GPC Spiritual Civilization Gathering Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture

630 Bedford Rd, Tarrytown, New York Friday, May 12, 2017 10:00 am – 3:00 pm

Transcript: Melissa Durda: I’d like to welcome you to the Global Philanthropists Circle Spiritual Civilization Gathering, which is a meeting of the Spiritual Civilization Affinity Group that has been around for about four years, and it’s a group of members of the circle who came together several years ago and decided they wanted to meet, and to convene, and to share around this issue, and we’ve been working to support them ever since. We have about 50 members of the circle who are actively involved in this group from around the world and it continues to grow. We meet on a regular basis in Europe, and in New York. We exchange ideas, practices, challenges, inspirations online as well, and today’s gathering is a continuation of this group. We have two partners in the room who have been working on this with us. It’s the John D. Templeton Foundation. Jim Pitofsky is here, and Fetzer Institute, Bob Boisture, and Jillian. With our partnership with the Templeton Foundation we went very deep on this issue with our members. We interviewed them, and helped them to look at what values drive them, what personal practices nurture them, how, if at all, does this inspire or link to their philanthropy, and how through their philanthropy may they be promoting these ideals and values more widely in society. Over the course of this two-year project, which ended on December last year we found shifts in all three areas. I’ve shared the evaluation document with our group but if you haven’t seen it and you’re interested in seeing what it revealed over this period of time, please let me know. What’s also been very exciting is that there have been some new initiatives that have emerged both between members themselves and also within the group, and the group’s desire to take the activities of this group further and in new ways. And we’re going to discuss some of those ways this afternoon. Peggy Dulany: Good morning, everybody. So, for me personally it’s very meaningful to be having this gathering here in this building and in this space. I said yesterday at our table when we were talking about values that a value that had gotten articulated in my being recently was reverence. And I realized that’s not new. It’s just that the word came to me. And it came to me in part because of the beauty around, whether it’s in the city, or here, or in Montana, or in any other place in the world and that the connection to the sacred for me often begins with beauty, and especially natural beauty.

When my mother died and my dad and I decided to do something here, which was as yet unidentified, and Jill Isenbarger, who’s the CEO, is going to say what the “it” turned out to be. My dad and I spent several years with a group of wonderful advisors trying to figure out what the “it” should be. But a lot it had to do with the beauty of the place and although the word isn’t spelled out in the plaque under the archway there, really the reverence for nature, for animals, for the wild, and you can carry that right on to the Divine. So that’s why for me it’s important to be having this meeting here today. So I’d like to welcome you and introduce Jill who has been for six or seven years now—nine years; I can’t believe it—the CEO of Stone Barns. She can let you know what this actually is and when you do take your walk at 1:15 maybe part of your wander might be around the grounds that she’ll describe. Jill Isenbarger: Thank you, Peggy, and welcome to all of you. We’re so glad you’re here. So, on our campus we have three things happening. We have an education center, we have a farm, and we have a restaurant. The place is really about relationships and how we work together re: symbiotic ideas about food together. And there are two big things we’re working to advance. Our goal is to change the way we eat and we farm and we want to do that so there’s more resiliency in the agriculture system. And when we say “resilient” we mean both environmentally resilient, but also kind of community resilient and resilient in the way we think about food and culture. And there are two big ideas that we feel we’re particularly well suited to be thinking about and working on, and those are agro-ecology, so how do we learn to better farm in harmony with nature, and this idea of farm-driven cuisine. We have a great opportunity here because we have a restaurant to think about how can we cook with all of the crops that we need to create healthy soil, not just the kind of typical crops that we’re used to eating. If we have to grow barley to have good soil how can Dan Barber in his team in the kitchen make that really, really delicious so it becomes part of our way of eating? It’s a very interesting opportunity that we have because we have the growing and the eating happening in quite close proximity. And we do work, I think, to try to advance those two ideas. The first is what we describe as farm innovation and experimentation. We try unusual things on our farm. Some of them succeed, some of them fail, and then we share those ideas with other people practicing agriculture or other farmers. An example of that would be we have an extensive program where we work on slow tools, so tools that are appropriate for small-scale, diversified agriculture. This winter we’re taking a group of farmers to Europe to exchange ideas with European farmers who are working on farms that are 12 acres or fewer. So that’s farm innovation experimentation. We have a large growing farmers initiative, so we have apprentices who are with us. And I hope today when you’re out on your walk you run into farmers or apprentices you’ll take a little time and talk to them. To me the real spirit of this place are all the people who work here who are hidden in corners of the fields, and the forest, and the kitchen, so I hope you do have a chance to engage with them some. And then we’re also open to the public. We have about 100,000 visitors a year who come to experience what we describe as aesthetic rapture of this place and I think it’s a really great way for people to have an early engagement with agriculture because of some of the things Peggy was saying earlier. I think the place really does have a kind of spiritual nature because it’s so beautiful. It’s quite different from the surrounding landscape so a lot of the people who come visit us spend most of their time in an urban environment and I think they can really kind of take a deep breath and

connect to nature when they’re here. So it’s a really great opportunity to talk to them about food and a better way of eating. I hope you all have a chance to experience some of that while you’re here with us, and I’ll be around and would love to talk to anyone who is interested in learning more about what we do. Thank you so much. Melissa Durda: So we’re going to take the time to have a round of introductions but I kindly ask that you keep them brief. The way we would want to do it is that I’d like you to say your name, the country that you’re from, and then a value that’s resonating with you today. Yesterday we did the exercise, for those of you who were not with us at our members meeting, we did an exercise on what are key values that are very important to us and put together a word cloud, which was really wonderful. I see very large compassion, love, empathy, self-awareness, trust, and, you know, these are the values that have really emerged—some of the values; there have been many more that have emerged from this group as we’ve been uncovering them and increasing awareness around them throughout this project. So, I’ll start. I’m Melissa. I live in the Czech Republic, and my value is love. Anna Ginn: The United States, and gratitude. Ivan Tse: Hong Kong, optimism. Adam Cummings: US, resilience. Maite Arango: Mexico and Spain, gratitude. Aaron Pereira: France, India, and wonder. Virginia Barros: From Brazil. I’d say equity. Richie Davidson: From the US, gratitude. Marvin Israelow: From the US, wellbeing. Dorian Goldman: From the US, awe. Laura Koch: Argentina and Italy, empathy. Mary Margaret Pipkin: From the US, beauty. Bob Boisture: From the US, love. Mohammed Amersi: from the UK, respect. Yussef Dib: Lebanon and France, empathy. Peggy Dulany: US and elsewhere, reverence. David Sadroff: US and Swiss, compassion and love. Daniel Kropf: I say Europe, and brotherhood. Daniel Domagala: Good morning, Poland, the US, Brazil, gratitude. Daniela Fainberg: From Brazil, empathy. Andrew Zolli: From the US, gratitude. Larry Lunt: Belgium and the US, trust. Angelica Berrie: New Jersey, compassion. Katie LaFleur: From the US, and my word would be “hope.” Adam Growald: US, awe. Casey Supple: United States, trust. Serena Kao: Singapore, appreciation and reciprocation. Peter Bokor: US, reverence. Charlotte de Mévius: I’m Charlotte, from Belgium, share. Libor Malý: From Prague, Czech Republic, awareness or instant presence.

Barb Mathison: United States, connection. Shannon St. John: United States, joy and openness. Sarah de Tournemire: US, constant learning. Jim Pitofsky: US, to paraphrase Michael’s song from yesterday, I’m from the towns of Gratitude and Openness.

Gillian Gonda: From the US, gratitude.

