Awakin Calls

Sharyle Patton is an environmental advocate who has spent much of her life working to remove toxic chemicals from the landscape and to empower communities to monitor their toxic burdens.  She led a network of 350 nongovernmental organizations from around the world in Stockholm in 2001 to guide the UN’s Persistent Organic Pollutants treaty, which calls for the worldwide elimination of the “dirty dozen” list of chemical contaminants considered among the world’s most hazardous. 

Sharyle grew up in the pristine mountains of Colorado, far from the factories that choke urban areas with smog and industrial waste. She later settled in Bolinas, Calif., a quaint, coastal ecotopia nestled among organic farms.  She discovered the town of Bolinas, Califonia and fell in love with it.  A pianist and singer who had studied at the Berklee School of Music in Boston, Sharyle played jazz and bluegrass for a living during the 1970s.  In Bolinas, she met her husband, Michael Lerner, founder and director of Commonweal, an alternative-medicine think-tank and cancer healing center.

So Patton, a longtime environmental advocate who personally remains fit and active, was stunned recently when her own body tested positive for 107 chemical pollutants – all of them known or possible toxins. “I was really angry,” she says, “because I’d never given permission for my body to be used as a toxic-waste storage site.”

Intellectually, given her work, she understood the pervasiveness of chemical pollutants.  But she didn’t expect the emotional jolt she received when she learned that her body was polluted with more than 100 chemicals linked in animal studies to a list of devastating health effects including cancer, disruption of the hormone system, birth deformities, and neurological impairments.  Blood and urine were screened for pollutants when she volunteered for a study at the Mount Sinai Medical School in New York.  Patton’s test results hint at the ubiquity of toxins in the environment, and their manifold – and everyday – sources, creating a chemical body burden for all.

Patton has been working to help community-based organizations initiate biomonitoring.  She is the director of the Commonweal Environmental Health Program in Bolinas, CA, which seeks to protect human and ecosystem health from environmental contaminants. Commonweal takes a science-based approach to the challenge of reducing manmade contaminants in the environment, and is engaged in initiatives that include the Collaborative on Health and the Environment (CHE), Health Care Without Harm (HCWH), the International POPS Elimination Network, and the Commonweal Biomonitoring Resource Center.  Sharyle’s program has pioneered the implementation of biomonitoring projects initiated by community-based organizations and the communication of the data from such projects to project participants.  She has also been a member of the Experts Group of the California Environmental Health Tracking Program for the past six years.

Previously, Sharyle was director of the United States Citizens Network for Sustainable Development and served as NGO liaison on United States delegations to the United Nations Commission, and the United Nations Habitat Summit, and was an NGO delegate to the United Nations women’s conferences, focusing on women’s sexual rights and reproductive health.

Join us in conversation with this visionary environmental leader!

"What I want to stand for is compassion for myself first, and then for all those other individuals, humans and non humans whom we so easily cast aside. The ones we marginalize, the ones we choose not to see, the ones we don't call beautiful." -Jasmin Singer from her TED talk "Compassion Unlocks Identity"

Jasmin Singer is the co-founder and co-host of Our Hen House, Inc, a non-profit multimedia hub that aspires to change the world for animals, as well as the Senior Editor for the award-winning VegNews Magazine, the world's leading vegan media brand. She is passionate about mainstreaming veganism and helping people achieve better health while living in alignment with their values. Bullied through childhood and her young adult years for being overweight, Singer's life dramatically changed when she began to take self-care seriously. Her weight dropped by 100 pounds, and the world that had overlooked her before suddenly began to take notice. The unsettling social implications of this fueled a deeper inquiry into her relationship with herself -- for the first time on her own terms. Discovering a self-compassion that transcended labels and judgments soon flung open the door to compassion for all living beings. There was no looking back. 

Today Jasmin is author of the acclaimed memoir, "Always Too Much and Never Enough", and the cohost of the Webby-recognized "Our Hen House" podcast. Online and on screen she appears in the "Teaching Jasmin How to Cook Vegan" podcast, the award-winning documentaries Vegucated and The Ghosts In Our Machine, and she has also been featured on the Dr. Oz Show and HuffPo Live. She speaks regularly across the country and beyond its borders on veganism and animal activism.

