Name: Debbie Millman: Fail Safe by brainpicker in Brain Pickings
Duration: 8 min 17 s
Description: An inspiring commencement address delivered to the graduating class at San Jose State University. Transcript and discussion: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/05/15/debbie-millman-look-both-ways-fail-safe/

Brain Pickings

Jennifer Kinon & Bobby Martin are designers and educators who co-founded OCD (Original Champions of Design). Together they develop brand identity systems for a broad range of clients that include, among others, the National Basketball Association, Girl Scouts of the USA and Friends of the High Line. Their work has won awards from the Art Directors Club, D&AD, AIGA365, Type Directors Club and Print as well as Best of Show and Judge's Pick in the 2011 Brand New Awards.

Jennifer Kinon recently served as the president of AIGA/NY. Prior to founding OCD, she worked in the New York office of Pentagram with Michael Bierut, served as design director of New York City’s 2012 Olympic Bid and worked as art director for Graphis Inc. She graduated from the University of Michigan and earned an MFA from the School of Visual Arts. Kinon is the first program graduate to join the faculty.

Prior to founding OCD, Bobby Martin developed brand experiences from the inside out while leading internal design teams at Nokia, in London, and Jazz at Lincoln Center. He has also served on the board of directors of AIGA/NY. He teaches identity design at The Cooper Union and recently joined the faculty of his alma mater, the School of Visual Arts, MFA Design Program where he holds a graduate degree. He graduated from Virginia Commonwealth University.

Design Matters with Debbie Millman: Jennifer Kinon & Bobby Martin

Sample tracks from Sharon Salzberg's, "Real Happiness at Work"

Drinking Tea Meditation

In this teaching, ordained Taoist, spiritual coach and traditional Chinese medicine practitioner, David James Lees offers a powerful mindfulness meditation for the New Year.

David guides you through the 5 key steps that will allow you to authentically review and 'take the blessing' from any spiritual lessons encountered in the past 12 months. 

You will be guided to connect to your ‘Yin‘ spirit centre of authentic inner wisdom and insight, and the harmonious ‘Wu Wei’ balance of your Yin and Yang energy – this is the Way of the Tao.

NB. Do not listen to the track whilst driving or operating machinery.

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Meditation for a Spiritually Positive New Year - David James Lees

"When words bring you closer to the prisoner in his cell, to the patient who is dying on his bed alone, to the starving child, then it's a prayer."

Elie Wiesel, the beloved writer known for his memoir of the Holocaust, "Night," speaks of the power of prayer and forgiveness in the wake of profound suffering. Find more at onbeing.org/becoming-wise.

Evil, Forgiveness, and Prayer | Elie Wiesel [Becoming Wise]

Speaking of Faith from American Public Media

Opening to Our Lives - Jon Kabat-Zinn's Science of Mindfulness (April 16, 2009)

Poem text and context: https://www.brainpickings.org/2017/05/02/rosanne-cash-adrienne-rich-marie-curie/

Recorded at "The Universe in Verse," April 24, 2017: https://www.brainpickings.org/the-universe-in-verse/

Photograph of Rosanne Cash by Molly Walsh / Academy of American Poets

POEM TEXT / CONTEXT

Rosanne Cash Reads "Power" by Adrienne Rich

Poem text and context: https://www.brainpickings.org/2018/04/23/ursula-k-le-guin-hymn-to-time-janna-levin/

Astrophysicist Janna Levin reads "Hymn to Time" by Ursula K. Le Guin

Become available for healing, forgiveness and a deeper connection with others.

This 15 minute guided meditation asks you to smile! This may seem an unusual practice however it is a rather beautiful way to open a connection to your heart which is the centre for healing and forgiveness. The intention of this meditation is to open your heart which allows you to connect more deeply to your own truth and to open lines of communication with others.

Open Heart Meditation

Poem text and context: https://www.brainpickings.org/2019/04/16/zadie-smith-reads-frank-ohara/

Zadie Smith reads "Animals" by Frank O'Hara

Lets suppose that you were able every night to dream any dream you wanted to dream,
and you would naturally as you began on this adventure of dreams, you would fulfill all your wishes.

