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I once tried an improv class to see if that would finally help calm my stage nerves. It didn't. But I did learn something amazing. If an actor is trying to show the audience that they love someone, they can do this by spending a lot of time looking at that someone. Returning their gaze to their object of love, again and again, glancing, tracking, noticing details. To us sitting in the audience, this looks a lot like love. We see where the actor's attention is going, and we intuitively sense their care. Even a child would sense it. The simplicity of this really hit home. What we look at is what we care about! A great metaphor for noticing is "gymnastics of the attention." It comes from Simone Weil, who taught philosophy of science at the Lycée for Girls in Le Puy. She used the phrase to talk about teaching as ... [Read more] Seed questions for reflection: How do you relate to the notion that what we practice looking at is what we care about? Can you share a personal story of a time you got really curious about how much of what you saw was directed by habit or external influences versus your own personal practice? What helps you slow down to be curious about your choices? |
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The Logger Who Learned The Value Of Living Trees In a years long journey from logging to eco-tourism, Roberto Brito, found a new way to support his family and his community. "I realised that through that standing forest, I have access to education, technology, a future for the young people living here, and I still contribute to the preservation of our planet in relation to climate change." Read the full story here.
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Watching My Friend Pretend That Her Heart Is Not Breaking In "Watching My Friend Pretend That Her Heart Is Not Breaking," Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer offers a moving poem about grief and the opportunity to treat each other with tenderness. Watch below: |
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"What can we do to stay resilient in the face of this election? One way is to check in with ourselves daily to make sure we’re doing the things that sustain our health and well-being, while remaining empowered to make a positive impact on the election itself." UC Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center offers eight inquiries that can help us navigate stress during the elections -- from checking in with the body and mind to proactively seeking out good news to a gratitude practice and beyond. [Read more ...] |
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Why do we send flowers? To make up for what is intangible? Those feelings we can’t hold in our hands and present as a gift to our loved ones? And why is it that the placeholders we choose — the dozen red roses, the fragrant white lilies, the long-stemmed French tulips — are so fleeting? Hold on to them for too long and you end up with a mess of petals, pollen and foul-smelling water. After my boyfriend’s death, I went about trying to find closure. I wrote letters and set them on fire. I went to a therapist, then another. I went to yoga and tried meditation. I moved to Colorado, then Oregon. I went so many places and carried him along with me to each of them. I have done so much holding. There’s a picture I took of him just days before I left for college, two months before ... [Read more] Seed questions for reflection: How do you relate to the notion that the fleeting nature of life is what makes it precious? Can you share a personal story of a time you found life valuable precisely because of its fleeting nature? What helps you appreciate impermanence? |
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How do we use the tools of today to bridge emergent phenomena of possibility with very ancient values? One of those ways is through AI, or artificial intelligence. AI can be an "innerscope" - and perhaps even lead us to an "interscope" to cultivate greater connection and compassion. During a Closing Celebration call for the recent Global Interfaith Compassion Challenge, we unveiled the Interfaith Bot -- which contains a corpus of 77,000 sacred documents! Here's how one person described it:
Tapan Parikh and Tulika Verma share more (view all clips here.), including examples of questions they asked the bot and the surprising yet beautiful responses they received.
Post today's call, people have been asking various questions of collective interfaith wisdom like ...
We're grateful for many kind words, across various other bots too:
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Sharon Salzburg: A Memorable Interfaith Space + A Meditation Sharon Salzburg, renowned meditation teacher, reflects on her memorable experiences with interfaith spaces during last month's Interfaith Compassion Challenge orientation call. She shared one stunning moment, saying "suddenly we were a community in a very different way...open to and with such heartfelt testimony, from everybody, on all sides." Watch her wonderfully rich talk here:
Then tune in to a meditation guided by Sharon, and to hear her response to the question: How do you balance the conviction of your path with the curiosity of something foreign to you? |
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Enjoy a recent KindSpring Community Roundup :) DrJoe: Sent Another Package To My Friend In Ukraine :) |
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Yuka Saionji: Story From A Hiroshima Pilgrimage On a reunion call during the recent Interfaith Compassion Challenge, Yuka Saionji Matsuura joined us to share stories of hope and forgiveness from her pilgrimage to Hiroshima. Yuka is the Deputy Chairperson of Byakko Shinko Kai, a spiritual organization dedicated to world peace and raising the consciousness of humanity During her deeply moving talk, she shared, "We believe everyone is a divine spark, and to see it from that perspective, doing something so against your divine spark, doing something so apart from the truth of who you are, causes so much pain and so much struggle." Watch her full remarks here:
You can also watch a brief video about the Symphony of Peace Prayers and watch as Yuka leads a peace prayer from her tradition. |
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Living into All the Honey: Embracing Grief and Joy "How the churning of opposite feelings weaves through us like an insistant breeze leads us wordlessly deeper back into ourselves ..." In a moving video, poet Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer reads from her new collection of poetry All the Honey. Watch below. |
