Perhaps in the West, if we think of initiation at all, we are prone to amplify the personal journey of the initiate. Rites of passage, like going off to college, getting married, even taking vows in a religious community, are read mainly as threads in the narrative arc of an individual.

Thich Nhat Hahn’s beautifully simple articulation of inter-being, the recognition that while things have form, they are also possessed of emptiness, meaning no thing exists alone but arises and falls in its form with all things.

What makes the Celtic tradition unique, according to Newell, is that “compared to most other Western traditions…it cannot be reduced to a set of doctrines or beliefs; instead, at its core is the conviction that we essential need to keep listening to what our soul already knows, either in the particular circumstances of our lives or in matters more universal”

As climate crisis, social fragmentation, and a global pandemic continue to evolve, we are faced with an increasingly urgent questions: how are we to live?

Perhaps most of all, Yellow Bird is a story about story. What are the narratives that shape and define our experiences, both individual and collective? How do we shape those narratives, for ourselves and for others? Who gets to tell them and what is lost or found in the telling?

Hamnet: A Novel of the Plague (Knopf, 2020), the latest work from Glasgow based writer Maggie O’Farrell is a fictional account of William Shakespeare’s family life, inspired by the early death of his only son.

On an increasingly imperiled planet, in a world where human technologies manufacture ever more disembodied realities for us, the question of how we are to live becomes more urgent.

Ann Boyer was 41 years old. She was a single mother. She was a poet. A friend. A lover. She was also in possession of a large tumor located in her right breast, triple-negative breast cancer. She was to survive. The Undying is her narrative, not just of survival, but of all the deaths, indignities and irrevocable changes that comprise the experience of having cancer and treating it…

Research of the chemical compounds in LSD in the 1950’s led to the development of the first antidepressants. And acid trips guided by the first pioneers of psychedelic therapy turned on the technocrati to insights and breakthroughs that helped to create the hub of innovation that silicon valley is today.

If we understand Weather with all our senses, in all its permutations, Offill has crafted a story in which the weather is us. This is to say that it’s less a story about how we survive life on a fractured earth and more about the ways that this global fracturing is our own personal fracturing.

I recently interviewed poet Jon Boisvert about his new collection of poems, BORN (Airlie Press). The juxtaposition of fantasy and the rawness of the poet’s grief create an energy that drive forward a narrative both strange and familiar.

We may not always know precisely where we are going, but we know we must take action; a movement must occur. But what is the quality of this movement? This is a critical question that is especially important in our times. Is violence justified? Is nonviolent resistance enough?

Trauma is a near universal fact of life. Both popular and clinical literature on trauma are growing as we become more aware as a culture about how traumatic experiences impact us through the lifespan.

Yogis, mystics and natural healers have long known that mind and body cannot be separated and treated as two separate entities. Advances in neuroscience and related fields are bringing new evidence and frameworks to our understanding of the mind-body connection.

letting sound expand our awareness, both in the practical sense of revealing actions and beings that are not visible from where we are, and in the more ineffable way that attention to sound can seem to make us more present in a place

The practice of yoga is expressed in the effort to realize intention. Just touching your toes in a forward bend is not the point. The incremental surrender to the pain or tightness in your hips as you reach to get to the toes is where practice lives and breathes.

The impulse to “move on” is not without wisdom, as it has at points in our collective history been a matter of survival. And yet, the haste with which we transform a loss into a gain, a death into new life, can leave us with a deeper loss, a sense that we have missed the point of our own life. Loss is everywhere.

When was the last time you looked at your partner—really let your gaze linger and take them in? What is it to really see your partner, to hold them in your gaze and attention. Try it. Let your gaze linger just a little longer and notice what happens.

The last few decades of neuroscience have revealed much about the inner workings of the brain, and raised tantalizing questions about the nature of mind. Yet, long before the evolution of science, there was art.

Movies like Love Story, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, and the more recent Her, all present relationships that develop, grow and change forms within a complex web of culture, family and personality.