Awakin Call

"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.

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.

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. 

"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 Flyer A 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.

**Please note special time for this call.  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"! 

**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.

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.

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, 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, 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. 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, 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).

**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.

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.

"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 what she calls "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.

"For a child who has been struggling to read, discovering how to crack the code of reading is like learning to do a magic spell that suddenly opens the whole world to you. You are getting a passport to an entirely different future in which you can trust your ability to shape your life, and change your world." -- Rayna Dineen A passionate educator, social innovator, and children's literacy advocate, Rayna Dineen has infused her humanitarian and professional passion for lifting up young children with a sense of service guided by a deep spiritual practice. At a time when two thirds of 4th graders in the United States are unable to read proficiently at grade level -- and with illiteracy a major pipeline for unemployment, incarceration, and homelessness -- Rayna Dineen holds a vision of a world in which all children are lovingly and effectively supported to become confident readers and emotionally literate citizens. Rayna has dedicated the past 40 years of her life to researching and implementing the art and science of teaching children how to read and thrive. Experience has taught her that all children can learn, regardless of their personal and socio-economic background, the language they speak at home, and whether or not their parents read to them. So her primary focus has always been to support the kids who struggle the most. She currently directs Reading Quest, a Santa Fe-based organization which provides free structured literacy tutoring and social emotional skills to hundreds of undersupported, struggling readers. Reading Quest employs a team of 24 reading specialists who tutor 450 low income students in reading every week. Rayna's creative approach to literacy, which she has finetuned over many years, draws on evidence-based scientific research about the critical importance of phonics, as well as of play, loving community, and a growth mindset. The effectiveness of Reading Quest's approach has been beautifully documented in two short videos: The Story of Reading Quest made by SONY and Breaking the Boundaries of Literacy made by Meow Wolf. What inspired Rayna's passion for teaching children how to read? Several threads have run through her life since she was a child: a love of reading, learning, and teaching; a dedication to the path of seva, or selfless service; and a commitment to social justice and inclusion for those who are often left out. In elementary school, she hosted classes in her family's basement for kids in her neighborhood. In high school, she started a club to help people with disabilities. During her college years, she started a dyslexic students organization, and worked at several schools and camps focused on supporting kids with special needs. Upon graduating, she worked at a residential school for troubled teenagers where she learned a lot about what works and what doesn't work with young people. She went on to get two Masters degrees from Teachers College at Columbia University, including one in Counseling Psychology. It is at Columbia that Rayna met Brian, who was a doctoral student as well as a Transcendental Meditation practitioner and teacher. They bonded over their passion for education, and their mutual desire to live a life of service guided by a deep spiritual practice. Upon getting married, they gave all their belongings away, and embarked on an open-ended pilgrimage to sacred sites around the world, with the intention of meditating for world peace. After a year of traveling through Europe, the Middle East, Pakistan, and Nepal, they arrived in India and were serendipitously introduced to Amma-ji, the hugging saint, who became one of their greatest inspirations on the path of selfless service, and the initial reason they moved to Santa Fe. In 2000, Brian and Rayna founded the Santa Fe School for the Arts & Sciences which they envisioned as a "sanctuary school." Rayna served as a teaching principal there for 13 years. She has also worked as an education consultant for EL Education, a transformational education non-profit serving hundreds of schools in the US. She has consulted for Harlem Village Academies, Heritage and Polymath schools in India, and Discover Learning in Tanzania - a collaboration between Save the Children and UC Berkeley. Rayna contributed to the ELA (English & Language Arts) Primary Literacy Foundation Skills Block portion of the EL Education K-2 curriculum, one of the country's most highly rated ELA curriculums. Rayna later supported a group of middle and high school students to start a literacy campaign called Hooked On Books, and some of the young literacy activists who gave a TEDx talk about that initiative later became Reading Specialists at Reading Quest which she started in 2016. Rayna also provides workshops on teaching reading and positive classroom management for teachers, tutors and parents. She contributed to the writing of Management in the Active Classroom, a highly regarded positive classroom management book for educators. and the EL Education book Learning That Lasts. While working in the trenches of children's literacy for the last few decades, Rayna has given a lot of thought to the question of how to end illiteracy, and has been invited to consult on policy issues at local, state and national levels. She agrees with Oakland-based NAACP activist Kareem Weaver, and the producers of a 2023 documentary titled The Right to Read, that the current literacy crisis is both one of the greatest civil rights issues of our time, as well as one of the most solvable issues of our times. She believes in the power of young people to change our world and loves supporting children as they discover the joy and magic of reading. Join Rahul Brown for a conversation with this dedicated teacher, social innovator, and champion of service.

When Dr. Akil Palanisamy recounts his recovery from a debilitating illness during medical school, he says it began with two words: "bone broth." In hindsight, this may not sound so surprising, because Akil (or "Dr. Akil," as his patients know him) has been a doctor, author, and educator at the forefront of the food-as-medicine movement for the past 20 years. Dr. Akil has been described by leading integrative doctor Mark Hyman as "a unique triple threat in the field," combining expertise in functional medicine, Ayurveda, and the Paleo diet and ancestral lifestyles. At the time that bone broth was given to him as a "prescription," however, Dr. Akil was a vegetarian. He had renounced meat a few years earlier "for ethical, environmental, and spiritual reasons" and had become an active member of the San Francisco Vegetarian Society while in medical school there, having completed his undergraduate work at Harvard. The Ayurvedic practitioner he had sought out for his ailment -- because conventional medicine and physical therapy did not help -- was well aware of this. But she saw it as a necessary means to nourish his depleted body and rebalance his excess "vata" (or "air" energy). Dr. Akil was torn. What had started out as a repetitive stress injury to his wrist -- while writing his senior thesis in biochemistry at Harvard University -- had now escalated into chronic pain, severe fatigue, and a weight loss of 30 pounds (from his already lean baseline of 138). He had to take a prolonged leave of absence from medical school. In his desperation, he turned to the story of the Buddha. After practicing an extreme form of asceticism that left the Buddha weak and near death, he was visited by a milkmaid who offered some milk. Despite the taboos, he accepted the offer and eventually regained his health. The Buddha would go on to teach about "The Middle Way," living by neither indulgence nor deprivation. Dr. Akil reached a similar turning point. He started with bone broth, which he could rationalize as being "animal bones that were to be discarded." Eventually, after more stalled periods of healing, he decided to experiment with eating meat again. "I could not fulfill my dream of becoming a doctor without a healthy body." With a nutrient-dense diet that supported his individual constitution, Dr. Akil tried other alternative and complementary therapies, including a holistic chiropractor who practiced functional medicine -- or root-cause medicine. He would heal his gut, regain his weight, and eliminate the pain for a full recovery, allowing him to graduate from the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine, then complete a residency program at Stanford Medical Center. He went on to receive a fellowship in integrative medicine with Dr. Andrew Weil at the University of Arizona, study Ayurveda in Southern India at the Arya Vaisya Chikitsalayam, and certify in mind-body medicine from the Georgetown University Center. With this breadth and depth of knowledge, Dr. Akil has treated thousands of people living with chronic diseases and conducts clinical research studies. He serves as the Department Chair for Integrative Medicine at the Sutter Health Institute for Health and Healing (IHH) and as IHH Physician Director for Community Education. Dr. Akil has also served as a consultant with the Medical Board of California for many years. A widely known speaker and educator, he is the author of two books, The Paleovedic Diet: A Complete Program to Burn Fat, Increase Energy, and Reverse Disease -- a customized Paleo diet that incorporates spices, specific fruits and vegetables, intermittent fasting, and an Ayurvedic lifestyle -- and most recently, The Tiger Protocol: An Integrative 5-Step Program to Treat and Heal Your Autoimmunity. Dr. Akil lives in Sacramento, CA. In his free time, he enjoys playing tennis, traveling, and spending time with his wife and daughter. Originally from India, he grew up in Singapore before immigrating to America. Join us in conversation with this "Middle Way" practitioner of medicine and healing who is skillfully weaving East and West, ancestral and novel.

Danny Almagor and Berry Liberman are pioneers of impact investing in Australia. In 2007, the married couple founded "Small Giants", a rare 100% impact family office that invests in businesses driving positive impact for people and planet. Sounds like a dream job? But this wasn't the dream they started with. As a child, Danny wanted to be an astronaut. He enrolled in aerospace engineering as an imagined pathway to be Captain Jean Luc Picard of the next Starship Enterprise. But witnessing a devastating earthquake while travelling in India planted seeds for a different form of service. Straight out of college, he let go of a lucrative job opportunity and founded "Engineers Without Borders" in Australia, mobilizing thousands of engineers to make a difference via aid work and education in marginalized communities across the world. Berry, on the other hand, was deeply drawn to storytelling. After studying acting in Australia, she moved to Los Angeles and began her career in Hollywood. After a short time, however, Berry's focuses shifted to using business and capital as a force for good, in a world that was desperate for radical change. These changes in career and mindset coincided with Danny and Berry's meeting and marriage. For two decades since, they have lived and worked together, bringing their diverse gifts - their skills, wealth, and networks - into alignment with the simple and profound Gandhian principle: "Be the change you wish to see in the world." In 2007, wandering through Hong Kong airport, the couple stumbled upon Bo Burlingham's book Small Giants. A book about companies that chose to become great instead of big. Inspired, and with Bo's blessings, the couple started Small Giants with a new vision that business can and should be a force for good. At a time when the term "impact investing" hadn't even been coined globally, they committed to moving 100% of their wealth to solely positive impact businesses - something that's extremely rare even today in the impact circles. Small Giants also went on to become Australia's first certified B-Corp. "You guys are just weird hippies with money. This is not how business is done," somebody told them. Yet, not only did Small Giants flourish, but in 2013 they also launched Impact Investment Group (IIG) where many more investors joined the journey of aligning their wealth with their values. This led to more than $650 million worth of impact investments by 2020, and IIG consistently performed in the top quartile of all venture funds in Australia. Come 2020, the pandemic and the lockdown, instead of shrinking in times of uncertainty, they've launched a new impact funds manager Sentient Impact Group, to further mainstream the idea of harnessing capital to benefit the living world. Danny and Berry recognize that if we reallocate capital without changing ourselves, we just change the face of the problems. "From oil barons, we will move to having solar power barons." That's where they see the work of Small Giants Academy, a not-for-profit accelerator, education and media initiative, to help move hearts and minds towards more authentic life-giving choices within, and greater harmony without. Additionally, they have founded over a dozen ethical, sustainable, and regenerative businesses in several sectors including agriculture, property development, and impact investing. Between them, they have received dozens of awards including a Medal of the Order of Australia, Social Entrepreneur of the Year, and UN's Shared Values Award. Danny has a flair for combining adventure with values - he was part of a team that broke the record for racing a solar car across Australia from Darwin to Adelaide; guides impact safaris to places like Bhutan, Israel and Palestine; and loves jumping on the trampoline with his three kids. Berry was the Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Dumbo Feather Magazine (now a podcast), which has reached over 500,000 people. She has interviewed hundreds of the world's deepest thinkers, philosophers, and change-makers and believes that "stories have the power to heal us and give us a vision of the way forward." Together, they have been the best sounding boards and greatest blessing in each others' lives helping them make more authentic and compassionate choices, and nourishing the best in each other. They are also parents to three young humans and do their life's work in service to them and to the generations beyond. Please join Ari Nessel and Navin Amarasuriya in conversation with this remarkable couple on a beautiful, courageous and inspiring journey to change the world both within and beyond.

How does it feel to see yourself as an "error" in the system? When you try out over 40 jobs and you fit into none? From system error to futurist, Ali Mahlodji discovered his sense of purpose in the midst of his life's difficulties. Having zigzagged his way from refugee to technology entrepreneur and CEO to global thought leader, he helps children and at-risk persons navigate the multiple paths to a sense of purpose in an uncertain world and often amid difficult circumstances. And he does so by drawing on his own inner and outer journey. As a boy, Ali had no idea what kind of career he wanted when he grew up. He envisioned a Handbook of Life Stories that would feature people in a variety of jobs from all around the world and would be available for anyone to borrow from libraries. When he was 30, he launched that vision as a digital platform (whatchado.com) with a few friends - an opportunity made possible by enhanced technology, social media, and the internet. At the time of its launch, whatchado.com featured 17 stories. Today, it is Europe's largest video job orientation platform featuring nearly 8,000 stories and hundreds of company profiles, including partners in education and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). If you asked Ali whether his younger self knew that he would one day become an award-winning entrepreneur, he would likely say no. "Life itself starts and ends by chance, and in between we think we can make plans for the next 40 years which is crazy. Life is a zigzag...The most beautiful thing about life is its uncertainty," says Ali. Ali was born in Tehran, Iran in 1981. His parents, both professionals in academia, took Ali and fled persecution in 1984. The family left Iran in the middle of the night and traveled to Turkey before making their way to Vienna, Austria. By the time Ali was 10 years old, he had lived in 13 different apartments. In Vienna, his mother cleaned for an architecture company while his father stocked groceries. When he was 13, Ali's parents divorced and he developed a stutter. He went on to drop out of school at 18, just before his exit exams. Ali remembers, "My father always told me to find out what I don't want to do, so the only way to do that was to try things out." And so he did, exploring more than 40 jobs before returning to finish his education in his late twenties. Ali went on to earn a Bachelor's Degree in Computer Programming and joined the technology sector. After his father passed away, Ali felt called to do something that felt more meaningful, so he left his high paying job as a Global Systems Engineer and became a grammar school teacher until founding whatchado.com. Ali said, "A lot of young people don't have any idea of what to do in their future. It's so powerful when you have a chance to talk to someone about your experiences. We started this platform to show people if they want to have a job one day, don't think there's only one way to get there." Passionate about helping prepare youth for the future, Ali dedicates 50% of his work to young people pro bono. In his TEDx Talk, Ali encourages young people to question the status quo, to be grateful so they do not end up acting in greed, and to believe in the future because "we need the energy to create the kind of world we want to live in." In his voluntary work, Ali also works with adult prisoners and youth at-risk of exclusion. The other half of his time he works with leaders and focuses on professional development. Since launching whatchado.com, Ali has gone on to create start-ups such as futureRocka, ALIDO, and futureOne (which also has a podcast called futureOne HEROES). He is a best-selling author of multiple books including Und Was Machst Du So? (or, And What Are You Doing?), Next Level WORK, Ent-Decker Dein Wofur (or, Discover What You're Doing For), and Work Report. He has worked with various companies and organizations including Google, BMW, IBM, Siemens, Mastercard, Microsoft, Red Bull, and the United Nations. He has won numerous awards including HR Excellence Award and New Work Award (twice each), Voices Award for Best Business Podcast, Digital Communications Award, and Andreus Peace Award, among others. Ali currently lives in Vienna with his wife, whom he describes as "the woman of his dreams," and they have two super cool daughters. Ali travels around the world as a keynote speaker on topics such as focus and simplicity in business, mindful leadership, leading new generations, diversity and inclusion, and "the art of making one's own life authentic." Join us in conversation with this master speaker and author, who inspires us to live with relentless enthusiasm and compassion through all the zig-zags of life.

