Awakin Calls

When Mary Pipher, a New York Times best-selling author, told her friends she was next writing a book on older women “like us,” they immediately protested, “I am not old.” What they meant, she says in a recent New York Times opinion piece, was that “they didn’t act or feel like the cultural stereotypes of women their age. Old meant bossy, useless, unhappy and in the way. Our country’s ideas about old women are so toxic that almost no one, no matter her age, will admit she is old.”

Mary Pipher’s work is far from “old” or “useless.”  She continues to discern the needs of the times and her writing presciently strikes a chord in the zeitgeist.  Her most recent book, Women Rowing North: Navigating Life's Currents and Flourishing As We Age (January 2019), happens to coincide with the news of older women ascending our mainstream institutions and culture. But while men’s value has long been perceived as rising with age, women’s has often fallen in popular perception.

“In America, ageism is a bigger problem for women than aging,” Mary writes. “Our bodies and our sexuality are devalued, … and we’re rendered invisible in the media. Yet, most of the women I know describe themselves as being in a vibrant and happy life stage. We are resilient and know how to thrive in the margins. Our happiness comes from self-knowledge, emotional intelligence and empathy for others.”

Mary’s self-knowledge, emotional intelligence, and empathy have been decades in the making.  A clinical psychologist in private practice in Lincoln, Nebraska, Mary is author of the #1 New York Times’ bestseller, Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls, in addition to 9 other books (three of her books have been New York Times bestsellers). Mary has written extensively on developmental issues facing young women and girls, as well as the struggles of modern families – and now, of the joys and challenges of women aging.

Mary is a community organizer and activist for many causes. In her book Seeking Peace, Mary speaks about her own struggles that emerged as a result of her professional success, and how self-care, self-exploration, and Buddhist practices helped her regain a sense of inner peace and meaningful engagement. In her most well-known work, Reviving Ophelia, she reflects on the struggles faced by young girls, such as depression, eating disorders, and suicide, as they navigate adolescence and try to find their true selves.

Mary has both the independence and hardiness of a well-lived life on the prairie.  She was born in the Ozarks and grew up in rural Nebraska. As a child, she enjoyed reading, writing, swimming, spending time outdoors, and being around her friends and family, all of which she enjoys today. Mary went on to study cultural anthropology and graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 1969 before earning her Ph.D. from the University of Nebraska in Clinical Psychology in 1977. She was a Rockefeller Scholar in Residence at Bellagio and has received two American Psychological Association Presidential Citations, one of which she returned to protest psychologists' involvement in enhanced interrogations at Guantánomo and other sites.

Mary specializes in how American culture affects people's health and has appeared on Today, 20/20, The Charlie Rose Show, PBS Newshour with Jim Lehrer, and National Public Radio's Fresh Air. She speaks across the country to families, mental health professionals, and educators, and is particularly passionate about the importance of community and development of healthy relationships between children and adults. "There's been a shift in how people are grouping in this country," she says. "In the '90s we put all our 8-year-olds in one place, our 14-year-olds in another, our 80-year-olds someplace else. There's a certain kind of toxicity from age segregation."

Mary lives in Nebraska with her husband Jim and is an adjunct clinical professor at the University of Nebraska.

Join us in conversation with this wise and spirited writer and activist!

Parker J. Palmer is a renowned writer, teacher, and activist whose work speaks deeply to people in many walks of life. For more than five decades, he has written and spoken about subjects ranging from contemplation to community, the inner life to public life, education to social change. He is known as one of the nation’s most thoughtful voices, calling us all to ways of being in the world that honor the human heart and promote a humane society.

Founder and Senior Partner Emeritus of the Center for Courage & Renewal, which oversees the "Courage to Teach" program for K–12 educators across the country and parallel programs for people in other professions, including medicine, law, ministry and philanthropy, Palmer has written ten books and designed powerful processes for people to access their deepest truths in community with others. He was named in 1998 by the Leadership Project, a national survey of 10,000 educators, as one of the thirty most influential senior leaders in higher education and one of the ten key agenda-setters of the past decade. In 2010, he received the William Rainey Harper Award, whose previous recipients include Margaret Mead, Elie Wiesel, and Paolo Freire. In 2011, the Utne Reader named him as one of "25 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World"—people who "don't just think out loud but who walk their talk on a daily basis." In 2005, Living the Questions: Essays Inspired by the Work and Life of Parker J. Palmer was published, in which university presidents, scientists, physicians, religious leaders, business consultants, public school educators, philanthropists, and community organizers bear witness to the depth, breadth, and reach of Palmer’s work and his courage and determination to live a life congruent with his ideas and principles. 

Palmer’s growing edge is learning how to live an engaged and creative life as an elder on “the brink of everything.” In his address to the class of 2015 at Naropa University, Palmer’s words have something in them that is at once as much a farewell as it is a warm handshake, and as illuminated with retrospect as it is a spirited call for forward movement:

“As you integrate ignorance and failure into your knowledge and success, … [t]ake everything that’s bright and beautiful in you, and introduce it to the shadow side of yourself. Let your altruism meet your egotism. Let your generosity meet your greed. Let your joy meet your grief. Everyone has a shadow. […] when you are able to say, ‘I am all of the above—my shadow as well as my light—the shadow’s power is put in service of the good. Wholeness is the goal, but wholeness does not mean perfection. It means embracing brokenness as an integral part of your life.”

