Awakin Calls

"Why am I me?" The chills and sensations of first being conscious of myself being conscious of myself are still vivid in my memory. I was a ten year old child then, sitting alone in my parents' bedroom, touching my own solid consciousness and wondering at it. I was stepping through the looking-glass seeing myself being myself seeing myself being myself...tasting infinity in a small body.   –Jeffrey Mishlove

Dr. Jeffrey Mishlove, a licensed clinical psychologist, is the creator and host of the interview program “Thinking Allowed” which explores alternative points of view on topics such as humanistic psychology, living philosophically, frontiers of science, personal and spiritual development, health and healing, mythology, computers and cognition, management psychology and global awareness.  The Thinking Allowed series aired on as many as 120 public television stations in the U.S. and Canada for more than 18 years, and featured his interviews of more than 200 of the world’s leading scholars, researchers, writers and teachers on such topics.

Dr. Mishlove is also past-president of the non-profit Intuition Network, an organization dedicated to creating a world in which all people are encouraged to cultivate and apply their inner, intuitive abilities. He is past-vice-president of the Association for Humanistic Psychology, and the recipient of the Pathfinders Award from that association for his contributions to the field of human consciousness.

Having crafted an individual, interdisciplinary doctoral program in parapsychology, Dr. Mishlove is the recipient of the only doctoral diploma in "parapsychology" ever awarded by an accredited university (University of California, Berkeley, 1980).  With a keen interest in leaving behind an academic record in a nascent field, he serves as Dean of Programs in Transformational Psychology at the University of Philosophical Research.  He teaches parapsychology through the Holmes Institute to ministers in training with the Centers for Spiritual Living.  He is the author of an encyclopedic volume of consciousness studies, The Roots of Consciousness.  A revision of his doctoral dissertation, Psi Development Systems, was released in 1988 as a Ballantine paperback. This book evaluates methods purported to train psychic abilities. He is also author of The PK Man: A True Story of Mind Over Matter, which documents the extreme, apparent paranormal ability of one human being.

Through both his interview series and other work, Dr. Mishlove seeks to explore various experiences and alternative viewpoints in topics related to parapsychology.  “I see myself as an impartial observer, accurately and fairly setting down the perspectives of believers and their critics,” he has written. “Yet, consciousness is a unique topic in that it is subjective, that it is direct, that we are it. Thus, while subscribing to the goal of objectivity, I wish to challenge the ‘myth of objectivity’ which holds that we can accurately and fairly describe the world about us without reference to our own selves, our beliefs and attitudes.”

Join us in conversation with this gifted conversationalist and thinker!

Ulrike Reinhard is a German publisher, author, futurist, and a catalyst for global development efforts.  As the woman behind the Barefoot Skateboarders of Janwar, a skateboard park in rural India that is upending notions of caste and gender barriers and empowering a community economically, she is re-defining the principles of traditional development aid while living in Madhya Pradesh, India.  She knows a thing or two about such efforts, as she set up a project in 2008 called WEbenin, aiming to help people in one of the poorest countries in West Africa to empower themselves, and avoiding the paradigm of rich NGOs giving goods to poor aid recipients.

Ulrike previously was based in the Bay Area and was part of The Well (one of the earliest online communities).  Drawn to the notion of decentralized and distributed power via networked relationships long before the Internet, she intuitively connects people across sectors, disciplines and continents.  She has traveled to more than 100 countries interviewing Nobel Laureates, politicians, visionary thinkers, entrepreneurs, critics, activists and field practitioners -- and has published these interviews on her youtube channel.  These conversations are also the core of many of the we-magazines that she co-founded in 2007 and that look at the impact the Internet on a specific ecosystem.

As she describes her work:  "I kickstart co-creation processes in companies and rural villages which truly drive change long-term. Through these processes flat network structured peer-to-peer groups come together and collaborate on a specific task or project and then separate again – they are the most agile and powerful teams ready to meet the challenges of the 21st century working and living environment. I constantly push my client’s boundaries and initiate cultural change. Being disruptive is my job."

Ulrike is currently writing a book about the Transformative Power of WE . Here's an excerpt about her (more info on her site):

"Ulrike is a catalyst for collective intelligence and a network enabler who forges direct links that connect people. She’s a virtuoso across the whole repertoire of modern communication technologies who would still be adding more reality to the WE in this world if she had to use smoke signals and pigeon post to do so. Ulrike is an impassioned maverick with an astonishing faith in her ability to find her way even in new and uncharted territory. She seldom follows a steady straight line but always shows an unflappable sense of direction. Like the path she’s carved through life, Ulrike is never boring and always good for a surprise!”