Sally Timpson: From the US, awe. Yoel Haller: Love and family. Andrea Federmann: from Brazil, gratitude. Thiciana Zaher: from Brazil, happiness. Eva Haller: New York, joy of survival. Ewa Zadrzynska: Poland and New York, empathy and honesty. Thais Beldi: Brazil, gratitude and hope. Monica Winsor: New York, love and gratitude. Len le Roux: Namibia, mindfulness. Melissa Durda: Well, thank you. You can feel a lot of love in the room. I’m very, very pleased to introduce Richie Davidson, who is here with us today and is going to lead us in this next session. I’d like to just briefly introduce him. His bio is in the packet along with all of your bios. But Richie is the William James and Vilas Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry, and the Director of the Waisman Laboratory for Brain Imaging and Behavior at the University of Wisconsin. He founded the Center of Healthy Minds at the Waisman Center in 2008 and throughout his career he’s published more than 300 articles and 80 chapters reviews as well as edited 14 books. He is best known for his groundbreaking work studying emotion and the brain. He’s a friend and confidante of the Dalai Lama and highly sought out to speak and lead conversations on wellbeing. Time magazine named Davidson one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World, so we’re so pleased to hear from Richie. Thank you so much for coming. Richie Davidson: Thank you all so much for inviting me and it’s really a great honor and pleasure to be here. And hearing all of these wonderful virtues that have been named around the room I think that I would like to begin with a short practice to actually help bring those virtues more present into the room. So with your permission I’m going to just take a seat and lead all of you, if we are all so inclined, in a little bit of practice to just bring us to the present and to start this day in this beautiful location where reverence, appreciation, gratitude are so readily available. So let’s please just take our seats and bring our awareness into our bodies. Maybe take a deep breath or two just to feel our bodies present… bringing our awareness into the present moment. One of the qualities which is so present when we cultivate awareness in this way is the recognition that calming our minds, and opening our hearts, and doing the inner work, which so enables the outer work, that engaging in these sorts of practices is beneficial not just for ourselves but for all the other beings that we touch in our lives.

And so let’s spend a few moments steeping ourselves in this motivation that calming our minds and opening our hearts in this way is really an act of generosity for all of those around us, all of those we touch directly and indirectly… And many of us know one, or two, or many more people in this room. There are probably folks here who know relatively few but we’re all here for a purpose. And let’s spend a few moments reflecting on this purpose. I think we all share some common vision that in part is motivated by the aspiration to promote wellbeing, to promote virtuous qualities among people throughout the world. And let’s spend a few moments leaning into the connection that we have, or the incipient connections that we could form together to collectively enable our work together on this planet at this propitious time in history… In many ways there is a tension, a battle in our cultures today between love and fear. This is a group which clearly has declared love as such an important virtue. And let’s spend a few moments toward the end of this practice time committing ourselves to harnessing all of the extraordinary opportunity that we have working together in a spirit of warmheartedness and shared vision, and to embody the kind of change that we all seek to make… So, thank you very much. Okay. I just felt you should begin in this way to introduce this topic of wellbeing. I’d like to begin by just sharing a little bit of my own personal story and how we arrived at this place, and I have a bunch of slides, which I may or may not show, but they’re there in case we want to see one or two of them. I’m a psychologist and neuroscientist by training and I was really lucky in the very early part of my career to have been around a number of people whose presence and demeanor were really infectious to me. I wanted more of what they seemed to have. And they all were united in having a spiritual practice of one sort or another. I know that some of you know some of the people that were around me at that time. One of them was my dear friend who I’ve known for more than 40 years, Dan Goldman. And actually, Dan and I have just written a new book together, which is coming out in the fall, which is very much a joint personal autobiography about our collective work together. Another person in that time, this was in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the mid-1970’s, was Jon Kabat-Zinn. Actually Jon, before he started his work, before he went to UMass Medical School where he developed Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, he was the one that first taught me meditation on my living room floor in Cambridge, Massachusetts. So that’s where it sort of began and after my second year of graduate school I had the aspiration to learn more about this stuff and so I went off to India, much to the consternation of the Harvard Psychology faculty, who mostly thought I was going off the deep end and many of whom thought I would never return. But I did have a pretty unswerving commitment to science as well as to my practice, but I got a taste spending three months in Asia of what these traditions may have to offer. And I came back with a fervent aspiration to pursue this work and I was told in no uncertain terms that if I wanted a successful career in science this was a terrible way to begin and I better find something that was more mainstream. And that was an important sort of bit of calibration in many different ways. One is that for whatever reason I kept paying attention to a kind of inner guide and continued my own personal practice. And as I often say, I became a closet meditator for many years and talked very little about it in professional

circles. And then I began to pursue this work on the brain and emotion, which in many ways still frames what we do today because one of the key attributes of virtually every of the virtues that you all named just a few moments ago in one way or another has something to do with our emotional lives. And when we think about wellbeing we’re thinking about certain kinds of emotional qualities which we know can be strengthened and cultivated, and so this is, provides a very important scientific framework for this work. And in the early part of my career I studied adversity, and stress, and anxiety, all this stuff on the negative end of the continuum, and then something momentous happened to me in 1992. That was the time I had my first one-on-one meeting with His Holiness, the Dalai Lama. And at that meeting in Darussalam, India he challenged me and he said, “You’ve been using tools of modern neuroscience to study stress, and anxiety, and depression. Why can’t you use those same tools to study kindness and compassion?” And he put it to me bluntly. And I don’t know if any of you have ever seen His Holiness be stern but he was quite stern with me and it was kind of a kick-in-the-butt act of compassion on his part. And it was a wake-up call for me and we began to turn toward the positive end of the spectrum. And this eventually led to the founding of the Center for Healthy Minds and this has been really an extraordinary unfolding that has happened quite organically. The mission of our center, put very simply, is to cultivate wellbeing and relieve suffering through a scientific understanding of the mind. And in 2010 His Holiness came to Madison to help us inaugurate our center and actually two folks who are part of our center are here, Barb Mathison and Casey Supple, and it’s been an amazing journey since. So, I’d like to spend a little time now sharing a little bit about what has enabled this work to become much more mainstream. What are the changes and developments in modern science that have permitted all this work to unfold? And I’d like to name four. One is neuroplasticity. Now that’s a word many of you I’m sure have heard, and when we think of neuroplasticity we understand that the brain can change in response to experience… and in response to training. And, in fact, the brain is constantly being shaped wittingly or unwittingly. And I would like to offer the suggestion that most of the time our brains are actually being shaped unwittingly. Most of the time our brains are subject to forces around us about which we have little control and much of the time little awareness. But the fact is that our brains are being dramatically shaped from very early on. In fact, we have work going on in our lab now; this is sort of hardcore neuroscience. This is kind of work that’s supported by NIH. We have a lot of NIH support for our basic research. NIH is the National Institutes of Health, for those of you outside the US, the largest biomedical research funding agency in the world. And this work is studying the impact of maternal wellbeing and maternal adversity during pregnancy on the development of the brains of the fetuses, and we study these babies once they are born. And we can put a very young baby in an MRI scanner very early on in infancy and you do this very easily because they sleep a lot. And so we actually put them in the scanner when they’re sleeping and we can study in great detail what’s going on in their brains and relate that to what’s happened during pregnancy. And we also get measures of the umbilical cord blood, which reflects the baby, and we can study epigenetics. And I’ll