Jasmin's invitation to the world is for each person to step up and be a better version of themselves, an invitation she vibrantly embraces herself -- with a potent mixture of honesty, humor, grit and empathy. She recently moved to Northern California from NYC, and is the companion human to a sweet pit bull named Rose and a cute kitty called Stella.

Once again this summer Service Space hosted a 10-week internship for students, with ages ranging from beginning high school to upperclass-persons in college! Each week, the interns were given readings and reflections, opportunities for silence, and experiments involving various personal practices of generosity and kindness -- all in order to encourage a shift into deeper values and subtle connections. 

This year, we had as our five interns Isabel, Apurva, Maya, Shyama, and Sophie!   

Apurva, despite being 500 miles away from us in Los Angeles, diligently explored each week’s theme and his reflections invited all others to explore more into the nuances of any topic. Shyama was somehow managing a job at Jamba Juice along with her intern work - sometimes even handling 300 orders at once! However, she always greeted us with a smile during our intern calls and even found a way to bring values of kindness and generosity to work. Sophie brought her shining presence and interconnected perspective to our interactions and her project on examining our relationship to suffering. Maya made some great artwork every week for our themes and always led the way in sharing humbly and vulnerably about her own life and continued inquiries. And Isabel – inspired to be part of the internship after ServiceSpace volunteers brought experiments in kindness to her high school – had a internship-long project of painting rocks and leaving them in inconspicuous places for people to find, and brought her very down to earth loving kindness to everyone from a woman who wanted an empty water container to her dogs!

Get excited for 90 minutes of soaking in the love, compassion, and stillness of these young ladders and their beautiful 10-week (and beyond) journeys :) 

Cities are birthplaces of civilization; centers of culture, trade, and progress; cauldrons of opportunity—and the home of 80 percent of the world’s population by 2080. Our Awakin Call guest Jonathan Rose has a vision to transform these cities into well-balanced, nurturing, sustainable ecosystems that would not only help us thrive and grow, but also harmonize us with nature.

A real estate developer, urban developer, philanthropist, and author, Jonathan Rose is best known as a developer of affordable, environmentally responsible communities.  Jonathan found inspiration for a vision of well-balanced cities from the legendary 17th century composer J.S. Bach, who used a new tuning system called “temperament” and a new technology, the clavier (the forerunner of the piano) to compose instructional patterns for composers and performers that demonstrated both the perfection of the whole and the role of the individual within it.  For Rose, “Bach’s music flowed across keys in ways that no one had ever explored before. The Well-Tempered Clavier was composed to align our highest human aspirations with the sublime harmony of nature. It is a model of the task we have today in designing and reshaping our cities.”

Awarded the Visionary Leadership Award by the MIT Center for Real Estate in 2010, Rose is author of the book The Well-Tempered City, What Modern Science, Ancient Civilizations, and Human Nature Teach us About the Future of Urban Life, winner of the 2017 PROSE Award for Outstanding Scholarly Work by a Trade Publisher.  Rose proposes an urban methodology for “temperament” built on five qualities: coherence, circularity, resilience, community, and compassion.  He notes that “there's an amazing biological idea called bio-complexity, and the core of the idea is that all of nature comes from a vast and integrated gene pool. … [I]f you think of a city plan as the gene pool of a city, and we can figure out how to tie all the parts together so that they actually can co-evolve together. What nature has it, is so magnificent, is an amazing adaptive capacity, and what human civilization needs, what our cities need is that same adaptive capacity.”

Jonathan’s inspiration from music extends throughout his career and his extensive, visionary philanthropic work.  In 1979, he founded Gramavision Records, now a subsidiary of Rykodisc, producing over 75 jazz and new music recordings.  In 1986, he joined Wynton Marsalis and a leadership group to form Jazz at Lincoln Center, where he was chairman of its executive committee from 1996-2003 and oversaw the design and construction of its home, Frederick P. Rose Hall, named after his father. 

In 2002, Rose and his wife co-founded the Garrison Institute, which connects inner transformation with outer solutions to relieve suffering in the fields of trauma, education and the environment. He has served on the boards of The Educational Alliance, Enterprise Community Partners, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and is an honorary board member of the Natural Resources Defense Council, The American Museum of Natural History, and Jazz at Lincoln Center. 