Palmer is tall, white-haired, smiling, and amicably unhurried in his delivery. Standing behind the wooden podium, he inhabits the capacity to truly connect, to be with—to be a living bridge between himself and others. Now in his late seventies, it is a life’s journey that brought Palmer to the position of being able to speak both for himself and in service to others—and, as such, to live the integrality that he calls “the undivided life.”

To Palmer, who was raised in a Methodist household, the question and endeavor of how best to marry practice and life, self and other, and, ultimately, self and vocation, grew out of a religious context.  It naturally evolved into an engagement with civil society and the higher education community. Over time, this question and its various experiential iterations and demands showed Palmer the necessity of self-examination and self-knowledge—and the associated inner work of integrating all aspects of oneself, and all aspects of experience, in the name of an open-heartedness and a vulnerability to truth.

To Palmer, such a vulnerability makes possible the bridging of the gap between the inner self and the outer world. The divided life is one lived from “the gap between who we really are and the face we put on to the larger world,” a gap that, Palmer explains, eventually becomes painful. “As human beings,” says Palmer, “we are born whole, integral—with no distinction with what’s going on inside of us and what’s going on outside of us.” But the gap gets created and widens as we grow; to bridge this gap is to live from a place of freedom, authenticity, and service.

Much of Palmer’s work is grounded in his Christian upbringing and education.  He began a religious course of study at Union Theological Seminary in New York City upon graduating from Carleton College with a dual degree in Philosophy and Sociology in 1961. But as his path naturally brought him to a deep engagement with the nonreligious public sphere, Palmer continued to affirm the spiritual nature of his message.  He speaks for the importance of value- and wisdom-based work over work aimed merely at efficiency and measurable results.

After completing his doctorate in sociology at the University of California, Berkeley in 1970, Palmer moved to Washington, D.C. with his family to become a community organizer, during which he also took on a tenure-track role teaching sociology at Georgetown University. Sensing the need to ground his work with community, Palmer became involved with The Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) in Pendle Hill, Pennsylvania. His experiences with the Friends led him to new questions and challenges about the expression of faith—challenges that contributed to periods of depression in his life that claimed his energy and ambition but eventually became pivotal to his life’s work. Having faced this period of darkness, Palmer came out with an evolved way of perceiving the value of the experience and a stronger rootedness in his own self-expression.  

His experiences of depression, alongside the journey of life itself, feed into Palmer’s belief in the importance of “that integral quality,” or the “capacity to be here as I really am.” This capacity—also a responsibility and a requirement of a life fully lived—is one that he sees as especially relevant to the classroom and to the work of education professionals, who face the necessary work of bridging the gap between self and other and, in so doing, preparing younger generations for coexistence in an increasingly diverse society.

In 1997, Palmer founded the Center for Courage & Renewal, which runs the Courage to Teach program for K-12 educators as well as profession-specific programs, leadership programs, and programs offering guidance in team and organizational transformation. Over the course of his career, Palmer has also published ten books, including Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation (1999), The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher’s Life (1997), A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life (2009), and Healing the Heart of Democracy: The Courage to Create a Politics Worthy of the Human Spirit (2011). His most recent book is On the Brink of Everything: Grace, Gravity and Getting Old (2018).

News, events, retreats, and conversations can be found on Palmer’s blog, The Growing Edge, and his columns for “On Being” can be found on that site. Fittingly, for Palmer, life cannot but occur on an edge—the edge on which all of experience can become a bridge between the self and the world that it seeks at heart to inhabit.

Palmer holds a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley, and thirteen honorary doctorates. He lives with his wife in Madison, Wisconsin.

Join us in conversation this legendary figure who is frequently described as an American treasure.

In 1970 when he was just 20 years old, Alan Wallace said to the universe, “I need to meet a wise old man and I need it quickly!”  He was hitchhiking alone in Norway.  After several hours of waiting to catch a ride to Oslo, a little old man in a Volkswagon picked him up. As it turns out, the man was Buddhist monk to whom Wallace expressed his deep interest in Buddhism, leading the two to corresponded for years after that fateful meeting, which Wallace says was his wakeup call.  “There are coincidences and then there’s a point where coincidence is just stupid. This was one of the stupid times.”

That was the summer that prompted Alan Wallace, who for more than a decade was a Tibetan Buddhist monk ordained by H.H. the Dalai Lama, to leave his college studies. In 1971, he began his spiritual journey deep into Buddhism, first in Switzerland, and then in Dharamsala, India with the Dalai Lama (and many other teachers). For the initial four of his 14 years of study with and translation for some of his generation’s greatest lamas, Wallace immersed himself in Buddhist theory and practice in India, even while suffering bouts of hepatitis, typhoid, worms and various other physical ailments. But the tradeoff, he admits, was that it was “mentally and spiritually a feast.” What really pulled him toward this immersion was intuition (that this was the path for him), the combination of science and philosophy with religion, and especially the realization that, “Here is a path of ever deepening meaning, of ever deepening insight, understanding and knowledge, and they’re all bound into one – wisdom and skillful means, you could say.” And that is what really caught and compelled him, “what’s held me ever since,” he says.

Wallace returned to Switzerland in 1975 where he continued to practice, study and write about Buddhism while translating for his original teacher. By the end of 1979, feeling saturated with a great deal of unassimilated knowledge, he wrote to the Dalai Lama asking where he should go to “just meditate.” His Holiness invited him back to Dharamsala, offering to instruct his meditation. Wallace went back and spent the next four years in a series of meditative retreats. By 1984, he had been away from Western culture for most of his adult years, learning from Buddhism how to live a full, meaningful and truthful life. Considering that he'd spent his first twenty years in one cultural perspective, and the next fourteen in another, he thought perhaps it was now time to integrate the two.