say something about epigenetics in just a moment. But from this we can tell a lot about what’s actually happened during that pregnancy period and relate it to the brain development of the newborn infant. We’re following these babies through the first ten years of life. And, the data are showing—and this is very new work; we’ve just finished scanning about 200 babies one month of age and what we can see is dramatic influences of prenatal factors that we can observe as early as one month of age in the brains of these babies. And so this is paving the way, just to give you an example, for a new project we’re initiating where we’re examining practices to cultivate wellbeing in pregnant women and looking at the impact on the brain development of the fetus in this kind of way. So we have the tools to do this and we can begin to track this with great precision in ways that were unthinkable even just a few years ago. So this is all about neuroplasticity, and one of the amazing things is with neuroplasticity is that we now have methods which are so sensitive that we can actually detect structural changes in the brain after an hour and a half of practice; in 90 minutes. Now, if you said five years ago that there would be structural changes in the brain after 90 minutes people would have just thought you’re nuts or just sort of New Age crazy. This is hardnosed scientific data now published in the best scientific journals in the world. You can see changes after that short a time and it simply underscores the fact that the changes in our brain are incredibly dynamic and they’re happening all the time. And so when we interact with each other, when a parent interacts with his or her offspring you are literally inducing structural changes in the brains of those individuals with whom you’re interacting. This is kind of the ultimate form of interdependence and it happens all the time. We don’t spend a lot of time appreciating it but it is constantly going on. So, this, that’s all part of neuroplasticity. The second major development in modern science is the genomic equivalent of neuroplasticity, and that is epigenetics. Epigenetics is the science of how genes are regulated. So each of us is born with a fixed complement of base pairs that is our DNA and that for the most part is going to stay stable throughout life. But, the extent to which a gene is turned on or turned off, you can think of genes having little volume controls, and the extent to which that volume control is high or low is incredibly dynamic. And that is under the influence of all kinds of environmental factors and also is associated with our emotion dispositions. We published data just very recently showing that if we bring long term meditators into the laboratory and have them spend a day practicing in a kind of retreat-like setting for just one day, and we simply take a blood sample at the beginning of the day and at the end of the day we can look at epigenetic changes over the course of eight hours. And we’ve actually shown robust epigenetic changes that are rapidly induced in just eight hours. And so this stuff is wildly dynamic, much more dynamic than any of us previously thought. This is something really important for our physical health. And this brings us to the third thing in modern science that is enabling this work to go forward and that is increased understanding of the mechanisms by which the mind and brain interact with the body, and it’s bidirectional. There is robust evidence that wellbeing, emotional wellbeing, psychological wellbeing is related to physical health, on average. So if you look at large epidemiological studies, and the best data comes

from the UK, there have been a series of studies that are sort of colloquially known as the Whitehall Studies, and it’s studies of British civil servants. And it’s a series of studies that were done, epidemiological studies with tens of thousands of British civil servants and they’ve been very carefully tracked. And these data clearly show that those individuals who report higher levels of wellbeing are physically healthier on a variety of different metrics. It doesn’t mean it happens all the time but if you look on average statistically at these large samples you see these associations emerge. And this leads to the possibility that cultivating wellbeing will actually induce changes in the periphery, in what we call “peripheral biology,” biology below the neck, in ways that may be beneficial for our health. And if we can actually show, “we” being the collective “we,” that cultivating wellbeing can actually increase physical health it will decrease health care utilization, it will decrease the use of prescription drugs, and it will decrease health care costs. And if we can actually show that every corporation on the planet is going to want to do this and then it’s going to be like gay marriage and the world is going to change overnight. And I believe that we’re on the cusp now of acquiring those kind of data. We don’t have them yet but I believe that in five years or so we will have robust evidence of that kind that could potentially lead to a tipping point, which would then, I think, really produce a change in the extent to which these kinds of practices are incorporated in a mainstream way. The fourth theme is if I had to pick a favorite it would be my favorite. And this is the one where there is more scientific controversy than in the other three. The other three are quite well-established scientifically, although this one I would say the evidence is now getting to be more and more robust, and I can actually show one or two examples of this, if you’d like and it might help, on a slide. And the fourth theme is innate basic goodness. I’ll say it again, innate basic goodness. We are all born with innate basic goodness. And there is good evidence for this at this point in time. So what does this mean? This means that if early in life an individual is given a choice about a warmhearted cooperative interaction compared to one that is selfish and aggressive that individual will on average most often choose the warmhearted interaction. There is a, an innate propensity to prefer warmheartedness, cooperation, and basic goodness. So, for this I’m going to give you a little example ’cause it will help, I think, to show you how we can make this kind of audacious claim. And it’s not to say that the negative stuff isn’t there. It’s simply to say that if you are given a choice you will choose the good. So, I’m going to just show you these. This is a very clear example. So these video clips are shown to six-month-old babies. Okay, so that’s one and here’s the next. You show those to six-month-old babies and then you offer the babies one of those two puppets, either the yellow one or the red one—and, by the way, this has been carefully counterbalanced so sometimes the bad guy is yellow and other times the red—and the infants very, very robustly and consistently, 95% of babies prefer the good one, the cooperative one from the one who was not cooperative. And this has now been done in all kinds of different ways with different kinds of props and the data are very, very clear and very robust. Young infants show a very clear preference for the good and it starts very early in life. And, you know, in some sense it, despite what we are exposed to in the media, is so true in every day life. If you just reflect on the instances of a typical day that the emotional instances are much more

prevalent for positive qualities like simple acts of gratitude, of cooperation, and things like that, than of negative qualities. And also people sign up for courses to improve their wellbeing. They don’t sign up for courses to learn how to become more angry. And it’s just very, very clear that we have a strong preference in this direction that you can see very early on but is, can sometimes get obscured as we develop. So these four things, neuroplasticity, epigenetics, the bidirectional communication between the mind, and brain, and the body, and innate basic goodness are themes that are so important that have enabled this work to go forward. Now, I’d like to move on and just share with you a little bit about how we approach the topic of wellbeing from a scientific perspective. And the title of this talk is “Wellbeing is a Skill.” We don’t ordinarily think of it as a skill but if there’s one simple message that I would like to share with you and leave with it is that wellbeing can actually be learned. And fundamentally it’s not different than learning other kinds of skills like learning to play the violin or learning a sport. If you practice at it you will get better. So, in our work we have parsed, wellbeing into four specific domains that have been intensively investigated both neuroscientifically, as well as psychologically and I’d like to just go through a little bit each of these domains to share with you what each of these domains is and why it’s important. So the first domain is awareness. Now, it may be surprising that we include awareness as a constituent of wellbeing. Let me give a few examples of why we feel it’s so important that it is a constituent of wellbeing and that we actually start, we begin with it, and the choice is quite intentional. There’s a recent paper which was published in the Journal Science, one of the top scientific journals in the world, that used smartphone technology to query people as they are out and about in the world. We call this experience sampling, asking people for their experience in the moment. And in this particular study —which was done by a group of Harvard psychologists, and it’s a very important study, several thousand people in the US were participants. They asked people essentially three questions. The first question is: what are you doing right now? and they had them check off from a list of activities. The second question is: where is your mind right now? Is it focused on what you’re doing or is it focused elsewhere? And the third question is: right at the moment that we query you how happy or unhappy are you right now? And here’s what was found. The average American adult spends 47% of her or his waking life not paying attention to what they’re doing, 47% of the time. And folks, I am absolutely convinced that we could do better. Now that’s an astounding number and just take a moment to envision the hit that we take on productivity, the compromises that occur as a consequence of interactions between parents and children, between teachers and students, between doctors and patients when the attention is not fully present. William James, America’s first great psychologist, wrote a two-volume tome in 1890 called The Principles of Psychology and he has a whole chapter on attention. And in that chapter he said, “The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention over and over again is the very root of judgment, character, and will.” And James went on to say that in education, which should improve this faculty, would be the education par excellence. And he actually italicized the “the” and the “par