"Every person - every place is a map to somewhere else." - Michael Nye Alejandro went hungry as a child and describes hunger as a "lion in your stomach that wants to be fed." Christine became a mother at 15 and expresses her hopes to "build a home across the street from my parents." Taylor reflects on her brother who lives with mental illness: "The great thing about him is he is always creative," and, "Unfair things that people shouldn't say are 'crazy' and 'are you retarded?'" What these individuals have in common is that they are all subjects of the soft lens of photographer and audio documentarian Michael Nye, who has been traveling the world for 30 years to capture unique stories, images, and voices. "Each face invites you to listen," he writes. "Stories are often found resting on the edges of surprise and revelation. Everyone knows something important and valuable, a precious wisdom born from experience." Michael's work focuses on remembering and holding on to voice and story and image and presence. One person at a time. "What is forgotten is lost." He can spend up to four days with a subject. He will then, for the purposes of his exhibits, distill everything down to one image accompanied by a five-minute sound clip. "It's a slowly revealing process, like unwinding a ball of string.... It's not about those people, but about humanity." Wherever he travels, Michael carries an antique 8x10 camera and a voice recorder. He has been aptly described by National Public Radio as "part reporter and part anthropologist" too. His projects have taken him to Iraq during the first Gulf War, refugee camps in Palestine, as well as Siberia, China, Morocco, and Mexico. His documentaries, photography and audio exhibitions, "Children of Children -- Teenage Pregnancy," "Fine Line -- Mental Health/Mental Illness," and "About Hunger & Resilience" have traveled to more than 150 cities across the United States. His newest exhibit is called "My Heart Is Not Blind -- About Blindness and Perception," based on seven years of listening to men and women who are blind and visually impaired. Michael explores how perception and adaptation are deeper than we can imagine, and much more mysterious. "How does anyone, blind or sighted understand the world outside themselves? These conversations focus on the deep and shifting pools of perception and the mystery of transformation. Our other senses, separate from sight, have their own wisdom." In 2019, he published a book by the same name, My Heart Is Not Blind - About Blindness & Perception, and in 2023, launched a podcast with 47 episodes devoted to the subject (Season 1). Season 2 of his podcast (forthcoming) will focus on Hunger & Resilience. Michael has received numerous awards, including the Mid-America National Endowment for the Arts grant in photography and two Kronkosky Charitable Foundation grants. He has also received the San Antonio Arts & Letters Award and the Dr. Jacob Bolotin Award from the National Federation of the Blind. He has participated in two Arts America tours in the Middle East and Asia. His work has been featured on NPR's All Things Considered. Michael is currently working on a series of essays/photographs relating to the nature and complexity of photography and aesthetics. Michael writes: "Photography is not just about Photographs, they are also about what is imagined or remembered inside and outside the borders of the photograph at that moment in time. Mood rearranges understanding. Care attaches weight and gravity. Experience wraps its arms around a moment. Perception rises like bread and is rarely limited to what is directly in front of us. Photographs specialize in time travel moving from now to then. The language of 'looking' goes deeper than surfaces." Before full-time photography, Michael practiced law in the appeals court for ten years. He lives in San Antonio, Texas, with his wife, the poet Naomi Shihab Nye. Please join Pavi Mehta and Danusha Lameris in conversation with this gifted photographer and keen listener of the soul.

Stephen Lewis, a social catalyst of community transformation and healing, was shaped by the classroom and medicine making activities that existed within his grandparents' kitchen. Without a college education, Stephen's grandparents held degrees in the practice of hospitality, leadership formation, and business. They were wise elders, farmers, food alchemists, educators, and community healers who imparted wisdom about life, the Sacred, and responsibility to family, friends, and neighbors who visited, ate, or graced their kitchen. Today, Stephen leads and instigates change and healing in faith communities, higher education, and social entrepreneurship. He is an innovative, organizational change strategist and a leadership development specialist serving as president of the Forum for Theological Exploration (FTE). He is also creator of DO GOOD X, an accelerator and a community of support designed for underrepresented and under-resourced social entrepreneurs who are passionate about developing businesses that do good in the world. He has co-authored Another Way: Living and Leading Change on Purpose and A Way Out of No Way: An Approach to Christian Innovation. During the past 20 years, Stephen has worked to inspire the next generation of artists, healers, freedom fighters, faith-inspired leaders, and entrepreneurs to live and work on purpose. What he learned and experienced in his grandparents' kitchen continues in his work of cultivating faith-rooted change-makers and centering BIPOC leaders' diverse, lived experiences, religious practices, and reflections on the Sacred. As a deeply curious individual driven to widen his understanding of God, calling, purpose, and mental health, Stephen leads with the desire to inspire, encourage, and form a new generation who yearns "for ancient wisdom that can withstand the big questions, worthy dreams, and severe tests of resilience and perseverance that greet or confront them daily." Through the years, his curiosity led him to explore mystic traditions of Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and African-centered wisdom traditions and discernment practices, as he shares in Another Way. The Late Elder Malidoma Some, innovator, spiritual teacher, and expansive thinker, reminded Stephen of his formation and the seeds that were planted in him by his grandparents and the generations before them: "What you woke up to is not something that is external to you. It's internal. It's your nature. It's who you are...The time has come because your ancestors have woken you up to a plan that you must take to heart...You are cut for this work. You have been cut all along. You needed something to fire you up in the direction of bringing your gift to the community in your work, which has to do with healing." Stephen has a background in business and finance and is an ordained minister with a Master of Divinity degree from the Divinity School at Duke University. In addition, he is a sacred herbalist and student of Master Herbalist Karen Rose and Sifu Falokun Fasegun. Stephen has reclaimed "the spiritual giftedness of his own twoness -- being both African and American" by excavating the African spiritual wisdom and genius that runs through his blood and is rooted in Burkina Faso and Nigeria. Further noted in Another Way, Stephen explains, "Why? Because this is the soil that birthed the soul of the Black church and its syncretized expressions of spirituality, and that in turn made possible the survival of Black people in this country. These sources nourished a communal sense of purpose, steeped in the multi-generational resistance and resilience of freedom fighters, warrior-healers, and dream defenders working to create a better life for future generations." One of Stephen's guides and theologian, mystic, and philosopher, Rev. Dr. Howard Thurman, shares in his 1980 baccalaureate speech at Spelman College: There is something in every one of you that waits, listens for the genuine in yourself--and if you cannot hear it, you will never find whatever it is for which you are searching and if you hear it and then do not follow it, it were better that you had never been born. You are the only you that has ever lived; your idiom is the only idiom of its kind in all the existences, and if you cannot hear the sound of the genuine in you, you will all of your life spend your days on the ends of strings that somebody else pulls. Stephen's journey and experiences have led him to connect with the Sacred and to be intentional about listening for the "sound of the genuine" within. In doing so, he follows his ancestral call illuminated to him through a vivid dream: "Fear less. Retrieve the ancestral gifts entombed in the graves of your community. Share this healing wisdom to create a more hopeful future for others." Join us in conversation with this healing leader and changemaker!

"All bodies are radiant but not all radiance is visible: stars radiate visible light; planets and donkeys and couches radiate infrared waves. (If your couch is emitting visible light GET UP IMMEDIATELY!)" -- Amy Leach Everything is visibly illuminated under Amy Leach's virtuosic pen. Whether she's writing about beavers, migratory birds, mesquite trees, or the moon, to read her words is to see things in a new light. To see in things a new light. And to find your mind being woken up, your conventions jostled, and your ribs being tickled multiple times along the way. Arguably no other writer in the world waltzes so delightfully between scientific fact, poetic digression, philosophical conjecture, and a flair for the comedic. Her debut essay collection, Things That Are, shines a spotlight on everything from the passionate yearning of pea tendrils, and the particularity of panda bear palates, to the perturbability of caterpillars, the oracular nature of mushrooms, and the dynamic between planets and their moons. Described as "a descendent of Lewis Carroll and Emily Dickinson," Amy defines her genre simply: Words. And what she conjures up with denizens of the dictionary is incantatory, full of incandescent observations, and almost always intoxicated with an unsentimental admiration for Things. That. Are. To read Amy Leach is to find yourself frequently wondering, "Is that a real word?" And then you encounter in the singular glossary of Things that Are (alongside her definition of "vasty") this unequivocal response: "Do not let anyone tell you these words are not words; all words are words." But "even more than words, I think I love music," confesses Amy, who plays bluegrass and the piano, "If a word doesn't sound right, I don't care if it means the right thing, it's not the right word. I can sort of get swept away with soundy things." In the realm of prestigious recognitions, Amy's soundy words have done their own share of sweeping, carrying away the Nautilus Book Award, a Whiting Writer's Award, and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Award. Her much-awaited second book -- published nine years, two children and a move from Chicago to Montana, after her first -- is titled The Everybody Ensemble: Donkeys, Essays and Other Pandemoniums. It is at once a book of praise, a sharply intelligent critique, and a musically attuned, scientifically informed philosophy of life and living. Inasmuch as it does anything else, this "effervescent tonic of a book" makes a winsome case for everybodyism. Where universalism maintains only that "all humans will be saved, whatever their sect or non-sect," Amy's everybodyism espouses a more playful and radical redemption for "not just all the human rascals but also all the buffalo rascals and reptile rascals and paddlefish and turkeys and centipedes and wombats and warty pigs." While Leach's admiration for Earth and its inhabitants is seemingly inexhaustible, it is not unaware. Her essays surface, often in lyrically satirical ways, the inconsiderate and often unconsidered impact we humans -- with our conquests, our categories, our need for control and our appetite for consumption -- have on this finite and fallible world. The trajectory of this essayist's writing is not predictable like an orbit, but incalculable like a dream. It seems to follow an inner impetus, bent only on discovering what happens when the writer's thought breaks free of habit, and encounters itself and this shape-shifting world. "There are not just cliches of phrases and words," Amy maintains, "but cliches of thought too, and that is something worth fighting." Part of this fight on the page involves "an exorcism of personal and cultural programming." To root out, so as not to simply reproduce conventional thinking. "I feel like writing crystallizes all of somebody's strengths and faults. You get to know yourself.... What I love about writing is that I can think the way I want to think because I can see all my thoughts there on the page. I can see my thinking; I can see where I've gotten into easy thinking, and I can take it out." If you are looking for a message in her work, you might find one, but not because Amy intended it. "I don't really write for a message, I write for myself. If someone else finds a message in it, then hooray!" What she is much more interested in is much more disruptive. "A lot of the things that I'm celebrating, like babies. music and donkeys, are really beautiful confusers of certainty." A graduate of the University of Iowa's MFA program, Amy currently resides in Bozeman, Montana, where she is a creative writing and nonfiction instructor at Montana State University. Rumor has it (and if it doesn't it should) that in this role she primarily instructs her lucky students on the art and science of liberating their pens from instruction. "I grew up in a church that taught you all the rules. How to go to heaven, here's what to follow -- and it's all dogmatic," says Amy, adding with a laugh and a paraphrased rendition of Hafez, "But how you really get to heaven is, you get on a drunk mule, and you recite poetry." Embedded at the heart of Amy's work is also a full-throated celebration of antidogma. A lifting up of all the unwieldy and ultimately undefinable being-ness at large in our world -- a being-ness that, despite the 21st century's best attempts, continues to evade propaganda, platitudes, practical purposes, and the profit motive. So, come miss the boat with us! Join us in conversation with this astonishing and enlivening writer, one who celebrates all things "speckled and plain, perfect and imperfect, indigo-feathered, green-skinned, orange-toed, squashed of face, cracked of shell, miniature of heart, young as ducklings, old as hills...indigenous to Earth." The mule I sit on while I recite Starts off in one direction But then gets drunk, And lost in Heaven -- Daniel Ladinsky rendering Hafez