This integration has been Wallace’s life’s work, not only for himself, but for countless others around the globe, from religious seekers to physicists and psychologists. At 68 years old, he is still bridging East and West for the betterment of all beings, and he won’t be stopping anytime soon.

In 1984, Wallace was accepted into Amherst College where he earned a BA summa cum laude in physics in just two and a half years, and learned Sanskrit studying with Robert Thurman. After graduating, he spent more time in meditation retreats, focusing on Shamatha meditation (both teaching and practicing). He notes that sometimes Shamatha's nine stages are less emphasized in teachings, and that some of the later stages are partly skipped over by practitioners. He says, however, that the Buddha’s great innovation was the union of Vipassna and Shamatha, which had never before been taught. “It’s that combination that has the powerful ability to eradicate mental afflictions from their root.” Wallace's teachings on Bodhicitta, Shamatha and Dzogchen are especially poignant to beginners and advanced practitioners alike.

By the 1990’s, at 40 years old Wallace had finished his education, spent a few years in retreat, then matriculated into the PhD program at Stanford, from where he received a doctorate in religious studies in 1995. It was at Stanford that he began his studies of dream yoga, the Tibetan practice of becoming aware while dreaming. (Though he had first received some of these teachings in 1978, his teacher then had told him, “You’re not ready yet.”) For the next seven years, he was his primary dream yoga teacher’s interpreter, giving him the opportunity to dive deeply into the practice, which he now teaches. In 2012, he published Dreaming Yourself Awake:  Lucid Dreaming and Tibetan Dream Yoga for Insight and Transformation.

In 2003, Wallace founded the Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies (SBICS). Its mission is to understand the nature of human consciousness by merging the first person (subjective, qualitative) approach of contemplative practice with the third person (objective, quantitative) approach of science. His latest project through the SBICS is the creation of Centers for Contemplative Research in Italy, India, Mexico, Brazil and other countries as “a laboratory with optimal conditions for advanced meditators to collaborate with researchers in the mind sciences and physics to better understand the primary role of mind in nature.”

Of the centers, he says, “Critical times call for critical responses. This is a critical response. We need greater wisdom in this world where we have so much knowledge, so much information, so much power.” The centers will be environments where professional contemplatives can practice full-time in service to the science of understanding the mind and the nature of reality. “We propose that rigorous training of a new generation of contemplative scientists could bring scientific research into the nature and potentials of the mind to a new level, also for treating mental disease. … The aim of ARCS is no less than to fathom the nature of consciousness and the potentials of the human mind through the collaborative efforts of highly trained contemplatives and scientists.”

Wallace has aspired to this particular dream for ten years. He is a prominent and important voice in the emerging discussion between contemporary Buddhist thinkers and scientists who question the materialist presumptions of their 20th-century paradigms. Since 1987 he has been a frequent translator and contributor at the “Mind and Life” conferences at which the Dalai Lama and prominent scientists exchange views and he has written and translated more than 40 books, including Meditations of a Buddhist Skeptic: A Manifesto for the Mind Sciences and Contemplative Practice (2011), Mind in the Balance: Meditation in Science, Buddhism, and Christianity (2009), and Hidden Dimensions: The Unification of Physics and Consciousness (2007).

Along with his scholarly work, B. Alan Wallace is regarded as one of the West’s preeminent meditation teachers and retreat guides known for his ability to present complex ideas with simple clarity. With his forty-six plus years steeped in Buddhist philosophy and meditation AND degrees in physics, the philosophy of science and in religious studies, Wallace is just the person to take humanity forward into this new frontier: bringing quantum physics (his favorite science because it challenges the absolutes of classical physics) and Eastern philosophy into meaningful engagement.

Join us in conversation with this gifted, warm-hearted scholar and teacher!

At the end of every class, Dr. Maya Soetoro-Ng would ask her students to consider one thing: to ask "so what?" after each lesson, in order to think about what they could do, in that day, to further the course of peace in their community.

Her brother is former US President and Nobel Peace Prize recipient, Barack Obama. But as a peace educator herself, Maya says we can't leave conflict resolution up to governments.

"We are not doing anybody a favor by waiting for government to solve our problems, by looking at top down solutions," she says.  "We really need to think about engaging our communities, our resources, human and otherwise, to build a sense of resilience."  And Maya believes that resilience will come from ordinary people, not from centralized, powerful institutions or well-tested solutions alone:  "It's imperative that we start paying attention to the work that's happening not only in the center of things but also in the periphery, the margins, and the liminal space between things."

Dr. Soetero-Ng is a long-time peace educator. She currently serves as a consultant to the Obama Foundation, where she works closely with the international team to develop programming in the Asia Pacific region. Prior to her work with the Obama Foundation, she was the Director of the Matsunaga Institute for Peace and Conflict Resolution at the University of Hawaii at Manoa where, in addition to leading outreach and development initiatives and running the internship program, she also taught Leadership for Social Change, History of Peace Movements, Peace Education, and Conflict Management for Educators.

