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An excerpt from the in-depth On Being conversation between Rebecca and Krista.
Rebecca Solnit is a columnist at The Guardian and a regular contributor to Literary Hub. Her many books include Hope in the Dark, A Paradise Built in Hell, and her most recent, Recollections of My Nonexistence.
Find the whole show — and learn more about her work and writing — here.
An excerpt from the in-depth On Being conversation between Rabbi Burger and Krista.
Rabbi Ariel Burger is the author of Witness: Lessons from Elie Wiesel’s Classroom, and he’s the co-founder and senior scholar of The Witness Institute.
Find the whole produced show — and learn more about Rabbi Burger’s work and writing — here.
An excerpt from the in-depth On Being conversation between Jacqueline and Krista.
Jacqueline Novogratz is the founder and CEO of Acumen, a venture capital fund that serves some of the poorest people in the world. She’s also the author of the memoir The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World.
Find the whole produced show — and learn more about Jacqueline’s work and writing — here.
An excerpt from the in-depth On Being conversation between Ayana and Krista.
Ayana Elizabeth Johnson is a marine biologist, and co-founder of the Urban Ocean Lab, a think tank for coastal cities. She’s one of the creators of the podcast, How to Save a Planet, and she co-edited the wonderful anthology All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis. She’s also the co-founder of the All We Can Save Project.
Find the full show “Ayana Elizabeth Johnson — What If We Get This Right?” at onbeing.org.
An excerpt from the in-depth On Being conversation between Oliver and Krista.
Oliver Burkeman is a journalist and author. His most recent book is Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. He’s also the author of The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking. He writes and publishes a twice monthly email newsletter called “The Imperfectionist.” You can find The Guardian column he wrote from 2006 to 2020 online. It’s titled, “This Column Will Change Your Life.”
Find the full show “Oliver Burkeman — Time Management for Mortals” at onbeing.org.
episode
June 19, 2023
An excerpt from the in-depth On Being conversation between Joanna, Anita, and Krista.
Joanna Macy is a philosopher of ecology and Buddhist teacher, and the root teacher of The Work That Reconnects. She’s the author of many books. Our previous On Being episode with her is “A Wild Love for the World.” That’s also the title of a lovely book of homage to her published in 2020.
Anita Barrows has translated three books of Rilke’s writing with Joanna, in addition to Letters to a Young Poet; Rilke’s Book of Hours; Love Poems to God; In Praise of Mortality; and A Year with Rilke. Anita is a psychologist and poet. She was a voice in the On Being episode, “The Soul in Depression.” Her most recent poetry collection is Testimony.
Find the full show “Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows — ‘What a world you’ve got inside you.’” at onbeing.org.
An excerpt from the in-depth Future of Hope conversation between Ai-jen and Tarana.
Ai-jen Poo co-founded and leads The National Domestic Workers Alliance, is the director of Caring Across Generations, and co-founder of Supermajority. Among her countless awards, she was a 2014 MacArthur Fellow. She’s the author of The Age of Dignity: Preparing for the Elder Boom in a Changing America.
Tarana Burke has been organizing within issues facing Black women and girls for over three decades. Her many accolades include the 2019 Sydney Peace Prize and the Gleitsman Citizen Activist Award from Harvard’s Center for Public Leadership. She’s the author of Unbound: My Story of Liberation and the Birth of the Me Too Movement.
Find the full show “Ai-jen Poo and Tarana Burke — The Future of Hope 5” at onbeing.org.
What might have been? A poet recalls flirtations and electric connections that could have led to a different life.
We’re pleased to offer Selina Nwulu’s poem, and invite you to connect with Poetry Unbound throughout this season.
If you had to make a self portrait of your daily morning routine through language and sensation, what would you include? John Lee Clark offers memories of a birthday through experiences the body holds.
We’re pleased to offer John Lee Clark’s poem, and invite you to connect with Poetry Unbound throughout this season.
A memory from childhood is viewed through the lens of the Malaysian poetic form of pantoum. New things emerge when lines break and reform with new associations.
We’re pleased to offer Kay Ulanday Barrett’s poem, and invite you to connect with Poetry Unbound throughout this season.
“Being able to hold everything, the dark and the light, and having a mind and a heart big enough and spacious enough … that’s really our task. To somehow be able to hold it all in a way that will allow us to not only survive, but stay connected and help others as well.”
| Question to Live
What’s the “weather pattern” inside me right now? How does it change over the course of the day? |
| Integration Step
Open your journal for this course by laying out all that’s happened to you in this time, all you’re carrying still. Add to it across the week. Take this in. Honor it. |
| Heart of the Matter
The invitation here is not to deny the enormity of what we’re struggling with in large ways and small. Some things hurt so much that we can’t see beyond them. That is real and true, and that needs grieving and mourning and lamentation and time. The invitation here is to see and name and honor what you’ve been living through, what you are living through still, and to use some simple practices and techniques to come into a different relationship with what is. It’s a strange and mysterious spiritual truth that, when we take in what is hard, take in the reality in all its complexity, it actually helps us be more present to that hardness — be more present to ourselves, generously and gently. It helps us make that move that Sharon talked about: holding the dark and the light of life together, at once. Bringing them into some kind of relationship with each other. This is a move not just toward becoming mindful, but becoming whole — with all the complexity of ourselves — as we meet a world that longs for wholeness even as it shows pain and fear through fracture. |
“Our body is this incredibly rich, textured source of data for us. We can intentionally be in postures in ways that the nervous system senses safety.”
| Question to Live
What shifts when I’m able to use my senses to intercept safety and pleasantness? |
| Integration Step
In the course of this week, try out the different short exercises and strategies Dr. Runyan leads us through. Experience what works for you, and what that makes possible. Journal about it. |
| Heart of the Matter
It’s so helpful to remember that our bodies are doing their best to take care of us and that there’s brilliance in them, there’s intelligence in that, even if it’s out of control. The invitation on the flipside of that knowledge is taking in that we have more power than we realize to actively reorient that intelligence and tap into those same powers. Through the senses, the body, we can incline the mind. We can look at our political life, at our societal fracture, and also see that as a manifestation of what’s happened in our nervous systems all around. This new way of seeing engenders compassion in every direction. |
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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.
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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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