"We must remember we are exhaustible. We need renewal. Silence, quietude, time alone, naturally gives that. Then we can come back in to serve others in small ways. That we do. Then we take time for renewal. Jesus, the Buddha, Mahatma Gandhi and all the great sages recognize the importance of connection with others to serve, then step back from that into quietness, then renewal, and then serve. This is the great rhythm of life." Christopher Titmuss, a former hippie turned Theravada Buddhist monk turned social critic, is Britain's senior Dharma teacher. Having once lived on 39 British pounds per year for ten years, he has sat beneath The Tree of Enlightenment in Bodhgaya, India and, so impacted by the experience, returned to Bodhgaya for years afterward to offer retreats there. For five decades, he has been teaching Dharma around the world for free. Living primarily on donations since 1970, Christopher has noted his intention to stay true to the spirit of dana, a practice of cultivating generosity. Christopher is a teacher of Awakening and Insight Meditation in the Buddhist tradition. He does not use the label 'Buddhist' for himself but expresses the deep benefits of his long-standing connection with the Buddhist tradition. He is the founder and director of the Dharma Enquiry Programme as well as co-founder of the Prajna Vihar School in India and Gaia House, an international retreat center in Devon, England. Many of the spiritual practices along with the Dharma talks and videos he offers also are freely available online, including a conversation between Christopher and Krishnamurti in 1984. Christopher was born on Earth Day in 1944, in County Durham, England. As a practicing Roman Catholic, he attended Catholic school as a boy, where he broke the school record for the number of times he was caned for his self-described prankster ways and a lack of cooperation. At age 15, he left school and began clerking in the newsroom for a Roman Catholic weekly before becoming a reporter in the London office for the Irish Independent Newspaper. At 22, disillusioned with the Catholic Church and politics, Christopher began his journey around the world. "I felt that the world is such an extraordinary place," he has said. "I wanted to be connected, involved and listen to other cultures and environments." Arriving in India, Christopher picked up a couple of books on Buddhist teachings and, inspired, became a Buddhist monk three years later. He went on to spend six years as a Buddhist monk in Thailand and India, during which time his experiences led him to contemplate on the corpse as well as contend with snakes and scorpions while living in a cave for nine months. He disrobed in 1976 and completed his journey around the world before returning to England, having spent ten years abroad. "The freedom makes possible the adventure," Christopher has shared. His spiritual recognition that everything is changing, and that non-clinging leads to a sense of freedom in one's life, has given him the ability to embrace continuously the next adventure. A prolific writer, Christopher maintains an active blog and has written numerous books that dive deeply into meditation, spirituality, political, social and global issues, and other topics in the Buddhist tradition. Despite this depth, Christopher has an accessible approach. "I found myself deeply touched by his willingness to be utterly ordinary, available, and walking his talk with humility and simplicity," recounted author Eliezer Sobel after attending a meditation retreat given by Christopher. Christopher has even found opportunities to reflect on Buddhist teachings through songs by The Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney and The Beatles, works by William Shakespeare, and Dharma Dancing. Christopher is known as a steadfast exponent of applying the Dharma to contemporary issues facing people, animals and the environment. He speaks, writes, and campaigns on social, political, and global issues. He also advocates the development of spiritual values, community renewal, and a green economy. He encourages Dharma practitioners to be Agents of Change and Caregivers. Since 1982, Christopher has lived in Totnes, Devon, England, regularly engaging in local activities. Vegan and environmentally conscious, Christopher only takes flights out of the EU to teach. He has one adult daughter and four grandchildren. Join us in conversation with this master seeker and teacher of wisdom and compassion in action.

**Note: This is a special experiential and participatory workshop. The movements will entail sitting or working on the floor. Please wear comfortable clothing and find a quiet, carpeted or lightly padded area. What allows painful events to continue affecting us over time? How can we transform our relationship to these events, to reduce their traumatic impact? These are the questions Breema Bodywork teachers Angela Porter, MFT, and Alexandra Johnson, MD, will explore in a special experiential and participatory workshop.** Breema Bodywork is a "teaching of the heart, an expression of the unifying principle of Existence." Angela and Alexandra will lead a variety of somatic (body-based) movement practices to help nurture connection between the body and mind, open possibilities to process events in a new way, and strengthen the capacity to assimilate, heal, and live fully. "To experience unity in our life, we must be unified within ourselves. A first step in this process is to bring body and mind together to bring us from a passive state to an active one." Angela Porter, MFT, is an activist and somatic therapist specializing in the treatment of trauma and addictions. She has trained in multiple modalities, including Gestalt Therapy, Somatic Therapy, counseling psychology, and EMDR. As an instructor and practitioner of Breema Bodywork since 1998, Angela uses the mind-body connection as the foundation of her work with individuals and groups. Outside of her Oakland-based private practice, Angela serves as adjunct faculty of graduate psychology at California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, JFK University, and The Psychotherapy Institute in Berkeley. She also teaches clinical trainees at various institutes. Formerly a program director and group facilitator at various substance abuse treatment centers, Angela has a passion for supporting veterans, formerly incarcerated men and women, and people with co-occurring mental health concerns. Angela enjoys traveling internationally to teach workshops for therapists, doctors, nurses, midwives, other healthcare professionals, and teachers. Alexandra Johnson, MD, is an integrative and functional medicine physician specializing in family medicine, women's health, and care for the underserved. Even before her medical training, she was interested in holistic care, learning Breema Bodywork and also certifying as a doula. In addition to studying and teaching Breema locally and internationally for over 20 years, she has served as teaching faculty for the University of Colorado and Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia. During her time in Ethiopia, she developed an infection in her brain, leading to significant health challenges, only to reinforce the role of Breema to transform body and mind. Her work in prenatal care, and labor and delivery, incorporates the Breema principles. To facilitate cross-talk between home birth and hospital birth providers, she was featured in the 2016 film, Why Not Home? Her current clinical practice in Northern California integrates Breema, hypnosis, diet, and personalized medical care. She lives in Santa Cruz, CA, with her husband -- who is also a Breema instructor -- and their five children. Please join us in this special offering to experience individual embodiment practices in a collective field.

*** This will be an interactive workshop that is two hours, not the customary 90 minutes. See the description below for more details. To Mayuka Yamazaki, a high-level business executive who sits on the boards of three Japanese public companies, ikebana -- the ancient Japanese art of floral creations -- is not just about arranging flowers. It is about attuning to the wisdom and beauty of nature to become more whole. A master of the art form, she launched an initiative in 2017 called IKERU to bring the wisdom of ikebana into business and leadership development. Previously, Mayuka was Assistant Director of Harvard Business School Japan Research Center, where she co-authored over 30 HBS cases related to Japan, and also worked as a management consultant at McKinsey. Mayuka was an Awakin Call guest in January, 2023.** We are delighted to share that this Spring she will be offering a special Wildflower Ikebana workshop to the Awakin Calls community! The two-hour workshop will include a presentation on what ikebana is, as well as a brief demonstration by Mayuka. Participants will then be invited to take a 15-minute walk outside, attuning to Nature in whatever forms it is present in their environment, and discerning to the best of their abilities which flowers, twigs, branches or leaves would like to be brought back home to "play." If you live in an area where it would be hard to do this real-time, you are welcome to do your Nature walk earlier and have your selections already on hand. Participants will then create their own Ikebana-inspired arrangement, keeping some of the core principles in mind. There will also be opportunity to share the creations with workshop participants, as well as reflections and learnings from the experience with the circle. Says Mayuka: "I love the concept of letting flowers lead. In order for us to let flowers lead, we have to calm ourselves and empty our mind. Otherwise, we cannot hear, listen to the voice of the flowers. And if you can listen to the voice of flowers, you just know where you should put your flowers. You just know it. Your body spontaneously starts moving. It's beyond our head, and I really love that... It's not like you have to empty your mind and then you can listen to the flowers. If you try to listen to the voice of flowers, you naturally start emptying your mind. For me, ikebana is a practice of the mind." Please join us in learning from and practicing with this gentle artist and changemaker! **Note: Prior to the workshop, you may be interested in viewing or reviewing the transcript of Mayuka's Awakin Call earlier this year. Please also note that the workshop will be two hours, rather than the customary 90 minutes.

As a seven-year-old living in Shiraz, Iran, Ari Honarvar stood on the rooftop of her home with her family one night, a "simmering terror brewing in her belly." Beholding the sky, she was aware that their electricity was just shut off, warning of an imminent attack. Missiles shot across the darkness. Sirens blared throughout the streets. Then, from a neighboring rooftop, Ari bore witness to a different kind of explosion: Even if, from the sky, poison befalls all, I'm still sweetness wrapped in sweetness wrapped in sweetness... A verse from Rumi, a burst of joy! Then, joining in from another rooftop: While others sing about love, I am the Sultan of love!" "I could feel the ecstasy of these verses in my heart, radiating to every cell of my being," Ari recalled of that moment amid the Iran-Iraq War that would last eight years and kill over a million people. "In an instant, my world not only became sane, but infinite and glorious. And what bomb could ever touch that?" When Ari's family sought to secure a visa out of Iran a few years after the war ended, it was also a poem that changed Ari's world -- this time, verses written by her mother to the Indian Embassy. After being granted passage to India, Ari would immigrate to the United States at 14 years of age. Those bombs touched neither her body nor soul, and in fact, ignited in her a joyful resilience. Currently based in San Diego, California, Ari is an award-winning writer, speaker, artist, "dance-ivist," who seamlessly integrates the arts with social justice and community building. She is the founder of Rumi with a View, an organization building bridges across war-torn and conflict-ridden borders "through the enchanted medium of poetry," and using dance, the visual arts, and other modalities. Her projects span sending musical love letters from American musicians to the people of Iran, to Dance for Freedom, an initiative to garner global support for Iranian protesters, to Musical Ambassadors of Peace, a nonprofit she collaborates with, bringing music and dance to refugees at the U.S.-Mexico border and in Europe. What does Ari-in-action look like? A few times a month, she drops off her son at school in San Diego and drives for an hour to Tijuana, Mexico, to serve as a "musical ambassador of peace." Her car is stocked with donations, food, drums, and a portable stereo. Along with two other musicians, Ari plays live music and cumbia songs on the stereo, popular among the Central American refugees. The children learn to drum and dance with partners, embodying a new rhythm by which to live -- and all of this done in time for Ari to drive back to San Diego to pick up her son when school lets out. Due to the program's success, she now offers a customized program to schools, nonprofits, and corporations committed to social justice. Ari also sparks community closer to home. In 2021, the Washington Post ran her op-ed on Arranged Friendships, describing her experiment to arrange friendships similar to how marriages in Iran are arranged: "commitment first, then let everything fall into place." Arranged does not mean forced, she clarified. "Counterintuitively, this offers more freedom because you can customize your group based on your own needs and desires." She has since been interviewed by numerous podcasts and publications on the subject, including The Atlantic's Friendship Files, and is helping to facilitate other arranged friendship groups. Ari's work has been featured in other outlets like The Guardian and New York Times. She is the author of Rumi's Gift, an oracle deck and book of Ari's original translations, meditations, stories, and the artistic collaboration with the renowned illustrator, Carmen Costello. Ari's critically acclaimed novel, A Girl Called Rumi, is based on Ari's experience growing up in post-revolution Iran. Ari also presents at conferences, universities, nonprofits, and other venues. She is a mentor at the College of Graduate and Postdoctoral studies at The University of Saskatchewan. "Joy is such a sustainable fuel. It's sustainable energy that we tap into to help us with the challenges. Seeing how people build their own resilience in difficult situations has been a tremendous inspiration." Please join Haleh Liza Gafori and Pavi Mehta in conversation with this activist-alchemist of verse and vibrations.

