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Hope Is a Muscle, I

Wisdom Retreats > Hope Is a Muscle, I

Hope, as we’ll explore it, is a practical, imaginative, everyday quality of wise and graceful lives. It is an orientation with real world consequences. It is a better way to live — to make a home inside oneself, and to be present to the world in its pain and its beauty. It is a necessary force for picking up the human and civilizational callings that have been laid bare by this moment in the life of the world.

This first course introduces some entry points to understanding and practicing hope, noticing cultural simplifications, and engaging a muscular practice with joy.

Session 1: How to Begin

episode

June 21, 2023

Why Hope Is Necessary

With Bryan Stevenson
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“I am persuaded that hopelessness is the enemy of justice; that if we allow ourselves to become hopeless, we become part of the problem. … And if I’ve inherited anything from the generation who came before me, I have inherited their wisdom about the necessity of hope.”

Question to Live

Where do I direct my curiosity and care? Where have I not been looking?

 

Integration Step

Remember: curiosity, listening, and presence — proximity that is spiritual as much as physical — is a first step before setting an action plan.
Heart of the Matter

This Wisdom Practice is a wonderful way into the question that so many of us have been asking, so many of us across all of our divides and differences. Seeing the reckonings that are upon us, seeing the repair that we want to happen in our world — how to begin?

The language of hope as a “superpower” could be problematic; one thing we do with virtues and with virtuous people is to put them up on pedestals where what they’re describing and modeling feels inaccessible to the lowly rest of us. But there’s no pedestal here, if you know what Bryan Stevenson’s first counsel is when people ask him, “How do I live this way you live?” How do I develop this muscular hope that is also so pragmatic, and that shifts things in the world? His counsel is: “Get proximate.” Find a way to get proximate to the people in your neighborhoods, your communities, the places where you work, the places where you live — the people who are marginalized, who are excluded.

He’s talking about physical proximity, but what he’s also describing is this connection that is always there with deep ways of living and being, with virtues and moves of character — that what we do externally also involves inward preparation and settling. Getting proximate also means getting spiritually proximate. How do you do that? You get mentally and emotionally present to things that perhaps you haven’t noticed or gotten up close to before. You get curious, which is just this very quiet muscle, this quiet virtue that makes almost all of the other virtues more possible.

The invitation to practice here is to take Bryan Stevenson’s counsel to become proximate into your mind, into your body. Walk around with it. Walk around with it and see what it does inside you, and see what it moves you to see and to do in the world that you can see and touch. That’s the first place, the primary place, any of us are called to be present — for our presence to matter.

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episode

June 21, 2023

Get Proximate

Guided by Krista
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Listen daily until you move on to the next Wisdom Practice.

Journal with the ideas, the questions, and invitations raised. Pay attention to how these things surface in your thoughts, in your body, and in interactions and experiences as you move through your days.

Use the Question to Live and Integration Step as further prompts for practicing, and for journaling.

You’re building spiritual and moral muscle memory.

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episode

June 21, 2023

Love Is the Motive

Bryan Stevenson with Krista Tippett
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An excerpt from the in-depth conversation between Bryan and Krista.

Bryan Stevenson is the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama, and Aronson Family Professor of Criminal Justice at New York University School of Law. He is the author of The New York Times bestseller Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption.

Listen to the whole produced On Being show — and learn more about Bryan, his work, and his writing — here.

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Session 2: On Cynicism

episode

June 21, 2023

Critical Thinking and Hope

With Maria Popova

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“Critical thinking without hope is cynicism, but hope without critical thinking is naïveté. I try to live in this place between the two to try to build a life there.”

Question to Live

What shifts when I get curious about the difference between critical thinking, cynicism, and hope?

 

Integration Step

Notice in your day when “hope inspires the good to reveal itself.”

 

Heart of the Matter

Maria Popova offers an invitation to practice that is akin to the practice of the previous session. It’s another move towards getting proximate: “What do I agree to attend to and notice?”

