Awakin Calls

Terry Patten is a philosopher, teacher, activist, consultant, social entrepreneur, and author. Over the last fifteen years he has devoted his efforts to the evolution of consciousness by facing, examining, and aiming to heal our global crisis through the marriage of spirit and activism. He co-wrote Integral Life Practice: A 21st-Century Blueprint for Physical Health, Emotional Balance, Mental Clarity, and Spiritual Awakening with Ken Wilber and a core team at the Integral Institute.  The book provides a framework for individuals to “wake up” and to grow in awareness, presence, and care by offering time-tested practices from the ancient spiritual traditions together with the most powerful practices and principles discovered and validated by modern science.

Terry’s new book, A New Republic of the Heart: An Ethos for Revolutionaries –A Guide to Inner Work for Holistic Change, was recently released in March 2018 (free excerpt and audio available here).  It offers more integral approaches to activism, and has been hailed as “a stunning marriage of wild heart and cool mind,” and as “combining brilliant social commentary along with a step-by-step blueprint for catalyzing whole-system change from the inside out.”

As a social entrepreneur, Terry led a team at the HeartMath Institute that developed their first heart-rate variability monitor. He founded the consciousness technology company, Tools For Exploration (now Tools for Wellness), and currently is involved in businesses engaged in restorative redwood forestry, developing fossil-fuel alternatives, addressing collective trauma, and creating new currencies for a sustainable economy. As a community builder, he founded Bay Area Integral, a central gathering place where people engage in conscious inquiry and find community in the San Francisco Bay Area.  As a consultant, he has worked on four continents.

As a philosopher-activist, Terry has long been a leading voice for facing, examining, and healing our global crisis through the marriage of higher consciousness and activism. Creator and host of the webcast “Beyond Awakening,” he has explored the biggest questions of our time in over a hundred public conversations with some of the world’s most prominent and dynamic thought leaders. As a teacher and coach, he has introduced thousands of people to Integral Practice in person and over the web where he created and taught the online courses, Integral Spiritual Practice, Living the Integral Heart, An Integral Soul Journey, and Awakening Your Revolutionary Heart. 

Raised in the York Center Community Cooperative outside Chicago, Patten was mentored by co-op aunts and uncles, a group of people who deeply believed in a social stand. This was expressed as a stand for peace and justice that Terry enacted as an anti-war protestor in the 1970’s. From this time onward, for the first 15 years of his adult life, he became a student of Adi Da Samraj. During his period, he learned that we face challenges that cannot be solved at the level of consciousness without cleaning up our own “stuff.”  Yet this attitude, too, has its drawbacks as one can focus so much on the inner-work and not have an impact on the outer work needed to effect change. Patten believes that to focus exclusively on one’s subjective experience today is morally indefensible. He explains that we are in a lifeboat that has sprung a leak and we need each other. The connection, heart to heart, is urgently needed and that is what is informing his work.

Patten states that we are losing our ability to have an honest conversation in a heart-felt way, to see what is in front of us. The total intelligence that is necessary is integrated and in the very center of our being — in the heart. Today there are a lot of distractions, misleading information, and conspiracy theories that are not optimal for holistic health; therefore, meditation is part of one’s holistic hygiene. His book, A New Republic of the Heart: An Ethos for Revolutionaries–A Guide to Inner Work for Holistic Change, is a deep meditation on what has been revealed to his heart.  Terry states we must become brothers and sisters in a community of practice like a super organism, where awakening people in conversation with one another can allow our practice to ripple forth on an amazing level.

Terry received his B.A., magna cum laude, from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he received three coveted Hopwood Awards for his fiction and poetry.  He has taught at the University of Notre Dame, Columbia University, San Francisco State University, John F. Kennedy University and Meridian University.  He currently serves on the board of Dr. Rick Hanson’s Wellsprings Institute for Neuroscience and Contemplative Wisdom, is chief strategy officer for Thomas Hübl’s Academy of Inner Science, is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Integral Theory and Practice, and belongs to Deepak Chopra’s Evolutionary Leaders group.

Join us in conversation with this pioneering leader!

Timber Hawkeye is the author of the bestselling books Buddhist Boot Camp and Faithfully Religionless, a memoir. From an early age, Timber recognized the contradictions inherent in our world and society, noticing that society’s endorsement of wealth, possessions, and career are complications and distractions from a freer, truer, simpler, and more happy and connected way of life.

