelve. "I connected to a 'Luminous Web' that I recognized as the Ultimate Reality beyond that which we see and feel with our senses. The experience was truly 'trance-ending' -- ending the trance of separation. I was left awestruck and feeling connected to something larger than myself -- in fact, connected to everything." Rather than retreating from the material world after such an "other-worldly" experience, he writes that he "ran TOWARD the world. I was fueled by the desire to embody the Love I had received from those transcendent experiences and be that Love in the world -- to bring the two worlds I have been experiencing together as one."Richard's experiments in "connecting the Transcendent with the Immanent" or "bringing Heaven to Earth" extend well beyond Sri Lanka's villages -- including when he found himself stuck in a confrontation of drug dealers armed with baseball bats, knives, and guns. He also founded Vecinos Unidos (Neighbors United), a non-profit initiative in a high-poverty and high-crime community of 50,000 people in San Diego, and subsequently led San Diego Food Bank, one of the county's largest nonprofit social service agencies. Overcoming his own prejudice and negative feelings about "the business world", he even started his family business in the medical industry in Reno, Nevada, where he parallelly engages in creating in local symbiotic networks by customizing his learnings from Sri Lanka -- a developing country, for an "overdeveloped" western city context.In addition to Dr. Ari, many teachers have graced his journey, including a Vietnam war Veteran in San Diego who taught him about Christianity and service; an Aztec medicine woman in Mexico who taught him what Love and Service in action are; a Tibetan Buddhist Rinpoche who taught him meditation; his wife Marta, who he says "has shown me what unconditional love is."Richard's list of teachers would be incomplete without including nature. After high school, he worked as a Hellitack firefighter at Challis National Forest in Idaho, sometimes rappelling down from a helicopter to fight a blaze and then hiking forty miles back to the station. Years later, he would spend hours in solitude in nature, often with insights bursting forth spontaneously in the form of his poetry. Inspired by Jane Goodall, he spent several years researching pilot whales, often literally immersing himself in their society around Catalina Island. He also pursued a master's degree in biology, seeking to unravel the mystery of whale and dolphin communication.The call will be moderated by Rick Brooks and Preeta Bansal. Rick is the co-founder of the Little Free Library project, a movement that has spawned 60,000 registered Little Free Libraries in all U.S. states and over 80 other countries. Preeta is an Awakin Calls anchor and has served for more than 25 years in some of the most senior posts in the public and private sectors including the White House and the U.S. Supreme Court. Join us for a conversation with this visionary leader, community weaver, and student of nature.
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Lucy Grace never intended to embark upon a formal spiritual path. Yet again and again, she felt called deeper into it.Raised by a young, single mother in an impoverished neighborhood in New Zealand, Lucy experienced significant trauma throughout childhood. Her neighborhood was riddled with gang violence and burglaries. Her mother worked at a secondhand shop, and meager earnings meant they sometimes went without food, heat, furniture, or schoolbooks - much less trips or vacations. They did not have the means for a car until Lucy turned fourteen.Despite the violence and trauma Lucy experienced and witnessed, she often felt joyful as a child. She also had a keen sense that though she didn't fit, she was in the wrong place. As an only child without much exposure to the world beyond her immediate surroundings, Lucy discovered the gift of spaciousness within herself. She describes her relative isolation as a kind of "welfare-child ashram". In her poem, "Kairos Time," she wrote, "I lived my whole life / on a whim and a dime / - on God's time / found solace and / wonderment / in the light that lives / inside the darkest quiet."Since childhood, Lucy has lived many lives, including graduating from college and working as a television journalist for New Zealand's largest national news channel, Channel One News. For 15 years, she worked as a humanitarian aid worker based in Europe for UNICEF, Save the Children, Fairtrade, and Oxfam. She has worked in orphanages and disaster zones around the world, helping to bring relief to people who are suffering.Returning to New Zealand in her early thirties, Lucy navigated a sudden debilitating illness with no recognizable cause. When she was thirty-six, she became a mother and experienced a sense of total separation in which she felt severed from the inner guidance that had accompanied her since she was a child. Many of the things she loved - including her career, marriage, and home - also came to an end during this time.But with a gentle cheerfulness, Lucy sees that her whole life has been about attuning to nature's messages - and learning to move with them. "There are things that want to happen and we can feel that pull," she has said. "And the plans of life are always so much more amazing and incredible than little Lucy's brain can think up."Today, Lucy is a spiritual guide who humbly observes that we are, each of us, teachers. She is also a mystic, holistic therapist, and the author of This Untameable Light, a book of poems that, in Adyashanti’s words, “shine with the light of deeply embodied spirit. A dance of light upon the land.” She is based in New Zealand and offers occasional retreats in other parts of the world, helping "unlock and integrate" the unique truths and wisdom in each of us.Join us on April 27 for a call with this mystic poet and deeply relatable spiritual guide, who regards her mother and daughter as her greatest gurus. My Mothers’ love ...I love you—in all your ways and always will!She taught me God will too, you will too, life will too, no matter what I am, aren't, do or don't do.And what else is there?Somewhere in my marrow is the sense that all of life is benevolentand it loves me like she did, without exception, without expectation-conditionlessShe gave me unearned-love's freedom, no life-lines to toe, no scripts to follow.So who needs dollars and cents?That's her gift, that'sinheritance...Thank you ...We are all haunted, grace-filled beings-I was just trying to live with the hauntings, wasn't seeking, anything.But you brought me to my knees, you broke me bodily (the heart was just the half of it.)You opened me,white flagged the wars in me.My three-foot guru, in gumboot feet...The call will be moderated by our volunteers Mark Peters, and Mili Nair, a young teenager "exploring life through the wonders of sentences and words, periods and exclamation marks"!