Chris Hoffman, a lifelong humanitarian serving in crisis situations in dozens of countries around the world, realized after nearly two decades of intense work in the field that humanitarians often do more harm than good – largely because they themselves are “not well”. Being passionate individuals who move from crisis to crisis, country to country, in short-term stints on behalf of international organizations, humanitarians often are suffering from the trauma they already embody as well as from what they experience afresh in crisis and conflict situations – to the detriment of their clients, their families, and their own effectiveness. Realizing after 20 years in the field that he was losing touch with what was most important to him (his family and his programs’ clients), Hoffman came to see a more generalized crisis of both well-being and effectiveness in the humanitarian and international aid sector. So he stepped out and stepped back to consider how he could support the humanitarian sector to be more effective and innovative. He first helped through contemplative resilience offerings for humanitarians (consisting of mindfulness and somatic practices) while serving as Managing Director of Garrison Institute International from 2019-2020. Now he aids the sector as Managing Director of Humanity Link, a firm that links innovative companies with humanitarian agencies to develop effective technology for flipping the paradigm in humanitarian programming to be more client-driven. Humanity Link acts as a matchmaker of sorts by linking up those who need help and those organizations who can provide that help. “We have corporates come to us and say 'We have a product we think will work really well in the humanitarian sector. Help us find who we can partner with to use it,'" Hoffman said. Hoffman is perhaps an unlikely global humanitarian. Born in small-town Ohio to a loving but very young teen mother, the seed for travel was planted by the time he was 10 years old, by which time he had already moved six times with his family. At age 13, he sought to travel abroad, and his local community supported him. He later said, “All of the churches, all of the people and our friends chipped in for me to go. So when you say it takes a village, I'm living proof that it takes a village. It took the village of Bremen, [Ohio] to be able to take a kid and get him out and see the world and really be able to change things." His local school district allowed him to progress by giving reports for his grades through a journal he kept. So at age 13, Chris went to live in the bush of Matabeleland in Zimbabwe with a group of young missionaries working to help a small community. At 14, he was off to the jungle of Rhodonia in Brazil to work with orphans stranded on the Madeira River. At 16, he landed in Beira, Mozambique soon after peace was declared, living in the basement of an orphanage helping children who were coming of age to have a trade skill to take into their adult lives. A war in Mozambique was just winding down when he was there, and so he got to see United Nations peacekeeping operations and international humanitarian functions in development settings and in crisis situations. He recognized his life’s purpose. After graduating from Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, Hoffman went to work for the Peace Corps in Kenya, and then worked across four continents for the U.N., World Vision, and other international agencies. “The 20 years from teen to now is peppered with crisis, disaster, more than 40 countries and countless experiences with the United Nations and International Non-Profits trying to find the simplest most effective answers to some of the world’s most complex problems,” he says. He established Humanity Link in 2020 to help develop tools and systems that transform how humanitarian organizations interact with people in need – from service delivery to genuine partnership. He partners with corporates to create transformational technology innovations using artificial intelligence, digital identity authentication, and cash distribution solutions for humanitarian agencies around the world. His clients include the International Federation of the Red Cross, the International Organization for Migration, and the Norwegian Refugee Council. Chris is the father of four global children and husband to Wakanyi, "an amazing partner" who he met at a Nairobi bus stop on a sunny Sunday. They live in Groningen, the Netherlands with their dog Thomas and their cat Totoro. Join us in conversation with this resilient and innovative humanitarian!

In July 2021, Neil Douglas-Klotz gave an inspiring Awakin Call: Breathing life into words, prayers, and scriptures. A renowned teacher, scholar, author, and musician who specializes in the native traditions and ancient Semitic languages of the Middle East, Douglas-Klotz shared with this Awakin community his personal discovery of what he calls the “Aramaic Jesus” — or Jesus before the religion of Christianity — and guided some moving meditations in Jesus’s original words and sounds. Now he returns to share this wisdom even more deeply, both as specific to Jesus’s culture and time, and to its relevance today. Douglas-Klotz’s most recent book, Revelations of the Aramaic Jesus: The Hidden Teachings on Life and Death, released in October 2021, is the culmination of his life’s work over 40 years. By examining the “heart talks” of Jesus — the Lord’s Prayer and the Beatitudes — he addresses universal themes and challenges like, How do we respond to the critical state of the world, individually and globally? How do we find renewal and healing amidst challenging times? How do we keep our hearts open? Or more fundamentally, who am I? What is my purpose? From his previous call in July 2021, Douglas-Klotz provided a glimpse into the Aramaic Jesus’s hidden teachings on prayer and its power to transform, beyond words or concepts: At different times, Jesus's disciples would ask him, “How should we pray?” It's in the Gospel of Thomas, they ask him, and different times in the gospels. And at one point he says this prayer in words [The Lord’s Prayer]. At another point, he just says, as I mentioned earlier, pray b’shemy – with my, or within my “atmosphere.” So that's a prayer without words. That just means "In Jesus's name," although there's nothing wrong with saying, "In Jesus's name," because that can be a powerful invocation for a person for whom it is, or protection. I don't want to downplay that at all. But he's really saying, “Pray within my atmosphere, within my feeling, yet within. Do like a spiritual gestalt with me and sit within me or let me sit within you. And then pray.” So that's prayer without words. And the word prayer itself in Aramaic, I'll just finish up with that, actually doesn't indicate — it doesn't mean saying words. It means just to open oneself, shalutah, open yourself, hollow yourself out, create space within yourself. And then Big Reality fills in. Join Pavi Mehta and Cynthia Li in continued conversation with this illuminating teacher of wisdom and peace.

"Pay attention to your attention." Amishi P. Jha came to her pathbreaking work studying the neuroscience of mindfulness and attention when, as a young professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania, she lost feeling in her teeth. She had been grinding them as a profound stress response to burnout from her responsibilities as a wife, mother, and tenure-track professor. Knowing from her academic work that the brain can change, she told herself at the start of summer, “before I quit my own career, let’s see if I can get my own brain to change.” She had just heard a talk about the power of meditation to change brain images from another neuroscientist. And although she had grown up in a Hindu family, born in the Indian city of Gandhi’s ashram – where meditation practice was “in the air” – she had never discussed it or practiced it (and her scientific mind had earlier dismissed some spiritual practices from her youth). But that summer, determined to see if she could change her brain, she bought a book by Jack Kornfield, Meditation for Beginners, with an accompanying CD. “I committed to reading a chapter each day and doing one of the practices, probably between eight and fifteen minutes. Within a couple of months, I was more present, more engaged. It got me thinking that there was something about doing this thing every day that was reacquainting me with my life. … Instead of being foggy and distracted, I was aware and connected. So I thought to myself, hey, wait a minute; I study attention. I need to figure out how this works.” She went to look at the scientific attention literature and found almost nothing.  So she decided to “put mindfulness meditation to the test and research it rigorously in the lab.” This was in 2004, “before mindfulness was even a thing in our popular culture, and people in my department warned that I’d be committing career suicide by researching this topic,” she recalls. She launched the first-ever study to offer mindfulness training tools to active-duty military service members as they prepared for deployment. What she has discovered is that without intervention, attention is compromised, and attentional lapses increase. Yet, with mindfulness training, attention can be strengthened and protected. As one of the first scientists to research the links between mindfulness and attention, she is known for her pioneering mindfulness work with soldiers, firefighters, medical trainees, and others for whom attention is a matter of life and death. With her book, Peak Mind, she has started bringing her healthy-attention message to parents, CEOs, accountants, teachers, managers—essentially anyone whose work and decision-making feels like life and death. Jha studies how we pay attention: the process by which our brain decides what's important out of the constant stream of information it receives. Both external distractions (like stress) and internal ones (like mind-wandering) diminish our attention's power, Jha says -- but some simple techniques can boost it and train it for greater focus and less distractibility. "Pay attention to your attention," Jha says in a TEDx talk that has more than 5 million views. Jha is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Miami, and Director of Contemplative Neuroscience for the Mindfulness Research and Practice Initiative. Working with the U.S. Army and others in extremely high-stress occupations, Jha uses functional MRI, electroencephalography (EEG) and other neurobehavioral measures to study how the brain pays attention, the mental effects of stress, and ways to optimize attention.  In addition to her own published body of research, her work has been featured in many outlets including TED.com, NPR, and Mindful Magazine. In addition, she has been invited to present her work to NATO, the UK Parliament, the Pentagon, and at the World Economic Forum. She received her PhD from the University of California–Davis, and received her postdoctoral training at the Brain Imaging and Analysis Center at Duke University in functional neuroimaging. She studies the neural bases of attention and the effects of mindfulness-based training programs on cognition, emotion and resilience. Acknowledging the tension between offering mindfulness tools (founded on Buddhist principles of nonviolence) to active military, Jha recalls her own Gandhian roots: “Nonviolence is part of my core philosophical thread. Yet nonviolence does not mean inaction. It doesn’t mean you do nothing. Sometimes what you do to reduce violence and suffering is take action. ,,, [I]f a soldier has a machine gun that can destroy an entire village, I want to make sure that person has the capacity to really know what they’re doing and have full control over their faculties, to be able to withhold as appropriate, not be reactive. So a super soldier in many ways is one that can control when to not pull the trigger, not to just pull the trigger.” Please join Stephanie Nash and Birju Pandya in conversation with this researcher using her gifted scientific mind for action to help reduce suffering.

**Please note the special day for this event — the call falls on Monday, instead of our usual Saturday time. “The key to creating health,” says Dr. Mark Hyman, “is figuring out the cause of the problem and then providing the right conditions for the body and soul to thrive. It isn’t taking another medication.” Whether he’s in a gray suit or hospital scrubs, Mark Hyman, MD, is often carrying in his pockets a pack of walnuts, coconut butter, turkey jerky, or some other nutrient-dense snack. A family physician, author, and public figure, Hyman has been transforming the landscape of Western medicine for the past 30 years. His latest book, Young Forever: The Secrets to Living Your Longest, Healthiest Life, aims to provide a prescription for healthy longevity, challenging the public to go beyond the status quo of the average lifespan riddled with “diseases of aging.” At 63, Hyman says he feels better than he did when he was half his age; by scientific methods, his biological age measures 20 years younger. He believes everyone has the same potential to thrive, and he is on a mission to make that an equal opportunity for all. For as long as he can remember, Hyman's life has been about mind-body wellness and personal growth. Born in New York, Hyman moved with his family to Spain, where his mother shopped in local markets and grew a backyard garden. In high school, he became a vegetarian for 10 years. At Cornell University, he studied nutrition and Buddhism. And before he pursued a calling in medicine, he spent time teaching yoga and wandering the mountains of Tibet and Nepal in search of meaning. As a young doctor, Hyman became disheartened by practicing medicine with conventional methods. “The way we were treating disease wasn’t working,” he says. “We can’t just cover up symptoms with medications. We have to understand the body as a biological system — an ecosystem.” This led him to research root causes of chronic disease — a paradigm called “functional medicine,” which focuses on each person’s unique genetic, biochemical, and lifestyle factors, as well as the social determinants of health. Teaching underserved and privileged communities alike to cook nutritious, delicious food – and likening foods such as Oreos and Coke to addictive drugs – has long topped his priority list. Hyman’s professional journey has also been shaped by his personal challenges. When he was a young doctor, he developed chronic fatigue syndrome and intense “brain fog,” ultimately leading him to functional medicine and a path to heal himself. In 2012, his younger sister died from biliary cancer and his marriage ended. In this raw state, he returned to the East for another pilgrimage, this time accompanied by his daughter, to the sacred mountain of Jomolhari in Bhutan and a Tibetan orphanage at Menri Monastery in the Himalayas. Then in 2017, he himself came very close to death with a severe illness, now understanding by direct experience, rather than only conceptually in his mind, some of life’s essential lessons — like surrender.  Among Hyman’s many and varied roles is serving as the founder and director of The UltraWellness Center, Senior Advisor to the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine, and board president of the Institute for Functional Medicine. He is the author of 14 New York Times best-selling books, the host of a popular podcast, The Doctor’s Farmacy, and a regular medical contributor for several television shows and networks, including CBS This Morning, Today, Good Morning America, The View, and CNN. Equally dedicated to the health of our food systems and the planet as a whole, Hyman founded a nonprofit organization, the Food Fix Campaign, to “transform the dysfunctional policies” that shape our food and agricultural systems. “What we do to our bodies, we do to the planet. What we do to the planet, we do to our bodies.”  Is there an inner compass that directs his outer work? A journal entry from Hyman’s pilgrimage to Bhutan and Tibet might give us a glimpse: I do not pretend to understand how this life works, my place in it, or how to arrive to a place that is settled, authentic, powerful, and clear, but I am trying….Being here, visiting the sacred places, in this sacred country where these Buddhist principles are their constitution, their declaration of interdependence and interconnection of all things, I am quieted and happy, but less certain than ever of how things should be – only open to how things might be if I relax, let go, be present, show up, pay attention, and listen for what is true in everything. Please join Pavi Mehta and Cynthia Li in conversation with this visionary doctor, changemaker, and student of life.