Graduated from Yale University in 1974 with a B.A. in Psychology and Philosophy, and from the University of Pennsylvania with a Masters in Regional Planning, Rose describes himself as both Jewish and Buddhist stating "I think Buddhism has really advanced the science of the mind, and Judaism has advanced the process of generosity."

Join us in conversation with this remarkable civic leader and visionary!

Laura Delano is a community organizer, psychiatric liberation writer, and activist who advocates for fully informed choice about psychiatric diagnosis and "treatment" and for individuals’ right to access alternatives to the mental health system.  Laura recently founded and serves as Executive Director of Inner Compass Initiative (ICI) and ICI’s The Withdrawal Project, which are launching in the winter of 2017.

Laura’s work is fueled by the fourteen years she spent lost in the mental health system and the journey that she’s been on since 2010, when she chose to leave behind a “mentally ill” identity and the various treatments that came with it, and gradually began to rediscover and reconnect with who she really was and what it means to suffer, struggle, and be human in this world.  Laura was sent to her first therapist at the age of thirteen, and by the time she was fourteen she was labeled “mentally ill” when she was diagnosed with “bipolar disorder”. She was put on psychiatric medicine and fought her diagnosis until she was a freshman in college. Enrolled at Harvard University, she embraced her label of “mental illness” and spent the next ten years on nineteen different psychiatric drugs, in and out of locked wards, outpatient programs, treatment centers, and intensive psychotherapy.

After reading the book Anatomy of an Epidemic by Robert Whitaker, her life was forever changed. At 27 years old she embarked on the journey of tapering off of the psychiatric medications she had been put on over the years. Since September 2010, she has been free from psychiatric labels and psychotropic drugs, and firmly believes the human experience should never be pathologized.

Laura’s journey to liberation meant reclaiming and trusting her voice as well as her agency, sense of accountability, and responsibility as a human being. Through her own personal journey she has come to believe that the darkest parts of ourselves are often our best teachers, and that mental and emotional pain is something to listen to, lean into, explore, learn and grow from – not fear, suppress, run away from, or pathologize and seek to shut down.  Having re-entered life fully as a human being, today she looks back on her thirteen years as a “bipolar” patient with gratitude; the years of isolation, marginalization, and darkness which led her to despair and suicidal thoughts ultimately taught her what a meaningful life is by showing her what it is not.

Since becoming an “ex-patient”, Laura has been writing and speaking about her personal experiences and about the broader social and political issues sitting at the heart of “mental illness” and “mental health”.  She has worked within the mental health system, providing support to and advocating for the rights of individuals in emergency rooms, psychiatric hospitals, and institutional “group home” settings, and she has worked beyond the system’s walls, consulting with individuals and families seeking help withdrawing from psychiatric drugs and rediscovering life in the wake of psychiatric diagnoses. Laura has given talks and facilitated workshops in Europe and across North America, and has organized mutual aid groups for people in withdrawal.

Today, Laura sees the experiences that get called “mental illness” not as sicknesses, but rather as opportunities to deepen our connections with ourselves and with each other – and through Inner Compass Initiative and The Withdrawal Project, she is eager to help create spaces and opportunities for all of us to do this important “rehumanizing” work together.

Laura is a 2006 graduate from Harvard University. She serves on the boards of the International Society for Ethical Psychology and Psychiatry (ISEPP) and National Association for Rights Protection and Advocacy (NARPA), and she is an advisory board member of It’s All About Childhood and Family.

Join us in conversation with this remarkable woman!

 

Rick Hanson, Ph.D., is a psychologist, Senior Fellow of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley, and New York Times best-selling author.  His best-selling books, available in 26 languages, include Hardwiring Happiness: The New Brain Science of Contentment, Calm, and Confidence; Buddha’s Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom; Just One Thing: Developing a Buddha Brain One Simple Practice at a Time; and Mother Nurture.

Growing up in Los Angeles, Rick was always younger than his peers, developed a self-described “shy, dorky, nerdy” temperament, and frequently experienced being left out or put down by other kids in school. In college, he took in all the small positive moments, such as a smile from a friend, and stayed with those moments to feel good. Years later as a neuroscientist, he realized that what he did in college not only changed his mind, but his brain. For decades, he has been studying the intersections of the three circles – brain science, psychology, and contemplative wisdom – and has developed many practical tools to transform our hardwired negativity bias into the source of happiness by rewiring our brain. He explains that we can use the mind to change the brain to change the mind for better. 