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**Please note this call is on Friday, rather than our usual Saturdays.
"Losing all of the basic functions of being a human being was the greatest teacher," says musician and composer Madhu Anziani. "It was an opportunity to go fully into the teachings I had received around energy, sound, and vibration."
In a baseball cap, hoodie, and jeans, Madhu stands behind a table, singing, swaying, and commanding a loop station, easy and natural as can be. There are no visible signs of his serious accident at the age of 23, during which a broken neck and spinal cord injury left him paralyzed from the neck down, incontinent, and unable to breathe on his own. Left only with his mind and its despairing thoughts, amid a flurry of emotions and poor prognoses, Madhu was forced to discover the gaps between his thoughts. And to realize the immense healing potential of his voice.
At the time, Madhu was just about to graduate from San Francisco State University with a degree in jazz and world music performance. He had also just attended his first reiki workshop, a Japanese form of energy healing. Supported by his parents and community, Madhu began to apply sound practices. From his hospital bed, he practiced or listened to them day and night. Two and a half months later, upon his discharge, he walked out of the hospital on his own two legs, an extraordinary healing that was featured in the book, Energy Medicine, by Jill Blakeway. With humility and grace, he distills the process to this: "The primary purpose of a voice is to create vibration. We have this beautiful gift, and we can either create harmony or disharmony." Since his recovery, Madhu has been bringing harmony in a myriad of ways to all dimensions of himself, his ancestors, and the community at large.
Madhu was born and raised in a Jewish-Puerto Rican family in the Bay Area, California. When he was in high school, he learned how to meditate from his grandmother. She also taught him how to do toning, an ancient sound healing practice in which vowels are elongated. "The vibrations can heal on the physical level, and can transform the mental, emotional, and spiritual levels, too." There is the sound, he explains, and then the silence between the sounds. The silence allows for the transformation of the sound to integrate more deeply into cellular memory. Toning, he continues, is a way to create space, and this allows us to live our lives with more spaciousness and flow.
Madhu is perhaps best known as a vocal looping artist, musician, and composer. He studied jazz and world music at San Francisco State University, and is a regular lecturer there. He chants in numerous ancient languages, including Sanskrit, Tibetan, Shipibo, Quechua, and Hebrew. His music can be found on Spotify and other platforms, as well as under the name The Sami Brothers.
Madhu is also a healer and ceremonialist, befitting of his name, which means "sweet nectar of the elders." He offers sessions in clinical hypnotherapy, vocal lessons, sound healing, and ancestral divination. Respectively, he is certified in sound, voice, and music healing from the California Institute of Integral Studies. Sanctioned as a teacher in the Pachakuti Mesa tradition of Ancestral Peruvian Healing Arts, which offers apprenticeship in earth honoring rituals and living in sacred reciprocity with spirits of nature. Blessed by Master Mingtong Gu to teach 5-Organ Sound Healing for emotional purification in the lineage of Wisdom Healing Qigong, Madhu has also been initiated as a stick diviner in the West African Dagara tradition, and serves as a medium between this world, the ancestral world, and the spirits of nature.
"The whole universe is vibration. So when we make vibrations, we are communicating with the whole universe. We are vibrational beings in a vibrational experience."
Please join us with this creative maker of harmony and healing in a call that will be part-conversation, part-workshop, with an invitation to explore sound, vibration, and the essence of being. -
**Please note special time for this call.
"Each of us lives in many different worlds. There's the world of work, the world of our family, and our inner worlds. These worlds inside are the ones we're most responsible for, because no one else can take care of them." - Ajaan Geoff
Thanissaro Bhikku, an American Buddhist monk of the Kammatthana (Thai Forest) tradition and more commonly known as Ajaan Geoff, embarked on a path outside his mainstream American upbringing soon after graduating from Oberlin College in 1971. Having eschewed the campus activism of his day because he didn't want to follow a crowd, Ajaan Geoff once described the defining issue of the day for him not as being the Vietnam War, but a friend's attempted suicide. When the opportunity to meditate in a religious studies class arose for him, he said "I was ripe for it. I saw it as a skill I could master, whereas Christianity only had prayer, which was pretty hit-or-miss."
Born in 1949 as Geoffrey DeGraff, he grew up in Long Island where his father had a potato farm. After graduating from Oberlin College in 1971 with a degree in European Intellectual History, he traveled to Thailand, where he eventually came to study meditation under Ajaan Fuang Jotiko, and then proceeded to become an ordained monk in 1976. His life in the Thai jungles was spartan and the rigorous schedule and training in meditation was a hard one; but it was one that forged monks of a high standard of knowledge and skill in the practice.
The Thai Forest tradition is known for upholding the strict standards of 200+ precepts of external conduct for monks as originally laid out by the Buddha, called the Vinaya. For example, the monks don't handle money and cannot ask for anything that is not freely offered; eat only one meal a day, before noon; do not spend time alone with a woman, or drive. In his early days as a monk, Ajaan Geoff himself didn't think much of the Vinaya. "They were just rules I had to put up with if I wanted to stay in Thailand and meditate. But then I began to see that every time something went wrong in the community, it was because someone had broken a rule. I also began to see the rules as protection for me in my practice."
