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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.
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.
“Sweetheart, you are in pain. Relax. Take a breath. Let’s pay attention to what is happening. Then we’ll figure out what to do.”
| Question to Live
Does it come naturally, for me, to offer kindness to myself? |
| Integration Step
Summon this mantra, as often as necessary: “Sweetheart, you are in pain. Relax. Take a breath. Let’s pay attention to what is happening. Then, we’ll figure out what to do.” Journal about what that works in you, and how happily — or awkwardly — it lands. |
| Heart of the Matter
What we have in Sylvia Boorstein is someone who has actively shaped her presence in the world across her lifetime, welcoming in her frailties and glitches, toward creating a wise and graceful whole. And there is a discipline of kindness tucked inside how she finds it in herself to be able to engage contemplative tradition in the first place, with the people she’s closest to in her life and with strangers, with the people she bumps up against all day long — just as a human loose in the world. We walk around in the most simple, ordinary of circumstances with the power to break someone else’s day, or to make someone else’s day with kindness. And, like all spiritual wisdom, we must offer that kindness to ourselves, too, if we truly, innately, and in a fully embodied way can offer it to others. This can become the way we are in the world, even if everything in our formation or what’s happening to us would suggest that we would be different. So the invitation here is to practice kindness — kindness as a spiritual way of being, especially when the most natural move would be something different. We can begin flexing a muscle of stopping, of “recalculating.” And as you work on this, at all times let this intention of kindness to others root in a deep practice of kindness toward yourself. That’s the only way this can become truly instinctive and defining of you, and for everyone around you. |
“There will be moments when we’re riding high & moments when we can’t bear to get out of bed. We need people who acknowledge that sometimes everything breaks. Short of that, we need to perform those functions for ourselves, to give ourselves a break when we need it & to be kind.”
Question to Live
What memories and emotions does this metaphor of “wintering” surface in me? |
| Integration Step
In your journaling, take “wintering” as a lens for looking back at that list of everything that’s happened to you this year. |
| Heart of the Matter
The invitation here is in some sense cosmic, and it is cellular: to set our sense of ourselves in a more spacious understanding of time, which is, in fact, the true nature of time; in a more spacious understanding of vitality — the true nature of vitality, the way the world actually works. Which is always seasonal and cyclical. Our world of work and industry and organization is structured in a clockwork way; but that’s not how time works, and it’s not how change happens. Katherine’s statement that unhappiness is one of the simple things in life also invites us back, with relief, to the ground of reality — that reality that we are here to befriend. To understand unhappiness as a place, a state of being along the spectrum of vitality, helps. In this world we inhabit now, there are so many people unable to stop, to rest, recover — to winter. And this may be about the work they do or the fact that they are parents or the matter of survival. Depression, which is something distinct from this simple thing in life called unhappiness, is also a very dangerous place in our world. So we hold all of that together in awareness alongside this wisdom teaching, and it becomes all the more an invitation to be honest, to create space for ourselves to be honest, for others to be honest with us about their lives. In another place, Katherine May writes that “whenever you start talking to people about your own winterings, they start telling you about theirs. And you realize what huge community there could be, if we talked about this in a different way.” |
If you could put a lock of your hair under a microscope, what would it contain? DNA certainly, but here in dg nanouk okpik’s poem, the hair also contains memory, smell, location, disease, dreams, and medicine.
We’re pleased to offer dg nanouk okpik’s poem, and invite you to connect with Poetry Unbound throughout this season.
An excerpt from the in-depth On Being conversation between Sharon Salzberg and Krista. Find the full conversation here.
Sharon Salzberg is a Buddhist teacher and author — and co-founder of the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, MA. She is the author of 11 books, including Real Happiness, Lovingkindness, and most recently, Real Change: Mindfulness To Heal Ourselves and the World.
An excerpt from the in-depth On Being conversation between Christine Runyan and Krista. Find the full conversation here.
Christine Runyan is a clinical psychologist and professor in the Department of Family Medicine and Community Health at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. She is a certified mindfulness teacher. She co-founded and co-leads Tend Health, a clinical consulting practice focused on the mental well-being of health care practitioners.
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.
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.
An excerpt from the in-depth On Being conversation between Sylvia Boorstein and Krista. Find the full conversation here.
Sylvia Boorstein is a founding teacher of Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Woodacre, California. Her books include That’s Funny, You Don’t Look Buddhist and Making Friends with the Present Moment.
An excerpt from the in-depth On Being conversation between Katherine May and Krista. Find the full conversation here.
Katherine May is an author of fiction and memoir whose titles include Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times, The Electricity of Every Living Thing, and Burning Out. She is also the editor of an anthology of essays about motherhood, called The Best, Most Awful Job.
A social worker holds a group for teenagers at a school. They only half pay attention to him. Then something happens, and they pay attention to each other.
We’re pleased to offer Benjamin Gucciardi’s poem, and invite you to connect with Poetry Unbound throughout this season.
Have you ever had a private moment — perhaps in the middle of the night — in a large city? When it just seems like it’s you and the great dreaming metropolis? Rowan Ricardo Phillips brings us into a memory he can’t forget, complete with a Wu-Tang Clan soundtrack.
We’re pleased to offer Rowan Ricardo Phillips’s poem, and invite you to connect with Poetry Unbound throughout this season.
In a poem of strict rhymes and old forms, Alexander Posey (1873-1908), a poet of the Creek Nation, poses challenges to pomposity.
We’re pleased to offer Alexander Posey’s poem, and invite you to connect with Poetry Unbound throughout this season.
In a church there are liturgies and prayers and statues. But in José Olivarez’s poem, there are more urgent things taking place, things that have “no time to wait.”
We’re pleased to offer José Olivarez’s poem, and invite you to connect with Poetry Unbound throughout this season.
Friendships deserve praise songs, and here’s a praise song — an ode — to friends that have crossed continents for each other, and would go further if needed.
We’re pleased to offer Safia Elhillo’s poem, and invite you to connect with Poetry Unbound throughout this season.
Poetry Unbound with host Pádraig Ó Tuama is back on Monday, May 22. Featured poets in this season include Selina Nwulu, Wo Chan, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, Mark Turcotte, and many more. New episodes released every Monday and Friday through July 28.
Follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Overcast, or wherever you listen.
We need a modicum of vitality to simply be alive in this time. And we’re in an enduringly tender place. The mental health crisis that is invoked all around, especially as we look to the young, is one manifestation of the gravity of the post-2020 world. How to name and honor this more openly? How to hold that together with the ways we’ve been given to learn and to grow? Who are we called to be moving forward? Dr. Vivek Murthy is a brilliant, wise, and kind companion in these questions. He’s a renowned physician and research scientist in his second tenure as U.S. Surgeon General. And for years, he’s been naming and investigating loneliness as a public health matter, including his own experience of that very human condition.
It is beyond rare to be in the presence of a person holding high governmental office who speaks about love with ease and dignity — and about the agency to be healers that is available to us all. There is so much here to walk away with, and into. This conversation quieted and touched a room full of raucous podcasters at the 2023 On Air Fest in Brooklyn.
There are many resources for mental health support. If you’re in the U.S., find some of them here.
Join our constellation of listening and living.
The Pause is a monthly Saturday morning companion to all things On Being, with heads-up on new episodes, special offerings, event invitations, recommendations, and reflections from Krista all year round.
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