excellence” in the original edition. And I think that if William James had more contact with the contemplative traditions he would have seen that these represent strategies for educating attention. So this is really a big one. Awareness. And, this is really a quality which enables all other forms of learning so if we’re not paying attention to what we’re doing it compromises all kinds of other learning and there’s another dimension to awareness, which psychologists and neuroscientists have been calling “meta awareness,” and it’s essentially being aware that you are aware, and it’s different than simply being aware. And the best way to describe this is that if you’re in a movie theater, and all of us have had this experience, watching a movie that’s really engrossing there are times when we kind of get so lost in the plot of the movie that we actually lose awareness of being in theater. We’re just completely swept up in the movie. But there are other times that we can be equally attentive but still in the background recognize that we’re in a movie theater. And in some sense that is meta awareness and in order for personal transformation to occur there’s a lot of reason to believe that meta awareness is absolutely essential. It’s a necessary ingredient. It may not be sufficient, and indeed, it’s not sufficient, but it is necessary we believe. And meta awareness is something that can also be cultivated. So, the second dimension of wellbeing we call connection. Connection is about many of the virtues that we all talked about, including compassion, kindness, gratitude, appreciation, love. Really all of those are in one way or another about connection. And there is a wealth of hardnosed research which clearly suggests that connection is an absolutely key ingredient for wellbeing. And this is also a quality which we know can be strengthened through practice, and one of the important ways in which it can be strengthened through practice is by engaging in exercises that in many ways are meant to embody something that Albert Einstein talked about in a letter that he wrote to a friend about compassion where he talked about the importance of widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty. That was something that Einstein said and it’s really a message about going beyond the in group. It’s easy in many ways to express compassion to those who are most similar or most familiar to us. It’s more challenging when we extend that beyond our immediate in group. And there are strategies that involve mental exercises where we can actually begin to have our in group and out group become a little bit more permeable and begin to get beyond those dichotomous division which can be so pervasive and destructive in their influence. The third dimension of wellbeing is what we call insight, and it’s specifically insight into the self. Another way to think about this is how to develop a healthy sense of self. And this is something that neuroscientists have studied intensively over the last maybe five or eight years. It turns out, and this is something that I’m sure all of us recognize, we all carry around a personal narrative that we, that occurs in our heads. We’re constantly being influenced by this narrative about who we think we are. And when you put a person in an MRI scanner and you simply instruct them to, “Please rest and don’t do anything else,” what typically happens is that this personal narrative will come to the forefront and

the brain activity that we see at this point in time is brain activity that turns out to be associated with self-relevant thinking. And when we become overly identified with our thoughts about who we are so that we begin to believe that those thoughts actually represent reality, as opposed to simply thoughts, that’s when we can get into trouble. And there’s a lot of research that shows that this is a key factor producing vulnerability to depression. And I’m sure many of you know that from World Health Organization data depression today is now the leading cause of disability worldwide. It trumps—pardon the expression—every other disease, more than anxiety, yeah, although they’re very comorbid. So, what we see as an individual is on a continuum perhaps moving along toward depression is that people begin to take these self-ruminative thoughts as if they are representations of who they are. So thoughts about negative self-worth, low self-esteem and so forth, when we become overly identified with these kinds of thoughts it can have a very pernicious effect. So learning to see our thoughts as thoughts in the cognitive therapy literature this is called “decentering,” and it’s a key principle in teaching people to learn skills of wellbeing. So this third piece is really about developing a healthy sense of self. And the fourth dimension of wellbeing we call purpose. You can think of it as meaning and purpose. In many ways this is where spirituality is most explicitly included. And this is about an individual identifying her or his sort of true north, their central purpose in life. And there’s a wealth of evidence to indicate that people who have a stronger sense of purpose are different on all kinds of other measures and they actually, there’s new evidence to suggest that these individuals are healthier and they live longer. And those data are very, very robust. And so with respect to plasticity we know that there are simple strategies that can be taught to a person to help them identify their true purpose. It’s not to give them a purpose but it’s to help them connect to a purpose which may be there, albeit masked by other extraneous kinds of factors. So, these four dimensions of wellbeing are dimensions that have been extensively studied and are really important. And I want to just share with you a summary slide which, pardon me for just flipping through all this. I’ll go back to some of this but these are the dimensions that I just spoke about. So awareness, connection, insight, and purpose. And this is just a summary slide as a reminder of these four dimensions which we think are so central. So one of the things about our center, I want to just go back to a little bit about how our center is organized because this is relevant to the next piece I’d like to share with you. Our center has three pathways, a research pathway, which is our core DNA, but we also have two other pathways. We have an innovation pathway and a movement pathway. And the innovation pathway is designed to enable us to bring products and services out to the world that come from our research that actually may promote good. And this actually emerged from a discussion I had about ten years ago with Pierre Omidyar, who I had met at that time for the first time at a meeting and he pulled me aside and he said, “Richie, do you really think that the next scientific experiment that is beautifully designed, really compelling, gets

published in a high-profile journal, that that’s going to change the world and the way we all aspire to have it changed?” And it was another wake-up call for me in helping to appreciate that the scientific research we view as necessary, but not sufficient to promote the kind of change in which we are engaged. And so we have become in our center activist scientists. We are not content siting on our butts or being in the lab doing just science. We formed a non-profit corporation called Healthy Minds Innovations that we will used as a vehicle for developing products that come from the research that we think can actually do good. And so one of the key products that we are developing is a digital platform to comprehensively cultivate wellbeing. This is very much not a mindfulness program. It includes mindfulness, but it’s much more than that. It incorporates all of these four dimensions of wellbeing. And, this is something very ambitious that we’re engaged in and we’re really excited about it and we clearly, I’m sure with many of you recognize the limitations of using technology to help facilitate this, but we also realize that if we’re going to scale this and we’re working now in Mexico with a group with a very large group of schoolteachers that we hope will have very widespread effects throughout the country and in order to do that we’ve got to use technology. We are interested in bringing this to school systems in many parts of the world. We are interested in disseminating this in many other venues. Another venue will be for college students. We are developing a version of what I’m about to describe as an undergraduate course that’s designed for freshmen and next year we will implement it on a pilot basis in three large public universities, major public universities in the US—the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Penn State University, and the University of Virginia. And this course will be taught as a flipped course so most of the content will be delivered online and the classroom time will be used for discussion and actual practice together. Let me just share with you a little bit about this digital platform that we are developing. This is being developed in partnership with the company IDEO. I don’t know how many of you have heard of IDEO but it’s a company that does human centered design. They’ve been amazing design partners and they are helping us create the digital design for this. And so this is the first inner wellbeing program of its kind designed to help you understand and cultivate a healthy mind, guided meditation practices, teachings, and science-based games help you strengthen the four key ingredients of inner wellbeing—awareness, connection, insight, and purpose. And this is meant to be a very comprehensive program. And one of the key features of this is that there are embedded assessment tools that will be sprinkled throughout it and these assessment tools will comprehensively provide a profile of wellbeing. So they will measure each of these four dimensions and they will measure them in four different ways using questionnaires, which are commonly used, but we think very limited and problematic. We’ll also use experience sampling of the sort that I talked about earlier. A third domain of measurement will be actual neuroscientifically grounded tasks. These are tasks that can be implemented on mobile devices that will measure qualities like, “How good are you at focusing your attention today?” or, “What is your empathic accuracy?” or, it will also measure pro-social behavior using simple economic decision-making tasks that come from the behavioral and neuroeconomics literature. So this will be a comprehensive battery. You can think of this as FitBits for the mind.

