I know what loneliness feels like. Many people use the title His Holiness to refer to me, but I sometimes joke that His Loneliness would be more accurate. In my own case, although I do not connect to people online, I do have lots of people surrounding me all day long, supporting me in different ways, as well as other…
As a literate society, the idea that reading fiction makes us better people is ingrained in us. However, even if reading fiction makes us more empathetic people, the relationship between empathy and action has been the subject of debate in the academic community.
Hear from young people around the world—India, China, New Zealand, and the United States—on how they’re feeling about climate change, and what they think we can do to better care for each other and our fragile planet.
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…