Timber was born in Israel.  Raised in a small town in the Golan Heights, he moved with his family to San Francisco at the age of 13,  He was introduced to books by Eknath Easwaran at 16, and that's what sparked his interest in mindfulness and meditation. He has described his teenage years and early twenties as an ongoing attempt to embody the "American Dream" and being "successful."  He started out as a paperboy at the age of 14 and got his start in corporate America during his senior year of high school.  He took on paralegal jobs at law firms around the Bay Area and later in Seattle, Washington.

In his books, interviews and public talks, Hawkeye mentions a few key moments that changed the trajectory of his life: First, when he moved from San Francisco, CA to Seattle, WA, he accepted a job at a law firm that offered him 50% of the annual salary he received in California, but he loved Seattle so much and found himself twice as happy in the Pacific Northwest as he had been in Northern California. At that moment he realized that how happy he is has nothing to do with how much money he makes (despite the media constantly telling us otherwise). Second, after five years of working at the same law firm in Seattle, another paralegal at the firm was celebrating her 30-year anniversary, and Hawkeye says the fact that she was celebrating 30 years in a cubicle terrified him, as it had already been a total of ten years for him in California and Washington. That's when he decided there's got to be more to life than just working for a paycheck.

He sold everything he ever owned and moved to Honolulu, Hawaii with the intention to lead a simple and uncomplicated life. He worked odd jobs on the island just to cover minimal expenses, and spent the rest of his time playing beach volleyball and tennis, hiking, and independently studying world religions and psychology simultaneously to better understand what people believe and why they believe what they do.

His first book, Buddhist Boot Camp, which began as a blog, is a compilation of the monthly emails that Timber sent to friends and family to keep them informed of his life in Hawaii. Eight years later, upon the suggestion of a friend who found his communications inspiring, Timber’s writing was published as a book and today also appears in Spanish, French, Polish, Chinese, Dutch, and German. The book provides mind-training techniques that are accessible, doable, and positive. Timber’s Buddhist Boot Camp podcast is a free online offering.

The force of Timber’s messages and life goes beyond inspiration. He offers a secular and non-sectarian approach to being at peace with the world, both within and around us. He does not consider himself a teacher or master of anything or anyone, but rather a translator of ancient wisdom into a language that people today can go beyond understanding to actually implementing into their daily lives.

A believer in action and the power of simplicity, Timber’s words encourage us to move from inspiration and thinking to application. In his 2012 TEDx Talk on gratitude, Timber cuts to the truth about the how our beliefs and choices make us the victims of suffering and make us blind to this condition. “What I found to be consistently true with everyone I met,” remarks Timber in describing a four-month period of travels and homestays, “is that all of our suffering is self-inflicted.”

Timber’s compassionate, kind, and down-to-earth manner takes us unabashedly to the parts of our common human condition that may be less appealing but that demand examination. Yet in illuminating what it means to be human, Timber also pithily guides us toward the flip-side of this coin, showing us how we can inhabit our humanity in a spirited, joyful way and opening our eyes to what is most essential to our time here on earth.

Join us in conversation with this wise, compassionate author and guide!

Sheryl Evans Davis, Executive Director of the San Francisco Human Rights Commission, has provided life-changing public service and advocacy for almost thirty years through her work as leader, educator, and community engineer.

When Davis was just a child, she remembers coming home to her mother, feeling distraught by another child's behavior and wanting to do something to fix or stop it. Her mother memorably replied, "Sheryl, you can't change people. The only person you have control over is you. So... figure out what you can do that can help someone want to change." This was the start of Davis' efforts to connect people and build bridges between them in a way that creates and supports change.

When she was in middle school in West Oakland, Davis had a negative experience  of being teased by the teacher for being identified as exceptionally intelligent.  This showed her the importance of having supportive educators.

Davis worked as an educator for Schools of the Sacred Heart in the wealthy Pacific Heights district of San Francisco for almost twenty years. She recalls that in that amazing environment, everybody knew they were going to college and had incredible opportunities, but just blocks away there was a neighborhood of public housing comprised of predominantly African-American people who weren't sure if they would live to graduate high school, let alone go to college. So she volunteered her free time to teach these low-income students in the nearby Western Addition, and came to realize that the kindergarten students she was teaching at the Sacred Heart school had better computer and reading skills than high school students down the road.