Join us in conversation with this dynamic and visionary do-er!

Anil Ananthaswamy is a science writer and author of The Man Who Wasn't There: Tales from the Edge of Self (Dutton, Penguin Random House, 2015), which has been described as “revealing the awesome power of the human sense of self” via an intimate look at the latest neuroscience of several mental conditions that eat away at patients’ identities – schizophrenia, autism, Alzheimer’s disease, ecstatic epilepsy, Cotard’s syndrome, out-of-body experiences, and other conditions.  Through extensive in-depth interviews venturing into the lives of individuals who lost some part of what we think of as our self, Anil brings alive patients’ stories that offer remarkable, sometimes heart-wrenching insights into what remains.  Using neuropsychology and narrative to take us inside the heads of people experiencing realities very different from our own, Anil, according to one review, “skillfully inspects the bewildering connections among brain, body, mind, self, and society… Readers will be fascinated by Ananthaswamy’s chronicles as he explores, with kindness and keen intelligence, the uncomfortable aberrations that reveal what it is to be human.”

Anil says:  "I think the first thing I realized during the writing of the book is that one should be careful with the use of the phrase 'mental disorders'. Cultures across the world treat disorders of the mind differently from disorders of the body: there is still stigma associated with the phrase 'mental disorder'. ... After interacting with so many people who so kindly shared their life stories with me—I was left feeling that each of us falls somewhere on a spectrum of physical and mental abilities. Each of us is a self that has formed during childhood and early adulthood—and the self is the result of a complex interplay between body, brain, mind, society and culture. There's genetic predisposition, there's upbringing and there's ongoing social interactions."

The Man Who Wasn’t There was nominated for the 2016 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award, named an NBC News Notable Science Book of 2015, one of Publishers Weekly's Best Books of 2015, and as a Must Read Brain Book of 2015 by Forbes. 

Ananthaswamy’s first book, The Edge of Physics (Houghton Mifflin-Harcourt, 2010), was voted book of the year in 2010 by Physics World. 

Anil is former deputy news editor and current consultant for New Scientist. He is a guest editor at UC Santa Cruz’s renowned science-writing program and teaches an annual science journalism workshop at the National Centre for Biological Sciences in Bangalore, India. He is a freelance feature editor for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science’s “Front Matter” and has written for National Geographic News, Discover, and Matter. He has been a columnist for PBS NOVA’s The Nature of Reality blog. He won the UK Institute of Physics’ Physics Journalism award and the British Association of Science Writers’ award for Best Investigative Journalism.

Ananthaswamy worked as a software engineer in Silicon Valley before training as a journalist at the University of California, Santa Cruz.  He was inspired to become a science writer by his passionate curiosity about the world.  He lives in Bangalore, India, and Berkeley, California.

Join us for a fascinating conversation with this remarkable writer who brings together cutting-edge science and philosophy from West and East!

Silas Hagerty is a filmmaker and founder of Smooth Feather Productions, a Maine-based film production company that creates films of significance and gives them away.  Silas and Smooth Feather Productions are perhaps best known for their creation of Dakota 38, a feature-length film that captured the healing reenactment of a horseback ride that a Native American elder had first experienced in a dream.

In the spring of 2005, Jim Miller, a Native spiritual leader and Vietnam veteran, found himself in a dream riding on horseback across the great plains of South Dakota. Just before he awoke, he arrived at a riverbank in Minnesota and saw 38 of his Dakota ancestors hanged. At the time, Jim knew nothing of the largest mass execution in United States history, ordered by President Abraham Lincoln on December 26, 1862. “When you have dreams, you know when they come from the creator… As any recovered alcoholic, I made believe that I didn’t get it. I tried to put it out of my mind, yet it’s one of those dreams that bothers you night and day.”

Four years later, embracing the message of the dream, Jim and a group of riders retraced the 330-mile route of his dream on horseback from Lower Brule, South Dakota to Mankato, Minnesota to arrive at the hanging site on the anniversary of the execution. They were accompanied by Silas and his production crew who captured the ride and the ceremonies on film.  Dakota 38 is the story of their journey – the blizzards they endured, the Native and Non-Native communities that housed and fed them along the way, and the dark history they are beginning to wipe away.