Five years after this teacher's death, he left Thailand and came to San Diego County, USA, in 1991 at Ajaan Suwat's invitation to help establish Metta Forest Monastery. It is the first monastery in the Thai Forest Tradition in the U.S. Ajaan Geoff was appointed as its Abbott in 1993. Nestled among groves of avocado trees with a spectacular view of Mt. Palomar, the monastery serves as a place of apprenticeship for the monks to master their inner worlds through meditation and the practice of vinaya.
For thousands of outsiders who come to the monastery for visits and stays each year, it offers an opportunity to engage and live around monks who have dedicated their lives to cultivate virtue, concentration and discernment. They meditate, receive the teachings and make offerings. All of this happens in a completely non-transactional way, that Ajaan Geoff calls an economy of gifts, "an atmosphere where mutual compassion and concern are the medium of exchange; and purity of heart, the bottom line." This also helps them keep the practice and teaching in its pure form without getting commoditized in accordance with popular likes and dislikes. "In this country of ours, where democracy and the marketplace are all-powerful, the question of what sells determines what's Dhamma, even if it can't walk or fly. And who loses out? We lose out. The Dhamma doesn't lose out; it's always what it is."
Ajaan Geoff is also a prolific author of books and essays on both Buddhist practice and theory. The topics range from those that have everyday use, such as meditation guides (With Each And Every Breath), to how to deal with aging, illness and dying (Undaunted), to more niche topics, such as the Buddha's use of humor in his teachings (The Buddha Smiles), and the influence of Western Romanticism in the way Buddhism is taught in the west (Buddhist Romanticism). In addition, he is a well-respected scholar and Translator of the original Buddhist Pali scriptures. In keeping with the Forest Tradition, all his books, essays and daily dhamma talks are offered freely through their website.
Join us for a wisdom talk with this inspiring teacher, moderated by Jay Patel and Rahul Brown. -
**Please note special time for this call.As Parag Agarwal started moving up in his 35-year global career with Fortune 500 corporations, he began to notice a lot of suffering around him. “I used to sit in a car with my son next to me playing with a toy while there were kids outside who were begging. Pretty early on, I decided I wanted to do something for the vulnerable.” His heart’s journey started with helping educate underprivileged children. But when his niece sent him videos showing how animals are abused in our society, “it opened a door of awareness for me which cannot be closed.” He decided to dedicate “the second innings of his life” to reducing the suffering faced by animals in India. In 2022, while also serving in his current role as CFO of Dr. Reddys, a multi-billion dollar Indian multinational pharma company, he co-founded India Animal Fund with the blessings of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. India Animal Fund is a backbone organization for ecosystem development of the animal protection movement in India. It works to reduce animal exploitation – including their use for consumption, as objects of research and testing, and other forms of labor – and to enable them to live a life of dignity without fear, hunger, or confinement. “No one gets up thinking I am going to exploit and be cruel to an animal today,” he reflects. “But somehow it has become part of the system… The suffering of animals is intense.” In a relatively short period of time, IAF has been able to mobilize various stakeholders and has positively impacted the lives of thousands of animals. Parag has co-founded several other social impact organizations in this area, including Ahimsa Trust (an organization to catalyze more investment and leadership talent in the field of animal welfare), Plant-based Foods Industry Association (an industry body of plant-based alternatives start-ups), and Physicians’ Association for Nutrition (a body of doctors that educates medical professionals about nutrition). Another pivotal turning point in his life came more recently, when he sat a 10-day Vipassana meditation retreat followed by extensive reading of Buddha's original teachings about the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path. “This has been the start of my real inner transformation. I feel as if I have just taken a few steps on a very long and beautiful path.” Parag is a Chartered Accountant and a Company Secretary and has previously been associated with organizations such as Reckitt, Unilever, GSK Consumer Healthcare & Genpact. He is also the founder of TAP India Foundation with the vision of an India where no child is out of school. Parag’s family has taken a pledge to share 50% of their net worth with society, and are signatories to Living My Promise. Join us for a conversation with this passionate vegan and a voice for the vulnerable. The conversation will be moderated by former Awakin Calls guests Ariel Nessel and Rev. Bonnie Rose. Ari is currently focused on advancing the alternative proteins sector to address animal cruelty. Bonnie is a minister with Ventura's Center for Spiritual Living and has recently authored a book titled Dances with Dogs.
