Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and the Art of Living

we basically come from a post-alcoholic culture. People whose origins are in Northern Europe had only one way of treating distress: with a bottle of alcohol.

what makes you resilient to trauma is to own yourself fully. So if somebody says hurtful or insulting things, you can say, “interesting, that person is saying hurtful and insulting things.” But you can separate your sense of yourself from them. We are really beginning to seriously understand how human beings can learn how to do that, to observe and

The balance of our world frequently is seen as a question of power. If I have more power and more knowledge, more capacity, then I can do more. And when we have power, we can very quickly push people down. I’m the one that knows and you don’t know, and I’m strong and I’m powerful, I have the knowledge. This is the history of humanity. And it is in

Way back already in 1872, Charles Darwin wrote a book about emotions in which he talks about how emotions are expressed in things like heartbreak and gut-wrenching experience. So you feel things in your body. And then it became obvious that, if people are in a constant state of heartbreak and gut-wrench, they do everything to shut down those feelin

There are very strong words of Martin Luther King. His question was always, how is it that one group—the white group—can despise another group, which is the black group. And will it always be like this? Will we always be having an elite condemning or pushing down others that they consider not worthy? And he says something I find extremely beautiful

I have more questions than answers. But good questions, generously posed, seriously held, are powerful things.

You can’t dominate people without separating them from each other and from themselves. The more people get plugged back into their bodies, into each other, the more impossible it will be for us to be dominated and occupied. I think that’s really the work right now, and I don’t mean that in a narcissistic way. I mean, how in our daily lives are we c

The notion that you can do things to change the harmony inside yourself is just not something that we teach in schools and in our culture, in our churches, in our religious practices. But if you look at religions around the world, they always start with dancing, moving, singing, physical experiences.

The nuclear family is a recent invention and a death blow to love—an unprecedented demand on a couple to be everything to each other, the family a tiny echo chamber: history one layer deep. None of the great virtues—even this—is meant to be carried in isolation.