Her interest in peacebuilding began in childhood.  Named after the American poet Maya Angelou, she was born to an Indonesian businessman father and an American cultural anthropologist mother.  She was raised in a bicultural household and within the multilingual worlds of Indonesia (as a young child), Hawaii (as a high school student), and then New York City (as a student and then young teacher). Immersed from an early age and throughout her life in environments that hosted so many cultures, she was allowed "access to more than one space and vista," which she describes as holding value "but also tension and struggles."  She came to recognize that culture was not bounded and fully defined; it was something that was always negotiated.   

She received her B.A. degree from Barnard College of Columbia University, and was awarded a Master's degree in Secondary Education from NYU's College of Education and later a PhD in Multicultural Education from the University of Hawai'i. In her dissertation, she examined the use of narrative to develop more complex understandings of identity in multicultural classrooms.

Maya has developed and implemented peace education curricula in public high schools and for K-12 teachers in Colleges of Education. For many years, she worked as an Assistant Professor and University Coordinator at the University of Hawai'i's Institute for Teacher Education, where she taught multicultural education, peace education, and social studies methods at both the graduate and undergraduate levels.  Earlier, she taught and developed curriculum at a progressive public middle school in New York City, and taught at the Education Laboratory High School and La Pietra Hawai'i School for Girls, both in Honolulu, where she facilitated classes on world cultures, U.S. history and the constitution, and Peacemakers (a course she designed to teach the power of nonviolence). Maya also worked as an Education Specialist at the East West Center, facilitating exchange between teachers in Asia and the United States.

With partner Kerrie Urosevich, Maya is co-founder of the nonprofit Ceeds of Peace, which creates peacebuilding action plan workshops for educators, families and community leaders.  Ceeds of Peace offers a 360-degree approach to raising peacebuilding leaders by supporting and building bridges between families, community leaders and educators to share resources and develop action plans to strengthen communities and improve children's lives.  It offers tools and practices for children and the adults who interact with them at home, in schools, and in the community to develop skills and daily practice in the key "C's" of peacebuilding:  critical thinking; courage; compassion; conflict resolution; commitment; collaboration; community-building; and connection. 

In aiming to plant ceeds for peace in "self, between, and service," the organization has developed tools and action plans for developing courage and critical thinking (and creativity and curiosity) within one's self; compassion, conflict resolution, and collaboration for the spaces between and with others; and commitment, community-building and connection for living a life of service, meaning and purpose.  Describing this 360 approach, Maya says that "you can dialogue and have discursive opportunities and structure academic controversies, but you need to have home, family and community in mutual support of one another."  And she says it's important to focus on all 3 areas of "self, between and service" because "courage (in self) without compassion (between) leads you to be brazen and bold but not necessarily peaceful.  If you're compassionate but not courageous, you'll never do anything to help or try to make the world better.  So we need to think about developing in young people in all those spaces."

Maya has published a number of book contributions as well as a children's picture book entitled Ladder to the Moon that was inspired by her mother and her two daughters.  Published in 2011, the book's title was taken from the 1958 Georgia O'Keeffe painting, which was depicted on a postcard the author had been given by her mother.  She is currently under contract to write a book about peace education and a young adult novel entitled Yellowwood.  In 2009, Soetoro-Ng helped bring her mother's dissertation to publication in the form of the book Surviving against the Odds: Village Industry in Indonesia, for which she wrote a foreword. 

Join us in conversation with this courageous, compassionate, and collaborative educator and leader!

Suzuki Roshi walked up to Mel Weitsman one day and said, “Just being alive is enough.” This became a touchstone for Abbot Sojun Mel Weitsman who, after more than 50 years of practice, continues to draw on Suzuki Roshi as his role model. He tries to be as simple as possible when he leads Zen practice, not to add things, not to expand it in some way or bring in outside sources, but to take the simplest practice and let it mature. This does not mean that he avoids talking about world events or the challenges we face at the San Francisco Zen Center, where he is a senior dharma teacher, or at the Berkeley Zen Center where he is Abbot. He merely shows how zazen (Zen sitting practice) teaches us to be alive as chaos swirls around us.

Weitsman says some people come to practice thinking the purpose is enlightenment. He explains that “reality is beyond your understanding, and so if you presume to have a God-like understanding, that’s arrogance…Enlightenment is a kind of arrogance.” Instead, to practice is to give up any kind of gaining mind.

Weitsman himself was not interested in enlightenment when he started his practice at the San Francisco Zen Center in 1964. Brought up Jewish, he did not have any reason, in fact, to start practice – just an open mind and an interest in learning what meditation was. He did not know what to expect, but when he faced the wall, he instinctively knew there was nothing else but this. He enjoyed meditation, but sitting zazen was painful for a long time -- until how to sit comfortably came to him. He learned from Suzuki Roshi to try to overcome attachments to physical conditions like pain so they were not creating an opposition. “As long as there is no opposition, there is no problem,” Weitsman says. “When you create opposition…it becomes a problem.”

Over time, Weitsman learned that sitting zazen is letting go. You have to let go of any gaining in your mind, to let go that sitting zazen will do any good at all. Weitsman teaches that nobody knows the purpose of practice because it is beyond thinking. He came to see that the purpose of practice was nothing – the antithesis of life, he says, because we see life in a materialistic way. So the purpose of practice is to get beyond wanting, “which is the hardest thing in the world, which is why practice is so hard.”

Weitsman says he felt like the prodigal son coming home when he first sat zazen. “When I sat down, I knew I was home.” After serving in the military, Weitsman had studied at the California School of Fine Art in San Francisco (California Art Institute) under Clyfford Still, one of the most original and influential painters of the 20th century. At age 35, he met his most significant teacher, Shunryu Suzuki Roshi. He gave up painting and studied with Suzuki for seven years until his death in 1971.