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Mary Ann Brussat learned as a young teenager how to see the sacred in the everyday, and in every culture and context. When her South Dakota-based family moved to Karachi, Pakistan, in the early 1960s so her father, a physician, could work with a USAID-affiliated project for Pakistani doctors, Mary Ann became foundationally trained to be open to and aware of the beauty in the ordinary. She met local Pakistanis through the interdenominational church her family attended, the bazaars, villages, and people right next door -- and began recognizing the sign of the universal connection in that new land and people. "Our family used to say that every time we left our house in Karachi, we would see something we had never seen before," she reflects. "And it was the little things I was most fascinated by."Along with her husband Frederic Brussat, Mary Ann for the past several decades has co-architected SpiritualityandPractice.com (S&P), an excavation of cultural and spiritual resources across faith, culture, and ethnic lines. The website's curation of materials -- from quotations and poems, to reviews of books and films, to virtual courses by leading wisdom teachers -- serve as insightful companions for those on spiritual journeys.She lives and works with the tenet that eternal, universal truths are not localized to holy places. extraordinary acts, or a special day in the week. Instead, they are embedded in our contemporary lives -- in signs, symbols, poems, music, films, rituals, places, daily chores, and relationships. She believes anyone can develop the capacity to connect with the passage of spirit through the quotidian landscape - if they are open to "start where they are." The crux of cultivating this spiritual perspective is to entrain our cognitions -- a subtler form of re-cognition -- to relate anew with the materials of our day-to-day lives.She shares: "a snowflake melting, a bee sucking honey, a seemingly ordinary (hu)man at a traffic light giving you directions. That's it to me. Little acts. Everyday things. Moments when we feel connected to something greater than our individual selves. Times when we serve others." Her lens of perception shares roots with diverse religious traditions and also upholds secular and spiritual sensibilities. "Sufi mystics share that the fingerprint of the beloved is in everything," she shares, "whereas Islam holds that everything that happens inside and outside of us is 'a letter to be read', and medieval monks called it reading the book of the world." In that sense, the practice of being open to the sacred in everyday, ordinary reality propels a multi-faith worldview.This goal speaks through Spiritual Literacy: Reading the Sacred in Everyday Life, a book she and Frederic co-authored in 1996 as a collection of more than 650 examples of spiritual perspectives on everyday experience. They introduced the Alphabet of Spiritual Literacy -- 37 spiritual practices that are common across world religions. In 1999, a Canadian film company turned the Brussats' Alphabet of practices into a 26-episode television series. Soon after, the Brussats wrote Spiritual Rx: Prescriptions for Living a Meaningful Life, an experiential book that helps readers explore practices befitting their particular path.Mary Ann is an interfaith Minister ordained by the One Spirit Interfaith Seminary and a 'Christian-Sufi' Initiate of the Mevlevi Sufi Order that traces its inspiration to Mevlana Jelaluddin Rumi. She remains actively attuned to the idea that "in our era of extreme polarization, we need to find points of connection among groups." She and Frederic, who is a United Church of Christ clergyman, have embraced a far-sighted view of their work from the get-go. They arrived in New York City in 1969 with no jobs and to dream up their own careers at the intersection of spirituality and culture. This was largely unheard of -- but they were persistent. Together they brought along interests and degrees in philosophy, history, media and arts, religion, and political science.In 1972, they started their first publication Cultural Information Service (CIS) where they reviewed movies, books, and events. They described it as a "monthly rendezvous with serious art which offers us opportunities to deepen our perceptions, expand our vision." As their creative approach rippled across New York, they began producing educational materials and television guides -- eventually working with leading media houses to launch a constellation of projects merging the internet, art, media, and spirituality. Their work eventually culminated in SpiritualityandPractice.com, which consolidated previous newsletters and websites to establish sections on more than 2000 spiritual practices. Bonus: Enjoy this 2018 review Mary Ann wrote for Bruce Springsteen's Broadway show in New York City, and the sermons on place, relationships, and service underpinning the show.Mary Ann is a member of Judson Memorial Church, a United Church of Christ congregation in New York City. Judson's long-standing commitment to arts and social justice for LGBTQ+ and immigrant communities bears special meaning for her. The Brussats live in Pilgrim Place, an intentional community in Claremont, California, since 2015, together with their Maine Coon cats, Rumi and Shams.Come join us for a call with this explorer, culture-shaper, and practitioner of everyday sacred adventures.The call will be moderated by Charles Gibbs, an Episcopal priest and Sufi by adoption and Janessa Gans Wilder, a CIA officer turned peacebuilder.
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Life's one non-negotiable is to be loved and to see our love make a difference. - Matthew T. Lee
"Are we becoming more fully alive through Education?" After a decade of conventionally successful research and university teaching as a sociologist, Matthew T. Lee, Ph.D., found himself meditating upon this existential question. It triggered a shift in how he showed up in class, and what emerged at Akron University from collaborations with colleagues were Unclasses. He began to meet the students downtown instead of in a classroom. Each class would begin with a heart check-in (and sometimes haikus!). Open space was carved for silence, contemplation, and even rest. As he changed the context, shifts in content naturally followed. His intense course "Conflict and Justice" at Harvard University expanded to "Conflict, Justice and Healing".
A sociologist and former criminologist, Matt is one of the leading experts in research on human flourishing - a relative state in which all aspects of a person's life are thriving, including the contexts in which that person lives. To "measure what we truly treasure", he took an interdisciplinary approach integrating quantitative social sciences with the deep wisdom of humanities. Currently, he serves as a Research Associate at the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard University and is co-leading the working group on love and care for the Global Study of Human Flourishing, one of the largest studies of its kind. He is also the Director of Flourishing Network, the program's community of practice. Alongside, he is a Professor of the Social Sciences and Humanities at Baylor University and a Distinguished Visiting Scholar of Health, Flourishing, and Positive Psychology at Stony Brook University, as well as a Visiting Scholar at the Benson-Henry Institute for Mind Body Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital.
Matt has extensively researched and written on shifting current extractive systems towards regeneration and "daring to say love". How do we bring the grammar of business into a constructive dialogue with the grammar of love? How might we re-imagine health as flourishing that locates the individual in social, ecological, and spiritual contexts beyond merely the absence of disease? What's the role of creating open spaces in education for greater self-discovery and transformative growth? His most recent three books are: Measuring Well-Being: Interdisciplinary Perspectives from the Social Sciences and the Humanities; The Heart of Religion; and Transcending Crisis by Attending to Care, Emotions, and Flourishing.