Sheryl wondered what she could do to bring these communities together. She realized there were some things happening in her school that weren't happening in communities nearby. There were expectations for her students, who could see what success looked like. So the challenge became how to give other communities in the neighborhood that same kind of exposure to success and to instill in them the belief it can happen -- as well as providing bridges for the gaps that are obstacles to success, such as financial aid. In short, students needed exposure, education, and expectation.

Davis' passion for community change eventually culminated in her spearheading a collaborative partnership of organizations addressing community issues together.  She served as Executive Director of Collective Impact, a community-based organization in the Western Addition neighborhood of San Francisco. Collective Impact brings together non-profit organizations that focus on challenges facing low-income children, youth, and families in the areas of economic development, community health, and violence prevention. During her tenure at Collective Impact, Davis created private and public sector partnerships to provide critical health and social services to historically underserved communities across San Francisco. 

In her current work as the Executive Director of the San Francisco Human Rights commission, she continues her focus on increasing access, opportunity and equity for vulnerable populations.  She also has been a member of many public committees serving the San Francisco area, including the San Francisco Police Department's Fair & Impartial Policing and Community Policing Advisory Committees, Fillmore Community Benefits District, and Redevelopment Agency's Western Addition Citizen Advisory Committee. She has received numerous awards for her community work and the opportunities she has helped create for youth and community development.

She holds a BA degree from San Francisco State University and a Masters in Public Administration from the University of San Francisco.

Sheryl Davis believes we all have the power to help...it's about "being a human bridge, making that meaningful connection, and changing someone's life, sometimes just by seeing them." 

Join us in conversation with this visionary changemaker!

Around the age of twenty-two, a near death experience transformed Dr. Michael Penn into a seeker. Following this profound encounter with his own mortality, he began an extensive study of sacred texts and the works of the founders of the world’s religions.

Today Professor Penn is a Clinical Psychologist and Professor of Psychology at Franklin & Marshall College. His research interests and publications include works in the pathogenesis of hope and hopelessness, the interpenetration of psychology and philosophy, the relationship between culture and psychopathology, the epidemiology of gender-based violence, and human dignity and human rights. He teaches a course called The Nature of Hope, which explores the biological, psychological, philosophical, and spiritual dimensions of hope. 

Many of his students maintain that in knowing Professor Penn, one gains not only intellectual knowledge, but also priceless wisdom and access to a variety of powerful stories. Born in North Carolina and raised in Brooklyn, NY, Professor Penn and his family began life in the south where they lived inside an old school bus that had been abandoned on his grandmother’s property. After moving to New York in his childhood, it was an eighth grade teacher’s compassion that sent the teenage Michael to a boarding school in Massachusetts on a full scholarship and changed the trajectory of his life.  He went on to study Psychology, Religion and History at the University of Pennsylvania, and completed his doctoral study in Clinical Psychology at Temple University.  He also had opportunities for a life which is rich with many unexpected encounters.

While travelling in a village in Africa in his twenties, for example, Professor Penn nearly died of severe food poisoning. A spoonful of sugar water fed to him by a local traditional healer miraculously restored him. At another time, while doing dishes after a Baha’i gathering in Philadelphia, he met a woman who had appeared to him in his dreams. They were married a few months later, and this summer they will celebrate their 33rd anniversary.

Professor Penn has taught and lectured widely around the world and has been invited to serve as a consultant and speaker at United Nations-related conferences in several countries. He serves as a member of the faculty for the United Nations Staff System College in Turin, Italy, and as a trainer for the UN Leader’s Programme, which trains director-level United Nations officers. He currently serves on the boards of the Authenticity Institute and the Tahirih Justice Center in Washington, D.C. Professor Penn is a former Ford Foundation Fellow, a former Aspen Institute Fellow, and is the recipient of several academic awards, including the Solomon Wank Memorial Peace and Human Rights Research Award, as well as the John Russwurm Award for Scholarship from the University of Pennsylvania.