You would have every kind of pleasure, you see,
and after several nights you would say, "well that was pretty great."
But now lets have a surprise, lets have a dream which isn’t under control.
Well something is going to happen to me that i don’t know what it’s gonna be.
Then you would get more and more adventurous, and you would make further and further out gambles as to what you would dream, and finally you would dream where you are now.

If you awaken from this illusion,
and you understand that black implies white,
self implies other,
life implies death.
You can feel yourself, not as a stranger in the world,
not as something here on probation, not as something that has arrived here by fluke, but you can begin to feel your own existence as absolutely fundamental.

What you are basically, deep, deep down, far, far in, is simply the fabric and structure of existence itself.

- Alan Watts

dreams

Pursuit of Pleasure 7

Pursuit 8

An inspiring commencement address delivered to the graduating class at San Jose State University. Transcript and discussion: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/05/15/debbie-millman-look-both-ways-fail-safe/

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Debbie Millman: Fail Safe

This is the fourth and final talk in a series titled “The Mind, Mindfulness, & Me”.
Here we examine the spiritual paradigm which should be foundational to how we live in and interact with the world.  

You are an eternal spiritual being, the seer, the inhabitant of the body.  Your presence makes it so that your body exhibits symptoms of life.  When you leave the body, the true nature of the body manifests as dead matter. But you also have another covering, a subtle body, comprised of the mind, the intelligence, and the false ego or false concept of the ‘self’.

We all possess a wonderful higher faculty, the intelligence or Buddhi.  This faculty empowers us to be able to step back from the mind, even at times when the mind is overwhelmed by heightened emotions, and effectively control the mind.  Mindfulness means to use this faculty to control the mind rather than having the mind control me. When this happens (being controlled by the mind) the soul is considered lost. The Bhagavat Purana says:

“This uncontrolled mind is the greatest enemy of the living entity. If one neglects it or gives it a chance, it will grow more and more powerful and will become victorious. Although it is not factual, it is very strong. It covers the constitutional position of the self/atma.”  BP 5.11.17

A wonderful verse from the Katha Upanisad paints the big picture:

"The individual is the passenger in the chariot of the material body, and intelligence is the driver. Mind is the driving instrument, and the senses are the horses. The self is thus the enjoyer or sufferer in the association of the mind and senses. So it is understood by great thinkers."   Katha Upanisad 1.3.3-4

4 The Body Is A Chariot

In 1968, Dr. Bernie Krause was leading a booming music career. A prodigiously talented musician and early master of the electronic synthesizer, Krause was busy working with artists like the Doors and the Beach Boys and performing iconic effects for blockbuster films. Then Warner Brothers commissioned him to create an album incorporating the sounds of wild habitats, so he headed into Muir Woods with his recording equipment. What he heard changed his life and triggered a fifty-year odyssey.

Then and there, Krause decided that he wanted spend the rest of his life recording and archiving the music of wild animals and wild places. He quit Hollywood and began traveling the world. The soundscapes he recorded were full of epiphanies about the origin of our own culture and music, about the profound connectedness of creatures, and about the unseen tolls of human activity. Previous wildlife recordings isolated the calls of individual creatures, but Krause recorded habitats as a whole. He soon proposed a new theory of ecosystem functioning: that each species produces unique acoustic signatures, partitioning and occupying sonic niches such that the singing of all of the creatures in a healthy ecosystem can be heard, organized like players in an orchestra. 

Today, Krause’s astonishing archive contains sounds made by more than 15,000 species. It is, as The New Yorker aptly put it, “an auditory Library of Alexandria for everything non-human." Fifty percent of the recorded habitats no longer exist due to habitat destruction, climate change, and human din. We spoke with Krause about the beauty of and perils facing wild music, the extraordinary science of soundscape ecology, and how sound impacts the welfare of animals. The music in this episode is from Wild Sanctuary (www.wildsanctuary.com).

Debbie Millman: Fail Safe

brainpicker

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