This film was created in line with Native healing practices. In honoring this ceremony, Silas filmed and screened Dakota 38 – representing six years of his work – as a gift rather than for sale. The film is being used among Native Americans for healing purposes, as foreseen in Miller’s dream.

As Silas recounts the magic of the experience:  “There were a lot of things happening on that ride that I didn’t know about, that I still don’t know about. A lot of songs were being sung. The stage was being set in the native tradition for a lot of these ceremonial things to happen, for a lot of this healing to happen. There were a lot of powerful, connected people on those horses who have done a lot of work in their lives to connect to this spiritual realm. … So there were a lot of spiritual things, many of which I’m hesitant to even talk about. But I’ve seen the power of these ceremonies.”

The film helped Silas shift in profound ways.  “On a simpler level, I’ve seen the power of giving. With Smooth Feather Productions, when we decided to give these films away, no strings attached, when we made that shift, it did feel like in some way the universe supported that. All of a sudden a lot of people started coming to us saying, hey, we want to help. We want in.  I still have projects I do to make money outside of Smooth Feather, but I’ve found that when we’ve done it in this way of making a gift, I think there is some kind of larger force, which I don’t even know what you’d call it. It just feels like you are supported. That’s how Dakota 38 has felt all along.”

Silas and Smooth Feather Productions have created several other films, including Change is Coming, which documents the powerful work of the Maine Inside Out program with incarcerated and recently released youth, and Playing for Change, which captures the Soccer Without Borders program, along with several other short documentaries.

Join us in conversation with this inspiring and inspired filmmaker!

After formally training as a psychologist from Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda (MSU), Trupti Pandya from Gujarat, India started working with special needs children. She noticed, among professionally trained psychologists, a tendency to label such kids has having mental disorders, technically within the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Categorizing special needs children under DSM would have a bearing on the treatment approach.

This did not feel right to Trupti. “I could not articulate the dissonance, but I felt suffocated looking at the limited lens of diagnosis with a surface level treatment plan. I could clearly sense that [the key to] their healing was beyond the text – especially after observing children whose family had accepted the child unconditionally versus children who were looked upon as a liability. What reaches a mind which is labeled as mentally challenged and what would heal the roots of the cause was my question that I started exploring.”

After feeling that western psychology was limiting in many ways, she met a Buddhist monk and asked him what brings healing. She asked him, “I feel love and compassion are key to healing of children; however this is dismissed by some of the well-known and experienced professionals. How to bring the two together?” The monk advised her on the importance of being skillful in professional work and shared that, “You need to be thorough with all the classifications and the current knowledge that is used. Once you are perceived as the master of that you can then share with your experienced colleagues that – however classified DSM is, there is something more that works manifold in healing and that is love and compassion. If you want to work on the way of Dhamma you work harder.”

This seeded in Trupti the quest for seeking the middle path.  At that same time she came in contact with elders who lived their lives following Gandhi and Vinoba values which reinstated her belief in kindness, nonviolence and compassion. Soon she found the convergence between her structured studies and the values that she held.

“The attempt now is to build friendship, see wholeness within the brokenness and heal in a wholesome manner with love, acceptance and dignity,” she says.  Trupti now designs her work using the wisdom of circles, expressive arts, prayer, silence and psychology to work with groups and individuals who have experienced severe trauma, abuse and emotional challenges. She brings grace, simplicity and unwavering inner strength in her work with women rescued from prostitution, victims of trafficking, children in detention centers, parents of children with disability and other individuals.

Beyond her regular work in detention homes and prisons, Trupti is full of life and creates and anchors spaces for service, deeper engagement and inner transformation.  She brings a sweet sense of wonder and connection into small things in life like tending to her plants, keeping food and water for birds in her balcony and doing random acts of kindness in her everyday life. Those who have been around are surely inspired by her effort in the pursuit of truth. Her journey has led her to a walking pilgrimage without the two M’s (money and mobile), taking part in a 30-day “In-Turn-ship” at the Gandhi Ashram in Ahmedabad where she engaged in daily practices like meditation and sweeping, holding circles with servant ladders from all walks of life, serving with Moved by Love in Ahmedabad, hosting HeArt circles and Awakin circles in Vadodara and volunteering with the Laddership project. And, when Trupti is not doing all of this, she is grounding herself in meditation, learning new songs to sing and traveling to open up both inside and outside.