Professor Penn has written several academic papers that explore the concept of the human spirit and the conditions that facilitate its healthy development. His influential paper published in the Human Rights Quarterly in 2010, “The Protection and Development of the Human Spirit: An Expanded Focus for Human Rights Discourse,” examines human development as the central goal of every legitimate government. He is the author of Overcoming Violence against Women and Girls: The International Campaign to Eradicate a Worldwide Problem, published by Rowman & Littlefield, and is currently completing his new book Protecting Human Rights and Human Dignity in An Axial Age: Reflections on the Reclamation of the Human Spirit.

For eight years, Professor Penn and his wife Kathy opened their home to everyone each Thursday evening where people from different walks of life would connect, share a homemade dinner, enjoy poetry, music, life, and much more. Every Monday morning, they host meditation, prayers, and a delicate breakfast for whoever wishes to come by. On Sunday mornings, children would come to their home for children’s classes to nurture their moral and spiritual development; and every other Friday, they also host Evening Light Cafe for the community and mostly students from Franklin & Marshall College. Over tea and arts, young people gather at the Penn’s living room to explore and reflect upon the meaning and beauty of life. Many students see Professor Penn as a light in their lives who nurtures hope and goodness within themselves. Despite a very full schedule, his door remains open to all. Anyone who walks in is bound to receive two offerings: his very deep listening, and his respect.

Join us in conversation with this remarkable teacher and human spirit!

“Holiness is everywhere. It abides hidden in the infinite ordinary and seeks expression through our intimate recognition of it.” -- Bonnie Rose

 

As a former registered nurse, actress, and opera singer, Bonnie Rose's career trajectory has been anything but run-of-the-mill, but through it all her life's purpose has stayed constant. Bonnie lives through love: being love, sharing love, and serving love.

Currently the Senior Minister at the Ventura Center for Spiritual Living, Bonnie has dedicated herself to a ministry with roots in the Transcendentalist Movement of the 1830s, believing "that the universe is spiritual and has intelligence, purpose, beauty, and order." It honors all the world’s great spiritual teachings and all paths to God -- "whether we call it God, Spirit, Energy, or Universal Intelligence."  She and her congregation believe that through study and spiritual practice, each of us can come to understand our oneness with this in-dwelling Divine Presence, because all people, places, and things emanate from the Universal Intelligence that is within us and all around us.  When we do so, "other areas of our lives fall into place and we can do more for others, be better stewards of the Earth, and bring more peace and harmony to the world."

Bonnie furthers her life's mission of being and sharing love by aiming to create ripples of goodness through acts of kindness and generosity, big and small.  She teaches a non-dual approach to reality and focuses on inspiring all beings to, as she puts it, "live like the Truth is True." The values of ServiceSpace (the umbrella ecosystem for these Awakin calls) -- leading by inner transformation, focusing on small acts of kindness, and trusting the ripples of goodness -- have had a profound influence on Bonnie's ministry.

Over the years and across the many dimensions of her life, Bonnie has left beautiful footprints in the hearts of animal and human friends, as well as in the hearts of her service community. Her blog DailyBeloved gives readers a window into her world -- a world where the mythical reveals itself in the ordinary, the sacred in the profane, and profound insights blossom out of very human encounters. Written with warmth, wit, irreverence and honesty, her reflections convey the essence of her vibrant spirit.

Join us in conversation with this loving and lively spirit!

Milan Rai is a self-taught Nepalese contemporary visual artist whose work is grounded in a personal response to the world around him.  A self-described failure in school, Milan's inquiry of the world has found artistic expression in a variety of mediums.

For Milan, the world is his studio and butterflies his medium. A moment of serendipity set him on his path. Inspired by a butterfly that alighted on his paintbrush in the middle of a challenging project in 2013, Rai began cutting out simple white butterfly shapes from paper and thoughtfully arranging and affixing them to surfaces in his hometown of Kathmandu -- including on trees, bridge pillars, walls, and dilapidated buildings.

Wanting to make art accessible to everyone and not to limit it within the walls of galleries, "I thought that this time the uninvited would be my guests, and I started putting white butterflies in public spaces in the city, like billboards and trees," Milan says.

The visual effect was breathtaking and often profound. As he puts it, "Such simple shapes can convey so much: peace, transformation, freedom, hope, whimsy....or whatever the viewer wishes."