Founder of Wellspring Institute for Neuroscience and Contemplative Wisdom, a non-profit corporation, Rick offers edits the bimonthly Wise Brain Bulletin to offer skillful means that anyone can use in daily life for greater happiness, love, effectiveness, and wisdom, and for changing the brain to benefit all beings in a world that cries for more harmony. As he puts it, we can actually deliberately stimulate parts of our brain to do good things, thereby, strengthening them...to grow the good stuff from the inside out, and to overcome the evolved hardwired negativity bias of the brain.

Rick also offers the free Just One Thing e-newsletter with over 120,000 subscribers which suggests practices grounded in brain science, positive psychology, and contemplative training, and the online Foundations of Well-Being program in positive neuroplasticity that anyone with financial need can do for free. He began meditating in 1974 and has studied and practiced in several traditions, including serving on the Board of Spirit Rock Meditation Center. A graduate of the Community Dharma Leader training program, he also leads a free weekly meditation group in San Rafael, CA.

A summa cum laude graduate of UCLA, Dr. Hanson has been an invited speaker at Oxford, Stanford, Harvard, and other major universities, and has taught in meditation centers worldwide. His work has been featured on the BBC, CBS, and NPR.

Join us in conversation with this compassionate neuroscientist, psychologist and wisdom teacher and learn to rewire your brain for more compassion and love in life.

“By birth, education and experience, my identity is shaped by a life spent at the crossroads - the place where cultures, ideas and beliefs collide and find both dissonance and resonance. I am most comfortable with those explorers and cartographers whose passion and life is the crossroads. There, at any given moment, what is magic and what is real shifts places depending on where I stand. ” -- TwoTrees

Kaylynn Sullivan TwoTrees has spent a life at the crossroads where species, cultures, beliefs and the unknown collide and find both dissonance and resonance.

As an artist/catalyst, her work focuses on re-orienting to indigenous mind and regenerating an essential relationship with Earth wisdom. She is past recipient of the Lila Wallace International Artist Award and her work has been exhibited and is in collections in the US, Europe and New Zealand. She continues to find passion, renewal and nourishment from all of the Earth's expressions including humans.

She is currently Artist in Residence and a member of the Leadership Team in the Leadership in Sustainability Masters Program/University of Vermont Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources as well as a current Whistenon Public Scholar at the Kettering Foundation, and Artist in Residence for the The Vermont Network.

Over the course of the past four decades TwoTrees has evolved a framework of spiritual technology with the input, support and guidance of many indigenous elders. Practice for Living, Living Practice is a current expression of this foundation (previously known as Seven Directions Practice®), which focuses on helping humans re-orient to our indigenous mind.

“I was born at the crossroads of 3 cultures and moved between those cultures and 3 languages by the time I was 10 years old,” she says. “I also believe that I thrive and find the greatest access to the creative impulse in the tension of the crossroads where cultures, ideas and beliefs intersect and sometimes collide. I find that to be a source of generative tension for me. I also live at the crossroads between the visible world and the invisible world, which is accessed through intuition, imagination and awareness of spirit.”

Join us in conversation with this remarkable spirit, teacher, and catalyst!

Shamash Alidina, one of the UK’s most well-known mindfulness experts, is an accomplished mindfulness teacher, coach, speaker and author.  He is author of the international bestseller Mindfulness For Dummies, and more recently, of The Mindful Way through Stress.  Based in London, he runs workshops and speaks at conferences all over the world and now uses webinars to show others how to teach mindfulness, too.

Shamash loves coaching people to live in the present moment in a calm and focused way, leading to greater health and wellbeing. With his lifelong interest and strong background in science (having a Master’s degree in Engineering from Imperial College, London), Shamash loves the way that mindfulness has been proven to work scientifically. 

Influenced by the monk Ajahn Brahm, Shamash believes mindfulness at its best leads to greater connection with the world, compassion, and “kindfulness.”   He has written that “a spiritual life isn’t about avoiding things. Spirituality is about facing up to your challenges with gentleness and kindness.”