Underneath the long list of his leadership positions, courses taught, papers published and awards, a simple insight grounds his daily actions - "Every person is infinitely valuable." Join us for an illuminating conversation with this inspiring teacher dedicated to fostering flourishing and well-being in our world.
This call will be moderated by our past guest and volunteer Navin Amarasuriya, who is passionate about bringing scientifically evidenced practices of well-being to schools around the world, and into his own heart.
[Some useful resources - Measure Your Flourishing Score, Flourishing App, Articles and Journals by Matt. And a couple of recent articles by others that Matt invites you to pre-read for this call --From Accessing Your Ignorance to Accessing Your Love and Fixing The System.] -
**Please note special day for this call to accomodate for our guest Moshe's weekly Shabbat practice. "When you're open to meaningful coincidences, opportunities will present themselves to you all the time." Rabbi Moshe Gersht
Rabbi Moshe Gersht found himself at a pivotal decision point early in his life. At 18, he chose to leave school in response to a forced choice between pursuing his passion for music or graduating instead. It was at this crossroad and subsequent ones that he learned there are two things that shape our decisions: how we see ourselves and how we see the world.
"I wasn't walking about believing in accidents. There were no mistakes in the universe. I was looking for hidden opportunities wherever they could be found. When you're the one looking for silver linings you'll be the one who finds them", said Moshi.
By the age of 20, having "made it" as a pop-punk rockstar, Moshi found himself wondering what living a successful life actually entails. This question led him to Jerusalem, where he experienced a spiritual awakening. He went on to spend two decades in Israel immersed in Torah study, prayer, and meditation as well as the mystical teachings of Kabbalah and Chasidus.
In bridging his spiritual and mystical studies with an exploration of the inner landscape, Moshe brings a new energy to the journey of personal transformation. Today, he is an international speaker, a meditation guide, and spiritual teacher helping people find fulfillment through self-discovery. The spiritual journey is essentially a journey to ourselves, and in being true to ourselves we are able to live out our highest good. "My mission is to share the life-giving wisdom of unconditional love, by empowering [people] to awaken to a higher consciousness," he said.
Many of Moshe's talks share his uniquely holistic approach to a spiritual and fulfilling life. He is a Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestselling author of several books including, It's All the Same to Me, a spiritual self-help guide endorsed by Deepak Chopra, and its companion journal. He also authored The Three Conditions: how Intention, Joy, and Certainty will Supercharge Your Life and the workbook, "The 5 Steps to Manifesting and Co-Creating Your Life".
Moshe grew up in an Orthodox household in Los Angeles (U.S.) and currently lives in Israel with his wife and their children, whom he believes he learns as much from as he shares with them.
Join us on Feb. 18 for a call with this compassionate spiritual guide. -
"Why is it that certain people are vulnerable to life's slings and arrows and why are other people more resilient?" Dr. Richard Davidson, Ph.D, felt guided by this question, and dedicated himself to developing insight into how our brains regulate our emotions.
But in 1992, Richard was inspired by the Dalai Lama to revise his initial question and instead consider: What qualities foster well-being? "His Holiness challenged me and asked why we are not using the tools of modern neuroscience to study qualities such as kindness and compassion rather than negative qualities of the mind such as depression and anxiety. I had no good answer, and on that day, I made a commitment to His Holiness and to myself that I would do everything within my power to help place these positive qualities on the scientific map," Richard said.
That renewed and refocused commitment has generated ripples of goodness. Named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time Magazine in 2006, Richard founded in 2008 the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he has served as a faculty member and professor since 1984. Richard's research is broadly focused on the neural bases of emotion and methods to promote human flourishing including meditation and related contemplative practices. A prolific researcher, he has authored more than 570 articles, numerous chapters and reviews, and edited 14 books. His research has identified four keys to well-being - resilience, outlook, attention, and generosity - that can be strengthened in each of us through practice.
Richard founded Healthy Minds Innovations (HMI), a nonprofit affiliate of the Center for Healthy Minds, in 2014. HMI translates well-being science into tools (including a Kindness Curriculum and the Healthy Minds program and app) to cultivate and measure well-being.
"I really feel a moral calling [to help people develop well-being as a skill], because I feel most people would agree that the trajectory we've been on is not a particularly healthy or sustainable one. Everyone has a role to play in this, everyone can be a participant, just like with climate science. Everyone can play a constructive role in helping the planet heal," said Richard.
Born in Brooklyn, New York, Richard earned his Bachelor's Degree in Psychology from NYU before completing his Ph.D in Personality, Psychopathology, and Psychophysiology at Harvard University. He authored (with Sharon Begley) the New York Times bestseller, The Emotional Life of Your Brain and co-authored Altered Traits with Daniel Goleman. In 2000, Richard was the recipient of the American Psychological Association's prestigious Distinguished Scientific Achievement Award in 2000. He was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2017, and appointed to the Governing Board of UNESCO's Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Education for Peace and Sustainable Development (MGIEP) in 2018.
Join us on February 3 for a conversation with this transformative psychologist and well-being advocate. -
**Please note special day and time for this call.
"Creation is moving toward us; life is moving toward us all the time. We back away, but it keeps pushing toward us. Why not step forward and greet it?" -Rev. Roshi Joan Halifax
In a catastrophe-turned-blessing, Roshi Joan Halifax discovered her rich inner world at four years of age when she contracted a virus that left her legally blind for two years. Today, as a Zen Buddhist teacher, anthropologist, ecologist, social justice activist, and hospice caregiver, she demonstrates a deep capacity to hold societal challenges and catastrophes for the blessing of our collective inner as well as outer development and conscious evolution.