Join us for an inspiring conversation with this remarkable spirit!

Mark Whitwell is a world-renowned yoga teacher and master who has enjoyed a lifelong relationship with the spiritual teachings of some of the world’s greatest masters.  Born and raised in New Zealand, Mark has studied yoga intensively in India, in the home of the legendary Professor T. Krishnamacharya, also known as the “Father of Modern Yoga,” and “the teacher of our teachers" -- whose notable students include his son, TKV Desikachar, BKS Iyengar, Pattabhi Jois, Indra Devi, and AG Mohan (all of whom have become distinguished teachers in their own right).

Mark studied with TKV Desikachar and shared a close friendship with him for more than 20 years. He also edited and contributed to Desikachar’s book, The Heart of Yoga:  Developing a Personal Practice. 

Having studied since 1973 in the home of Krishnamacharya, Mark is committed to communicating the timeless yoga principles with compassion and clarity.  Mark’s teachings clarify the profound passion and relevance of ancient wisdom to contemporary life.  He has taught yoga for over twenty years throughout the US, Asia, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand.  According to Mark, yoga is every person’s direct intimacy with reality, which is an entirely abundant, regenerative and nurturing power. Yoga must be adapted to individual needs according to body type, health, age and cultural background. This is yoga from the heart for the heart.

Mark lives in Los Angeles and travels throughout the world teaching the timeless principles of ancient Yoga wisdom. In 1996 Mark established The Heart of Yoga Association, a non-profit foundation that provides yoga education around the world.  He is the author of The Promise of Love, Sex, and Intimacy: How a Simple Breathing Practice Will Enrich Your Life Forever, and of Yoga of Heart: The Healing Power of Intimate Connection.  He teaches The Promise practice to thousands of people internationally. He also oversees Heart of Yoga Peace Project, which brings together Muslim and Jewish women in the Middle East to teach them the Promise practice.  Mark's mission is to revitalize the way people connect to self, community, and relationships through the power of breath and yoga.

“Yoga is the practice of unifying opposites internally and externally. The inhalation develops a feminine receptive quality, and the exhalation develops a masculine strength. I call this strength-receiving. … Yoga is making love to life. The body loves its breath, and the exhalation loves the inhalation, and feeling this love tangibly helps us learn how to love one another. When we feel loved, we inevitably give love to those around us. When we become intimately connected to each other from this place of mutual strength and receptivity, we are strong and present to each other as we receive each other.”

Join us in conversation with this yoga master!

What would happen if schools focused on kindness and gratitude before achievement and academics? This is a question that Andy Smallman not only entertained, but also acted upon. In 1994, Andy with a group of dedicated parents and their children started Puget Sound Community School [PSCS] “founded upon the belief that people are intrinsically compelled by their own curiosity and desires to learn, and when provided a positive and supportive environment…will enthusiastically pursue meaningful and challenging tasks.” 

At PSCS, kindness was not just a concept, it was part of the curriculum—a class. The kindness class became so successful, that Smallman offered an online version open to the general public. 250 “students” from around the world joined the class and practiced random acts of kindness that rippled out in their communities. In 2011, Andy created a website called Kind Living which offers self-paced kindness classes.

But Smallman didn’t stop there. In 2012, Andy was asked to adapt the kindness class for The Compassion Games, an annual event in September in which cities all over the world compete cooperatively to determine which is the most compassionate. So Andy developed The Secret Agent of Compassion, a “coopetition” (cooperative competition) between cities based on compassionate acts.

Smallman, who is excited about how awe “has become a secular, or generally acceptable, way to refer to the divine,” sees kindness as “both an avenue in to recognizing awe, and is the result of experiencing awe.” 

Don’t miss this awesome conversation with kindness educator, inventor, and warrior Andy Smallman.   

After embracing the yogic lifestyle and becoming a successful yoga teacher, Maya Breuer was visited by her grandmother in a dream, having fallen asleep with the question on her mind, “what will my work be?”  In the dream, her grandmother told Maya to be herself and to use her strength as a woman.  Around the same time, another African American elder, bell hooks, spoke to Maya through her book, Sisters of the Yam, stressing the importance of a black woman’s need for healing and self-examination. These events inspired Maya to create the national Yoga Retreat for Woman of Color, a retreat offered annually for 20 years at the Kripalu Center for Yoga. 