Another muscle suggested by Maria is to interrogate yourself when you have a cynical reaction, and wonder how you might be protecting yourself with that reaction. It is, after all, a reaction you may have been trained to have. Is there a different move you could make, even just flexing that muscle of curiosity that lives so close to the muscle of hope?

That Emily Dickinson line that comes to us through Anne Lamott is also such a gift here: “Hope inspires the good to reveal itself.” If you’re going through your days practicing hope, notice when that happens — when an orientation of hope inspires the good to reveal itself.

 

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episode

June 21, 2023

Practice Courage

Guided by Krista
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Listen daily until you move on to the next Wisdom Practice.

Journal with the ideas, the questions, and invitations raised. Pay attention to how these things surface in your thoughts, in your body, and in interactions and experiences as you move through your days.

Use the Question to Live and Integration Step as further prompts for practicing, and for journaling.

You’re building spiritual and moral muscle memory.

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episode

June 21, 2023

Cosmic Imagining, Civic Pondering

Maria Popova and Natalie Batalha with Krista Tippett
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Listen to Krista’s entire On Being conversation with Maria Popova here.

This Delve is an excerpt from Krista’s On Being conversation with Maria together with Natalie Batalha. Find the whole produced show — and learn more about each of their work and writing — here.

Maria Popova is the creator and presence behind Brain Pickings, which is included in the Library of Congress’s permanent digital archive of culturally valuable materials. She is the author of Figuring and hosts “The Universe in Verse,” an annual celebration of science through poetry, at the interdisciplinary cultural institute Pioneer Works, in Brooklyn.

Natalie Batalha is a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of California at Santa Cruz. She served as the project scientist for NASA’s Kepler mission from 2011 to 2017.

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Session 3: On Hopelessness

episode

June 21, 2023

“Hope Against Hope” Is a Useful Phrase

With Devendra Banhart

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“The hope that suffering will go away if I don’t look at it — that’s the wrong kind of hope.”

Question to Live

Is there a hope I’m holding onto that gets in the way of taking in the full reality of things?

 

Integration Step

Practice tonglen in the face of news or an experience you can hardly bear. Breathe in the pain, and breathe out healing.

 

Heart of the Matter

“The hope that suffering will go away if I don’t look at it — that’s the wrong kind of hope.”

 

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episode

June 21, 2023

Make Room for Everything

Guided by Krista, Inspired by Pema Chödrön
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Listen daily until you move on to the next Wisdom Practice.

Journal with the ideas, the questions, and invitations raised. Pay attention to how these things surface in your thoughts, in your body, and in interactions and experiences as you move through your days.

Use the Question to Live and Integration Step as further prompts for practicing, and for journaling.

You’re building spiritual and moral muscle memory.

< Back to Retreat

episode

June 21, 2023

When Things Fall Apart

Devendra Banhart with Krista Tippett
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An excerpt from the in-depth On Being conversation between Devendra and Krista about Pema Chödrön’s book When Things Fall Apart.

Devendra Banhart is a visual artist, musician, songwriter, and poet. His albums include Ma, Mala, What Will We Be, Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon, and Cripple Crow, among others. His book of poetry is Weeping Gang Bliss Void Yab-Yum.

Listen to the whole produced show — and learn more about Devendra’s music and work — here.

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Session 4: The Gravity of Now

episode

June 21, 2023

Evolving Humanity

With angel Kyodo williams
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“Our teachers are really the people, the situations that … incite a sense of discomfort, dis-ease, awkwardness in us. … We’re evolving into a greater and greater sense of what it means to be fully human … completely in the truth of the human experience and all of its complexities.”

 

Question to Live

How is just being alive now calling to struggle that is an invitation to new life?

 

Integration Step

Pause amidst the overwhelm. When you’re in a challenging experience, ask what it is making available to you rather than how it is limiting you.

 

Heart of the Matter

The invitation here, at a very elemental level, is to take in the magnitude — the peril and the promise — of being alive at this moment in time.