His current signature work, the White Butterfly, started as a simple project in his studio and has evolved into a powerful symbol of global expression, inviting change and interaction in more than 40 different countries across the globe. “What truly inspires me is the unfathomable depth of creative resurrection and metamorphosis that human beings are capable of...My handmade cutouts of white butterflies remind people of the essentially simple things in life that we tend to forget."

Rai also aims to remind people of who they really are. “I wanted my butterflies to ignite the long-forgotten passions, burn the desires alight again in hearts, destroy the walls people build around them and in doing so, I wanted them to free themselves. Just like the butterflies who break out of the cocoon, I wanted them to break the boundaries they created around themselves and open their hearts to life and the limitless possibilities it can garner once we decide to so. I am imagining a butterfly world."

In addition to inspiring personal transformation of his viewers, Rai has used the butterflies to bring attention to social needs. When the earthquake hit Nepal in 2015, killing and displacing thousands, Rai felt fortunate to be alive and to have a house that was still standing. He used white butterflies and social media to make people aware of the dire need for emergency shelter and sanitation in the area, which he helped build. Rai has also recently staged a symbolic protest in Kathmandu to draw attention to the problem of pollution, and his most recent work involves multimedia installations that aim to bridge the virtual, cyber world of technology and the physical, natural world.

Milan's other forms of expression include painting, performance art, and installations. He began his career with an exhibition at Patna University’s College of Arts. Upon receiving an award in India for his oil painting entitled “LIGHT,” he did his first solo exhibition at Park Gallery in 2007. He is the recipient of the 2016 Harvard (SAI) Visiting Artist Award.

Behind all his work is the firm belief that art can change the way we perceive the world around us and help to shape the choices we make. Art can challenge us as individuals and as a community to examine significant issues of our times and inspire us to take action.

Join us in conversation with this visionary artist!

Thought leader, storyteller, and advocate for the creative class, Greg Tehven is turning the world of conventional economic development on its head, and inviting people to build the communities they want to live in. 

After traveling around the world and taking in other places and ways of life, Greg returned home ready to stop observing and start taking action. Confronted with the business failings of his beloved hometown of Fargo, North Dakota, he asked himself what the community could offer to the public that would help get it back on its feet. One of the unexpected answers that surfaced? Drones.

Fargo's small population and abundance of open spaces make it an ideal site for the development of emerging drone technology, and it now hosts an annual drone conference attracting hundreds of attendees from around the world. The town has quickly become an appealing city for college graduates, business leaders, and tech enthusiasts. Tehven attributes its newfound popularity to the commitment and desire of its citizens to make a difference.

“I think we have to love our sense of place,” says Tehven, “and champion the heck out of it.” Cofounder of Emerging Prairie (a startup news and events organization), curator of TEDx Fargo, host of the largest 1 Million Cups in the nation (supporting local entrepreneurial ecosystems), and an adjunct professor at North Dakota State University's College of Business, Tehven is changing what it means to harness the power of our communities, and improve the human condition. 

Join us in conversation with this innovative community builder and changemaker!

“It seems like we want it both ways: we want love to feel like madness, and we want it to last an entire lifetime. That sounds terrible.” -- Mandy Len Catron

Driven largely by her attempts to make sense of the divorce between her parents as well as the end of her first romantic relationship as a young adult, Mandy Len Catron started examining the narratives and scripts that individuals organize their love lives around. “So I turned to science. I researched everything I could find about the science of romantic love,” she said in a popular TEDx talk.

She came cross Dr. Arthur Aron’s “36 questions that lead to love” – a series of questions that were designed to study and promote closeness and trust (i.e., not necessarily romantic love) between strangers inside a lab setting through "sustained, escalating, reciprocal, personalistic self-disclosure."

 After giving the questions a go with an acquaintance and deciding that it would make for a good story, Mandy in fact fell in love with her experiment’s partner and eventually sent her story off to the New York Times’ “Modern Love” column. The article that was eventually published became one of the most popular articles in the New York Times.

“I’ve begun to think love is a more pliable thing than we make it out to be. Arthur Aron’s study taught me that it’s possible — simple, even — to generate trust and intimacy, the feelings love needs to thrive.” 

