"For brief periods, when life breaks our way, it can feel as if we are finally getting somewhere. We may feel that we are finally becoming someone who understands this crazy life. With this self-image securely in place, we may decide that we are good and life is good and that we can share this with others. But things change. A voice or relationship or job or health is lost." One morning in 2018, writer and meditation teacher Tracy Cochran woke up with little audible voice and just a faint,...

Victor Koo is a familiar face in China's tech industry. In the 90s, he was president of Sohu, China's second-largest search engine. Subsequently, he founded YouKu, China's largest online video platform with 500 million monthly users (commonly called the "YouTube of China" and later sold to Alibaba). Surprisingly, his journey of scaling began to turn inwards at a tech conference in Sun Valley in 2016, when a networking conversation with a young entrepreneur soon turned towards meditation. Upon...

I believe humanity is undergoing a profound transformation in consciousness. What the world needs most is for each of us to shine our light, love and genius into the realms we inhabit...and to share stories, examples, discovery and practices that will support humanity in taking its next evolutionary step. -- Stacey Lawson Sitting in a corporate board meeting and planning quarterly targets nearly 20 years ago, Stacey Lawson recalls a strange vision: "We were talking about the next quarter of...

Traversing through time and space, and through humanness to the beyond, listening is a powerful and underrated practice. So says author, educator, and cultural activist Christian McEwen. She prefers to use the word "listening" not simply for the work of our ears, but as an extended metaphor for openness and receptivity - less actual than symbolic, less physical than metaphysical - rippling out from the self-centered human to the farthest reaches of the non-human world. In her latest work, In...

After an inspiring Awakin Call with Madhu Anziani last month, Reinaldo, Madhu and a few more heartful artists are coming back for a unique experiment -- A musical immersion into the three worlds of shamanic journey, through singing, chanting and drumming.  About Three Worlds: As per Inca mythology, we inhabit three worlds simultaneously, and many other spiritual practices discuss the “middle path” in a similar way.  These worlds are said to exist within us and all around us: Ukhupacha: the...

"As a Westerner, my heart was lifted in the 1980s when I heard about Sarvodaya. It answered my longing for a way to transform our very individualistic and materialistic culture. Thus began my own 40-year journey to translate Dr. Ari's principles into American cities." - Richard Flyer A disciple of the late, recently deceased Dr. A.T. Ariyaratne, who was informally revered as the Gandhi of Sri Lanka, Richard Flyer has dedicated his life to integrating embodied spirituality and the building of...

**Please note special time for this call.  Lucy Grace never intended to embark upon a formal spiritual path. Yet again and again, she felt called deeper into it. Raised by a young, single mother in an impoverished neighborhood in New Zealand, Lucy experienced significant trauma throughout childhood. Her neighborhood was riddled with gang violence and burglaries. Her mother worked at a secondhand shop, and meager earnings meant they sometimes went without food, heat, furniture, or schoolbooks...

**Please note this call is on Friday, rather than our usual Saturdays. "Losing all of the basic functions of being a human being was the greatest teacher," says musician and composer Madhu Anziani. "It was an opportunity to go fully into the teachings I had received around energy, sound, and vibration." In a baseball cap, hoodie, and jeans, Madhu stands behind a table, singing, swaying, and commanding a loop station, easy and natural as can be. There are no visible signs of his serious...

**Please note special time for this call. "Each of us lives in many different worlds. There's the world of work, the world of our family, and our inner worlds. These worlds inside are the ones we're most responsible for, because no one else can take care of them." - Ajaan Geoff Thanissaro Bhikku, an American Buddhist monk of the Kammatthana (Thai Forest) tradition and more commonly known as Ajaan Geoff, embarked on a path outside his mainstream American upbringing soon after graduating from...

**Please note special time for this call.As Parag Agarwal started moving up in his 35-year global career with Fortune 500 corporations, he began to notice a lot of suffering around him.  “I used to sit in a car with my son next to me playing with a toy while there were kids outside who were begging. Pretty early on, I decided I wanted to do something for the vulnerable.”  His heart’s journey started with helping educate underprivileged children. But when his niece sent him videos showing how...

Mary Ann Brussat learned as a young teenager how to see the sacred in the everyday, and in every culture and context. When her South Dakota-based family moved to Karachi, Pakistan, in the early 1960s so her father, a physician, could work with a USAID-affiliated project for Pakistani doctors, Mary Ann became foundationally trained to be open to and aware of the beauty in the ordinary. She met local Pakistanis through the interdenominational church her family attended, the bazaars, villages,...

Life's one non-negotiable is to be loved and to see our love make a difference. - Matthew T. Lee "Are we becoming more fully alive through Education?" After a decade of conventionally successful research and university teaching as a sociologist, Matthew T. Lee, Ph.D., found himself meditating upon this existential question. It triggered a shift in how he showed up in class, and what emerged at Akron University from collaborations with colleagues were Unclasses. He began to meet the students...