The invitation is to make a shift when we can — when we can get out from under a sense of overwhelm — to ask what the incredible fullness and gravity of now is making more available to us, rather than how it is limiting and uncomfortable.

 

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episode

June 21, 2023

Meet Discomfort as a Teacher

Guided by Krista
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Listen daily until you move on to the next Wisdom Practice.

Journal with the ideas, the questions, and invitations raised. Pay attention to how these things surface in your thoughts, in your body, and in interactions and experiences as you move through your days.

Use the Question to Live and Integration Step as further prompts for practicing, and for journaling.

You’re building spiritual and moral muscle memory.

< Back to Retreat

episode

June 21, 2023

The World Is Our Field of Practice

Rev. angel Kyodo williams with Krista Tippett

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An excerpt from the in-depth On Being conversation between Rev. angel and Krista.

angel Kyodo williams is a Zen priest, activist, and teacher. She’s the author of Being Black: Zen and the Art of Living with Fearlessness and Grace and Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love, and Liberation. In 2020, she created the first annual Great Radical Race Read.

Find the whole produced show — and learn more about her work and writing — here.

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Session 5: Rising to Your Best Self

episode

June 21, 2023

The Community Inside You

With Naomi Shihab Nye
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“One nice thing about writing is that you get to meet these other selves which continue on in you — your child self, your older self, your confused self, your self that makes a lot of mistakes — and find some gracious way to have a community inside that would help you survive.”

Question to Live

What is my best self? Where do I keep it when I’m not being it?

 

Integration Step

Journal every day, even three words or three lines. Practice taking a single word as an oar to get you through the day.

 

Heart of the Matter

This Wisdom Practice holds so much teaching about the human condition, and through that why journaling is such a fruitful spiritual practice, a life practice. Journaling is a way of being in conversation with yourself, but Naomi Shihab Nye takes that a step further: writing things down is a way of getting into community with yourself, with all of your different selves.

The invitation here is to start writing things down. Exchange words with yourself about what you’re doing here. You might land on a single word or phrase that you find animating and use it as Naomi teaches: as an oar that could get you through the days just by holding it differently, thinking about it differently, and seeing how it rubs against other words, how it interplays with other words.

She insists that we all, naturally, think in poems. And writing as a gift we make to ourselves, towards “the mysterious rising of one’s best self” — an act towards healing and wholeness and a sustainable, renewable, reality-based hope.

 

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episode

June 21, 2023

Write Things Down

Guided by Krista
Download Transcript

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Listen daily until you move on to the next Wisdom Practice.

Journal with the ideas, the questions, and invitations raised. Pay attention to how these things surface in your thoughts, in your body, and in interactions and experiences as you move through your days.

Use the Question to Live and Integration Step as further prompts for practicing, and for journaling.

You’re building spiritual and moral muscle memory.

< Back to Retreat

episode

June 21, 2023

Before You Know Kindness as the Deepest Thing Inside

Naomi Shihab Nye with Krista Tippett
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An excerpt from the in-depth On Being conversation between Naomi and Krista.

Naomi Shihab Nye is the Young People’s Poet Laureate through the Poetry Foundation and a professor of creative writing at Texas State University. Her recent books include The Tiny Journalist, Voices in the Air: Poems for Listeners, Cast Away, and Everything Comes Next: Collected and New Poems. She received the 2019 Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Book Critics Circle.

Find the whole produced show — and learn more about Naomi’s work and writing — here.

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Session 6: Words

episode

June 21, 2023

Making Worlds with Words

With Ocean Vuong
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“We often tell our students, ‘The future’s in your hands.’ But I think the future is actually in your mouth. You have to articulate the world you want to live in.”

Question to LiveWhat difference does it make, even in the most ordinary exchanges, if you take in Ocean’s wisdom that the future is in your mouth?

 

Integration Step

Notice all the death metaphors that come so naturally, so blithely. Start to shift them, and feel what that starts to shift in you.