David Rothenberg is a writer, philosopher, ecologist, and musician, speaking out for nature in all aspects of his diverse work. He investigates the musicality of animals and the role of nature in philosophy, with a particular interest in understanding other species by making music with them. As a professor of philosophy and music at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, he “teaches engineers nonquantifiable things.” He is also an acclaimed composer and jazz clarinetist known for his integration of world music with improvisation and electronics. Originally intending to be a scientist, music pulled Rothenberg away during his high school years – ultimately becoming the modality through which he would explore nature and deep ecology. Looking back at those high school years of the 1970s, Rothenberg told The New York Times, "I was influenced by saxophonist Paul Winter's Common Ground album, which had his own compositions with whale and bird sounds mixed in. That got me interested in using music to learn more about the natural world." As an undergraduate at Harvard, Rothenberg created his own major to combine music with communication. He traveled in Europe after graduation, playing jazz clarinet. Listening to the recorded song of a hermit thrush, he heard structure that reminded him of a Miles Davis solo. Because of Rothenberg's study of animal song and his experimental interactions with animal music, he is often called an "interspecies musician." He is said to "explore the sounds of all manner of living things as both an environmental philosopher and jazz musician." Rothenberg's book Why Birds Sing: A Journey into the Mystery of Bird Song (Basic Books 2005) was inspired by an impromptu duet in March 2000 with a laughingthrush at the National Aviary in Pittsburgh. A CD accompanying the book also featured Rothenberg's duet with an Australian lyrebird. The book served as the basis for a 2006 feature-length BBC documentary of the same name. His next book, Thousand Mile Song (Basic Books 2008), reflects similar curiosity about whale sounds considered as music, from which both scientific and artistic insights emerge. It was turned into a film for French television. Philip Hoare of The London Telegraph said of the book, "while Rothenberg's madcap mission to play jazz to the whales seems as crazy as Captain Ahab's demented hunt for the great White Whale, it is sometimes such obsessions that reveal inner truths...I find myself more than a little sympathetic to the author's faintly bonkers but undoubtedly stimulating intent: to push at the barriers between human history and natural history." His book Survival of the Beautiful: Art, Science and  Evolution (Bloomsbury Press 2011) was described by the journal Nature as exploring the theme that beauty is not random but is intrinsic to life—and that evolution proceeds by sumptuousness, not by utility alone.  His remarkable output in books is matched by his creative output in other areas. As a composer and jazz clarinetist, Rothenberg has sixteen CDs out under his own name over the past 30 years. His 2020 releases include In the Wake of Memories and They Say Humans Exist, named best jazz album of the year by Stereo+ Magazine in Norway. He has performed or recorded with Peter Gabriel, Pauline Oliveros, Ray Phiri and Suzanne Vega. As a musician, Rothenberg tries to blend the indigenous energy of the world's primal music with the exploratory spirit of improvisation. He has studied jazz clarinet professionally, as well as Tibetan ritual wind music in Nepal and folk music in Norway. Since 2014, Rothenberg has been an Ambassador of the international non-governmental humanitarian mission, the Dolphin Embassy, participating in non-invasive research of the possibilities of free dolphins and whales – playing music for them. In 2017, the Dolphin Embassy released the full-length documentary Intraterrestrial, which received awards from international film festivals. The film's soundtrack features music by Rothenberg. Links to his extensive work, global press coverage, and extended recognition can be found on his website. Please join us in conversation with this remarkable philosopher and interspecies musician who combines art and science to make nature come alive in remarkable ways!

*** Please note the special day for this event -- the call falls on Sunday, instead of our usual Saturday time.  When Zachary Shore was a sophomore at the University of Pennsylvania, he called his parents to tell them he was dropping out. Legally blind by age 16, his vision had continued to deteriorate, and he found himself socially isolated, fearful, and debilitated by eye strain. After an encounter on campus with a fellow blind student who had just returned from a solo excursion with seeming ease, Zach had a moment of awakening: “My problem wasn’t my blindness. It was my lack of skills and confidence.” He would indeed come to find a remarkable set of skills and confidence — eventually earning a doctorate from Oxford University, becoming a distinguished scholar of international conflict and an author of six books, and traveling to more than 30 countries, many of them as solo journeys. Zach credits his strong sense of self to the nurturance of his parents. But his ability to move freely about the world came through a rigorous and demanding training program at the Louisiana Center for the Blind (LCB) — where he made his way after his moment of awakening in college — whose requirements for graduation would challenge even the best of sighted students. Shop, prepare, and cook a meal for 40 people, all by yourself, and don’t forget the entire cleanup. Accomplish a “drop route”; that is, find your way back to the LCB after being dropped in an unfamiliar location, without asking anyone, using only environmental clues like the direction of the sun. And take a solo trip to a city you’ve never visited before, with an assigned checklist of to-dos. Armed with solid skills and having confronted many of his fears, Zach returned to finish his studies at U. Penn. He went on to receive a master's in history, a doctorate in modern European history, a postdoctoral research fellowship at Harvard, and a Fulbright Award, among other distinctions. His books, which have hard-hitting names like What Hitler Knew, A Sense of the Enemy, and Breeding Bin Ladens, examine themes like morality in war and “strategic empathy,” focusing on understanding the enemy. As a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Northern California, he is “doing his best to give back to the community by helping military leaders and others think more deeply about the choices they make and the causes of war.” Zach’s hard-hitting academic interests belie his gentle and modest demeanor. He has been described as “a historian of great humanity and insight” with analyses that are “penetrating yet sensitive.” He often shares stories of his personal failures and lessons learned, that “it is okay to fail as long as I try again.” Most recently, he has “tried again” and brought forth another book, This is Not Who We Are: America's Struggle Between Vengeance and Virtue. According to the esteemed historian Adam Hochschild, Zach “spotlights the moral quandaries that plagued Americans as their wartime thirst for vengeance wrestled with their loftier ideals.” As to whether his blindness sparked his broader interest in human judgment, Zach reflects, “I don’t think so… but being unable to read body language or facial expressions has certainly led me to think about how we read other people. I’m also obsessed with the general question of why people shoot themselves in the foot.” For more than three decades, he has been an advocate of improving opportunities for the blind. He has also written on why smart people make bad decisions and how to succeed in graduate school. Through his company UpWords, he serves as a writing coach for authors, professionals, and students. Please join Adam Hochschild and Rahul Brown in conversation with this insightful historian and courageous citizen of the world.

We are living with a global epidemic of injustice, but we've been choosing to ignore it.  More than 25 years ago, Vivek Maru told his grandmother that he wanted to go to law school. “Grandma didn't pause,” he recounted. “She said to me, ‘Lawyer is liar.’” Though he went on to fulfill that desire, Vivek soon realized that his grandmother wasn’t entirely wrong. Vivek came to see that “something about law and lawyers has gone wrong.” Law is “supposed to be the language we use to translate our dreams about justice into living institutions that hold us together” – to honor the dignity of everyone, strong or weak. But as he told an audience on the TEDGlobal stage in 2017, lawyers are not only expensive and out of reach for most – worse, “our profession has shrouded law in a cloak of complexity. Law is like riot gear on a police officer. It's intimidating and impenetrable, and it's hard to tell there's something human underneath.” In 2011, Vivek founded Namati to demystify the law, facilitate global grassroots-led systems change, and to grow the movement for legal empowerment around the world. Namati and its partners have built cadres of grassroots legal advocates in eight countries. The advocates have worked with more than 65,000 people to protect community lands, enforce environmental law, and secure basic rights to health care and citizenship. Globally, Namati convenes the Legal Empowerment Network, made up of more than 3,000 groups from over 170 countries who are learning from one another and collaborating on common challenges. This community successfully advocated for the inclusion of justice in the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, and for the creation of the Legal Empowerment Fund, with a goal of putting $100 million into grassroots justice efforts worldwide. Though he nearly dropped out of law school after his first year because the law felt disconnected from the problems of ordinary people he had encountered in rural villages the year earlier, Vivek stuck with it and moved to Sierra Leone soon after he graduated, just after the end of a brutal 11-year civil war. Several years before Namati, he co-founded an organization called Timap (which means “stand up”) to help rural Sierra Leoneans address injustice and hold government accountable. Realizing that a conventional legal aid model would have been unworkable, as there were only 100 lawyers in Sierra Leone (more than 90 of which were in the capital rather than in rural areas), he instead focused on training a frontline of community paralegals in basic law and in tools like mediation, advocacy, education, and organizing. Just like a health care system relies on nurses, midwives, and community health workers in addition to physicians, he saw that justice required community paralegals (sometimes called “barefoot lawyers”) to serve as a bridge to serve the legal needs of communities and “to turn law from an abstraction or a threat into something that every single person can understand, use and shape.” As he later recounted, “We found that paralegals are often able to squeeze justice out of a broken system: stop a school master from beating children; negotiate child support payments from a derelict father; persuade the water authority to repair a well. In exceptionally intractable cases, as when a mining company in the southern province damaged six villages’ land and abandoned the region without paying compensation, a tiny corps of lawyers can resort to litigation and higher-level advocacy to obtain a remedy.” More significantly, he realized: Paralegals are from the communities they serve. They demystify law, break it down into simple terms, and then they help people look for a solution. They don't focus on the courts alone. They look everywhere: ministry departments, local government, an ombudsman's office. Lawyers sometimes say to their clients, "I'll handle it for you. I've got you." Paralegals have a different message, not "I'm going to solve it for you," but "We're going to solve it together, and in the process, we're both going to grow." And case by case and story by story, community paralegals help paint a portrait of the system as a whole, which can serve as the basis for systemic change efforts in laws and policy. “This is a different way of approaching reform. This is not a consultant flying into Myanmar with a template he's going to cut and paste from Macedonia, and this is not an angry tweet. This is about growing reforms from the experience of ordinary people trying to make the rules and systems work,” Vivek says. It’s ultimately “about forging a deeper version of democracy in which we the people, we don't just cast ballots every few years, we take part daily in the rules and institutions that hold us together, in which everyone, even the least powerful, can know law, use law and shape law.” Vivek was named a Social Entrepreneur of the Year by the World Economic Forum, a “legal rebel” by the American Bar Association, and an Ashoka Fellow. He received the Pioneer Award from the North American South Asian Bar Association in 2008. He, Namati, and the Global Legal Empowerment Network received the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship in 2016. He graduated from Harvard College, magna cum laude, and Yale Law School. His undergraduate thesis was called Mohandas, Martin, and Malcolm on Violence, Culture, and Meaning. Prior to starting Namati, he served as senior counsel in the Justice Reform Group of the World Bank.  Vivek is co-author of Community Paralegals and the Pursuit of  Justice (Cambridge University Press). His TED talk, “How to Put the Power of Law in People’s Hands,” has been viewed over a million times. He lives with his family in Washington, DC., and though he travels a lot, he tries to spend time in a forest or other natural place every week, wherever he is. Vivek studies capoeira, an Afro-Brazilian martial art that mixes dance with fighting techniques as a creative form of resistance, with Dale Marcelin at Universal Capoeira Angola Center. “There’s a mischievousness and soulfulness even though you’re engaging in a life-and-death struggle,” Maru says. “I like its lesson of smiling in the face of danger.” He is also deeply influenced by his Jain spiritual background and Gandhian principles. He is interested in a Jainism that balances an inward turn with an engagement in the outer world, citing a Jain monk who said “The test of true spirituality is in practice, not isolation . . . there is a need to strike the right balance between internal and external development.”   Join us in conversation with this exceptional leader and warrior for justice!

***Please note the special time for this event, to accommodate the time zone of our guest and other Asia-based participants. “In order to let flowers live, we need to calm ourselves and empty our mind — otherwise, we cannot listen to what flowers tell us.”  To Mayuka Yamazaki, a high-level business executive, ikebana — the ancient Japanese art of floral creations — is not just about arranging flowers. It is about attuning to the wisdom and beauty of nature and enriching our experience of being human. As a master of the art, she explains that ikebana is a word derived from the verb ikeru (to bring alive) and hana (flowers), or combined, “letting flowers live.” For over 20 years, Mayuka has been letting flowers live, and most recently, she has brought this practice to help restore wholeness to schools, international organizations, communities, and most notably, corporations. As a young child in Japan, Mayuka was drawn to “finding beauty in the small changes in nature and its seasons.” When she was 18, she began to learn ikebana as a hobby under Risen Kajikawa, a headmaster of ko-ryu shoreikai, one of the ikebana factions in Japan. After studying economics at Tokyo University and then working as a management consultant, her education took her to the United States, where she would graduate with honors at Georgetown University’s Graduate School of Foreign Service. On the outside, her life trajectory seemed clear. On the inside, however, Mayuka felt lost.  Some years later, she found herself working at Harvard Business School (HBS) at a fortuitous time. HBS was trying to transform its education system and its new guiding principle was “Knowing, Doing, Being,” emphasizing the need to rebalance the head, hands, and heart. Mayuka realized that the heart, which ought to be her true inner compass, had been largely silenced by her focus on acquiring knowledge and skills. So she set about trying many things, from meditation practices to exploration circles with colleagues. What opened her heart the most was creating things — concrete things — like poems, stories, and paintings. This moved her from consumer to creator, from thinking to being. And one day, she had an epiphany that ikebana — which had begun as a beloved hobby but had over two decades become an art she would master — could be her career. Ikebana is an art of great subtlety and sophistication. Simple floral arrangements in Japan date back as early as the 7th century, beginning as simple Buddhist temple offerings that symbolized paradise. Today, it is a popular and innovative “living art” that continues to engage the ikebana artist in deep conversation with nature and her energies, equally incorporating the forms and empty space. In 2017, Mayuka launched an initiative called IKERU, with a vision of bringing the wisdom of ikebana into business and leadership development. Through IKERU, she offers individual and group sessions, inviting people to create harmony in themselves or their teams through practice of the art form. They also learn the challenge and beauty of creating something when they have no answers or directions. Mayuka sees herself more as a co-learner than a teacher: “While I acknowledge the value of the [traditional] apprenticeship model as a way of teaching, it may not be my way. For me, those who come to my lessons and workshops are not ‘apprentices’ to whom I transfer what I know. I have learned so much from them and they are ‘friends’ who explore the wisdom of ikebana together. And this is why I started IKERU — to let people simply enjoy ikebana itself outside the system, as well as why I have managed the IKERU community as openly and flatly as possible.” Prior to devoting herself to IKERU, Mayuka worked as Assistant Director of Harvard Business School Japan Research Center and visiting editor at the Harvard Business Review (Japan). With HBS professors, she co-authored over 30 HBS cases related to Japan, and played a critical role in designing and running the HBS immersive field course in the 3.11 disaster-affected Tohoku areas. She also worked as a management consultant at McKinsey & Company. Previously only having lived in big cities, she moved in 2020 to Karuizawa, a small and beautiful town in the mountains, where she now lives with her husband and six-year-old daughter. She currently sits the boards of directors of three Japanese public companies. Please join us in conversation with this artist and changemaker, and dare to allow beauty to open us up to transformation!