**Please note special day for this call to accomodate for our guest Moshe's weekly Shabbat practice. "When you're open to meaningful coincidences, opportunities will present themselves to you all the time." Rabbi Moshe Gersht Rabbi Moshe Gersht found himself at a pivotal decision point early in his life. At 18, he chose to leave school in response to a forced choice between pursuing his passion for music or graduating instead. It was at this crossroad and subsequent ones that he learned there...

"Why is it that certain people are vulnerable to life's slings and arrows and why are other people more resilient?" Dr. Richard Davidson, Ph.D, felt guided by this question, and dedicated himself to developing insight into how our brains regulate our emotions. But in 1992, Richard was inspired by the Dalai Lama to revise his initial question and instead consider: What qualities foster well-being? "His Holiness challenged me and asked why we are not using the tools of modern neuroscience to...

**Please note special day and time for this call. "Creation is moving toward us; life is moving toward us all the time. We back away, but it keeps pushing toward us. Why not step forward and greet it?" -Rev. Roshi Joan Halifax In a catastrophe-turned-blessing, Roshi Joan Halifax discovered her rich inner world at four years of age when she contracted a virus that left her legally blind for two years. Today, as a Zen Buddhist teacher, anthropologist, ecologist, social justice activist, and...

Margaret Jacobs grew up in the American West but, like many others, never considered the history of the place she grew up in as particularly interesting or worthy of study. "There was, and still is, so much mythology around" the West, she said. "I had not been interested in this kind of 'boots and spurs' or 'wagon wheels and sunbonnets' type of history." But a pivotal history course in college changed her trajectory. She realized there was much important work being done in the field, and she...

"Make the world your Temple." In 2019, Sarah Tulivu had been given this clear instruction by two Taoist masters, including her direct teacher, Master Waysun Liao. At the time, Sarah, ordained as Fong Yi, was living and training full-time as a monk in a Taoist temple in Lago Atitlan, Guatemala. For six years, she had practiced meditation and the embodied consciousness practice of taiji (tai chi) in the lineage of Taiji Tao for six to seven hours a day. In the two years prior to her monastic...

The thread binding together Shaylyn Romney Garrett's perhaps unorthodox career path - spanning diverse fields of research, writing, activism and social entrepreneurship - is community. "I've studied it, experimented with it, been fascinated by it, and been frightened by it," she says, adding poignantly, "I often feel that community is something I have thought more about than almost anyone but have less of than almost everyone." After a profound 3-year personal healing journey, Shaylyn...

Cornelius Pieztner, currently a high-impact financial professional, spent the first 45 years of his life at Camphill - a network of intentional communities co-founded by his father Carlos Pietzner. The communities were designed for children and youth with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Through his interactions and work with teenagers with pronounced developmental disabilities, Cornelius realized that his primary work was not to fix the "other", but to work on himself to...

"Disability is not the characteristic that defines you; it's the characteristic that others project onto you, and it's up to us to change those perceptions." - Haben Girma   As the first deafblind graduate from Harvard Law School, Haben Girma aims to help eradicate what she calls "ableism" in society, the assumption that disabled people are inferior. "We are not inferior. But society often sends this message," she says. Now a distinguished human rights lawyer advocating for disability...

"For a child who has been struggling to read, discovering how to crack the code of reading is like learning to do a magic spell that suddenly opens the whole world to you. You are getting a passport to an entirely different future in which you can trust your ability to shape your life, and change your world." -- Rayna Dineen A passionate educator, social innovator, and children's literacy advocate, Rayna Dineen has infused her humanitarian and professional passion for lifting up young...

When Dr. Akil Palanisamy recounts his recovery from a debilitating illness during medical school, he says it began with two words: "bone broth." In hindsight, this may not sound so surprising, because Akil (or "Dr. Akil," as his patients know him) has been a doctor, author, and educator at the forefront of the food-as-medicine movement for the past 20 years. Dr. Akil has been described by leading integrative doctor Mark Hyman as "a unique triple threat in the field," combining expertise in...

No individual can truly thrive without looking inward. The same is true for societies. - Thomas LegrandAuthor and sustainable development leader Dr. Thomas LeGrand invites us to co-create a new development paradigm focused on "being" and human flourishing instead of a materialistic "having." Through his work as a social scientist, spiritual search, and 20 years of professional experience in microfinance and sustainability for the UN and other public and private sector entities, Thomas has...

Danny Almagor and Berry Liberman are pioneers of impact investing in Australia. In 2007, the married couple founded "Small Giants", a rare 100% impact family office that invests in businesses driving positive impact for people and planet. Sounds like a dream job? But this wasn't the dream they started with. As a child, Danny wanted to be an astronaut. He enrolled in aerospace engineering as an imagined pathway to be Captain Jean Luc Picard of the next Starship Enterprise. But witnessing a...