Share Author Rachel Stafford wants you to find your joy again. To be human is to live with instability, uncertainty, and a sense of personal overload, but Stafford says joy is still possible. In fact, more than simply possible. “You are not alone in how you feel,” she writes, and “You are not alone in what you seek.” The path to joy is finding the “reset button.” Stafford is a New York Times bestselling author of previous books, certified special education teacher, and popular blogger and spiritual influencer on social media. She makes the jour...

Share “Dear Soul Shift Companion, the beauty of this journey is recognizing that we have a choice each day. We can work against ourselves or for ourselves; we can push through life or ease through life. “I know it’s not easy to make the loving choice. We’ve been conditioned to produce, compete, compare, and consume every minute of every day. We have damaging messages ingrained in our body and embedded in our psyche. But identifying self-limiting dialogue is a catalyst for overcoming it, and we can begin with three powerful words: only love toda...

Share Each year on May 4 students, activists, and survivors gather at Kent State University in Ohio to mark the anniversary of the day in 1970 when members of the Ohio National Guard shot and killed four students who were peacefully demonstrating against the Vietnam War. Nine students, including one who suffered permanent paralysis, were wounded. The deaths at Kent State did not take place in a vacuum. Fear, mistrust, and hatred over the war in Vietnam had been heating up the atmosphere for some time before that fateful Monday when violence eru...

Share Within a family, an object can take on special significance, uniting generations and preserving heritage. Take, for instance, the bowl passed down from parent to child in Caren Stelson's true story, A Bowl Full of Peace, a reminder of what remains intact even after an atomic bomb blast. In Dezh Azaad's book, the titular carpet gives a refugee Afghan family a piece of home that accompanies them wherever they go. Throughout the day, the carpet gives them a place to sit, to prepare and share food, to play, to listen to stories, and more. Nan...

Share “Maybe the most important thing I can share with my own kids and the kids I teach — my nonexpert/expert’s advice — is to hold onto your beginner’s mind. Approach each moment as if it is brand-new and stay open to that newness. You have the tools within you to breathe, to be present, to make choices, and to be kind to yourself. You can practice using these tools, knowing that you will inevitably mess it up and will have to start again, try again. Instead of seeking perfection, looking for an outcome, going through the motions because you t...

Delicious is the term used to describe the type of food I hope to eat, but also the way in which I move. Come to a yoga class with me and you will hear me say, “Move in a way that feels delicious.” Delicious means enjoyable, delightful, and pleasant—and we can bring that perspective into the kitchen as we cook.  1. Turn on some music. I love to start the process of cooking by setting the mood. Something upbeat gets my body moving into action.  2. Feel your body moving. There are many movements required in the cooking process. Pay attention to t...

Believe it or not, we are checking our phones an average 344 times every day. This might seem almost unfathomable until you bring mindful attention to how often you’re eyeballing your email, Twitter, TikTok, finances—the list goes on and on. One moment we’re scrolling our Instagram feed, then the next we’re buying something online. Before you know it, you’ve distracted yourself from your life’s purpose hundreds of times during the day (and perhaps even spent a lot of money). Moreover, that frequency of distraction can’t be good for cultivating ...

Share "Every happening, great and small, is a parable whereby God speaks to us, and the art of life is to get the message."— Malcolm Muggeridge A postcard of the above quote is available to view as a JPG. Imagine what it would be like to be illiterate, unable to read a sign on the highway, a menu at a restaurant, a warning label on a bottle, or a story to a child. Every day you would have to engage in tricks and evasions just to get through all the ordinary activities that require reading skills. You would know that words — whether in a book or...

The clock, the calendar, the days of the week—it’s easy to forget that these are all human inventions. It’s also very hard to imagine a world without them, which is clearly why they were invented and why they’ve served the world so well. It certainly makes it easier to make an appointment to meet up for coffee in two weeks. In many lines of work, we’re facing an epidemic of burnout, so perhaps it is an opportune time to consider how we view time—both our own time and how time works in general. It’s a topic that’s been on people’s minds. When th...

You’ve likely come across the term “conscious consumerism.” It’s the idea that consumers deliberately make purchase decisions that they believe have a positive impact. They shop with sustainability in mind. Similarly, “conscious employeeism,” while not a technical term, is very much alive in today’s organizations. People are coming to work with sustainability in mind, for their mind. While thinking about the positive impact of their employment, they are centering considerations of their own well-being and the well-being of their colleagues. Wha...