When he was ten years old, Balakrishnan Raghavan was moved to tears listening to a centuries-old Tamil hymn about Lord Shiva, sung by musician 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 the spiritual traditions of India have shaped “how I engage with, make sense of and access the world around me.” He strongly believes in the power of the collective kindness of humanity across time and space. Raghavan is particularly drawn to the classical verses of communities on the margins, on the fringes, the “other’” to the dominant. “They were the alternative, the undercurrent, the subversive,” he says. “This liminal space inhabited by the marginalized saint, the marginalized women from the hereditary artist community, and the marginalized sexual minorities are where my work finds solace, inspiration, and meaning.” He has been bringing forth the voices and contributions of women mystics, poets, and courtesans whose writings have rarely made their way into the mainstream classical tradition. He sets to music erotic poems by some of these silenced voices, and collaborates with dancers in the art form of Bharatanatyam to bring out visual imagery of their poems. One source describes Raghavan as “a passionate classical musician formally trained in Carnatic music, but highly proficient in other forms too, [who] is taking some steps in ensuring the voice of these amazing and daring women poets of our history does not fade off into oblivion.” As Raghavan says: “Through the verses and poems of the saints and the voices of women, I strive for a vanishing present. In 15th-century poet-saint Kabir’s words, I was wounded by the word. In my work, I bring together seemingly disparate idioms/poems/stories across time and space and place them beside each other. I enjoy this juxtaposition as it opens up space to consider a perennial philosophy that is beyond binaries, beyond the constraints of borders or boundaries.” Raghavan finds immense hope, resilience, love, kindness, and diversity in these voices. “As we grapple with global problems of hate and violence, we need to foreground the marginalized voices to find solutions and solidarity. I strive to be a medium of flowing kindness and desire to be surrounded by kindred spirits in this life pilgrimage.” An elder from Mumbai recently told him, “tum toh duniya ke ho” (you belong to the world). A friend’s mother said that in a world where people are busy creating boundaries, [Ragavan’s] work erases them and makes space for love. Indeed belonging to the world, he has found a home in Santa Cruz, California, while inhabiting spaces with beloved friends and family in India (Hyderabad, Punjab, Pune, Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore), London, Paris, Mexico City, Berlin, Xalapa, New York, New  Jersey, North Carolina, and New Orleans. Raghavan is an accomplished musician, researcher, and educator. He is pursuing a Ph.D. with a Regents Fellowship at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC). His research encompasses Carnatic music, mystic traditions, poetry, translation, temple art, gender, caste, South Asian performance traditions, and the politics of spirituality. He trained from illustrious maestros in Carnatic music for over twenty years, including a two-year-long immersive full-time discipleship (gurukulam) with his guru, Carnatic musician and scholar, Dr. R. Vedavalli. Additionally, he has been training with Shri. Prahlad Tipaniya, the contemporary voice of the musician-poet saint Kabir. As a guest faculty of music at Snehadhara Foundation, and Spastics Society of Karnataka, he explored the healing powers of music within the context of autism. Prior to pursuing his passion for music full-time, he was a Business Intelligence and Analytics consultant in London. As an interdisciplinary artist, he continues to collaborate internationally and share his music across cities in India, the UK, Mexico, and the US. He is fluent in multiple languages, including written and spoken fluency in Tamil, Telugu, Hindi, and Kannada, and is conversant with Sanskrit, Urdu, Arabic, Malayalam, and Marathi. Please join us in conversation with this gifted artist erasing boundaries, as he brings forth the sacred.

"What's gone / is not quite gone, but lingers./ Not the language, but the bones / of the language.  Not the beloved, / but the dark bed the beloved makes / inside our bodies."  -- Danusha Laméris Danusha Laméris’s poems have been called “wise, direct, and fearless” (American poet Dorianne Laux). She began writing poetry, as she believes many people do, from a place of heartbreak, and not knowing what to do with it. Her first book of poems, The Moons of August (Autumn House, 2014), came on the heels of a rapid succession of deep losses in her early 30s. “I’ve buried a lover, a brother, a son,” she writes early on in the collection. Poetry allowed her to become “intimate with world and life, down to the marrow.” In the process, it enabled her to lay to bed some of the grief, freeing her to go to the edge of discovering joy and pleasure once again – at the place where grief and pleasure live together, in the body. Poet Naomi Shihab Nye says, “Her poems strike deeply, balancing profound loss and new finding, employing a clear eye, a way of being richly alive with appetite and gusto, and a gift of distilling experience to find its shining core.”   Poetic explorations of the ecstatic joy of the body and of somatic experience helped Laméris to move beyond grief. “Poetry is the body’s bright wailing against its limits,” she wrote in the title poem of her second collection, Bonfire Opera (U. Pittsburgh Press 2020). According to Colleen J. McElroy, “there is something waiting to be said, something to be revealed, as each poem draws us onward like a bird trying ‘to escape… throwing itself, again and again, against the stained glass.’ The bird and the ‘ghost child’ call out to each of us to ‘begin again.’" And “begin again” Laméris seeks to do through her poetry. “There was something really powerful about how loss operated in my life …. And so the process of beginning again is really a daily process. […]How do I begin again, how do I in a way become innocent again. So I think that’s the ongoing life story.” She believes a poem isn’t done until it’s changed her somehow. “I don’t want to be exactly the same person I was when I start out to write the poem.” She might write and re-write a poem for 10 years, because she is dedicated “to seeing where the poems will bring me” in terms of actually changing her life. Laméris has said that all writers tend to have the same irritant in their life – an irritant that underlies multiple works. She describes her own irritant as grief – which she experienced again and again – leading her to contemplate: how do you deal with loss? She sees herself “as someone who lost my innocence early. Who faced the death of a child, my brother’s suicide, a difficult childhood.” Against that irritant of cascading grief is her solace – beauty, and being a creature in a body. “Now I put my faith in what is unfinished. Off-center. A kind of psycho-spiritual expression of Wabi-Sabi, the Japanese aesthetic concept of admiring that which is worn-in, imperfect, altered by time. If we can praise what is flawed and tattered and half-done, we can praise so many things.” “We live in a culture that is a very hungry culture because so many of the things that our souls crave are not what we are feeding ourselves,” she says. “What am I hungry for? Moving toward beautiful, complex, meaningful imagery. Trying to feed myself images that are meaningful. The erotic – expression of craving, wanting. Are we wanting the body or something else inside of or beyond that?” Laméris was born to a Dutch father and a Caribbean mother from the island of Barbados. She was raised in the California Bay Area, spending her early years in Mill Valley, then moving to Berkeley, where she attended The College Preparatory School. Since graduating with a degree in Art from The University of California at Santa Cruz, she has lived in Santa Cruz. The 2020 recipient of the Lucille Clifton Legacy Award, Laméris is a Poet Laureate emeritus of Santa Cruz County, California. She co-leads the Poetry of Resilience webinars and the HearthFire Writing Community with James Crews. She is on the faculty of Pacific University's low-residency MFA program. Her poems have been published in The Best American Poetry, The New York Times, The American Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, The SUN Magazine, Tin House, The Gettysburg Review, and Ploughshares. Her poem “Small Kindnesses” went viral during the pandemic, inspiring a follow-on collaborative poem by 1300 teenagers from around the world. Please join poet Haleh Liza Gafori and Pavi Mehta in conversation with this remarkable writer who uncovers not just the bones of language, but also the marrow of life.

“There’s 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 that nearly all of them could recall an outdoor experience they perceived as spiritual or sublime. “Nature awakens a sense of awe at the mystery of life, a sense of wonder, a sense of humility in the face of something so much bigger than we are,” says Harper. “A sense of appreciation and of gratitude. Sometimes a sense of fear — a healthy recognition that we’re not the center of the universe.” Harper, an Episcopal priest, is Executive Director of GreenFaith, an international interfaith and multi-faith environmental organization that conducts education and advocacy, and provides environmental sustainability services, to faith-based groups. GreenFaith uses the power of religious networks to help people from diverse backgrounds put their belief into action for the Earth. It works with houses of worship, religious schools, and people of all faiths to help them become better environmental stewards. It believes in addressing environmental issues holistically and is committed to being a one-stop shop for the resources and tools religious institutions need to engage environmental issues and become religious-environmental leaders. An award-winning spiritual writer and nationally-recognized preacher on the environment, Harper teaches and speaks about the moral, spiritual basis for environmental stewardship and justice. He seeks to tap and activate the values base of the religious sector in ways profound and practical to curb wasteful consumerism and set faith-based communities on a track to environmental stewardship—in practice as well as in belief. And yet Harper resists the platitudes and bromides that some religious communities cite about generalized care for God’s creation. “Very powerful vested interests maintained the status quo,” he says, “and polite conversation and periodic references to the Bible were not going to dismantle the system. It was going to take people really confronting centers of power and calling them out in ways that a lot of religious people feel uncomfortable with.” Noting that specific targeted actions – rather than generalized moral exhortations – create change, he notes that “the only way that a status quo gets changed is through moral discomfort; [religious leaders have] got to be willing to be instruments of moral discomfort.” And so he writes about how to preach specifically on the issue, saying “I’m more concerned about [religious moderates] and a sense that religious institutions exist to help people remain comfortable and to help deal with the challenges and tragedies of their own lives, without looking at larger societal issues.” He personally lives the environmentally sustainable life that he preaches. Harper was named an Ashoka Fellow in 2011 and is the author of GreenFaith: Mobilizing God’s People to Protect the Earth (Abingdon Press, March 2015). In recent years, Harper coordinated the 2015 OurVoices campaign, which mobilized religious support globally for COP 21, led the organizing of faith communities for the People’s Climate Marches in NYC and Washington DC, helped lead the faith-based fossil fuel divestment movement, supported the launch of the global Interfaith Rainforest Initiative, and co-founded Shine, a faith-philanthropy-NGO campaign to end energy poverty with renewable energy by 2030. He helps lead GreenFaith’s new local organizing initiative, creating multi-faith GreenFaith Circles in local communities globally. He is a graduate of Princeton University and Union Theological Seminary, and served as a parish priest for ten years and in leadership positions in the Episcopal Church before becoming GreenFaith’s Executive Director. Join us in conversation with this powerful voice for environmental stewardship who walks the talk.

“You are the cumulative expression of all your ancestors.” When Iya Affo meets someone, she instinctively looks for the best in that person, a seed in them that can be nurtured. To nurture others is a high calling for Iya, whose deepest identity is as Mother and Healer. Her African name, Wekenon, means Mother of the Universe, and her title, Iya, signifies Holy Mother. Both were bestowed on her in a traditional ceremony on the soil of her ancestral home in the Benin Republic of West Africa. Iya's passion is to cultivate intergenerational healing by connecting intuitive ancestral practices with modern neurobiology. A culturalist and historical trauma specialist certified in the western tradition, as well as a certified Adverse Childhood Experiences Trainer, she is a descendant of a long line of traditional healers from West Africa, a Chief in the Village of Ouidah, and a High Priestess in the Yoruba tradition. Iya’s search for her individual and cultural identity formed in her childhood while growing up in New York. She was deeply drawn to the rituals observed among her Jewish friends and neighbors – from their ceremonies and traditions, their holidays, to the Yiddish language spoken in their homes. She began to wonder why her Black community had such a different trajectory; why was the history of the Holocaust widely known, but not the stories of enslavement of her ancestors? She sensed that a connection to one’s history and to ancestral land would help communities be resilient and overcome adversity. Setting off to travel alone in her late teens, Iya visited more than 30 countries to understand other cultures. She has proceeded to live abroad in five countries and experienced different spiritual environments – from China, where she practiced Buddhist meditation in a Shaolin Temple; to Myanmar, India, where she stayed at a Hindu ashram; to the Navajo Nation and the Gila River Indian Community, where she engaged in service; and briefly to France. Significant immersion in her ancestral village of Ouidah, Benin Republic, also commenced then and deepened over nearly three decades. Iya relearned how to live as an indigenous woman and now practices the Yoruba tradition in her day-to-day life among the egalitarian, indigenous people of Arizona. “Relentlessly, I pursued the truth about our enslavement,” she has said. “I received my birthright of ritual, ceremony and initiation. My greatest gift has been relearning how to live as an indigenous woman, in egalitarian society, as a wife and mother.” Iya’s early travels led to studies of trauma and epigenetics, which inform her current work. Decades-long research shows that trauma persists in the human psyche and body from one generation to the next, up to 14 generations, via physical DNA. Living in Africa helped her understand the neurobiological dysregulation that is prevalent in the United States for BIPOC (Black Indigenous People of Color) communities. She came to realize that Western treatments – such as talk therapy or medication – are counter-productive or damaging for healing trauma in BIPOC individuals. Alternative healing practices – rituals, drumming, martial arts, and guided meditation – provide more sustaining solutions. Iya carefully says, “In communities where people have been traumatized, the best way for us to heal moving forward is to become self-healing communities. We must be healing ourselves.” Epigenetics also shows that benevolence and positive childhood experiences can be passed through generations. This knowledge gives new motivation for parents, teachers, and caregivers to practice self-regulating behaviors that foster healing, safety, and consistency, and most importantly, love. She hopes to facilitate reculturing and the subsequent healing of indigenous people all over the world. “If we, as a people, are to return to grace, we must go back to the soul of the [African] Continent,” she says. “Only in Her soil will we take root in ancestral land, fertilized by ritual, tradition, spirit and identity. Then we will blossom into a harvest of productive, happy, peaceful and evolved African people.” Through teaching about the importance of culture and neurobiology, Iya advocates for the harmonization of Traditional Medicine and Western Medicine to facilitate holistic healing. She recently stepped down from being an executive board member on the Arizona ACEs Consortium, but continues to serve as the Chair of the Historical Trauma committee. She is an Adjunct Faculty member at the Arizona Trauma Institute/Trauma Institute International, and the founder of Phoenix Rising to Resilience virtual community on the ACEs Connection platform.  Please join us in conversation with this grounded ‘Mother of the Universe’ as we explore healing intergenerational collective, historical trauma.