 

Heart of the Matter

What happens if we alter our language? Where would our future be? Where will we grow towards? We are so fluent in the sensibility and imagination and atmosphere of violence with our words. Part of the work of making hope more reasonable and more possible is putting more vivid, intentional language out there to illustrate its reality and its possibilities. Words orient us and orient the atmosphere of our cultures, both microcultures and the larger culture.

The invitation here is to really pay attention to the words you use, the words you engage, and the worlds these words are actively bringing into being and sustaining — to imagine the possibility of building a vocabulary of muscular hope. Building a vocabulary of the strength and the possibility of life, a vocabulary that makes the conditions more likely for what is lifegiving and redemptive.

Words make worlds, the ancient rabbis said. “We often tell our students, ‘The future’s in your hands,’ Ocean Vuong says. “But I think the future is actually in your mouth. You have to articulate the world you want to live in, first. We pride ourselves as a country that’s very technologically advanced. We have strong, good sciences, good schools, very advanced weaponry, for sure — but I think we’re still very primitive in the way we use language and speak.”

How will you move even through the most ordinary exchanges, if you take in Ocean’s wisdom that the future is in your mouth?

 

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episode

June 21, 2023

Speak Hope into Vitality

Guided by Krista
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Listen daily until you move on to the next Wisdom Practice.

Journal with the ideas, the questions, and invitations raised. Pay attention to how these things surface in your thoughts, in your body, and in interactions and experiences as you move through your days.

Use the Question to Live and Integration Step as further prompts for practicing, and for journaling.

You’re building spiritual and moral muscle memory.

< Back to Retreat

episode

June 21, 2023

A Life Worthy of Our Breath

Ocean Vuong with Krista Tippett
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An excerpt from the in-depth On Being conversation between Ocean and Krista.

Ocean Vuong is an assistant professor of English in the MFA Program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is the author of the poetry collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds, which won the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Whiting Award; and a novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. He was a 2019 MacArthur Fellow.

Listen to the whole produced show — and learn more about Ocean’s work and writing — here.

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Session 7: Tending Delight

episode

June 21, 2023

Joy Is a Companion to Hope

With Ross Gay
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“We forget to advocate for what we love, for what we find beautiful and necessary. We are good at fighting. But imagining and holding in one’s imagination what is wonderful and to be adored and preserved and exalted is harder for us, it seems.”

Question to Live

Do I have a delight radar?

 

Integration Step

Set out to actively cultivate joy in the most granular of experiences. What is pleasant and sweet and tender? What brings flashes of light into your day?

 

Heart of the Matter

There’s a question loose in our hurting world: is it possible, is it a privilege, to be joyful in a time like this? But joy is a resilience-making, lifegiving birthright of being human. To suggest that you can’t be joyful in a time like this is akin to the idea that you can’t be hopeful unless everything has gone right for you.

In his Book of Delights, Ross Gay took it upon himself to move through a year looking for delight and writing about delight every day. “One of the things that surprised me,” he says, “was how quickly the study of delight made delight more evident.”

It’s precisely the closeness and ordinariness of what Ross attends to that makes him a teacher to us.

 

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episode

June 21, 2023

Turn on Your Delight Radar

Guided by Krista
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Listen daily until you move on to the next Wisdom Practice.

Journal with the ideas, the questions, and invitations raised. Pay attention to how these things surface in your thoughts, in your body, and in interactions and experiences as you move through your days.

Use the Question to Live and Integration Step as further prompts for practicing, and for journaling.

You’re building spiritual and moral muscle memory.

< Back to Retreat

episode

June 21, 2023

Tending Joy and Practicing Delight

Ross Gay with Krista Tippett
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An excerpt from the in-depth On Being conversation between Ross Gay and Krista Tippett.

Ross Gay is a professor of English at Indiana University. His books include the poetry collection, Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, and a book of essays, The Book of Delights. He co-founded The Tenderness Project together with Shayla Lawson.

Listen to the whole produced show here.

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