The pandemic’s wake shed a glaring spotlight on the need to rethink the way we work. Burned out and exhausted workers left their jobs in droves, creating work shortages across industries, and forcing employers to reevaluate what they offer employees. But benefits alone will not solve this crisis. Organizational culture must change, and that is driven by leadership. This shift requires more than advocating people-first concepts or work-life balance. As a leader this looks like channeling people toward a common goal, suspending self-interest, and...

By Ayah Rathore The concept of life and death has always been an interesting one. A cold, dead mystery surrounds it, one that we’re never sure will ever be solved. In my faith, uncertainty is certain. What comes after death has always been a strangely normalized but still intimate and unanswerable question. Yet, also a question that continues to receive new answers continually. Because, after all, no matter how much we love to avoid the bitter, stinging truth, we all will die, and the fear of not knowing what will happen with us afterward is on...

Share This book takes both a psychological and spiritual approach to the subject of awe, or wonder, defined as that which “heightens our awareness of being part of a community, of feeling embraced and supported by others. Feeling awe, we place the stresses of life within larger contexts.” Author Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, makes it clear that awe is something sorely missing from most of our lives today. Levels of stress are, by all accounts, at historic levels. Keltner takes a scientific ...

Share “The natural world is to be revered. And indeed, awe promotes the reverential treatment of nature. In one study, after brief experiences of awe, people in China reported being more committed to using less, recycling more, buying fewer things, and eating less meat. “Wild awe awakens us to this ancient way of relating to the natural environment. And in this awakening, we find solutions to the inflaming crises of the times, from overstressed children to overheated rhetoric to our burning of fossil fuels. Wild awe returns us to a big idea: th...

Most of us grow up being taught that the body is a flesh-and-blood organism made up of parts and systems. It is something that is described and researched, an object to be known. Rarely do we think of the body as something that knows things. Rarely do we ask the body for answers. Does the body have answers? Does it have a subjectivity—a way of perceiving and knowing—from which to speak? In many ways, across human history, the mind and body have stayed in their separate domains. Historically, in the disciplines of philosophy, cognitive science, ...

Share Since he was a boy riding in the family Ford station wagon from Detroit to points all over America with his parents and brother and sister, Phil Cousineau has been fascinated with travel. He has taken cross-country motorcycle trips, driven the length of Route 66, sailed on the Mediterranean, taken trains from the Arctic to Cape Horn, dragged movie cameras down the Amazon River on a film shoot, and led groups around Ireland, France, and Greece on mythic journeys. Along the way Cousineau read accounts of the greatest travelers in history, a...

Share "Our health is a voyage and every illness is an adventure story," Margiad Evans has noted. Anyone who has experienced a passing or chronic breakdown of the body knows what she means. During illness, we are forced to deal with pain, vulnerability, loss of control, and dependency on others. Illness is a crucible that tests our faith, our patience, and our ideas about the flesh and the mind. It is a conduit for valuable feedback from our body and our soul. Disease is a spiritual teacher showing us what is really important to us. It dispenses...

Share With gentle ease and touches of whimsy, this book helps children see-saw back and forth between solitude and friendship. That's a valuable skill for anyone any time, at any age, but more so than usual as we make our way haltingly back from the extra alone time dished out to us by the pandemic. One by one, the book unfolds scenarios in which it's nice to be alone. For each it asks: What happens then if a friend shows up? The emphasis, alone and with company, is on pure enjoyment. Reading alone can be nice, when "the only sound in the world...

Share This is a book of prayer and a work of fire and light. Teilhard de Chardin, French scientist and theologian, Jesuit, priest, and passionate Darwinian, was way ahead of his time. These are his words set sometimes as poetry, sometimes as “hymns,” and often simply in the prose in which they were always written, for the purpose of praying with them. The prayers are designed for use at dawn, day, dusk, and dark (four repeating segments) for each day from a Sunday through a Saturday. Use the book for a week, and then do it again, and again. Eac...

Share Let us awaken to the light: the world is full of God! For if it were empty, the world would long ago have died of disgust. I bless you, matter, and you I acclaim as you reveal yourself to me today, in your totality and your true nature. There is a communion with God,and a communion with earth,and a communion with God through earth. Blazing Spirit,Fire, personal, super-substantial,the consummation of a unionimmeasurably more lovely and more desirablethan that destructive fusion of which all the pantheists dream.Be pleased yet once againto ...