
Nov 9, 2023 KarunaNews: The Zero Waste City: What Kiel In Germany Can Teach The World
Nov 6, 2023 Kathrin, a ServiceSpace volunteer in Austria, is serving local projects in Gautemala and was quite moved to see their flavor of 'heartivism' recently. "This journey was all about cultivating peace from the inside out, as I have wittnessed indigenous people saying no to coruption and supression after 300 years in a very peacefull way," said Kathrin. "They recently had elections and very suprisingly a man won, who is supporting the Mayans and their ancient culture a lot. His dad already did as a president 50 years ago helping them coming out of slavery. The other party, which lost, had contested the election result and out of that they started to block the roads. Over some weeks it was like a lockdown situation in certain areas. How the Mayans were blocking the roads deeply touched me." See photos of these very special cermonies for peace below.
Nov 3, 2023 KarunaNews: A Meeting Of Jewish And Muslim Women Gives Me Hope
Nov 2, 2023 Introducing the Spirituality&PracticeBot! The Spirituality&PracticeBot is the newest pilot in a ServiceSpace AI experiment designed to bend the arc of technology toward compassion. The new Bot compiles a wealth of multifaith and interspiritual wisdom from Spirituality & Practice, a platform founded by Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat, to support spiritual journeys. [...] Spirituality&PracticeBot will answer your questions and create reflections by drawing upon the website’s 65,000 pages of content, including articles about spiritual practices, book reviews and book excerpts, film reviews, spiritual teacher profiles, spiritual quotations from books, a database of 2,000 spiritual practices, and curated content on topics and traditions. With its replies to you, the Bot will also give you several links to the Sources where it found the wisdom. Read more about the Spirituality&PracticeBot here.
Oct 30, 2023 Harvard Medical School pens an article that makes ServiceSpace work: What We Get When We Give Gregory Fricchione, the Mind/Body Medical Institute Professor of Psychiatry at HMS and director of the Benson-Henry Institute for Mind Body Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, describes it as a release of “chemical juice.” When we help others, he says, neurotransmitters flow up in a tight bundle of axons called the medial forebrain bundle through the subcortex with “exit ramps to many of the important structures of the brain” — the fear-conditioning amygdala, the memory-forming hippocampus, and the motivation-moderating medial prefrontal cortex. Numerous other processes may be implicated in the helper’s high, says Fricchione: pain-reducing endogenous opioids, endorphins, and perhaps even the neuromodulating chemicals that make up the endocannabinoid system. Then there’s oxytocin, the so-called affiliation hormone, which has plentiful receptors in the amygdala, where it helps suppress fear and anxiety. [...] Evolution has provided us with the structures and functions that remind us that we survive better by cooperating as a group — not only when we’re seeking social support, but when we’re giving it. “How two people treat each other in one part of the city may relate to how two other people treat each other in another part of the city,” says Christakis, who now directs the Human Nature Lab at Yale University. In other words, he says, “altruism is contagious.” The kindness of individuals cascades, ultimately creating a stronger group that is better equipped to survive. [...] A 2020 American Journal of Preventive Medicine study of nearly thirteen thousand volunteers over age 50 who were assessed over a four-year period revealed that those who spent more than a hundred hours per year volunteering had a 44 percent lower risk of mortality compared to those who did not volunteer, even after controlling for factors like stress, health behaviors, and personality traits. [...] Acts of altruism can also burden the body. Caregiving, for example, can become an immense stressor contributing to myriad health issues. That’s why Post doesn’t think that altruism itself is the best medicine. “It’s not how much you do for others, but the kindness you pour into it,” he adds.
Oct 28, 2023 What a joy to host a Awakin London retreat with Jin Wei and Jin Chuan!
Oct 24, 2023 KarunaNews: They Always Leave A $1,000 Tip After Breakfast
Oct 23, 2023 Cindy's touching comment on yesterday's DailyGood: Drinking the Tears of the World: Grief as Deep Activism ... "Thank you for this article. Since losing my son two years ago (when everyone was so afraid of covid that only two friends attended my son's wake), I have been waiting and waiting to read the words somewhere that might resonate. Over the past two years, I've probably read 30 books and 40 articles on grief. This is the only one that reached me. I'm very grateful."
Oct 20, 2023 Tomas Bjorkman recently invited us to a weekend retreat around inner development. He's the author of a compelling book, The Nordic Secret. Here's David Brooks describing it in the New York Times: Almost everybody admires the Nordic model. Countries like Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland have high economic productivity, high social equality, high social trust and high levels of personal happiness. Nordic nations were ethnically homogeneous in 1800, when they were dirt poor. Their economic growth took off just after 1870, way before their welfare states were established. What really launched the Nordic nations was generations of phenomenal educational policy. They look at education differently than we do. The German word they used to describe their approach, bildung, doesn’t even have an English equivalent. It means the complete moral, emotional, intellectual and civic transformation of the person. It was based on the idea that if people were going to be able to handle and contribute to an emerging industrial society, they would need more complex inner lives. See also Tomas's Ted Talks: How Inner Development Can Create Stronger Democracies
Oct 19, 2023 KarunaNews: How Boston Halved Its High School Dropout Rate