He is co-founder of the Museum of Happiness, a nonprofit organization in London that provides an experiential adventure, where people of all ages and backgrounds can learn more about the essence of happiness and well-being via kindness, creativity, community and mindfulness.  By using a series of interactive exhibitions, workshops and events, the museum offers science-based techniques that people can implement into their everyday lives.

Join us in conversation with this joyful and kindful teacher and coach!

Alarmed by drastic changes in the Earth’s systems, Dr. Peter Kalmus, a climate scientist and suburban father of two, embarked on a journey to change his life and the world. He began by bicycling, growing food, meditating, and making other simple, fulfilling changes.  He stopped flying and he dramatically curtailed his usage of fossil fuels, ultimately slashing his climate impact to under a tenth of the US average, and became happier in the process.  "I became grateful for every moment and more aware of how my thoughts and actions in this moment connect to other moments and to other beings. I began to experience that everyday things are miracles …. Now, I feel more connected to the world around me, and I see that fossil fuels actually stood in the way of realizing those connections.”

An Earth scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory/Caltech, in Pasadena, California, Kalmus at work uses satellite data, in situ data, and models to study the rapidly changing Earth with a focus on boundary layer clouds. At home, he explores how dramatically reducing carbon emissions can lead to a happier, more connected life. His new book, Being the Change: Live Well and Spark a Climate Revolution, explores the connections between our individual daily actions and our collective predicament. It merges science, spirituality, and practical action to develop a response to global warming.

Kalmus stopped trying to convert climate change deniers with facts and figures and instead embarked upon a mission to become the change he wanted to see in the world. Along the way, he shows how he brought together his head (the science), his hands (food growing, bicycling, and lifestyle change), and heart (meditation and community building), to find new direction in his life.

"With the world population approaching 8 billion, my reduction obviously can’t solve global warming," he acknowledges.  "But by changing ourselves in more than merely incremental ways, I believe we contribute to opening social and political space for large-scale change. We tell a new story by changing how we live."

Kalmus now does everything he can to spread this message and to help humanity transition away from fossil fuels. He believes that the problem is not only technological or scientific, but also spiritual: it calls humans to set aside the notion that we are exceptional within the web of life, and instead to live, gratefully, in alignment with the biosphere.

Dr. Kalmus received his undergraduate degree from Harvard, and doctorate from Columbia – both in physics. He lives in suburban Altadena, California with his wife and two children.  He volunteers with Citizens’ Climate Lobby, a group focused on implementing carbon fee and dividend. He enjoys orcharding, beekeeping, and backpacking. (Peter speaks purely on his own behalf, not on behalf of NASA or Jet Propulsion Laboratory.)

Lara Galinsky once asked a question, “What would the world look like if we all owned a problem?”  One has only to look at her life to view the powerful change the answer to this question could represent.  From her beginnings as national program director at Do Something to her work as senior vice president of Echoing Green, a nonprofit organization seeking to identify, invest in, support, and unleash next generation social entrepreneurs, Lara’s focus is to recognize and support those individuals who are striving to help solve the world’s biggest problems.

As a Leadership and Purpose coach, Lara launched Work on Purpose, a program at Echoing Green which inspires and equips the Millennial generation to build lives and careers that are both right for them and good for the world.  She is the co-author of two books that have become cornerstones of the program: Work on Purpose (2011) and Be Bold: Create a Career with Impact (2007).  

Lara is currently serving as the Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the start-up Future Laboratories, a social innovation incubator for new solutions to entrenched problems in America. She also serves as a business developer for The Women's Building, a groundbreaking new project led by the NoVo Foundation to transform a former women's correctional facility in downtown Manhattan to a 100,000 square feet physical home for activism, community, and reclamation by women and girls.

Lara serves as a coach for impact-driven leaders and facilitates teams to have powerful conversations to unlock their greatest work together. She is founding co-chair of Wesleyan's Patricelli Center for Social Entrepreneurship and vice chair of Initiative for Medicine Access & Knowledge (I-MAK) to ensure life-saving drugs are affordable to people around the world who need them the most. And most importantly, she is a mother and friend who tries to live from the highest purpose of generating love in the world.

Her numerous articles help individuals to find and recognize our own moments of obligation or demonstrate that it is possible to blow bubbles and grow a family while creating a successful social enterprise.  Lara’s life demonstrates what purposeful women leadership can look like.