Celebrated as one of America’s distinguished Black Yogis by Black Enterprise magazine, Maya Breuer is also president and co-founder of the national Black Yoga Teachers Alliance, a non-profit organization created to support and provide opportunities for Black Yoga Teachers to be in community with one another and to receive yogic education from Black Yoga Teachers who are master teachers in their discipline. She is also founder and director of the Santosha School of Yoga, based in Providence, Rhode Island.

Maya’s mission is to empower individuals through “teaching the practice and philosophy” of yoga to “renew spirit and achieve positive outcomes” from healthy living. She draws on a deep knowledge of yogic theory, practices, applications and philosophy studied at the Lakulish School in Khayavorahan, Gujarat Province, India. She combines these traditional forms with indigenous methods to offer a unique and soul-full approach to the ancient practice of yoga.

Maya also emphasizes yoga as a method to abate and control chronic illnesses, such as diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, stroke, cancer and depression which are illnesses that disproportionately impact people of color.  She is co-author of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) study, “Back to Health: Yoga vs. Physical Therapy for Minorities with Chronic Low Back Pain,” conducted at the Boston Medical Center.

Maya’s work has been featured in many publications including Yoga Journal magazine, The Philadelphia Enquirer, Ebony magazine and Essence magazine.  Shaken by the number of deaths in recent years from violence, especially police violence within the black community, Maya co-created an initiative titled Yoga As A Peace Practice. “This initiative will introduce a contemplative approach to yoga to help individuals and communities recover from the trauma of loss and the impact of violence,” she says.  The initiative was launched in Oakland in May 2017, and will be in Massachusetts and Brooklyn later this year. 

Maya’s life exemplifies her motto: “Listen to spirit and take action.” On this week’s call, we will be discussing the importance of honoring our calling and serving our communities with this preeminent yoga instructor and practitioner, author, community activist and consultant. 

“Dying is much more than a medical event. It is a time for important psychological, emotional and spiritual work – a time for transition. To a large extent, the way we meet death is shaped by our habitual response to suffering, and our relationship to ourselves, to those we love, and to whatever image of ultimate kindness we hold.” - Frank Ostaseski

Frank Ostaseski is a Buddhist teacher, international lecturer and a leading voice in contemplative end-of-life care.  He is the Guiding Teacher and visionary Founding Director of Zen Hospice Project, the first Buddhist hospice in America, in San Francisco.  He has sat on the precipice of death with more than a thousand people and trained countless clinicians and caregivers in the art of mindful and compassionate care.  His work draws on his many years of Buddhist practice and 15 years at the bedsides of people dying of cancer and AIDS. He is the former Spiritual Teacher-in-Residence at the Esalen Institute.

From his decades working with dying people and those who are dealing with the death of loved ones, Frank has recognized that we must “go toward what hurts”:  “When confronted by such harsh realities in life, or even some small discomfort or inconvenience, our instinctive reaction is to run in the opposite direction. But we can’t escape suffering. It’ll just take us by surprise and whack us in the back of the head. The wiser response is to move toward what hurts, to put our hands and attention gently and mercifully on what we might otherwise want to avoid.”

Frank is the author of the Being A Compassionate Companion audio series and The Five Invitations: What the Living Can Learn From the Dying, which was published earlier this year.  The Five Invitations has been described as “an exhilarating meditation on the meaning of life and how maintaining an ever-present consciousness of death can bring us closer to our truest selves.  The Five Invitations show us how to wake up fully to our lives. They can be understood as best practices for anyone navigating a life transition, coping with loss or serious illness or a personal crisis; they guide us toward appreciating life’s preciousness. Weaving together pragmatic tools, real life stories and ancient wisdom, Frank helps us discover how an awareness of death can be a valuable companion on the road to living well, forging a rich and meaningful life free of regret.”

Frank has lectured at Harvard Medical School, the Mayo Clinic, Wisdom.2.0 and teaches at major spiritual centers around the globe. His work has been highlighted on The Oprah Winfrey Show, featured by Bill Moyers in his PBS television series, and honored by H.H. the Dalai Lama. In 2003, he was named one of America's 50 most innovative people in America by the AARP magazine. 