The popularity of her New York Times story found her on the receiving end of accounts of many relationship and love stories, and accompanying that, people seeking her out for advice. Drawing from personal experiences in love and the letters she often receives, there’s something she wishes more people knew: it take intention to cultivate love, and sustainable relationships often feature a process of making one mindful choice after another. She tells us that “falling in love is the easy part.” Beyond that, the longer journey of staying in love is a deliberate process, one that implies a process of revisiting regularly what it means to practice love. 

In a second TEDx talk, Mandy reminds us that the metaphors we adopt to talk about love have the propensity to shape how we perceive it. She sees love not as something we should “fall into” passively in periods of passion and madness, but as a collaborative work of art, involving “everything that collaborating on a work of art entails: effort, compromise, patience, shared goals.” 

And this applies to building a more trusting, loving world more broadly, because while “these ideas align nicely with our cultural investment in long-term romantic commitment, … they also work well for other kinds of [non-romantic, loving] relationships … because this metaphor brings much more complex ideas to the experience of loving someone.”

In 2017, Mandy published How to Fall in Love with Anyone: A Memoir in Essays, which was recently long-listed for the 2018 RBC Charles Taylor Prize.  The process, she recalls, made her confront her own notions and scripts about love, her willful ignorance about wanting to keep love in the terrain of the “unknowable and mysterious.”

“Love isn’t something that happens to us — it’s something we’re making together.”  And so the presence of an explicit agreement can make visible and name desires, needs, and expectations. “It’s amazing how empowering this can feel: to name your desires or insecurities, however small, and make space for them.”

Mandy has been and continues to write about love and love stories on The Love Story Project.  Her writing unpacking the notion of love and all its accompanying appendages (like romance, cohabitation, monogamy etc.) can also be seen in her articles regularly appearing in the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Rumpus, and The Walrus, as well as literary journals and anthologies. From drawing parallels to the prairie voles’ mating habits and the pain they express on being separated, to using data to debunk myths on love, Mandy tries to make these nuggets of wisdom on love relatable.

Originally from Appalachian Virginia, Mandy Len Catron is a writer living and working in Vancouver, British Columbia.  She teaches English and creative writing at the University of British Columbia. 

Join us in conversation with this writer and student of love!

Anil Sachdev is a businessman who integrates a path of self-knowing and meditation with a successful executive career. His business experience in India and across the world covers areas such as talent management, strategic change and organizational transformation. He has been a senior leader in the Eicher Group in India and the founder and CEO of Eicher Consultancy Services. He founded Grow Talent – the leading player in Education and HR Consulting – and became the Founder and CEO of the School for Inspired Leadership (SOIL) outside of Delhi, India, an innovative values-based business school with the vision of building inspired leaders with character, competence and enthusiasm.

SOIL puts focus on the five pillars of Mindfulness, Ethics, Compassion, Diversity and Sustainability to develop character; it emphasizes whole systems thinking to enable competence; and it encourages all its students to find their “callings,” discover their gifts, and learn to leverage their positives toward their purposes. SOIL has been co-created by a group of 32 leading global and local corporations. In addition, it partners with 25 not-for-profit organizations in order to encourage the “social innovation” sector to confront some of the most pressing issues faced by our planet today.

Anil’s values, informed by the teachings of Swami Chinmayananda and the Bhagavad Gita, have been core to his professional work. He offers nature-based courses in the Himalayas using the theatre arts to teach positive psychology and appreciative inquiry to SOIL students based on Indian spiritual teachings. In December 2015, he hosted the World Leadership Dialogue in Pune, India, bringing together leaders in education, business, government, journalism and not-for-profits to speak, in a secular way, about the applications of the Bhagavad Gita’s wisdom to today’s leadership.

Anil's commitment to ethical modeling and leadership was tested earlier in his career when, as a human resources head, he had to compassionately let go his company's entire batch of 21 incoming hires from India's top schools (many of whom he had personally recruited and hired) due to their falsification of travel expense reports following a group trip.

After completing his MBA from the University of Pune in 1975, Anil spent 15 years at Tata Motors and then joined the Eicher Group in 1978. In 1991 he became the founder CEO of Eicher Consultancy Services and later brought A.T. Kearney to India. He later founded Grow Talent – the leading player in Education and HR Consulting. Recognized as a thought leader in leadership development and organizational transformation, he has done pioneering work with leading global and local firms. He began his career with Tata Motors in 1975 and joined Eicher in 1978, working in human resources, operations and total quality management.