Upon Suzuki’s request, Weitsman opened the Berkeley Zen Center in 1967. In 1984, he received Dharma Transmission from Suzuki Roshi’s son and successor, Gyugaku Hoitsu, at Rinsoin temple in Japan and was officially installed as Abbot of Berkeley Zen Center in 1985. In 1988, he was installed as co-Abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center where he served for nine years. Although Suzuki Roshi was his role model, Weitsman says that zazen is the teacher. “Everyone receives Buddha’s teaching through zazen; that’s why zazen is so important.”

In sitting zazen, there is no Buddha, no achievement, no religion, no enlightenment. There is only reality. You have found your place in the universe and you can find it any time you want. Practice is holding the universe in the palm of your hand lightly. It is being home. “You can’t give anything to anyone that isn’t already theirs. … You can’t put something into somebody; you can only encourage it out.”

The phrase ‘Nothing special’ is one Suzuki Roshi used frequently and is the heart of practice. Weitsman says that Suzuki Roshi taught that “when we are always looking ‘over there’ for something, it is harder to appreciate where we are right now. With this understanding, grasses, pebbles, and water are always preaching the Dharma and teaching us how to act. There is nothing special to achieve. And yet, everything is special in its own unique form and way, and to be fully respected and appreciated is a form of Buddha nature” Sitting zazen is not special because it is ordinary and that makes it very special. Weitsman explains that “The selfless see the extra-ordinary quality of life in the dharmas of our ordinary world, and others suffer trying to be special while missing the special qualities of their ordinariness.”

One day Suzuki Roshi told the students that the problems they were experiencing would continue for the rest of their lives. This was not what they expected to hear. Although they laughed, they also considered what he said. Weitsman explains that improvement is okay, but it is not the goal. Some future moment is not going to be better than this present moment. Solving the problems you have now might give you a bigger problem, which is not to say you shouldn’t solve the problem, but rather, while solving the problem you shouldn’t neglect to live fully in each moment. Sacrificing this moment for a future time, we miss our lives, which is only this moment with its joys and sorrows.

Weitsman incorporates these lessons into his lectures and applies them to what is going on in America and the world today. He does not skirt the issues, but addresses them explicitly in his weekly talks, by his example, and through sitting zazen.  Have the nature of determination and steadfastness, he posits: Sit still and don’t give up; have the nature of compassion: change your position without judgment; accept yourself just as you are which makes it possible to identify with others and support them. He advises using problems as tools for practice. When life is out of control, we must control our emotion. When the world is being turned upside down and we are bearing the unbearable and feeling uncertain, we must “find and maintain our composure so we can remain open and compassionate while helping to stabilize our surroundings.” We learn this when sitting zazen. We release tenseness in our bodies. We wake up to places of unresolved anger. We become aware of how we hold our well-balanced, unconditioned posture. We meet the trials and tribulations and savor the sweetness and love of our everyday activity. We learn how to be active in the world with a foundation of openness and acceptance, with concentration and non-reactivity.

We breathe. When we see one atrocity after another, we breathe deeply. This will pass. This is where we abide. We abide in our composure. Weitsman teaches that we sit in zazen and like the grass which is blown by the wind, we bend and come back up. It is more than can be explained because it is more than thinking. It is life. It is simple. It is enough.

Join us in conversation with this gifted teacher!

Shinzen Young is an American mindfulness teacher and neuroscience research consultant who frequently uses concepts from mathematics as a metaphor to illustrate the abstract concepts of meditation and who is building a bridge between contemplative practice and hard science. His interest in integrating meditation with scientific paradigms has led his teachings to be popular among academics and professionals, and has resulted in collaborations with neuroscientists at Harvard Medical School, University of Massachusetts Medical School, Yale, Carnegie Mellon, and the University of Vermont in the burgeoning field of contemplative neuroscience. He is working on various ways to bring a secular mindfulness practice to a wider audience across faith traditions using revamped terminology and techniques as well as automated expert systems.

But if one were to ask Shinzen how he describes himself, he might, perhaps, say something like this:  “I’m a Jewish-American Buddhist teacher who got turned on to comparative mysticism by an Irish-Catholic priest and who has developed a Burmese-Japanese fusion practice inspired by the spirit of quantified science.”

When addressing his listeners, Shinzen infuses his words with the same wit and warm sense of humor, never losing touch with his own brand of charismatic serenity. Clarity, too, defines his address, as do allusions to Western science and mathematics, alongside unexpected metaphors such as a hockey stick hailing from his current home state of Vermont and plastic laughing Buddha dashboard tchotchke bobbing on a spring (for the latter, as well as a reference to the seventeenth-century Anglo-Irish thinker Robert Boyle, watch this excerpt of one of Shinzen’s talks called The Spring of the Void).

Shinzen Young was born as Steve Young in Los Angeles, California. His parents were Jewish. While in middle school, he became fascinated with Asian languages and cultures. After graduating from UCLA as an Asian Language major, he enrolled in the University of Wisconsin's Ph.D. program in Buddhist Studies. In order to gather materials for his doctoral dissertation, he ordained and spent three years as a Shingon (Japanese Vajrayana) monk at Mount Koya, Japan starting in 1970. There he received the name of Shinzen, and afterward he trained extensively in each of three additional Buddhist traditions: Vajrayana, Zen, and Vipassana, as well as in Native American traditions.