“Wisdom is dangerous. Love and beauty are too. Our culture has kept us away from them, and must do so to perpetuate the insanity we see all around us.” Mankind has lost its way, which is why we now have plastic in our blood, lead in our bones, iron and mercury in our brains, says Nikos Patedakis, a philosopher on a mission to nudge us back onto the path of wisdom, where all of human endeavor is of service to life. The problem is that much human activity today serves narrow interests and agendas, not the common good. And while many of us pin our hopes on technology to solve the world’s problems, which we have largely caused, Nikos insists that “the solution to our problems is not a technological one, because … it’s a spiritual [issue].” To grow spiritually, we need to open ourselves up to learning, and Nikos embodies the drive to achieve such growth through meaningful experiences, an eco-literate mindset, and consistent practice. Wisdom is a practice, as is love, and both are forms of each other, and manifestations of true understanding. But today, he laments, we tend to seek knowledge, not wisdom. Yet by acquiring, clinging to, and then teaching such fragments of knowledge, “we marginalise and distance ourselves from the very thing we are ultimately chasing: wisdom, meaning, purpose, and learning that will reconnect us to the sacred.” Fragmented knowledge is dangerous. According to Nikos, it’s like “we’re running around with a torch and think we have the sun in our hand.” Nikos himself has practiced many things, having worked as a professional dance teacher and blackjack player, a negotiation trainer, a consultant for Fortune 500 companies, and an Alexander Technique teacher. Having pioneered wisdom-based learning at San Francisco State University and University of California, Santa Cruz, he left academia to become a consulting philosopher, educator, and Co-Director of the Haumea Ecoliteracy Programme. He also has a podcast called Dangerous Wisdom, the name inspired by Buddha’s advice to handle his teachings with the same care as a venomous snake. Today, Nikos works as a consulting philosopher rooted in the ancient Greek orientation – as well as a friendly, neighborhood soul doctor, mentor, permaculture designer, and artist – applying the most powerful, holistic teachings of the wisdom traditions that influenced people like Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. Quoting Epicurus, he says “Vain is the word of the philosopher that heals no suffering.” And so drawing from the arts and sciences, he helps professionals from all walks of life learn to think the way nature works and reconnect with the philosophical traditions of the world. Humility is a good starting point, knowing what you don’t know. In his experience, top performers are so committed, so hungry, they always want to learn more, from any source, and their willingness to learn makes them humble. Nikos, too, is humble, being a serious “student of horses,” which have a culture of the wild. In their sacred presence, horses defy conquest consciousness so profoundly that even those who love horses get a little nervous because horses present an existential--and potentially humiliating--threat to the dominant culture and the human ego. Nikos sees horses as “part of the magic and mystery of the world,” incarnating dangerous wisdom, which makes them great teachers. To experience the magic of the horse, we need to heal and re-indigenize, renouncing what doesn’t work and learning to live a culture rooted in wisdom, love, and beauty, in a manner attuned to ecological and spiritual realities. Nikos argues that Homo sapiens, a being originally rooted in wisdom, love, and beauty, has morphed into a destructive homo economicus, imposing a “conquest culture” intent on taming, shaping, and ultimately degrading our planet, creating “value” for ourselves at the expense of all other beings and our own interconnectedness with the cosmos. “This culture makes us into takers and the planet pays for our ignorance,” says Nikos. “The world can absorb a certain amount of ignorance. But things are now out of hand, so we need to think in a new way. We have become used to thinking in a certain way, but that way is out of sync with nature.” Drive by agendas, such as development, growth, and innovation, we practice “spiritual materialism,” disconnecting us from reality and distorting it through a narrow view of conquest consciousness. In this epoch of “endarkenment,” business and political “leaders” even insist that our need for a thriving, just world is not “realistic,” even though we—and they—all know that our well-being depends on ecological health, that we are mutually interdependent, that our true culture is about belonging and interconnectedness to a greater whole, and that we will succeed most profoundly by cooperating and collaborating, re-attuned to our wisdom and “re-indigenized.” Philosophy helps us paint an accurate picture of the cosmos and give us an awareness of our place in it. Education in the dominant conquest culture “protects” people from philosophy and art. As Nikos wryly comments: “It takes a dysfunctional education to have a dysfunctional culture. Otherwise, people wouldn’t put up with it.” We need to see the world with fresh eyes and an awakened heart. For Nikos, art and philosophy both foster this, offering insight and inspiration for the benefit of all citizens and the broader community of life. Join us in conversation with this philosopher and purveyor of “dangerous wisdom.”

Silence isn’t just the absence of noise. It’s a presence that brings us energy, clarity, and deeper connection. A few years ago, Leigh Marz, a leadership coach, dance teacher, and confessed naturalist, met Justin Talbot Zorn, a policymaker, meditation teacher, and writer, through the introduction of a mutual friend. Though their meetings were entirely online, they hit it off professionally right away, “geeking out on all sorts of things” that they wanted to do in the world. They decided to write an article together and pitched some ideas, the very last one being on silence. The editor of the Harvard Business Review wrote back and said, “Write about silence. Thanks.” So in 2017 they wrote an article called “The Busier You Are, The More You Need Quiet Time.” It went viral and became HBR’s most shared article in recent years, translated into a few languages. So Leigh and Justin stepped back and thought, “What is this telling us?” Though they still hadn't met in person, they decided to write a book together. “Golden: The Power of Silence in a World of Noise” is the result of that inspiration and five-year-long subsequent collaboration. In Golden, Justin and Leigh explore the meaning of silence in a wide range of contexts—from the West Wing of the White House to San Quentin’s death row; from Ivy League brain research laboratories to underground psychedelic circles; from the temperate rainforests of Olympic National Park to the main stage at a heavy metal festival. Though their original article focused largely on auditory silence, Golden looks more broadly at noise—auditory, informational, and internal—not just in our ears, but also on our screens and in our heads. The second part of the book is a field guide to getting beyond the noise. Drawing on lessons from neuroscience, business, spirituality, politics, and the arts, Justin and Leigh explore why auditory, informational, and internal silence is essential for physical health, mental clarity, ecological sustainability, and vibrant community. Justin and Leigh see “silence as a pathway to compassion, to empathy, and to insight as well. Stepping back into deep silence—even sharing that silence as we think through these issues—really allows for novel thinking to emerge.” Silence counteracts “the ethic of performing constantly, to be able to tune into what’s true,” Justin says. It allows for discernment. According to Justin: Sometimes the word silence can have a connotation of complicity or complacency around what’s wrong. Sometimes we hear culturally that even silence is violence. And we respect this notion: it’s something we write about with great appreciation in the book, but our contention is that so much of the apathy in the world right now isn’t born of silence—it’s born of noise. When we’re caught up in paying attention to Instagram “likes,” gossip, career jockeying, and whatever else it might be, all that noise makes it difficult to truly focus on living a life of empathy, to focus on hearing what’s necessary in our lives from the people around us, and to hear what’s necessary with respect to what’s happening in the broader world. And there’s a special alchemy that happens when we are quiet together, experiencing silence with others, Justin and Leigh found. “The power of silence is magnified when it’s shared,” they write. They believe we can repair our world by reclaiming the presence of silence in our lives through a variety of modalities (and not just through mindfulness practice alone). Leigh Marz is a collaboration and leadership coach for major universities, corporations, and federal agencies as well as a longtime student of pioneering researchers and practitioners of the ritualized use of psychedelic medicines in the West. She began her adult journey studying ecology and the interrelationship of things, having in her childhood spent “a lot of time alone and together in nature” with her sibling. “It’s a place of comfort, of magic, dreaming, and self-transcendence, which I think is really good for us humans to experience as much as possible. The self becomes smaller and vaster at the same time,” Leigh says. She also learned to revel time in her body through her lifelong practice of dance, later realizing that “there's some transmission—not verbal, quite ineffable—that takes place” in dance, and that dance choreography allows bodies to come together in relationship like a murmuration. Leigh has led training programs to promote an experimental mindset among teams at NASA and a decade-long cross-sector collaboration to reduce toxic chemicals in products, in partnership with leading corporations, universities, and policy institutes. She is the cofounder of Astrea Strategies, and lives in Berkeley, California, with her husband and daughter. Justin Talbot Zorn has served as both a strategist and a meditation teacher in the US Congress. On Capitol Hill, he served as Legislative Director to three Democratic Members of Congress. He helped to launch and lead a first-of-its-kind mindfulness program in the US House of Representatives, bringing together people from across the political spectrum to do the work of finding greater calmness and insight. A Harvard-and-Oxford-trained specialist in the economics and psychology of human thriving, he has written for the Washington Post, The Atlantic, Harvard Business Review, Foreign Policy, and other publications. Justin is cofounder of Astrea Strategies, a consultancy that bridges contemplation and action, helping leaders and teams envision and communicate solutions to complex challenges. Justin lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with his wife and three children. Please join us in conversation and discernment with Leigh and Justin!

“Post capitalist philanthropy is a paradox in terms. A paradox is the appropriate starting place for the complex, entangled, messy context we find ourselves in as a species.” This is how long-time activists, political strategists, and “accidental philanthropy advisors” Alnoor Ladha and Lynn Murphy start their forthcoming book on Post Capitalist Philanthropy. The authors take us on a journey from the history of wealth accumulation to the current logic of late-stage capitalism – and ultimately to the lived possibilities of other ways of knowing, sensing and being that can usher in life-centric models. This “ontological shift”, as they call it, into new possibilities is at the heart of their work. Creating new-ancient-emerging realities is not simply about how we redistribute wealth or “fight power”, but rather, how we perceive and embody our actions in relationship to a dynamic, animistic world and cosmos. Their book is a result of decades of deep personal inquiry and practice, as well as lifelong engagement with activists, philanthropists, philosophers, social scientists, cosmologists and wisdom keepers. Alnoor Ladha comes from a Sufi lineage and writes about the crossroads of politics and spirituality in troubled times. His work focuses on the intersection of political organizing, systems thinking, structural change and narrative work. He was the co-founder and Executive Director of The Rules, a global network of activists, organizers, designers, coders, researchers, writers and others focused on changing the rules that create inequality, poverty and climate change. TR started in 2012 as a time-bound project and an experiment in temporary organizational design, exploring new ways of how to work, play, and make trouble together. His work has been published in Al Jazeera, The Guardian, Truthout, Fast Company, Kosmos Journal, New Internationalist, and the Huffington Post among others. He is a board member of Culture Hack Labs, a co-operatively run advisory for social movements and progressive organizations. He holds an MSc in Philosophy and Public Policy from the London School of Economics. Lynn Murphy is a strategic advisor for foundations and NGOs working in the geopolitical South. She was a senior fellow and program officer at the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation where she focused on international education and global development. She resigned as a “conscientious objector” to neocolonial philanthropy. She holds an MA and PhD in international comparative education from Stanford University. She is also a certified Laban/Bartenieff movement analyst.  Lynn and Alnoor are co-directors of The Transition Resource Circle, a group focused on the broader transition from our current meta-crisis to adjacent possible futures. TRC seeks to work with resources and resource holders to alchemize and liberate capital to be in service to Life. They work through circle ways – “e.g. non-hierarchical, embodied cognition approaches, psycho-spiritual practices to move from a culture of entitlement to ways which honor the multiple entanglements of historical precedents, our respective lineages & karmic storylines, and what future beings (including ourselves) require for reconciliation and healing.” TRC focuses on philanthropy as it has the potential to play a critical role in rebalancing wealth, power and historical injustices. Join us in conversation with these heartful and soulful thinkers and doers.