The fourth kind of measurement will be device-generated data where we use GPS and other information from social media, of course, if people give us permission, to do content analysis as well as frequency of social media use. We’ll also look at GPS to determine whether wellbeing is facilitated when you’re in locations like this, or are there particular places where your practice has been really especially helpful. These are kinds of information that people don’t typically have at their fingertips and we think it’d be potentially useful in cultivating wellbeing. So this is an initiative that we’re currently engaged in that we’re super excited about and we’d be happy to share more information if anyone is interested. So, this is our website, Centerhealthandminds.org, if anyone is interested, and I want to leave plenty of time for questions and elaboration. So I will end here and I thank you all for your high levels of awareness, and attention, and happy to answer questions. Thank you. Peter Bokor: [INAUDIBLE]. Richie Davidson: Yeah. It’s a great question and a really important one. Great. Thank you, Peter. So, I didn’t have a chance to share this but there is a mode of using this platform where it’s designed to be specifically in either diads or groups. So there’s a group mode that’s actually designed to be implemented in a workplace setting where groups can actually get together. There also is a mode to do this explicitly in pairs, and so where there is actual real interaction between two people and sharing. And we think that this is something that’s going to be really important, and it’s been explicitly built in, at least initially, and one of the things that we’re eager to see is how this plays out once we bring it out into the field. And we envision this will be a continuous kind of process of iteration and agile design where we’ll continue to tweak it as we go along based on this kind of feedback. I should also mention this. Your question prompted one other thing. Another venue where we’re thinking of disseminating this in workplace settings. So I find myself in the strangest places these days so just ten days ago I was sitting in the office of Kevin Johnson who is the new incoming CEO of Starbucks. He took over on April 3rd and they’re intensely interested in this. And one of the things that we hear from people like him and others is that the folks that we’re dealing with just have no time to allocate in their day, if we’re talking about something to promote wellbeing that requires them taking out more time it’s going to decrease their wellbeing and not increase it. And so we have a mode where you can engage with this platform where we say, “You do not have to take a single minute out of your day from what you’re otherwise doing.” And this actually comes from good behavioral science data on how to create and establish new habits. And one of the ways you do this is by piggybacking it onto another activity of daily living. It could be commuting. It could be cleaning your house. It could be washing the dishes. If you are engaging in a regular, non-cognitively demanding activity, which we all do, you can have this in the background and most of this you can think of as mini podcasts that are three to five minutes in length. And so this doesn’t look, smell, or feal like formal meditation. This is meant to be sprinkled throughout a day and to be piggybacked on activities of daily living.

And it will enable us to investigate how this will work and there’s a lot of evidence to suggest from the more basic scientific literature that these kinds of practices, even when they’re piggybacked will be very helpful and doing it for very short periods of time, many times a day we think is better particularly initially than trying to sit down for an unrealistic amount of time where people might do it for a few days and then stop. Libor Malý: [INAUDIBLE]. Richie Davidson: Although multitasking is a fiction but I’ll say more about that later. Libor Malý: [INAUDIBLE]. Richie Davidson: Okay. Great, great question. So, in the ways in which we—to answer it simply, in the ways in which we can we do. So we measure lots of stuff going on in the body in our laboratory research. We measure the heart, we measure breathing, we measure temperature on the skin, all kinds of things that we can measure. We’re even-, I could talk about this in this group. I’m going to tell you about something that I don’t ordinarily talk about in public settings so this is, I’m letting you all in on some really wild stuff that we do. About eight or nine years ago I was sitting in India with the Dalai Lama talking with him and there’s a phenomenon in these contemplative traditions that is known by the Tibetan word “tukdam.” And Tukdam refers to the clear light stage that follows the western conventional definition of death. And during tukdam the practitioner is said to have some residual quality of awareness even though according to standard western definitions that individual is dead, flat heart rate and no observable brain activity. And so the Dalai Lama said, “You should study that.” So we’re studying that. So we are doing this wild research project now and we have a data collection station in Darussalam, India and one in Bylakuppe, India. Bylakuppe is in the south. It’s in a very large Tibetan resettlement region and we have tested so far nine practitioners who have died by conventional western definitions of death. And this is a project which is really on the fringes of what we can measure with science as we know it today, and it is also helping us to expand our understanding of death as a process rather than as a binary event. And so there’s absolutely no question in my mind that it’s very unscientific, if you will, to think of death as something binary. It just-, biological systems, first of all, don’t operate like that in binary form. And so this has been a wild project and what I can simply share with you is at this point, and I’m not being coy, it’s just that we’re still immersed in it and we’re really still at the beginning stages and we have a scientist from our center who’s now spent six months a year in India and he’s there now doing this work. But what I can simply share with you is that these are individuals whose bodies seem to not decompose and remain totally fresh for many days after they have putatively—not “putatively,” after they’ve died we confirmed using our own measurements that according to standard western definitions they’re dead. And in certain cases they’d been dead for 17 days and in tropical weather with 95 degree Fahrenheit ambient temperature and their bodies have not decomposed one smidgen. So there is definitely something unusual happening. Just what it is I don’t think anybody knows. And

one of the important things that we try to practice in the work that we do is the practice of not knowing, and of humility in the face of what is so much more complicated than any of us can possibly put our arms around at this time. Question: Thank you very much for the very illuminating analysis. My foundation works on what I say are global challenges and I think the application of this for some of the work that we try to do is very interesting. And I noticed that in your talk you completely omitted religion and faith. And whether it is intentional or not I don’t know but this sort of education is so important and my question is what are you going to do in terms of how do you educate faith healers today so that their narrative starts to change and we start to reach wellbeing, and love, and compassion as opposed to hate because your point about the innate good being something that people are born with, unfortunately, that may apply here and in some societies. In the rest of the world, in the toughest part of Africa, and Asia, and the Middle East maybe that doesn’t apply because of any situation that goes on there. So if we want to really create a better world, it’s not only education but it’s also faith. Faith accounts for probably four and a half billion people today in some form or shape have some practice of faith. And the second point I would like to make is that when you say that basically your brain changes with every interaction people have, so that goes against the grain of what some people believe in this world is predetermined and that it is something that has to do with developing your destiny. So how does that reconcile? Richie Davidson: Great, great questions. Thank you for both of them. With respect to the first question, I think that, you know, the religious and faith-based groups are really important targets, if you will, or groups to engage with around this kind of program. We’ve intentionally designed it in a way which will be acceptable to individuals from any religious tradition. And so it will help people to connect to their own spiritual values, which are at the core of whatever their particular religious tradition might be. So we’ve designed it in that kind of way so we use the words “spiritual” and “religious” in parts of it, not in the sort of headlines but particularly in the last module on developing purpose. This is an area where the aspiration is to help individuals connect with whatever their core religious or spiritual tradition might be and connect to those core spiritual values which enable them to find a sense of meaning and purpose. And so the opportunity to actually deploy this to groups of religious leaders would be super exciting to us and something that would be I think really important. In the fall I’m going to be going to a meeting in Qatar sponsored by the Qatar Foundation and they’re deeply interested in exactly this question. And I think that there is now a lot of openness to this and so it’s not at all that we’ve intentionally excluded religion but we don’t want to privilege any particular religion. We want to make this something that will be embraced by all religious traditions. With regard to the second question: The evidence is just so abundantly clear that when you talk about destiny in that way, even with a condition that we know is heavily genetically determined. You can take, for example, phenylketonuria, the metabolic disorder. We know that that’s caused by a single Mendelian mutation and it has essentially 100% genetic contribution but it can be entirely changed by an environmental manipulation of diet.

