More and more of us spend enormous spans of our time captured, optimized, or appropriated as a financial resource by the technologies we use daily. We are caught in a dynamic where our value is determined by our productivity. In her book, Jenny Odell points out, “The convenience of limitless…

American society has become increasingly divided, with people sorting themselves into like-minded groups, othering those who disagree, and siloing themselves from opposing viewpoints. The good news is that people are more complex than the labels we assign them. Here we explore tools for fearless curiosity leading to empathetic conversations across…

Our ancestors’ village was not the global village of the 21st Century, so writes Oren Jay Sofer in the Introduction to his book, Your Heart Was Made for This. The ancient ones did not have to contend with a bombardment of reportings of mass shootings, wars, and other ecological and social catastrophes. Nor…

“Vitality is the essence of what it is to be alive,” says Deborah Zucker, “it is our life energy moving through us and expressing itself uniquely in each of us.” She believes that health and vitality are one and the same, so taking care of our health is absolutely necessary for our total…

Here we explore the emotion of awe and how we can receive its powerful benefits in our everyday life. Awe gives us a break from processing and judging unwanted events and gives us the capacity to see through them—to see a larger picture and we don’t have to travel to…

For millennia, humans have pondered their place in the grand cosmic order of things. If we had the opportunity to speak to our younger self, what would we say? What wisdom could we give to that younger self about the meaning and purpose of life? What does our experience tell…

The French philosopher Descartes (1596-1650) was certain that we could alleviate chaos and provide certainty through rational means. His reigning philosophy was one of separating the mystery of Spirit from the life of the body. Reason ruled and sensing, feeling; intuition, and emotions, took a backseat to logic and conceptual…

We spend a bulk of our time in a very boisterous world of noise. We are in a constant deluge of information and chat whether it is from our email and social media, or the 24-hour news cycles with its constant announcements of breaking news. Even our households can be…

Many spiritual practices guide us in what is known as “waking up.” Even though this process gives us a great sense of freedom and spaciousness, John J. Prendergast suggests that the path to “waking up” is by “waking down.” As we tune into our bodies, we receive messages where our…

After experiencing a spontaneous transcendent mystical experience, Tim Burkett sought spiritual instruction in Buddhist meditation. This was in 1964 before meditation was even on the American radar and there were hardly any Buddhist teachers on the scene. Looking in a San Francisco phone book he found a listing for a…