Born in 1942 in New Hampshire, Roshi Joan started out as a scientist in the field of medical anthropology and psychology. During her university years, she became drawn into participating in the US civil rights movement and in anti-war protests in the 1960s. She was first introduced to Buddhism and meditation when she worked at the Universities of Miami and Columbia, and was instrumental in developing the dialogue between science and Buddhism.
Roshi Joan is the founder and abbot of the Upaya Zen Center, a place she calls a "refuge of practice, learning and service for our complicated and fraught world". Upaya is a culturally diverse place, where meditation and compassion meet to reduce suffering and celebrate the gift of life.
Realizing early on how much misery is rooted in the fear of death, Joan set an intention to be present for people going through the death and dying process. She became a pioneer in the field of end-of-life care and works in other areas where hope is scarce. She has served as a hospice caregiver and Buddhist teacher in conventional medical centers and other clinics in remote areas, such as the Himalayas, where she has worked with death row inmates and refugees. Joan`s work with dying people and their relatives as well as her efforts as a social and environmental activist have been recognized and awarded internationally.
She is now present as we face collective fears of extinction and death of our social systems, our planetary ecologies, and our very notions of humanity in an age of machines. She is an artist, a prominent author of many books, a teacher, an abbot, and founder of the Nomad`s Clinic in Nepal. Most of all, though, Roshi Joan is living her Buddhist vision with everything she does. Apathy is not an enlightened path, she says. Instead, she advocates engaged Buddhism, social activism and, most of all, compassion as responses to the multifaceted crises we are confronted with today.
Join us for an inspiring conversation with this renowned Buddhist teacher, compassionate caregiver, and social activist.
**Please note special day and time for this call (Friday instead of Saturday). -
Margaret Jacobs grew up in the American West but, like many others, never considered the history of the place she grew up in as particularly interesting or worthy of study. "There was, and still is, so much mythology around" the West, she said. "I had not been interested in this kind of 'boots and spurs' or 'wagon wheels and sunbonnets' type of history."
But a pivotal history course in college changed her trajectory. She realized there was much important work being done in the field, and she accepted with curiosity the sense of responsibility and inquiry that came with her self-identification as a descendant of White settlers of Indigenous lands. Jacobs is now an award-winning author, professor of history, and Director of the Center for Great Plains Studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln who studies the history of the American West in a transnational and comparative context with a focus on women and gender as well as children and family.
Jacobs has published over 35 articles and 3 books, including White Mother to a Dark Race (2009), which won the esteemed 2010 Bancroft Prize. The book concerns government-enforced separation of Indigenous children from their families through the use of distant boarding schools and other institutions, and the role of White as well as Indigenous women with respect to those policies. Her more recent scholarship examines how government authorities in the U.S., Australia, and Canada continued to remove Indigenous children from their families after World War II through foster care and adoptive placements in non-Indigenous families. She also highlights how Indigenous women mobilized transnationally to reclaim the care of their children.
Jacobs' most recent projects delve into truth-telling, healing, and reconciliation efforts. Her newest book, After One Hundred Winters: In Search of Reconciliation on America's Stolen Lands, has two goals: to confront the history of American settler colonialism, and to explore possibilities for reconciliation. "I have come to see reconciliation not as a one-time effort that our nation will achieve and then move on," she says. "I see it, indeed, as a practice, as a way of life, in which all of us can engage. This practice is based on considering how the past has shaped us today and how we can work to promote healing and respectful relationships. I'm a big believer that settlers, like myself, should start where we are and use whatever strengths, skills, and resources we possess to practice reconciliation within our own communities and institutions. This must be done in close collaboration and partnership with Indigenous colleagues."
For Jacobs, reconciliation is not simply about returning land; "an ongoing sustained relationship" is needed to really achieve reconciliation. She collaborates with Rosebud Lakota journalist Kevin Abourezk on Reconciliation Rising, a multimedia project that showcases Indigenous people and settlers who are honestly confronting painful and traumatic histories, and who are creating pathways to reconciliation, including through voluntary repatriation of land by settlers to Indigenous peoples.
She is also the co-founder and co-director of the Genoa Indian School Digital Reconciliation Project, a space for telling the stories of the American Indian children who attended Genoa, the stories of their communities, and the stories of their descendants. The Project, which was featured in The New York Times, aims to repatriate government records of Nebraska's Indian boarding school back to their families and tribal nations, to "bring history home."
Jacobs received an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship in 2018 for her project, "Does the United States Need a Truth and Reconciliation Commission?," which compares reconciliation efforts between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in the U.S., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. From 2015-16, she served as the Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions at Cambridge University.
Join us in conversation with this "pioneering" scholar and practitioner of historical uncovering and reconciliation. -
"Make the world your Temple." In 2019, Sarah Tulivu had been given this clear instruction by two Taoist masters, including her direct teacher, Master Waysun Liao. At the time, Sarah, ordained as Fong Yi, was living and training full-time as a monk in a Taoist temple in Lago Atitlan, Guatemala. For six years, she had practiced meditation and the embodied consciousness practice of taiji (tai chi) in the lineage of Taiji Tao for six to seven hours a day. In the two years prior to her monastic life, Sarah had been a deep student of the Buddhist tradition across Nepal, India, and Thailand. It was now time for her to venture into the world. "Find the Teacher and the Teaching everywhere, and in everyone," said Master Liao.