And so just because something is heritable says nothing about how it can be changed. And so it’s really a distortion of scientific fact to jump to the conclusion that because something is heritable that it’s “predetermined.” It’s just that biology doesn’t operate that way. It’s an open-ended loop and there’s much more flexibility in the system. I don’t want to leave you with the suggestion that there’s infinite flexibility. I think that there are constraints. But let me just give you one example of this. It’s from the area of brain damage with stroke and paralysis. So, the kind of conventional wisdom is that if you have a stroke, and say, the stroke on one side of the strain produces a hemiparesis so that one side of your body is paralyzed that there’s pretty much nothing you can do about it, and that’s kind of the conventional dogma. My response whenever I hear something like that is, “Where’s the evidence? Where’s the evidence that with really intensive training there isn’t plasticity?” And so there is a neuroscientist at the University of Alabama that did a radical experiment a few years ago. What he did is he took patients with hemiparesis where one side of their body was paralyzed because of stroke and he put their good side of their body, the good side in a full body cast for 16 weeks. So he prevented the good side of the body from being used at all. And what this did it induced a retraining of the brain 24-7 for 16 weeks, and 2/3 of those patients showed dramatic recovery when they were told before that there’s absolutely nothing that they can do. I think that unless we try with really intensive kinds of interventions the knee-jerk reaction that it’s, “predetermined” in my view just doesn’t hold weight. Melissa Durda: Thank you so much, Richie. Anna Ginn: Before I have a chance to introduce Andrew Zolli I’m gonna ask Daniel to say a couple of words about our work with Richie Davidson group in Mexico because we have been involved with them. Daniel: Thank you very much, Anna. I think just very briefly to report that in Mexico we have been very happy to partner with the local organization with Catalina Barragan and her group who have adopted all of this wonderful knowledge and concepts in Spanish and into the Mexican context, and we have been able to really bring them into sections of our Bridging Leadership program, which is designed for next generation philanthropists and leaders from Mexican society. And they all have definitely found the ideas very powerful. I think there’s some work to be done in terms of the habit change because people, people get it intellectually and they’re really excited about it but actually making that change in their lives continues to be a bit of a challenge. But it has been a very exciting venture and we continue to work with them for the next round of our Bridging Leadership program there, so we’re very excited about this. And thank you for this wonderful research and the information. Thank you. Anna Ginn: Daniel, thank you. And it’s my pleasure now to introduce Andrew Zolli who is our next speaker. Andrew is one of the really great thinkers, writers, and innovators in this whole area that we talk about at the Spiritual Civilization Group. He spent a dozen years creating and curating something called PopTech, which was a social change network that gave people an opportunity to think and talk about all these important issues and especially the intersection between technology and societal issues. And he’s involved with something called Planet, which it’s a geospatial imaging organization.

Earth-observing satellites, maybe you’ll tell us something about this. But he’s coming to us today as the President of the Garrison Institute. My understanding is that he was Chair of the Board of the Garrison Institute and was so smart, and so thoughtful, and so full of ideas that they said to him, “Hey, can you run the place?” And so that’s what he’s doing now and the Garrison Institute is something that was founded by members of the Global Philanthropists Circle, Jonathan and Diana Rose. They are currently at the Venice Biennale where their daughter is showing or else they’d be with us today. And the current Chair of the Garrison Institute is Monica. So Monica, you better hope that Andrew does a good job so you don’t have to run it next, right [LAUGHTER]. So we have a lot of connections to them. Andrew Zolli: Thanks, Anna. Hi, everybody. How are you? It just felt like a very strange wandering into a kind of physical manifestation of many of the most important, and for me, influential, on my own thinking, relationships. There are people here who are obviously connected to Garrison. Much of my work in recent years is focused on systemic and social resilience. We understand resilient systems, resilient communities. In a book that I wrote about that subject I wrote extensively about Richie’s work and I have connections to the other people who are presenting today in manifold ways, so it’s a really wonderful thing to come here and be with all of you. Just a quick introduction to me. Rather than give you a long story I’ll just tell you about two things that I’m involved with at the moment. The first one, as was mentioned, is I’m honored to serve as the President of the Garrison Institute located just up the road in Garrison in a former monastery. I think it’s well-known to many of the people in this room. It’s a place that brings together people from many contemplative traditions, scientific forms of inquiry and new forms of social change to encourage a more resilient and compassionate future for all. So I spend a lot of my time there and then I spend the other half of my day working at the very forefront of new and emerging technologies, in this case an organization called Planet, which has deployed the largest constellation of earth-observing satellites in human history, which collectively image the entire surface of the earth every day in very high resolution. What’s interesting for me to look at the juxtaposition of those two things is to understand them both as tools of sensing and sense making in very profound ways, both the sort of deep inner work and deep outer systems for understanding and coming into communion both with ourselves and the world around us. And almost everything I’m going to talk about is rooted in this idea of noticing. So I want to just start with that and I thought we could because—what time is it right now? Does anyone know the exact time? 11:45, the peak learning hour of the day that we’re all in right now. What I’d like to do is do a little exercise together. So I’m going to show you two images on the screen. They’re going to flicker. It took me a while to learn how to do that and I promise you there is one and only one difference between those two images. And when you see them, and I promise you there’s only one, I’d like you to gently and non-competitively—I mean we’re at a Spiritual Civilizations retreat, we’re not going to block out the view of the people around us—I’d like you to just gently raise your hand when you see the change. That’s it. That’s the whole game. Okay. You got it? Ready, go… There’s one, two, three. See if we get to five… four and five. Five people who spotted the difference. Okay. Now here I just want to ask how many people honestly saw no difference between

those two images, if you’d raise your hands. We’d like you to meet the honest cohort here, the special Spiritual Civilizations group. The first time that I was shown this I didn’t see it either. But for those of you who didn’t, I just want to say that’s most of us, I’d like you to pay attention to this part of the image and I’d like you to watch as the thing that holds airplanes in the sky disappears in front of your eyeballs over and over and over again. So, this is alarming for many reasons not least of which that some of you, myself included, flew here and so this is particularly challenging circumstance. So I want to ask us a collective question, a serious question: why didn’t we see it? I mean I told you ahead of time with 100% certainty that something important was changing. I showed it to you. And, by the way, when I asked you to raise your hands I wasn’t counting you because I knew that only three or 5% of you were actually going to find it over the course of the first minute or so. I was counting the number of times I was exposing you to the change. I was showing you this change over and over again and yet we didn’t see it. I showed you not less than 30 times, it flickered in front of your eyes and you didn’t see it. So why? So one of the first things is, we attend to pieces of the scene. The second thing, just out of curiosity, how many people here started by looking at the soldiers? How many people here looked first or second at the tail of the aircraft? Now none of you coordinated and yet you all followed, most of you followed the same strategy intuitively, right. A piecemeal strategy focused on the things we expect to change in front of us. Our brains long ago evolved to deal with lions, and tigers, and bears and primarily had to deal with the complex social world that is in the foreground of this image. Our brains are acutely sensitive to changes that are happening where we expect them to occur, at a speed we expect them to occur, and in the social domain where they normally occur. Human beings are very good at seeing change that moves the foreground at this speed. We’re really bad at seeing things that move like this, but we’re also really bad at seeing things that move like that. And that’s a particular issue today and that’s actually why I wanted to chat with you. A wonderful thinker about the future named Stewart Brand, some of you may know, I think he captured this idea very beautifully when he said, “In our society the fast-moving trends get all the attention but it’s actually the slow-moving trends that have most of the power.” That’s the stuff that’s happening in the background. So, the challenge for us in having a conversation about encouraging a spiritual civilization, let’s take that word “civilization.” It’s the scale of human habitation on the planet has changed. And that form of change, we don’t have disappearing aircraft engines but we do have other forms of change that are happening around us largely and visibly. So, that’s because we’re living through a moment, which is variably referred to as either “the Great Acceleration” in which every single form of derivative of human beings and their exponentiated growth on the planet, whether it’s the amount of carbon put into the atmosphere, or the amount of water that we are utilizing, or the number of McDonald’s restaurants on Earth are all growing at a kind of exponentiated way. And this is what it looks like if you don’t look at graphs, right. This is what human beings do to the earth. And we don’t just do that because I think Richie’s right and the science is I think clear that human beings have an innate proclivity, a propensity to goodness and a kind of innate biophilia, right, which are intertwined.

