Exploring Nature, Culture and Inner Life

Join us for this webinar from The Learning Community series at The New School at Commonweal, this time with Host Michael Lerner and Rachel Naomi Remen, MD. Rachel is a long-time part of the Commonweal family and co-founder of the Commonweal Cancer Help Program—as well as a master story teller and author of best selling books Kitchen Table Wisdom and My Grandfather’s Blessings. During the webinar, Rachel read a quote from Vaclav Havel, from Disturbing the Peace (pp. 181-182). https://www.vhlf.org/havel-quotes/disturbing-the-peace/ Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D., is a Professor of Family Medicine at Wright State Boonshoft School of Medicine and the Founder and Founding Director of the Remen Institute for the Study of Health and Illness (RISHI), which was at Commonweal for decades and is currently at Wright State University Boonshoft School of Medicine. She is one of the best known of the early pioneers of wholistic and integrative medicine. As a medical educator, therapist, and teacher, she has enabled many thousands of physicians to find individual meaning and purpose in the practice of medicine and thousands of patients to remember their power to heal. More than 30,000 medical students have completed The Healer’s Art, her groundbreaking curriculum for medical students taught at the majority of medical schools in America. A master storyteller and observer of life, her bestselling books, Kitchen Table Wisdom andMy Grandfather’s Blessings have sold more than 2 million copies and have been translated into 21 languages. Dr. Remen has had Crohn’s disease for more than 65 years and her work is a unique blend of the wisdom, strength, and viewpoints of both doctor and patient.

~Co-presented by The New School at Commonweal, the Commonweal Resilience Project, Beyond Conventional Cancer Therapies, and Healing Circles~ Join TNS Host Michael Lerner in a virtual conversation with Janie Brown, nurse, psychologist, and founder of the Callanish Society—a grassroots non-profit organization in Vancouver for people living with, and dying from, cancer. Find out more about The New School at Commonweal on our website: tns.commonweal.org. And like/follow our Soundcloud channel for more great podcasts.

~Recorded from the Awakin Series by Service Space~ Cynthia Li, MD, is a physician, author, and speaker. Currently, she has a private practice in integrative and functional medicine, and serves as faculty for the Healer’s Art program at the University of California San Francisco Medical School. She is author of a new book, Brave New Medicine: A Doctor's Unconventional Path to Healing Her Autoimmune Illness. The transcript for this call can be found at: https://www.awakin.org/calls/464/cynthia-li/transcript Find out more about The New School at Commonweal on our website: tns.commonweal.org. And like/follow our Soundcloud channel for more great podcasts.

~Co-presented by The New School at Commonweal, the Commonweal Resilience Project, Beyond Conventional Cancer Therapies, and Healing Circles~ Resources, links etc. from the webinar can be found here: https://tns.commonweal.org/audio/resources-from-weller-webinar/ Join TNS Host Michael Lerner in a virtual conversation with psychotherapist, writer, and soul activist Francis Weller about living in times of pandemic, finding community during social distancing, and living with grief in the anthropocene. Three panelists join Francis and Michael on the webinar: Diana Kelly, director of Healing Circles Langley; Ladybird Morgan, executive director of the Humane Prison Hospice Project; and Janie Brown, founder of the Callenish Society. This is a recording of a Zoom webinar. Francis Weller, MFT, is a psychotherapist, writer and soul activist. He is a master of synthesizing diverse streams of thought from psychology, anthropology, mythology, alchemy, indigenous cultures and poetic traditions. Author of The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief, and The Threshold Between Loss and Revelation, (with Rashani Réa) he has introduced the healing work of ritual to thousands of people. He founded and directs WisdomBridge, an organization that offers educational programs that seek to integrate the wisdom from indigenous cultures with the insights and knowledge gathered from western poetic, psychological and spiritual traditions. His work was featured in The Sunmagazine (October 2015) and the Utne Reader (Fall 2016). Francis is currently on staff at Commonweal Cancer Help Program, co-leading their week-long retreats with Michael Lerner. He is currently completing his third book, A Trail on the Ground: Living a Soulful Life and Why It Matters. Find out more about The New School at Commonweal on our website: tns.commonweal.org. And like/follow our Soundcloud channel for more great podcasts.

Due to the Coronavirus outbreak, this New School conversation with Richard Heinberg was held as a webinar instead of meeting in person at Commonweal. Richard Heinberg of the Post Carbon Institute is one of the visionary thinkers of our time on community resilience. Join Richard and TNS host Michael Lerner for a searching exploration of building community resilience for the coming turbulent decades. Listen to the recording of our last conversation with Richard Heinberg. https://tns.commonweal.org/podcasts/richard-heinberg/ Richard Heinberg is the author of thirteen books, including some of the seminal works on society’s current energy and environmental sustainability crisis. He is Senior Fellow of the Post Carbon Institute and is regarded as one of the world’s foremost advocates for a shift away from our current reliance on fossil fuels. He has authored scores of essays and articles that have appeared in such journals as Nature, Reuters, Wall Street Journal, The American Prospect, Public Policy Research, Quarterly Review, Yes!, and The Sun; and has appeared in many film and television documentaries, including Leonardo DiCaprio’s 11th Hour. He is also the author and narrator of Post Carbon Institute’s 22-video Think Resilience online course. https://education.resilience.org http://www.postcarbon.org/ Find out more about The New School at Commonweal on our website: tns.commonweal.org. And like/follow our Soundcloud channel for more great podcasts.