In 2004, Frank created the Metta Institute to provide innovative educational programs and professional trainings that foster compassionate, mindfulness-based care. A primary project of Metta Institute is the End-of-Life Practitioner Program that Frank leads with faculty members Ram Dass, Rachel Naomi Remen MD, and others.

Frank has served as a consultant to several healthcare organizations, NGO's and foundations including Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Fetzer Institute and others. He also leads workshops that explore individual relationship to suffering and death, emphasize a mindful and compassionate approach to caring for the dying, and offer pragmatic methods drawn from our direct experience.

Join us in conversation with this wise teacher!

Meredith May is a storyteller, award-winning journalist, author, and third-generation beekeeper.

For much of her career, Meredith was (until 2015) a feature writer at The San Francisco Chronicle.  Her 2004 newspaper series “Operation Lion Heart,” about a war-wounded Iraqi boy, inspired the U.S. government to grant political asylum to the child and his family, and won the PEN USA Literary Award for Journalism and the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for photography.  Her 2006 investigative series on sex trafficking, “Diary of a Sex Slave,” broke journalistic ground by telling the story of a Korean woman who was trafficked to San Francisco and forced to work in a massage parlor; the series earned first place feature writing awards from the Society of Professional Journalists and the Associated Press, and was turned into a graphic novel by Stanford University.  Her discovery of a San Francisco Bay Area school superintendent’s private use of a district credit card led to his fraud conviction and a subsequent state takeover of his school system.  Her exposé of a chain of Fresno-based charter schools that took taxpayer dollars and taught religion led to the closing of all 14 schools and a new California law that bans such schools.  

May’s writing is included in the book, Best Newspaper Writing 2005, published by the American Society of Newspaper Editors.

Her gift of story-telling found expression this year in I, Who Did Not Die (2017), a book she wrote which tells the true story of two men—one from Iraq, the other from Iran—who were destined to be mortal enemies, but instead found in each other mercy, kindness, and hope.  One of the men, Zahed, then a 13-year-old Iranian child soldier, was among the first Iranian troops in Khorramshahr after Saddam’s invasion of Iran.  He was ordered to clear the bunkers and execute any surviving Iraqis.  He prayed he would not find anyone alive, but, in the third bunker, he heard a sound.  In the beam of his flashlight he saw six dead Iraqis and among them was a 29-year-old Iraqi conscript, Najah.  Zahed, the Iranian boy, could not kill Najah, and instead secretly nursed the enemy Iraqi fighter back to life during the brutal Iran-Iraq War.  Twenty years later, after suffering terrible loss and imprisonment, the men met by chance again on the other side of the world, finding themselves sitting next to each other and sharing stories of their past in the waiting room of a Canadian help center for torture survivors.

The two men are listed as co-authors, along with Meredith, of the book.  Meredith says that writing this story of survival, resilience, humanity, and friendship has made her much more spiritual, as the chances of these two men ever meeting again were infinitesimal.  

This touch of spirituality is something Meredith also experiences while she keeps bees.  A third-generation beekeeper from Carmel Valley, Meredith tends beehives in her backyard as well as at the Connecticut Friendship Garden, a community garden in San Francisco.   While she was an active journalist at The Chronicle, she used to care for two beehives on the roof of The Chronicle.  She said in 2004:  “over there [pointing towards the newsroom] is all about a job, a job I love—telling stories is very important—but it’s also about making money. And working with the bees is about being alive, which is a much grander thing, I think.  So this is about my purpose. This is why I’m here. This is my connection with my grandfather. And yes, people are very surprised that we have this agricultural phenomenon right here at Fifth and Mission with bus stops and parking garages and coffee shops. It’s just odd. In almost a protest in a way against… I guess I’m a country girl living in the city.”

Meredith currently writes books, keeps bees, and teaches podcasting at Mills College in Oakland, where she graduated with a bachelor’s degree in government in 1991. She has been a competitive rower for 22 years, and is a member of the nationally ranked Marin Rowing Association. She also likes to swim and paddle a Hawaiian outrigger canoe in the San Francisco Bay with the Dolphin Club, one of San Francisco’s oldest sports clubs.

Meredith mentors at-risk children, and speaks French, Spanish and American Sign Language.  She is a co-founder of bigTINY, a pop-up artist salon held in a former Italian basement boxing club that spotlights emerging Bay Area writers, musicians, photographers, pranksters and other offbeat creatives.  

Join us in conversation with this vibrant and beautiful storyteller!