But what we do is we take this and we turn this into that. So this is our flicker right now, back and forth. This is what we’re doing. And the issue, the challenge for most of us is that it’s happening at a speed and scale that’s simply outside of the normal processes of our cognition. And part of the reason why a spiritually grounded civilization is so important is because these tools of cultivated wellbeing also shift our perceptual mechanisms and our ethical frame so that we can better commune with these facts and understand them and live first in understanding of them and then in relationship to them. And then, ultimately, we hope to potentially change them. In fact, this period, which researchers refer to as the Anthropocene, started in the 1950’s with the dropping of the first hydrogen bombs because millions of years from now in the striations of the rock we will actually find radioactive isotopes that are the signal of the 20th century. We’ll be able to date it exactly in the stone. And, the challenge for all of us is that climate change, and the Anthropocene, and the Great Acceleration present us with problems and challenges that are civilizational in scale. And they’re bigger in our cognition and they often require us to work well beyond the scale of a single human lifetime. We’re talking about challenges that took generations to make and will take generations to undo. And so this set of questions about how we are connected to each other, what are the kind of core ethical driving principles of a civilization and what, most importantly, is its relations, how do we relate to each other and to the world, are so fundamental that conversations like this one are popping up all over as I’ll show you in a minute. Now that’s not the whole story ’cause there’s other stuff that’s going on. So I’m going to play a little game with you. Maybe you’ve heard of it. I’m going to show you two images on the screen. They’re going to flicker back and forth. There’s one and only one change between them. When you see the change I’d like you to gently raise your hand. Do you remember this? Not that long ago. So here’s a picture of the election of Pope Benedict. This is when they burn the smoke, “We have a Pope.” This is the election of Pope Benedict in 2005. Here’s exactly the same shot in 2013 with the election of Pope Francis. It’s a very subtle change but I don’t know if you can see it. It’s in there. So very large-scale societal-level change can happen very quickly, in this case equidistant in 2008. 2007 the advent of the iPhone, but the tipping point where long, slow developmental change tipped into large-scale social phenomenon. And so we see a lot of this patterning of change. Long fuses and then short, sharp explosive change is a dynamic of the 20th century and it’s going to continue to be because it’s a function really of the Great Acceleration. So the dynamics of this century ones in which the scale, and speed, and scope and expansion of our challenges are accelerating faster than our normal rates of cognition and the scale, and speed, and capacities of human beings is accelerating faster than our capacity to easily comprehend. We are living through the sixth extinction and the second renaissance at the same time. Are you a pessimist? Are you an optimist? Are you totally confused and having a mental breakdown? Well I can give you good evidence for every position because this world produces evidence for everyone along that spectrum. Does that make sense? The reason I mention this is that it’s not just that these systems are big. It’s also that the systems on which civilization now depends are deeply intertwined. They’re interacting in ways that are only partially visible. They’re mired in complexity in what you might call a giant hairball—and I’d like to do you all a favor and encourage you never to google “giant hairball” ’cause it cannot be unseen—and they’re only partially understood. And it gives us a kind of global challenge, a basic question for this

century, which is while we work we hope to some fundamental transition driven by love, driven by a deep spiritual reorientation of society. We have to do this hat trick. While we do that we also have to figure out how to help people in communities and systems persist, recover, and really flourish amid disruption. That’s a design challenge. And the tools that Richie showed, which I think are amazing, that wonderful platform for encouraging wellbeing happens against a backdrop where all of these short sharp shocks are going to be a major feature of the world we live in. And you can see it in this very paradoxical moment in which human beings are, as a generation, wealthier, longer lived, more informed than any other in human history. And yet even in our society, which is at the tip of that large global change, we’re experiencing this giant, what’s called a sea of despair. There’s been a huge shift among American white working class people in the diseases of despair, so-called by the two Princeton, public health researchers who study them. You can actually see these are mortality rates just over the last 20 years in France, in Germany, all those ones going down. That one that’s going up is US white working class people. Now what’s killing them is not heart disease. What’s not killing them is not the illnesses that we normally think of as strenuous labor-oriented life. It’s alcoholism, and drug abuse, and suicide. People are taking themselves out of an equation and a system where they can no longer see a future for themselves. And it’s not just happening in those communities. It’s happening in all of our communities and not just in a generation but between the generations. We’re seeing this explosion of the transfer, of the intergenerational transfer of stress, and trauma, and both primary and secondary trauma. And all of the neuroplasticity, all of the fundamentals of intimacy that are required for the cultivation of wellbeing that Richie so elegantly talked about just a few minutes ago, we’re seeing those systems are fundamentally disrupted in communities. There’s a wonderful psychiatrist, a clinical psychiatrist named Denese Shervington and she’s been working in African-American communities post-Katrina for the last ten years. And she has this work she does on what’s called allostatic load. Allostatic load is the sort of stress load. So you are stressed, you come back to some sort of equilibrium, you are stressed, you come back to equilibrium. And what she’s discovering through the kind of long, intergenerational histories of people in these communities is they’re stressed and then they’re stressed again, and then they’re stressed again, and then they get a rest but they’re stressed again right after that. And all of that cultivates in a way that crosses the generations. We don’t see that in our society. Many of the people, who are in the best positions to help don’t see it because we’re increasingly living in a sorted out society in which it’s possible to live in sort of solipsistic bubbles. It’s very hard to cultivate the foundations of a spiritual civilization in which we don’t see each other. How do we form the bonds of compassionate solidarity that are essential underneath if we literally don’t interact with each other. A wonderful book I would encourage everyone to read, mostly on the politics of this, is called The Big Sort by Bill Bishop. He’s a journalist. He wrote this book in 2008 long, long before we had to worry about fake news, and filter bubbles, and all the rest of that. What he was talking about was that from the period of the Carter Administration through to Obama what had happened in American society is we’d started to live an increasingly self-similar society. We’d self-sorted into politically self-similar, and religiously self-similar, and culturally self-similar, and