It was upon his return to the United States that Shinzen’s interest in dialoguing Western and Eastern science developed; today, much of his thoughts in this vein can be found on his blog, where reflections on mindfulness, compassion, and positive behavior give space to William James, Bertrand Russell, David Hume, and the Grateful Dead. There, readers can also begin to begin to build their own lived practices with reference to tools like Shinzen’s formulation of the Five Dimensions of Happiness and techniques called Focus on Feel and Nurture Positive.

Today, Shinzen Young is well-known not only for his particular way of combining Eastern and Western science and thought traditions, but also for his categorical, systematic approach to meditation, which he has applied in the form of many publicly available teachings and resources. His recent book, The Science of Enlightenment: How Meditation Works (2016), is a guide to meditation that integrates discussions of universal religious insights, meditation techniques, and aspects of the lived and meditation experiences with emerging neuroscience research.

Working lucidly with terms such as “mindfulness,” “self,” and “enlightenment,” Shinzen Young is able to make key concepts accessible and think-able to his students. Shinzen’s unique system of mindfulness, Unified Mindfulness, includes, among other work, resources such as an elucidation of basic mindfulness, categorical articulations of thoughts and emotions, and various techniques such as those integrating the physical senses and “flow states.” As Shinzen puts it, enlightenment is attainable by any human being.

Shinzen runs phone-based monthly retreats through his Home Practice Program and hosts phone-based weekly life practice calls through the Life Practice Program, opening up his teachings to a global public. For access to this content, see Shinzen’s Five Ways to Know Yourself, one of many articles and videos made available as resources on his website. (Interviews with Shinzen can be found on YouTube, as can an extensive collection video talks featured on his Youtube channel.)

What flows through and continuously surfaces in Shinzen Young’s work and writings is a consistent reference to positivity. For, as Shinzen explains, it is when we begin to find that our own being is instrumental to bringing good into the world that we know that the practice is finding its own success. That, like the experience of emptiness that Shinzen likens to “the spring of the air" when he quotes Robert Boyle, is something that he puts forth for us to know, leaving us with tools that may help us to perhaps some day find our way to it ourselves.

Join us in conversation with this gifted teacher who is both erudite and accessible!

Melissa Stephens is a spirited elementary and middle school teacher with 24 years of classroom experience, a wife, and mother of three children. A woman of many talents, she currently serves as Student Activities Director, 5th grade Enrichment Teacher, 8th grade Leadership Coordinator, and 7th grade Service Innovation instructor at Kent Middle School in Kentfield, California.

She recently earned her Masters in Educational Leadership with a focus on how service learning can cultivate student leaders -- research that she immediately puts into practice with her groundbreaking Service Innovation class, where students deepen their own definition of service, engage multiple forms of capital, cultivate self-awareness through stillness, and culminate in a group service projects. In 2015, she received the Golden Bell Award on behalf of her school district, for their work with this class.

In her own words, she reflects, "My journey here has been one filled with self-discovery and healing which guides me to live my educational philosophy: 'Be the person you needed when you were younger.'"

Upon entering her classroom, it's apparent that she is definitely that person for many students. Her desks are arranged in a circle, so everyone sees each other. There are inspirational quotes on every wall. A student or two or three are always around, waiting to ask her a question, or just hang out in the safe space during a break between classes. She has a closet for students who get dress code violations -- rather than feel self-conscious by being forced to change into their gym class uniform, they can grab a shirt or slacks from the closet. This past fall, her Service Innovation class launched a community food bank out of her classroom: every week, students pack food for families in the district whose children are on free and reduced lunch. Melissa, quite literally, spins a "Wheel of Kindness" with her advisory class.  Many enriching school-wide programs, such as a "Be The Change" Week, can be traced back to her efforts.

An author, poet, and actress, Melissa also produced and starred in a one-woman-show, based on her journey of healing through abuse experienced as a young child. She is the author of Little Miss and Spirit Bear's Kiss, a children's book about rediscovering one's light after walking through darkness.

Melissa is also an alumnus and volunteer with ServiceSpace's Laddership Circles, a 6-week fellowship program and incubator of generosity-driven designs. Even over video conference calls, her infectious enthusiasm, compelling heart, and bright spirit effortlessly shines through -- and has often manifested as heartfelt limericks and poems reflecting back the value of everyone around her!

Join us on Saturday, January 19th, for an uplifting conversation with this gem of an educator, mother, and human being!

Sally Mahé is a founding staff member and Senior Consultant for United Religions Initiative (URI), a global grassroots interfaith network dedicated to promoting enduring, daily interfaith cooperation, ending religiously motivated violence, and creating cultures of peace, justice, and healing for the Earth and all living beings.

The United Religions Initiative is made up of grassroots groups of people all over the world who jointly engage in community actions such as conflict resolution and reconciliation, environmental sustainability, education, women’s and youth programs, and advocacy for human rights. Through Cooperation Circles – self-organizing grassroots groups that consist of at least seven members from at least three religions, indigenous traditions, or spiritual expressions (including atheists and agnostics) – participants learn to work together and aim to transform religious tension into positive change, address urgent human and environmental needs, tackle poverty, social conflict, and disease, and build cultures of peace, justice and healing.

Sally Mahé came to this work of nurturing spiritual ties from a background and interest in social justice and democracy building. Born in Atlanta, Georgia at a federal penitentiary where her father was a prison doctor, she moved with her family at age two to Clayton, Missouri, a leafy suburb of St. Louis. In high school and college in the late 60s, Mahé spent much of her free time exploring other realities downtown and she worked summers in the housing projects where she witnessed first-hand the dangers and challenges of living in the projects.

