I recently attended Zen Brain: Consciousness, Complex Systems, and Transformation, an intensive three-day retreat with a panel of brilliant experts that included scientists, philosophers, and Buddhist thinkers. The conference was held at Upaya Zen Center, nestled in a quiet valley surrounded by mountains in the heart of Santa Fe. Upaya, founded on a vision of Buddhism, is based on the…
You hear it on talk shows. It’s mentioned in every romantic comedy at least a trillion times. And it’s something we men have been told we have a problem with since the dawn of time. It’s intimacy, of course. I recently attended a class on “developing deeper intimacy in our relationships,” a proposition that both intrigued me and, as it…
Do you know how some people walk into a room and bring it to life? That’s Agapi Stassinopoulos. Her first name means “unconditional love” in Greek, and that’s what she so brilliantly shares. I met Agapi last summer. She’s an inspirational speaker, teacher, actress, and author. Last week, in a talk she gave at the META Center in New York City,…
On January 15, 1929, in the bedroom his parents shared in his grandparents’ house on Auburn Avenue in Atlanta, Michael Luther King Jr. was born. No, Michael is not a typo. It wasn’t until 1934, upon his return from a globe-spanning journey that had taken him from Paris and Rome to Cairo, Jerusalem, and Berlin, where he was a delegate…
Nelson Mandela enjoyed such a long twilight that it’s easy to forget what a threatening figure he once cut—not just in South Africa but in the United States, where he was routinely condemned as a Communist terrorist. In 1985 William F. Buckley wrote: “where Mandela belongs…is precisely where he is: in jail.” Mandela made no bones about being a revolutionary;…
Creativity is more complex than the maps we fashion to understand it. “There being no known method from the known to the unknown,” as the narrator of James Joyce’s über-imaginative Ulysses said, ascertaining what facilitates creativity might seem like a fool’s quest. Psychoanalyst Marion Milner’s On Not Being Able to Paint, a neglected classic in the literature on the creative…
An editor once remarked after reviewing the third revision of an essay I was trying to perfect, “You’ve rewritten this so many times it’s turned brown.” Her analogy to children who color and recolor the pictures in a coloring book was spot-on. I had tweaked the essay too much. Instead of a simple message that floated off the page, it…
Second Acts is a series of interviews with interesting people who discovered new pathways midway through their lives. On January 15, 2009, just moments after takeoff, US Airways flight 1549 collided with a flock of geese, which shut down the engines and resulted in the famed “Miracle on the Hudson.” Captain Sullenberger crash-landed the plane in the icy Hudson River with time…
My friend Mark is on a quest for personal greatness. “I know I can be a more empowered person—I just don’t know how to do it!” He sighs, then rushes off to the bookstore for the perfect book to transform him from who he is today to the awesome person he envisions for tomorrow. In the six years I’ve known…