While she considers herself still in training, Sarah has done just that. With her gentle presence, light-filled eyes, and a tender smile, she shares her wisdom in retreats and workshops around the world, mostly in Tuscany, Ireland, Vienna, Lebanon, and Greece. She also returned to be part of the world of humanitarian aid, which she had been doing in East Africa and the Middle East before her immersion in contemplative practice. This second time around, Sarah was called to conflict in regions -- like the border of Lebanon and Syria during the Lebanese Revolution (2019-2020), and again in 2021. Sarah also led Taiji Tao practices in support of the aid workers, addressing burnout and healing at its root. She has seen how cultivating inner stillness and harmonizing the complementary forces within can sustain the great need for compassionate service.
For her early childhood, Sarah was in Canada and Italy. Despite Catholic influences in the Italian town of her upbringing, her family didn't observe any particular spiritual or religious traditions. At 16, Sarah began to travel, and she encountered many different traditions and approaches to the spirit. She never felt herself an "-ist" of any particular doctrine, but rather, embracing the diversity of ways to find truth, love, service, freedom, and beauty. For Christianity, "it was only when I was in Kenya, in a slum of Nairobi," she reflects, "that I met the life of Jesus through different eyes, thanks to the volunteers there who lived his teachings in a very different way than what I had seen growing up. For example, I was reminded that Jesus lived with the poor and the marginalized, and spoke up to oppressive powers."
When she moved to the Tao Temple at 24 years old, it happened in a very organic way, just as the "natural consequence, the natural next step in my journey." A monastic lifestyle seemed to be the best fit for her priority of "waking up," so she followed the call. The tradition happened to be Taiji Tao. Taiji, Sarah explains, is often translated as "the unlimited, absolute, boundless..." Similar to other wisdom traditions, Taiji Tao is a path that aims to return us to our origin, to our most natural state, which means to return us to a state of harmony, balance, and union of the yin (feminine) and yang (masculine) aspects of ourselves, our communities, and the world at large.
For a taste of Sarah's presence and offerings, please explore her introductory video and a series of 10-minute meditations, for all levels.
Please join Cynthia Li and Rohit Rajgarhia for this special offering -- part conversation, part workshop on taiji and embodied consciousness practice -- as a response to the great challenges and the great flux in the world. -
The thread binding together Shaylyn Romney Garrett's perhaps unorthodox career path - spanning diverse fields of research, writing, activism and social entrepreneurship - is community. "I've studied it, experimented with it, been fascinated by it, and been frightened by it," she says, adding poignantly, "I often feel that community is something I have thought more about than almost anyone but have less of than almost everyone."After a profound 3-year personal healing journey, Shaylyn experienced the wisdom in the old adage "If you want to go far, go together." In 2019, she decided to spend a year engaging in a series of radically simple but transformative monthly challenges to shift from "I" to "We" - 15-minute connections, meeting her neighbours and hosting dinner parties - giving birth to Project Reconnect. When suicide rates, bullying, loneliness and polarization are on the rise, Shaylyn believes that such everyday interactions are where we do the "heart work" required to transform our hyper-individualistic culture and reclaim the power of "We."Shaylyn is a co-author along with best-selling author Robert D. Putnam of The Upswing: How America Came Together A Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again, which has been acclaimed "a magnificent and visionary book," and "a must-read for those who wonder how we can reclaim our nation's promise" to once more turn the tide from "I" to "We". Her writing also includes uniquely revealing portraits of religious communities across the United States in American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us, which won Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson Award for best political science book of 2010-11. Her thoughtful opinions, writing, and research have been featured in numerous outlets including TIME Magazine, The New York Times, National Public Radio, BBC Radio, and the PBS Newshour.She is also the founder of Project Reconnect and a founding contributor to David Brook's Weave: The Social Fabric Project, an Aspen Institute initiative. Formerly, along with her husband, she co-founded Think Unlimited, a nonprofit in Jordan that helped thousands of young Arabs find their voice and their place as changemakers in their countries and the world. It won multiple international awards while also partnering with the Queen of Jordan.Shaylyn holds a BA magna cum laude in Government from Harvard University, and is a returned Peace Corps volunteer. She’s also a certified Holistic Health Coach, as well as a permaculturalist who loves to get her hands in the dirt, and thinks a lot about healthy soils as a metaphor for healthy human communities. She now lives in Southern New Hampshire with her husband James Garrett, their daughter Sophie and son Aeon, and their loyal dog Dewey (named for John Dewey, one of her favorite Progressives!)Join Shayna Parekh and David Bonbright for a conversation with this remarkable author, planting seeds for a new story of "we" in the garden of her own life and that of others.