He serves on the Academic Committee of CEDEP (an Executive Education consortium, founded in association with INSEAD in Fontainebleau, France to design and develop innovative company specific programs for its members); Chairs the National Committee on Human Resources of the Confederation of Indian Industry of India; and is a Trustee of Chinmaya Mission, a global spiritual nongovernmental organization. Anil has been adjunct faculty to leading business schools such as Indian School of Business, Kelly School of Business at Indiana University, General Motors Institute (Flint, Michigan), Antioch University Seattle, and Ohio University (Athens, Ohio).

Join us in conversation with this inspired and inspiring business leader!

“My purpose is to lead people to higher consciousness, that is to be wise and full of love.”

Shin Terayama, a Japanese physicist, voluntarily checked himself out of a hospital in 1984 at the age of 46 to die from inoperable, metastasized kidney cancer. Having regularly worked twelve to fifteen hours a day, every day, to achieve success in his career, he had had a record of professional accomplishments and provided well for his family.  He became the president of his own consulting firm in his forties.  He also had a workaholic lifestyle in which he consumed up to twenty cups of coffee per day.

Suddenly facing the advanced stages of kidney cancer that had spread to his lungs and beyond in 1984, his doctors informed him that he had only a few months to live. Shin accepted death, but after decades of a panicked, fearful work life, he wished to achieve serenity in his final weeks. So he left the hospital and began to watch the sunrise atop his apartment building every morning. He worked with his body, paid attention to his intuitions, and chose to live his remaining time in a new way. 

He meditated through breathing exercises and aligning his chakras (a Hindu and Buddhist practice). He took up again the cello that he loved in his youth, and switched to a macrobiotic diet. He refused to hate his cancer; rather, he loved it like a child he had created.  Realizing that the tumor was an integral part of himself and as such it should be loved, he literally began to love each cancer cell. 

To both his astonishment and that of his healers, he lived, and lives to this day, more than 33 years later. In 1988, a little more than three years after being discharged to die, his routine CT scan revealed that no cancer was present.  Shin didn’t battle cancer. He swam it like a river, neither resisting nor panicking. Instead of dying, Shin took control of his healing one loving step at a time. After three years of healing his body, mind, and spirit, he became cancer free and transformed into a person full of love.  And his ability to perceive subtle patterns – including the energetic auras surrounding individuals, which was awakened during his experience with illness and self-healing – continues to this day.

As Shin writes, “Contemporary medicine seems to forget the words ‘natural healing power of the body’ which Hippocrates wrote about more than two thousand years ago.  This process happens beyond scientific comprehension. It transcends mind, body and spirit, to reach the love of God. … Now is the time for modern medicine to recognize the ancient wisdom of human beings to bring about their own recovery from cancer. The healing power within will save many people with serious and chronic diseases.”

Shin is an advocate for holistic medicine and works with and helps thousands of cancer patients around the world.  He has served as President of the Japan Holistic Medicine Foundation, a Fellow of Findhorn Foundation and Vice-President of the Weller Than Well Association of Japan. 

A physicist, healer, management consultant, teacher, writer and lover of life, Shin is now President of Terayama Consultants Holistic Management, teaching patients how to love your cancer, helping persons, companies, communities and systems approach healing through holistic means, and educating people with loving wisdom using the tools of Subtle Energy and Energy Medicine.  His personal healing journey has been written about extensively, including in the book Radical Remission: Surviving Cancer Against All Odds by Dr. Kelly A. Turner.  Shin’s book in Japanese, My Cancer Disappeared-A Document of the Natural Healing of Cancer, was published in 2006, with an introduction by Dr. Andrew Weil.

Born in Tokyo in 1936, Shin graduated from Waseda University with a degree in electrical engineering. During his time as a student of electrical engineering he studied solid state physics at the masters level and continued to privately practice his cello. After working for Toshiba Corporation in their development engineering of semi-conductor products, he left to establish Terayama Consultants Office in 1980 to provide consulting services to private companies for implementing computer systems.

Join us in conversation with this remarkable and infectiously joyful person!