This sonnet is also available in my book "Guns Are Not Our God! The NRA Is Not Our Church!" https://ravichandramd.com/portfolio/ganog/

"Word to the Universe" is a poem I wrote in 2003, and which is in my book "a fox peeks out - poems" - available on Amazon. "If it ain't all about poetry - why is it called the Uni-Verse?" :) https://www.amazon.com/fox-peeks-out-poems/dp/061553337X/

This is the podcast version of Dr. Ravi Chandra's talk at Tadaima 2023, "Treating America's #1 Addiction: Abusive Power." That presentation is available with the visual Keynote slides at https://youtu.be/9q4jQdb4jYg?si=gvvVbFFMhN9XkWTC. Associated blogposts will be published at Psychology Today and East WInd eZine on October 9, 2023.

Abusive Power and Megalomania Perpetuate American Trauma | Psychology Today https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-pacific-heart/202310/abusive-power-and-megalomania-perpetuate-american-trauma and MOSF 18.10: Treating America’s #1 Addiction: Abusive Power https://eastwindezine.com/mosf-18-10-treating-americas-1-addiction-abusive-power/

More about Dr. Chandra at https://linktr.ee/ravichandramd

This episode of The Pacific Heart Podcast features the host, Dr. Ravi Chandra's, conversation at Tadaima 2022. Tadaima is the online Japanese American Pilgrimage held each October. Our discussion, titled “Speaking Out and Calling In with Bravery and Humility: A Conversation with Dr. Ravi Chandra,” was moderated by organizer Julie Abo, and included her mother, Mary Abo, who was incarcerated as a child, and Mike Ishii and Rikio Inouye, both activists and scholars in the Japanese American community. I was invited to be on the panel because of my long history with the Japanese American community, and because of two articles I’d recently written. The first, on Psychology Today, was about humility, and was recently republished by The Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley. The second, at East Wind eZine, questioned the “good heartedness” of Trump supporters and their opponents. Our YouTube conversation is linked below, and all these articles are linked in the associated Psychology Today blogpost, published October 5, 2023. Creating Transitional Spaces to Heal Intergenerational Trauma https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-pacific-heart/202310/creating-transitional-spaces-to-heal-intergenerational-trauma

A conversation and commentary on feeling close, feeling angry, and finding belonging, particularly for the Asian American community, but for everyone. With Dr. Ravi Chandra, psychiatrist and writer in San Francisco. Companion blogpost at What Do We Feel When We Feel Close? The Dim Sum Dialogues | Psychology Today https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-pacific-heart/202309/what-do-we-feel-when-we-feel-close-the-dim-sum-dialogues .

More details at https://linktr.ee/ravichandramd

Dr. Ravi Chandra of SF Love Dojo (https://sflovedojo.org) offers a teaching and meditation about allyship. Included in the meditation is a version of the Mindful Self-Compassion break, part of the MSC program pioneered by Christopher Germer and Kristin Neff. More on Ravi Chandra's work and writing at https://RaviChandraMD.com. East Wind articles at https://eastwindezine.com/tag/memoirs-of-a-superfan/

July 30, 2020. This edited video contains only Dr. Ravi Chandra's remarks at a 90 minute Mindful Self Compassion Teacher' Forum, sponsored by the Center for Mindful Self Compassion (https://centerformsc.org). The last segment includes the poem 'mudfire', written about one month after the police murder of George Floyd on May 25, 2020. 'mudfire' was supported by a Individual Artists Commission grant from the San Francisco Arts Commission.

Note: I did accidentally leave out one example of our international philosophies of interdependence - the Ubuntu proverb from Africa, "people become people through other people."

Video at https://youtu.be/j1AjD22JSlo

May all merit from these remarks go towards the alleviation of suffering, and to the transformation of the web of trauma into a web of healing.

Words:

Jeong - 'just as the mind is not separate from the body, so the self is not separate from other selves' (Korean) (also imbued with a sense of permeating love, compassion and connection for and with all beings)

Han - a deeply felt sense of collective suffering and oppression (Korean)

Umami - the fifth flavor, making food more tasty and delicious. (Japanese) Here, the "extra ingredient" of love, friendliness and compassion that make inner life and relatedness more "tasty and delicious". I continue to cultivate umami with Mindful Self Compassion, Compassion Cultivatiion Training (https://www.compassioninstitute.com) and practices from the Buddhist tradition.

More on Ravi Chandra at https://ravichandramd.com, and more on his compassion organization at https://www.sflovedojo.org

Tokyo Crows. See the movie Tokyo Waka by John Haptas and Kristine Samuelson http://www.stylofilms.com/tokyowaka.html and the book Facebuddha: Transcendence in the Age of Social Networks for more on crows. https://www.facebuddha.co

A recording of birds in Usuki, Japan, on repeat.

July 22, 2020. Dr. Ravi Chandra is interviewed by graduate student Maud Hu on whether racism should be considered a mental illness. The corresponding blogpost in Psychology Today is "After Charlottesville: Is Racism a Mental Illness?" from August 15, 2017.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-pacific-heart/201708/after-charlottesville-is-racism-mental-illness

For more on Dr. Chandra, see www.RaviChandraMD.com and www.sfpsychiatry.com, and for more on his compassion organization, see www.sflovedojo.org