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Cornelius Pieztner, currently a high-impact financial professional, spent the first 45 years of his life at Camphill - a network of intentional communities co-founded by his father Carlos Pietzner. The communities were designed for children and youth with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Through his interactions and work with teenagers with pronounced developmental disabilities, Cornelius realized that his primary work was not to fix the "other", but to work on himself to cultivate tolerance, acceptance, and love."The inner aspect of community" as he calls it, became one of the central inquiries of his life and work - "What would be needed for an aggregation of people to understand themselves and experience themselves as a community of people?"For more than 30 years, Cornelius has carried this inquiry into leading roles at the intersections of philanthropy, investment, social impact enterprises, transformative education focusing on the well-being of the planet, and commercial ventures toward a human-centered economy. Currently, he serves as the CEO of Alterra Impact Finance GmbH, an impact investment, management, and advisory firm in Switzerland with private equity investments in several European companies. Until 2021, he served as Managing Director of Mind & Life Europe, founded by the Dalai Lama. He also served as Chief Financial Officer on the Executive Board at the Goetheanum, General Anthroposophical Society, Switzerland (2002-2011), with affiliates in 90 countries and approximately 10,000 related institutions in agriculture, medicine, and therapy, (Waldorf) education, ethical banking and business, and the arts. He was the President of Camphill (life-sharing) Communities in North America.Growing up in a community that had no concept of individual ownership or income, Cornelius also developed a deep interest in understanding money and working with it in new ways to foster greater belonging. His earliest experiment was to set up a youth group fund with the principle, "put what you can, take what you need". His various leadership roles in finance have been guided by his vision of "positive economy" to catalyze a shift from consumerism to "enoughness", rationality to wisdom, and self-interest to compassion for others.Cornelius is also the steward of the Pietzner Art Collection, composed of over 1,500 artworks from his father and several other revolutionary artists. He is a partner at NOW Partners and serves as a member of the Board of Directors of the Karl Konig Institute in Berlin Germany, among other privately held European companies. He has also served on Advisory Boards for Gross National Happiness Center in Bhutan, B Corps Europe, Partnering for Global Impact, and OOOM World. He is the author and editor of several books (Candle on the Hill, Village Life) and presents on various topics in conferences internationally. Born in Northern Ireland in 1957 and having grown up in Pennsylvania, USA, he received his degree (Highest Honors) in Political Science from Williams College, Mass., and was awarded a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship. Pietzner lives near Basel, Switzerland and Vienna, Austria.Join Birju Pandya and Susan Clark in conversation with this remarkable agent of change, impact investor, and community builder.
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"Disability is not the characteristic that defines you; it's the characteristic that others project onto you, and it's up to us to change those perceptions." - Haben Girma
As the first deafblind graduate from Harvard Law School, Haben Girma aims to help eradicate "ableism" in society, the assumption that disabled people are inferior. "We are not inferior. But society often sends this message," she says. Now a distinguished human rights lawyer advocating for disability justice, she is an internationally recognized beacon of empowerment and inclusivity - appealing not to a sense of charity, but rather to a belief in societal opportunity and the creative potential that comes from honoring the multi-sensory nature of human perception.
Haben reminds business leaders that disabled persons spark growth and innovation. "Employees with disabilities drive innovation. Disability creates a constraint, and embracing constraints spurs inventive solutions," she wrote in The Financial Times. "Our history has numerous examples of people with disabilities leading advances in science, technology and other fields."
And she notes that many of the tools developed by people with disabilities benefit non-disabled colleagues as well. One of the first working typewriters, for example, was developed by a couple - a sighted man and blind woman - who sought to send secret love letters to one another. "After much deliberation, the lovers came up with a tactile solution. By treating blindness as a design challenge, they developed a revolutionary method for producing print by touch." Similarly, a blind astronomer developed a non-visual system for studying stellar radiation, converting complex data from space into sound - a system that expands the pattern detecting techniques for sighted astronomers as well.
Haben has transformed disability into opportunity at the cutting edge of many innovations herself. She came up with the idea of having transliterators in the classroom who would narrate discussion for her using an assistive listening system into her headphones (Haben can hear higher pitched sounds) so that she could follow the back and forth of the debate. Going further, Haben aided in development of an ingenious text-to-braille communication system using a braille device connected to a keyboard so that people can type her messages, or their speech can be transcribed such that she can then converse with them. Along the way, she's developed both personal non-visual systems for understanding things as varied as salsa dancing, rock climbing, and handling electric saws.
Her graduation from Harvard Law catapulted Haben into the global spotlight, and she was subsequently honored by President Obama as a White House Champion of Change. Former President Clinton, Prime Justin Trudeau, and Chancellor Angela Merkel have also formally recognized her innovative work and advocacy. Her journey from a child learning to communicate through touch to a formidable Harvard Law graduate ignited her passion for justice and equal access, and is upliftingly captured in her memoir, Haben: The Deafblind Woman Who Conquered Harvard Law- a Publisher's Weekly Bestseller and Oprah Magazine "Book of the Month" favorite.
Haben's influence extends beyond her individual achievements; it resides in her pursuit of systemic change. She works to ensure that technology is a tool for all, not a barrier. As a leading advocate for digital accessibility, Haben collaborates with tech giants and governments to make websites, software, and products user-friendly for people with disabilities. Her impact is not confined to legal frameworks; it spans across industries.
Born in California to an Eritrean mother and Ethiopian father, Haben's life journey has been a testament to the power of embracing the creative potential of uniqueness to forge unexpected connections. Her advocacy for disability rights has paved the way for a more accessible and compassionate world. Her work, as she aptly puts it, is about "changing the way we think about disability" - a mission that reverberates far beyond the classroom and courtroom.
Join us in conversation with this trailblazer whose journey of empowerment and advocacy has touched hearts across the globe. **Note: This call will be 60 minutes, to support the hands and wrists of the typists assisting with the call. - Vis mere
