Photographer and author Bill Hayes’ most recent book, Insomniac City, is a memoir about his partnership with the belated Oliver Sacks and set in his beloved New York City. Like Sacks—who is one of the greatest contributors to our understanding of the brain and neurodiversity—Hayes is a keen observer and documenter of his fellow human beings. When Sacks and Hayes…
When the truth of what had happened on Election Day 2016 sank in, our meditation community—like many churches, temples, and centers of worship and healing—organized spaces and gatherings to help people open to and share what they were feeling and be supported in community. We began with a guided meditation. Participants were invited to step out of the mental narratives…
The poems here—roughly “scenes” in which two elderly women read the news, a young woman considers the wonderfully temporary nature of her body, and an elephant meditates on the trauma of bearing witness—reflect my longstanding fascination with voice. Although I’ve been performing poems for twenty years, I’d never studied voice directly until I attended the Garrison Institute’s “Voice on the…
Most of the time when we talk about resilience, we talk about bouncing back from acute traumatic events, like medical emergencies or natural disasters. We don’t always acknowledge the resilience necessary to respond to chronic adversities and structural inequities that lead to historical trauma through multiple generations. Psychiatrist and public health advocate Denese Shervington—who directs a community-based post-disaster mental health recovery division that she created…
Have you ever woken up in the middle of the night and eaten precisely four spoonfuls of yogurt? I have. In fact, I used to do so every night in a misguided, but desperate, attempt to deal with my insomnia. Eventually, my psychiatrist told me this obsessive-compulsive ritual was not helping me, and so I made it my goal to…
In order to carry a positive action we must develop a positive vision. —The Dalai Lama Last month the Carter Center held a conference on Climate and Health. This follows the remarkable report of The Rockefeller Foundation–Lancet Commission on planetary health, released in 2015, which concluded that while there have been overall improvements in human health, they have come at…
We do not live in an enlightened world—have you noticed? Sometimes just when we seem to be progressing forward, and we find ourselves falling further behind than ever. Our current world and larger culture seem to becoming more, rather than less, oppressive—despite the gains in equity and rights that our communities have so arduously achieved. With racism, homophobia, misogyny, and…
Given the current state of the world, many of us feel an inner tug to do something to help others in our own individual way. Maybe we want to be social workers. Maybe we have toyed with running for office. Maybe we just know we have some gift to give but are not sure what it is yet. Perhaps we…