Please join TNS Host Steve Heilig for a conversation with physician BJ Miller and writer Shoshana Berger about their new collaboration: A Beginners Guide to the End-–Practical Advice for Living Life and Facing Death. BJ Miller is a hospice and palliative medicine physician and educator and has worked in all settings of care: hospital, clinic, residential facility, and home. His career has been dedicated to moving healthcare towards a human-centered approach and he speaks on this topic both nationally and internationally. He is a Mesa Refuge alum, has been featured in the New York Times, and interviewed by Oprah Winfrey, Tim Ferriss, Krista Tippett, and GQ Magazine. Shoshana Berger Shoshana Berger is the editorial director at IDEO, where she has worked on projects ranging from the end of life to modern Judaism to school lunch. She was a senior editor at WIRED, and has written for the New York Times, Fast Company, TIME, WIRED, Popular Science, Marie Claire, and Quartz. She cofounded the DIY design magazine, ReadyMade, later turning it into a book, Ready Made: How to Make (Almost) Everything. Find out more about The New School at Commonweal on our website: tns.commonweal.org. And like/follow our Soundcloud channel for more great podcasts.

~Co-presented by KWMR radio~ https://kwmr.org Join us for a concert by three-time Grammy nominees Quartet San Francisco, a non-traditional and eclectic string quartet led by violinist Jeremy Cohen. https://www.quartetsanfrancisco.com Quartet San Francisco has toured Italy, China, South Korea, Japan, Turkey, and Guam, performing in Cremona, Foggia, Seoul, Tokyo, Hyogo, Sanda, Istanbul, Hagatna, and throughout central and eastern China. As winners of the Argentine Consulate’s International Tango Competition in New York, they performed tangos for an Argentine audience at the historic Café Tortoni in Buenos Aires. In 2018 they performed the opening concert for the Cremona Music Festival in northern Italy and their CD release, A QSF Journey, reached the #1position in Amazon’s new chamber music releases. U.S. appearances include New York's Le Poisson Rouge, Yoshi's Jazz Clubs in San Francisco and Oakland, the Brubeck Room in the Wilton Library (at the invitation of Dave Brubeck), the Mendocino Music Festival, in concerts with the Marin Symphony, the Peninsula Symphony, and the Tulsa Symphony, and guest appearances with numerous chamber orchestras.

Please join us in an investigation into the life and times of Polish painter Józef Czapski, following further along the path of discussion begun between Eric Karpeles and TNS Host Michael Lerner in the spring of 2019. That talk was prompted by the release of Karpeles’s biography of Czapski, “Almost Nothing,” and his translation of the painter's lectures on Proust given in a Soviet prison camp. The upcoming publication of a lavishly-illustrated monograph of Czapski’s paintings and drawings, “An Apprenticeship of Looking,” is the occasion of this further inquiry in which the question "how does an artist live his life?” will be addressed.

Join TNS Host Michael Lerner in the next of our spiritual biography series conversations, this time with Nipun Mehta. During his mid-20s, Nipun left the .com world to cultivate projects that support a gift culture. Among other accolades, President Obama appointed him on a council for social change and the Dalai Lama recognized him as an “Unsung Hero of Compassion." Nipun is the founder of ServiceSpace.org — an incubator of projects that support a gift culture. In his mid-twenties, Nipun quit his job to become a "full time volunteer" and over the last 15 years, his work has reached millions, attracted more than 500 thousand volunteers, and mushroomed into numerous projects like DailyGood, Awakin Circles, and Karma Kitchen. Tirelessly, he has addressed thousands of gatherings around the world, speaking next to wide-ranging leaders from Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak to author Elizabeth Gilbert to civil rights legend John Lewis. One of his most formative experiences was a walking pilgrimage across India, with his wife of six months, whose profound lessons also became the subject of his widely-read address at UPenn commencement. Nipun's mission statement in life reads: "Bring smiles in the world and stillness in my heart."

Join TNS Host Michael Lerner in a spiritual biography conversation with Jungian analyst John Beebe. John Beebe Born in Washington, DC, in 1939, John Beebe lived in many parts of the United States, as well as two years in China, before his desire to pursue psychiatric education led him to settle in the Bay Area. Since completing his residency at Stanford’s Department of Psychiatry, John has been practicing Jungian psychotherapy in the same San Francisco office since 1971. Guided by such Northern California Jungian pioneers as Thomas Kirsch, Jo and Jane Wheelwright, and Joseph Henderson, John became an analyst member of the C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco in 1978. John gives lectures around the world on various topics, including psychological types, moral integrity, the I Ching, and film. For the past twenty years, he has been part of the training of the first generation of Jungian analysts in China. The many books he has worked on include, under his name as sole author, Integrity in Depth and Energies andPatterns in Psychological Type: The Reservoir of Consciousness.