“It is not what music does,” writes Christine Stevens, “it is what music undoes.” In July 2022, as a crimson supermoon lit up the sky in Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming, Christine Stevens sat afloat in a kayak, beholding the still, alpine waters of Jenny Lake and attuning to the wisdom offered by the natural world. When the time was ripe, she reached into her backpack, took out the wooden flute that usually accompanies her, and played a mesmerizing ode to the moon. A certified naturalist, poet, and music therapist who has worked globally with survivors of trauma, war, and disasters, Christine was now preparing for her annual vision quest—alone for four days, fasting, and silent. Deeply connected with music and nature since a young age, Christine grew up in an “outdoorsy family,” adored her grandfather’s tree farm, and learned to play the piano and saxophone. Up until high school, however, she felt alone whenever she performed music. Then one day, she volunteered in a classroom of autistic children. They joined her in playing music together. And it was there that she discovered her life calling, going on to receive two master's degrees—one in music therapy, the other in social work.  Although her current work is comprised in large part by drumming (Upbeat Drum Circles), it wasn’t easy at first. “I thought I had no sense of rhythm at all,” Christine reflects. “I almost failed the percussion class in college.” But she stumbled into a drum circle while attending a music conference and immediately felt transformed by the energy. She learned to play congas and improvise freely. Inspired by the ease of handling drums, their spiritual depth, and historical significance, Christine became a “musical ambassador of peace,” bringing their healing potential to communities touched by significant trauma: Columbine High School, Ground Zero after 9/11, and Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. Most recently, she worked with Iraqi refugees and created the first drum circle training program in northern Iraq. As a member of an integrative research team, she has published multiple studies on the scientific benefits of group drumming, including research that showed an increase in immunity and T-cells in participants of drum circles. Her book, Music Medicine: The Science and Spirit of Healing Yourself With Sound, goes deeper into music as a healing modality and teaches a paradigm of music that integrates the four directions and four elements with the four dimensions of the human being.  When it comes to spiritual background and beliefs, Christine is a self-described “smogasbordian.” She has been influenced by The Soul Saving Station for Every Nation, the Quakers, the Sufi lineage of Hazrat Inayat Khan, and the Agape International Spiritual Center in Los Angeles—the latter in which her co-leading of the Drum Ministry has “really helped [her] consciousness of positive thought and affirmative prayer.” In her forties, she was adopted into the Lakota people after a sweat lodge purification ceremony and elaborate offerings of song, feast, and gifts. In addition to grassroots communities, Christine has also worked with the Department of Defense and many Fortune 500 companies including DuPont, Disney, and Verizon. For the general public, she offers multiple YouTube videos teaching simple rhythms with drummers from around the world.  Her other books include The Nature Sutras, The Healing Drum Kit, and The Art and Heart of Drum Circles. She is a contributing writer for magazines like US News and World Report, Fitness, and The Christian Science Monitor.  Ultimately, she feels her mission is to embody, with or without instruments, the music that moves through her and to support others in realizing that they, too, are music. Please join Mina Lee in conversation with this musician and poet of Earth’s wild beauty, and learn with us some ways to awaken through rhythmic and playful expression.  

“Music generates energy. If we attach music to our message, it will help create the interest and excitement that is necessary to move people out of inertia and into activism.” How does an individual, moved by spirit and conscience, begin to stand up against systemic human rights violations around the world? For Jack Healey, a former Franciscan priest and pioneering head of the Washington, D.C.-based Human Rights Action Center, it is by harnessing the world’s leading musical talent to raise awareness and mobilize youth to engage in nonviolent action. Called "Mr. Human Rights" by U.S. News and World Report, Jack for over 60 years has exponentially raised the visibility of human rights and inspired activism among youth and ordinary citizens. He has been described as having "helped move the topic of human rights from closed-door diplomatic negotiations to widespread awareness, public debate, and direct citizen action." Through creative use of media and enlistment of world-class rock performers, Jack has bridged art and activism with the ultimate mission to defend the rights of humanity everywhere. Jack saw first-hand the power of music to inspire and galvanize while in South Africa during the freedom struggle. As director of the Peace Corps in Lesotho from 1977 to 1981, he witnessed people singing protest songs in the streets and was struck by the power of music to activate and empower a community. This vibrancy stayed with him long after the streets emptied, even past when the event details faded from memory. “The music brought the crowds together, and the music carried their message with more strength than words.” Jack came to the realization that artists – musicians, writers, performers – can be uniquely effective activists and activators, given their ability to reach wide audiences and to “capture and convey the emotional state of society and question what is right and what is wrong.” Following his time with the Peace Corps, Jack became director of Amnesty International, USA, where he would lead the organization for twelve years through unprecedented growth and a complete overhaul. He experimented with and introduced to the world a new tool in human rights activism – organizing musical events to raise awareness about human rights, including concert tours with U2, The Police, Peter Gabriel, Bruce Springsteen, Tracy Chapman, and many other musicians. In the month following the first benefit concert tour that Jack produced with Amnesty, membership increased by 45,000. Concert-goers were asked to send appeals for freedom on behalf of six prisoners of conscience, and two were released soon after. In 1994, Jack fulfilled his dream to create “a one-person organization that could be effective as a medium-sized human rights group with a lot less money,” with the Human Rights Action Center. HRAC devoted over a decade to supporting the pro-democracy movement in Burma and the release of leader Aung San Suu Kyi, through a variety of projects, including the benefit album For the Lady, a documentary film Douye!, and a 30-day YouTube campaign. It has long been Jack’s vision to have the Universal Declaration of Human Rights document printed in every passport; he has stressed that the wide recognition of a written pronouncement for rights can be the basis of innumerable movements for change. Another current HRAC effort is clemency for Leonard Peltier, a Native American activist. Jack spent his young adulthood in seminary, training over a decade to become a Franciscan priest. Attending graduate school in Washington, D.C. during the height of the civil rights movement hugely influenced him; integration, inclusion, and equality would become central themes in his sermons and in his work at a college ministry center. Around the time of his ordination, Jack knew deep down that he would someday answer the call to be of service beyond the walls of the Catholic church. In 1968, following four years as a Catholic priest, Jack left the priesthood to lead the youth division of the American Freedom from Hunger Foundation. Jack coordinated with local youth to produce over 300 “Walks for Development” across the nation – long before charity walks or races became commonplace in American culture – raising $12 million for national and international non-profits that help alleviate world hunger. Jack would later team up with comedian and activist Dick Gregory on his world hunger run from Los Angeles to New York City to raise awareness and funds. Jack has spoken at over a thousand high schools and colleges, is the recipient of seven honorary doctorates, and is a contributor to Huffington Post, The New York Times, and independent blogs. He helped to start the Reebok Human Rights Foundation, which hands out the Reebok Human Rights Award each year, and two other non-profits, Witness (supporting citizen video documentation of human rights abuses) and Equality Now (supporting equality for women and girls). Jack’s life is celebrated in the forthcoming documentary film, Keeper of the Flame. His memoir, Create Your Future, details his many innovative ideas on how to bring human rights into mainstream consciousness and effect positive change, as well as his adventures collaborating with rock musicians, actors, producers, and NGOs to make it all a reality. Please join us in conversation with this innovative and tenacious activist and humanitarian.

“Haleh Liza Gafori’s ecstatic and piercing translation has lifted a veil, bringing Rumi closer into the quick of our present. Each poem is a divine invitation. Free your mind. Drown in love.” —V (formerly Eve Ensler) With black curls twirling across her shoulders, Haleh Liza Gafori — a poet, translator, vocalist, and educator — stands on a stage, performs a poem of Rumi that she translated into English, then bursts into song in Persian. As her voice echoes across the room, she evokes the divine ecstasy and vision this great mystic poet is known for — expressing in an intimate manner entirely her own. For well over a decade, Gafori has inspirited and taught the poetry of Persian poets across various universities, festivals, museums, and institutions. A bicultural woman of Persian descent raised in New York, Gafori’s ears are highly attuned to both American poetry and the Persian text. As a child, she listened to her parents recite Rumi’s Persian poetry. “It’s very common for Iranians to memorize poetry,” she explains, saying she would hear these words but not quite understand. But the energy the lines carried, and their effects on the listeners made an early, indelible imprint on her.  As an adult, she began reading Rumi in English. “It was interesting that American translators kind of pointed me back to my roots," she says. For Gafori, Rumi’s words offer ancient wisdom pertinent to our current time: What do his poems tell us about ego death, compassion, greed, generosity, selflessness, soul, and the cultivation of ecstasy? What is his liberating take on death? Then she began singing in Persian, and eventually, translating these same poems. “As someone who can look at the Persian and look at the English,” she reflects, “one can see, oh, we don't have these lines here, we're missing these lines, or wow, this is a great, well done translation here, or oh my God, what in the world was happening here? It's a mixture. It's a mixed bag.” Her new book, Gold, is a fresh selection and translation of Rumi’s poems — its title a reference to Rumi and other Sufi poets being alchemists, transforming mental states and feeling states into “the deepest love, the deepest generosity, the most expansive consciousness that we can touch, the ecstatic.” Former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets Marilyn Hacker describes Gold as “the work of someone who is at once an acute and enamored reader of the original Farsi text, a dedicated miner of context and backstory, and, best of all, a marvelous poet in English.” Gafori explains that the book is a collection sourced from the Divan-e Shams-e Tabrizi, a sprawling text of over 40,000 verses. Each poem here had to be cut from this endless cloth, reshuffled, styled with modern enjambments, and, finally, translated. Perhaps it’s more accurate to think of Gold not as a translation of one medieval mystical poet by a modern poet, but as a collaboration between two equal poets that spans centuries. I saw myself sharp as a thorn. I fled to the softness of petals. I saw myself sour as vinegar. I mixed myself with sugar. An aching eye seeing through pain, a stewing pot of poison, I was both. Reaching for the antidote, I touched compassion. I touched mercy. After a BS in Biological Sciences from Stanford University, Gafori received an MFA in creative writing from City College of New York. Her thesis — comprised of original poems, as well as translations of Persian poets like Sohrap Sepehri and Omran Salahi — earned her an Academy of American Poets Prize and the Goodman Grant for Poetry. She has been featured at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Fetzer Institute’s Gathering on Love and Forgiveness, Bowery Poetry Club, and Verses of Hope hosted by the Marginalian (formerly Brainpickings). For the poetry journal Rattapallax, Gafori served as a guest editor of the New Persian Poetry section. In addition to her gifts as a poet, Gafori is also a musician. For current and past musical projects, including Haale (former spelling of her name, “Haleh”) and The Mast, Gafori toured across the US and Europe, including stops at One Note at Carnegie Hall, the Lincoln Center Out of Doors Festival, and the Bonnaroo Festival. Her albums have received critical acclaim, and her songs have appeared in the NBC’s series “Life” and the CWTV’s series “The Originals.” In 2018, she translated, composed, and performed in a collaborative multi-media project, “Ask Hafez,” supported by the Queens Council on the Arts. Like the poems she translates, Gafori’s voice is timeless, and her offerings are perhaps best observed or listened to. We invite you to find a quiet space to sample one of them here. Please join us in conversation with this gifted poet and musician who infuses new vitality into ancient love and wisdom.

“If your heart is broken, I urge you not to waste it.” – Sarika Jain In 2012, Sarika Jain was living a life similar to that of her clients today: she was a “smart, professional, go-getter” woman on Wall Street seeking to find love. But after a broken engagement that left her heartbroken and disillusioned with life, she realized she needed deeper, spiritual healing. “It was time to let go of all the things I thought I knew about love, dating, and relationships, and begin a powerful new inner journey of profound healing and transformation,” she realized. True to her later advice, she didn’t waste her heartbreak. She embarked on a journey of self-love and true self-acceptance. That journey took her through, among other things, Awakin meditation circles, where she would meet the man who eventually became her life partner, Krishan Patel. She didn’t stop at just marrying her life partner, but also crossed a bigger milestone: “marrying one’s own self.” Through her work of self-transformation, she came across the great leaders of history. What was their relationship with self-doubt? “They take a leap of faith in themselves,” Sarika observed, leading her to do just that for herself. From a well settled career as a management consultant, Sarika Jain decided to take a leap of faith and follow her dream: inspiring women to live the lives they’ve dreamed of - experiencing profound love, success and fulfillment. Sarika is a love, relationship and dating coach and the author of an upcoming book, The 90 Day Soulmate Plan: Get Out of Your Own Way and Attract the Higher Love You Deserve. While a quick reaction about love coaching may feel like it’s about making oneself more appealing to attract the partner of one’s dreams, Sarika’s entire focus is on inner transformation. She has applied a deeply psycho-spiritual lens in the realm of personal relationships. How do we cultivate ourselves to be joyful and complete? How do we heal the wounds of incompleteness and the grief of unresolved heartbreaks and past hurts? Instead of changing oneself to be attractive to another, she focuses on helping people stop getting in the way of their most authentic self. Her unique approach encompasses everything from uncovering relationship patterns and closing one’s “Ex Files” to practicing self-love and mindfulness in relationships. And although her primary early motivation was to help women, her work helps both women and men. Sarika walks the edge of inner transformation, leaning into interpersonal struggles and mining the gold from them. The relatability of her approach, the clarity of her message, and the power of her values has led to some calling her a “Relationship Sorceress.” In her personal life, Sarika focuses on creating a conscious, joyful partnership with Krishan and a healthy home for her two daughters (with a third on the way!) as well as building a sacred community around her, which she views as an extension of cultivating her Love Garden. Through the teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh and her involvement with various volunteer communities, she has evolved her understanding of love – centering around the concepts of interbeing, mindfulness and service. Her underlying passion is around healing the relationship between men and women and “creating a future of peace for the children of the world” by ending generational trauma and creating healthy family units. Sarika’s professional journey includes 15 years in the corporate world. It has been more than a decade since she made the conscious decision to connect with the song of her heart. Sarika is a student of yoga, energy healing, psychology, feminine spirituality, and relationships and has studied Life Centered Therapy with licensed clinical psychologist Dr. Andy Hahn. She has an undergraduate degree in Computer Science & Engineering from University of Pennsylvania, an MBA from The Wharton School, and has worked at Bain & Co., Merrill Lynch and the World Bank. Sarika lives with her husband, Krishan, and two daughters in New Jersey, and leads a playful, passionate life. Join us in conversation with this votary of healthy love -- a love that is enabled by self-acceptance and inner transformation.