After college, Mahé taught in an inner-city public school in St. Louis, where she and her friend were tasked with teaching civics to 8th graders. Uninspired by the material, the kids were encouraged by Mahé to create a project themselves from which they might benefit. The result was that her students came alive; she could see that each one had a spark. . . a unique song to offer.

This was the start of a passion for teaching civics and democracy that prompted Mahé to obtain a master’s degree in Education with a focus on law from Harvard and to publish a series of five books that detailed a law-related education curriculum for teachers called “Law in Action” (West Publishing 1975, 1980).

A few years later Sally came to the realization that the spark inside her students – and in all of us – had something to do with the Divine, and that she should use her teaching skills to convey this. She and her husband had moved to New York City where she was helping her husband run an elementary school and raising two girls of her own. So she obtained a master's degree in theology and spiritual counseling at General Episcopal Seminary in New York. While she was qualified to become a spiritual director, she was drawn to a bigger vision that went beyond individual counseling. “Generally, as I contemplated being ordained a priest during those years, my conviction to listen to people rather than preach from a pulpit grew stronger. For the next ten years, I experimented with this new area of learning and initiated creative programs in spirituality,” she wrote.

Along the way, while reading speeches of Vaclav Havel, she came across the term "spiritual democracy" and felt a bolt of lightning run through her. She started searching for all uses of that term and found a deep affinity for the concept. She read about the Iroquois Confederacy and learned about the Great Law expressed in this native constitution that brought hundreds of years of peace to the native Americans in northeastern America.

Mahé's passions for democracy and spirituality – and for nurturing the “deeper values of democracy” – came together in her decades of work for the United Religions Initiative. "The seeds planted during the years teaching democracy, the seeds nurtured in the years deepening spiritual knowledge, and the seeds cultivated in the daily challenges of building an organization are springing to life" via URI, she recalled. Currently, she writes a weekly blog for URI called Every Voice that offers the words of people all over the world whose voices provide heart history and wise guidance for the URI.

As an international network which consists presently of more than 965 grassroots interfaith groups (cooperation circles) in 108 countries, URI unites people of diverse faiths into a dynamic web of relationships for building peace.  URI is a horizontal, shared-leadership organization that engages grassroots communities in a global movement toward collaboration, cooperation, and peace, where people work together for common good to benefit all parts of the world regardless of religion.

Mahé is co-author of The Birth of a Global Community: Appreciative Inquiry in Action (2003), A Greater Democracy Day by Day (2004), and the Law in Action series. She holds an M.Ed. from Harvard and a MA in Theology from General Episcopal Seminary.

Join us in conversation with this committed builder of spiritual and global citizenship!

Jane Murray, a former commercial lawyer qualified in the UK, Ireland and New York, and now a start-up entrepreneur in the United Kingdom, has shifted both in her life and in her career from inhabiting the head-space to the heart-space. As she's sought connection and belonging in a disconnected world, she has seen and experienced the power of small acts – and now seeks to amplify them to foster greater inner and outer peace.

As a lawyer, Jane spent her career based in London specializing in venture capital and running a fund in Gibraltar for a few decades. She was actively involved with companies during the technology boom and witnessed the shadow side of that boom – the de-coupling of value from values, as well as the results of extraordinary material success without concurrent wisdom. For the last decade of this time in the venture capital world, she was studying and teaching Fourth Way philosophy and trying to cultivate an inner space while navigating a cut-throat external working world. The tension between her inner and outer worlds imploded with the sudden death in 2015 of her father – a technology innovator and entrepreneur who had helped develop SMS technology, and with whom she had worked.  The loss of her father, coupled with the subsequent corporate battles, compelled her to focus on her three passions: peace, community consciousness and technology.

Jane founded Peacebeam as the culmination of her own movement from headspace to heart-space.  Peacebeam calls itself “a facilitator for kindness” that offers short audios (called peacebeams) that are designed for commuters and busy people to get calm, connected and out of their headspace into their heartspace in the most stressful times of the day. “This is not about changing yourself,” the company says.  “It's about being your best self.”

Peacebeam delivers five minutes of peaceful time through the app Insight Timer.  The idea for the offering came to Jane fully formed in the aftermath of the Brexit vote. She was struck by her own naiveté, as she had believed that the kind of borders that existed no longer did. Jane conceived of Peacebeam as a way of helping others address the stress and overwhelm of living in a city. She realized the largest urban community was the one that commutes into and out of London daily – people doing the same thing at the same time and, although they don't typically look at or speak to each other, sharing the same space. Jane wanted to activate people's heart centers so they might see the idea of their (our) connectedness.

Jane is an avid watcher of the transformative technology space and believes that the next big evolution on consciousness will be the move from the headspace to the heartspace. She sees technology fundamentally as a delivery system for our human intentions – and if those intentions are unconditional good for ourselves and the world around us, we could make some pretty staggering changes.

Jane believes there has been a seismic shift in consciousness in the last 20-30 years that technology has compromised. As we moved forward into the technological age, we created borders based on our internal worlds of which we were unaware. She says that if we don't understand our internal borders, then we will create a world that we can't move on from. We won't understand how we can connect deeply within ourselves and with each other. Our internal spaces are being eroded with the spread of technology. The growth of the well-being industry is a testament to that, but the well-being industry has created an exaggerated sense of individualism and wealth: it is all about my consciousness, my enlightenment, my well-being, which is fed by some of these technologies. This leads to a kind of narcissism, which is destructive.

