Climate change is not a problem that can be ‘fixed;’ it’s more like a long-term health issue that must be managed. And it’s anything but a monolith, affecting diverse communities in diverse ways. Shifting to a zero carbon society is necessary but not sufficient. Many different forms of civic engagement, mitigating and adapting are needed to create a less energy-intensive,…
In his keynote presentation to our Climate, Buildings and Behavior symposium in October, leading organizational thinker Peter Senge offers a distillation of his insights into the most important factors in achieving meaningful change for the environment or in any sphere of life. They include positive aspirations instead of negative admonitions (“the power of aspiration is much greater than the power…
Small group discussions at the CTL symposium. Photo by Deborah Donahue-Keegan. Nearly one hundred teacher educators and teacher leaders from across the US and Canada, and from as far away as Israel and Colombia, participated the Garrison Institute’s Contemplative Teaching and Learning (CTL) Initiative’s annual symposium. Held in late November with generous support from the 1440 Foundation and…
Typhoon Haiyan damage, Tacloban, Philippines. Photo by Eoghan Rice – Trócaire / Caritas. Images from disaster zones, like these pictures showing the devastation Typhoon Haiyan left in its wake, convey an inkling of how overwhelming and traumatic daily life inside the disaster zone can be. Aid workers on the ground share the stresses of these environments, which raise…
We’ve announced the date and set the agenda for a much-anticipated second installment of our semi-annual Buddhist Contemplative Care (BCC) Symposium, to be held at the Institute November 6-9, 2014. A joint project of the New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care (NYZCCC) and the Garrison Institute’s Initiative on Transforming Trauma, the BCC Symposium showcases contemplative-based approaches to end-of-life and…
Soren Gordhamer Wisdom 2.0 is a conference and events series, a book, a social media conversation and a movement for purposeful engagement in business and life, addressing what its organizers call “the great challenge of our age: to not only live connected to one another through technology, but to do so in ways that are beneficial to our…
Meditating in the Garrison Institute Annex Tania Singer, a director at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, is a founder of the field of social neuroscience, a branch of neurosciences which seeks to understand how biological systems relate to social processes and behavior. Enormously influential in that field, she’s also a…
Our new Contemplative Teaching and Learning blog series, “Coming to Care: Collecting Stories for Teachers by Teachers” has attracted inspiring posts from K-12 teachers, university professors, teacher educators and others about their discoveries as they foundand applied contemplative approaches to education. Washington and Lee University political philosophy professor Eduardo Velasquez describes how as a student he became fascinated with…