Sneak Peak Preview of Inspiration Center
If the world is to be healed through human efforts, I am convinced it will be by ordinary people, people whose love for this life is even greater than their fear.
― Joanna Macy, scholar of Buddhism and and deep ecology
Watch our 5-min Inspiration Center Sneak Peek Preview below:
Dear PEERS community,
What’s going right with the world? What brings out the best in humanity and society? Who are the helpers and the healers? In a world gone awry with bad news, these questions might be the most important ones we prioritize.
In a few weeks, we'll be launching our new Inspiration Center! We are currently organizing some of the best insights, resources, and inspiring news articles we've collected since 2003. New content is being created as well, with a focus on the powerful role of art and creativity in social change, solutions to address the world’s most pressing problems, mysterious explorations into consciousness and spirituality, and incredible stories of human goodness and resilience.
Our Inspiration Center will include the following themes:
Healing Social Division and Polarization
Healing Our Bodies
Healing the Earth
Healing the War Machine
Reimagining the Economy
Reimagining Education
Repairing the Criminal Justice System
Ending Human Trafficking
Technology for Good
Power of Art
Nature of Reality and Consciousness
Psychedelic Medicine
Near-Death Experiences
Overcoming Odds: Human Interest Stories
Amazing Seniors
Incredible People with Disabilities
Animal Wonders
Most news is about what we fear. The recurrence of human failures, war, corruption, tragedy, and us vs. them thinking contribute to a cycle of cynicism, loneliness, and disengagement. This negativity is in part due to our evolution. For more than two million years, the human nervous system has evolved to constantly monitor for threats— real and unreal, reacting more intensely to negative stimuli than ones that we interpret as good and safe. This threat awareness helped keep our ancestors alive. Yet this fear-based perspective by itself, creates three core challenges in the modern era: We separate ourselves from other ways of thinking and being, we overestimate threats, and we underestimate our inner and outer resources.
When our fears dominate, we lose touch with what brings out the best in humanity: creativity, collaboration, wonder and awe, social-emotional intelligence, shared purpose, and love. For every problem you see reported in the news, there are almost always people responding. And some are doing amazing things.
Just as our negativity bias has helped us to survive, we need to know what is going right and well in the world, and that new ways of seeing and understanding the world are possible. Emerging neuroscience shows that the brain is designed to change and rewire itself. Every time we take in the good and hold it in our minds and bodies, we’re literally strengthening neural connections associated with these positive experiences, which has far-reaching healing potential.
Most importantly, our inspiring work cultivates a vision of love. Specifically, a type of love rooted in the Greek word agape, a moral imperative defined by Martin Luther King Jr. as the creative, redeeming, and understanding goodwill for all people. Agape is the willingness to go to any length to restore community, across our differences and divides.
Love brings the best of heart intelligence to all aspects of our lives. And through science, we know that the heart has its own electromagnetic field that affects others around us. It sends more information to the brain than the brain does to the heart. Numerous studies have even shown that heart rhythms stood out as the most reflective indicator of one’s well-being.
Many wisdom traditions see the heart as an organ of inner vision, allowing us to see the deeper meaning in everything we do, from ordinary daily events to the most challenging of circumstances. As nonviolent activist Kazu Haga once said, "if we carry intergenerational trauma, we also carry intergenerational wisdom" inside all of us.
With faith in a transforming world,
Amber Yang for PEERS and WantToKnow.info
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