Jane believes we need to capture this emerging wave of shifting consciousness and move it from wellbeing to world-being. She sees Peacebeam as working within the creative constraints of the commute time to activate our innate humanity. She says we forget how powerfully creative we are. Jane’s experiences have convinced her that the motivating force for overcoming any challenge is love. There is no algorithm for it, but people are constantly acting from it. The creative capacity that we all have, that sets us apart, that no technology or machine can replicate is our connection to self and to each other. That's what has been eroded when we give our agency away to technology, and that's what is restored through love. Jane sees technology as the delivery system for our human intentions – unconditional good for ourselves and the world around us, a space where wisdom, values, ethics, and technology coalesce and where small acts like taking five minutes to feel centered, compassionate, kindness, empathy and caring can make big changes in the world.

She is using that wisdom in the service of others through Peacebeam. Having been part of the old paradigm, she sees that her generation – those who bridge the old world and the new – are called to contribute that unique understanding and help navigate the transition. There is a job to be done of palliative care for the collapsing old structures and midwifery for the birthing of the new. “Neither process is straightforward but we need everyone who feels moved to lend their energy to the space where wisdom, values, ethics and technology coalesce,” she says. “That is the arc of the future and where small acts will make big changes.” She is simultaneously a cynic and an idealist and believes it is imperative to hold both views while we are at the cross-roads of this new era. She wants to mobilize this generation to get involved and has conceived of and initiated Peacebeam to do just that.

Join us in conversation with this inspiring leader!

James Stark, M.A., F.E.S., has committed his life to exploring how we – our selves, our communities, and our species -- might move into greater harmony with who we are and reignite a deep connection with the rest of the natural world. Stark is the co-director of the Regenerative Design Institute (RDI) at Commonweal and co-founder and co-director of the Ecology of Leadership and the Ecology of Awakening programs, which prepare community leaders for what some are describing as the “Great Turning” of our era: an invitation to face the destructive nature of our modern way of life and urgent need to transition into living in harmony with and support of our Earth home.

The Commonweal Garden is a 17-acre site in Bolinas, California which has been developed into a large-scale living permaculture classroom and demonstration center for regenerative design. In 2003, James and his partner Penny Livingston Stark became the caretakers of the Commonweal Garden, bringing to bear their combined expertise in landscaping, permaculture design, and nature awareness and permaculture education.

 

As a nonprofit educational organization, Stark’s RDI embodies the vision that all people can live in a mutually enhancing relationship with the earth. "We envision a world in which people, inspired by nature, create and maintain healthy and abundant livelihoods that enhance fertility and biodiversity on the planet. We envision humans as a positive, healing presence on Earth, creating more abundance on the planet than would be possible without them." RDI’s mission is to revolutionize the way humans relate to the natural world, and through programs and courses, to teach the skills and technology people need to become community leaders and create healthy solutions to the current environmental crisis. James considers the programs and the garden at RDI to be a nursery for growing visions of the new era by providing the skills and tools to bring those visions to life.

As a young boy growing up on a sheep and cattle farm in Canada, James was transformed after reading Rachel Carlson's Silent Spring, and from that moment on, knew that he wanted to devote his life to changing the way we relate to the environment around us. At the start of his educational journey, James was drawn to exploring how to cultivate vitality in all areas of one’s life: physical, mental, emotional and spiritual.  After adopting practices of yoga and meditation in his twenties, he came to understand that creating a loving, peaceful inner ecology provides the soil for the seeds of our visions to grow in the world and leads to a fully expressed life lived from the heart.

Following the completion of his master's degree in Regenerative Development, James spent a number of years working in Southeast Asia, addressing and attempting to alleviate the profound environmental, social, and spiritual challenges arising from tourism being used by countries as a development strategy.

Upon moving to California in 1990, he began to co-found a number of organizations in response to the same challenges that were developing in his new Marin County home, including West Marin Growers Group (WMGG), created to ensure food security in Marin County; Waste Free Now, committed to West Marin becoming waste-free and host of the innovative annual Recycle Circus including a "Stuff Exchange" for people to redistribute community resources; KWMR "Watershed Radio," a licensed not-for-profit community radio station providing a voice for West Marin residents that is heard around the world live through web casting; and CLAM -- Community Land Trust Association of Marin, an affordable ecological housing land charitable trust created to provide affordable housing in the face of increasing gentrification.

It was through the development of these organizations that James was able to help weave together the spirit and resilience of the West Marin Communities, and began to sharpen his interest in learning how to assist community leaders in cultivating a resilient inner space to enhance their work in the world.

As part of that inquiry, he earned a master’s degree in Spiritual Psychology from the University of Santa Monica to better to support the next generation of change agents in leading from the inside out and sourcing their lives from a deep nature connection. James continues this work through the Ecology of Leadership programs he co-founded and through the Art of Vitality, a program he co-directs with Anna O'Malley, MD, director of Natura Institute for Ecology and Medicine, that weaves self-healing concepts and practices with experiential learning about food as medicine, mind-body medicine, and body-ecological permaculture.

Last summer, leaving the Commonweal Garden in the hands of Anna O’Malley, James and Penny moved the Regenerative Design Institute to its new home on Whidbey Island, WA where James continues his local, national, and global work.

Join us in conversation with this deeply nature-aligned and transformational leader and educator!