“To speak a language is to take on a world, a culture.” -Frantz Fanon Last month I wrote about how the modern West has lost its connection to the land and to nature. The challenge is to find ways to reestablish this critical relationship that we once had but lost with the rise of materialism, science, and industry. This disconnection is…
In the wake of last night’s election results, many of us are experiencing feelings of confusion, sadness, doubt, anger, and fear. Whatever we’re feeling, though, it’s important to allow ourselves to fully experience our emotions. As meditation teacher and author Ethan Nichtern says, “The point of meditation is not to suppress your feelings. It is to make friends with yourself.”…
When individuals try to maximize their own benefits, systems collapse. When individuals are committed to optimizing their communities, they thrive. This requires a world view that understands that all of life is part of an interdependent system, and only when we infuse that system with compassion for all life will it progress through the current global trends. At a recent…
Jay Michaelson led a retreat at the Garrison Institute entitled “Jhana Meditation,” on November 12 – 17, 2016. The diversity of our emotional lives—especially difficult emotions like sadness, concern, and even anger—is both the context and the content of liberation. On the one hand, life as it is, not as we might wish it to be, is the place where we…
In the video above, filmed during her recent Garrison Institute retreat, Joanna Macy discusses the poetry and spirituality of Rainer Maria Rilke. She talks about how the young poet found the sacred in ordinary life, how he had an incredible sense of what the 20th century had in store, and how he tells readers to “let everything happen to you, both the…
Welcome to episode eight of the Climate, Mind and Behavior Podcast. Each episode, we’ll explore groundbreaking intersections between climate change, resilience, contemplative practice and human behavior. Pauly Denetclaw is a Native American journalist born and raised in Manuelito, New Mexico. Interested in writing from a young age, she began her first book at eight years old. Today she is studying mass…
Poets Robert Polito and Gregory Pardlo co-led a retreat at the Garrison Institute entitled “Imagining Your Voice on the Page” on December 16 – 18, 2016. The essay below was originally delivered by Polito during the panel Genre-Crossing and Poetic Truth: Lyric Nonfictions, Reported Poems at AWP 2016 in Los Angeles. This is a short talk with a long list inside it,…
At a recent Wisdom Talk that the Garrison Institute co-presented with 92nd Street Y, On Being‘s Krista Tippett spoke with Garrison Institute Board Member Andrew Zolli about her new book Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living. (Read an excerpt of Becoming Wise.) Some of the key questions they discuss: What are the raw materials of…