socioeconomically self-similar communities. And it’s no surprise that now we live in a media landscape in which that self-similarity, that sort has occurred. So, from that place of being sorted out, deeply stressed, and profoundly uncertain about the future it’s easy to see why in many corners we’re experiencing a kind of great repudiation, but I don’t see myself in that future and so enough. I’m done. It’s this gesture, stop. I’m out. And more importantly—I’m closing the door around me and around my immediate circle. When that happens people’s moral community shrinks. They show increased not just indifference but a kind of future insensitivity. They’re not calibrated to think about the long term. The effect of an increasingly zero sum society as we think more and more about today because it’s harder to predict tomorrow and because we’re in this challenging situation where we see lots more narcissism. But, everybody in this room, I think the motivation for this discussion is this: that there is the potential for deep restoration of compassion, and with it the inversion of all of the things we were just talking about or just mentioning—a kind of self-desegregation, a reintegration. And I think in some ways this is the pretext to a spiritual civilization. This is not what spiritual civilization looks like, per se, but it’s the kind of measure by which we have to be able to see into society. And I’m going to show at the end of this talk a couple of new ways in which we can see what’s going on with our brothers and sisters. Okay, so just a word or two about compassion. I do a lot of work with my friend David DeSteno. He’s a psychologist at Northeastern. He has a wonderful series of experimental work. I’m going to show you a couple of his results about compassion. And I think the foundational observation is it really doesn’t matter what the facts are. It doesn’t matter whether we look alike or look different. It doesn’t matter whether we’re part of the same tribe. Or another one, particularly when our moral communities are shrinking as a result of the things I just talked about, instead it’s really about do we see ourselves reflected in the other. And that’s a challenge in a society that’s sort of marked by this, right. And this is a non-political talk but the kind of, you know, industrial great narcissism of our society—you know, I’m sorry, I got the hairstyle wrong but close; this, you know, kind of industrial scale narcissism—might lead you to believe that this is hard to do. So I’ll give you one experiment that these guys did, that David and his colleagues did. They took two random research subjects, people that had never met each other and brought them into a room and taught them to play a game. They were taught the rules of the game before they walked in. It was a game over money, like, say ten bucks or so; people give in a stack of quarters. And they play a game in which the incentives for cooperation and the incentives for defection are the same. So in that environment you need a stranger. You’ve never met them before. You sit down in silence to play a game. You sit down over a pile of money. What do you think the default rate of cooperation between two strangers is when money is on the line? It’s about 15%. In 15% of the cases people did what was in their mutual interest not what was in their individual interest. And then David and his colleagues created a variety of controlled experiences. And one of them they did this: they had people come into the room, exactly the same set-up—they’re meeting a stranger but there’s a metronome on the desk and it’s ticking regular, TICK-TICK-TICK…

And they’re instructed for three minutes to simply tap their fingers in unison with each for three minutes. No talking. Just tapping. So, Daniela, will you tap with me. Right, we have to look at each other. And what happens is people get it wrong, and then they smile and then they’re like, “I’m not allowed to talk I’m just, TAP, TAP, TAP, that’s it. Three minutes. And what happens is the default rate of cooperation increases 300% because now Daniela and I are in a tribe. We’re the finger-tapping tribe. You don’t’ get it. You wouldn’t know. We’re in our thing, right. Our in group goes way up. Our level of cooperation goes way up with almost no signal because human beings, I think, are primed to connect, primed to form these communities. And we do it in lots of other ways. Dach Keltner, whose work I imagine some of you may know, he’s a researcher at Berkeley, had a group of his research students who knew nothing about basketball watch the first game of every major team in the NBA. So there they are, they didn’t know anything. They didn’t actually even watch the score. All they were tracking the whole time that they were doing this was this behavior… Right. This is why we’re not in the NBA. That’s the only reason is ’cause we can’t quite figure out how to do that. So that’s a cooperative touch. That’s the sort of thing when people do a chest bump, or they give each other a pat on the… rear end, or, you know, you get the general idea. By the way, I’m not encouraging a touching policy in any part of this remark. But, here’s what they found. They found that more touching, just that little gestures of cooperation and solidarity, led to more cooperation season long, better individual team performance, and more wins. In fact, you could actually calculate how they did on a seasonal average by knowing nothing else about them except how much they showed each other signs of support, trust, and cooperation in the game, including whether or not they won the game. And it turned out to be the defining factor for the people that came behind them. So, that has real world consequences for the ways in which we prime the circumstances for the emergence of a spiritual civilization. After Super Storm Sandy the Rockefeller Foundation did a wonderful study in which they looked at communities who are exactly the same and affected by the disaster in the same way and to the same rate, and they found that communities where people reported being in solidarity with their neighbors recovered, all other things being equal, about twice as fast. And the major primary correlate for those communities that did so was that they had a community garden. They did things, they put their hands in the soil together, really basic verbs of civilization. And I think about that because back up at the big global scale we’re seeing the emergence of these new frames. One of them you’re going to hear about from Ivan about ecological civilization emerging from the East, one in the West called Planetary Health, which is focused on integrating planetary wellness and human wellbeing, and plenty of other examples besides. It’s big and abstract but it must ultimately be connected to… that kind of big systems change work ultimately has to be rooted in the rich community garden soil of spiritual change, of the kinds of things that we’re talking about here, or mostly in this talk I’m talking around them. So, the way we prime is with the rights kinds of new framing, the right kinds of connection to our deepest spiritual principles and new forms of connectivity and solidarity. It forms the kind of outlines of an agenda. So I now I want to leave you with one way in which we can begin to observe—or actually two ways. Are you all still we me? Doing okay? Okay. So, the first one I’ll just tell you about is this work

I’m doing at Planet, which we deployed this huge constellation of satellites. One thing I will tell you about them is that every satellite is covered in artwork and it’s covered in the foundational principles of human wellbeing in large script. So in this case we actually make these very large pieces of art and then we laser etch them on the sides of the satellites. And what we do is we put them in a big orbit like this in which they essentially orbit vertically while the earth turns perpendicularly underneath them. And what we are able to see is amazing. We see change on the earth at a vast scale brought down to a humanly cognitive scale, to a scale we can see and therefore care about and act upon. These new sensing technologies are going to be important for us building solidarity and dissolving the prior distinction we have between us and nature, but to see us as an integrated whole. And I’m not going to say a whole lot about that but, for instance, we can watch the emergence of refugee camps. We can see the kind of visual signature of suffering and the visual signature of flourishing on the earth. And, Planet’s working to make all of this data available to everybody in the world. I won’t say much about it ’cause we don’t have much time. The other one I want to talk about is Facebook. So I’ve done a lot of work with these guys. Let me just say top five social organizations on Earth: Christianity, 2.2 billion people; Facebook, 1.9 billion people; Islam, 1.6, I think; China, 1.4; India, 1.3. So the top five list, you have two of the largest nation states, two of our oldest spiritual traditions, and these guys in one list. Now, it’s a really interesting thing. Every day millions of people post things on Facebook that deeply upset other people, and there’s a consequence. The team at Facebook actually put together an inside out research team of people who came from academic traditions, the kinds of traditions represented by Richie’s work but more applied affective social psychology along with people who are wisdom holders and contemplative practitioners and the engineers. And, what they were able to do was to begin to redesign these platforms, make the first down payments on designing them to encourage not just social media but sociable media, to encourage trust, and empathy, and cooperation, and compassion, and empathy. And I’ll give you just one example from that very large body of work, and this will be the last thing I mention. So, for a long time researchers have studied the prevalence of universal human emotions. Over here you have a default rate of six from Martin Seligman, widely understood to be one of the leaders in the affective psychology space looking at the human emotion and the expression of human emotion. So a team of researchers at Facebook actually took these human universal expressions and they worked with an animator at Pixar to develop a series of coherent, universally-salient emoticons. Have you seen those little smiley faces, and frowny faces, and the like? And then they took them around the world and they tested them in countries all over the earth to see if they had the same emotional salience. Could people identify, “That’s a smiley. That’s a frowny. I understand what this little symbol represents emotionally.” Once they’d done that scientific validation work they were able to take them and distribute them to hundreds of millions of people in countries all over the world and look at their statistical prevalence not at the individual level but at the societal level. So here, for instance, is where in the world all the love is expressed, not using the language of love but using common utilization of these tools as a kind of universal symbology. Red’s the highest. So what you see here, and I’ll show you a couple of examples, this is, these are called culture.

This is correlative, not causative work. So here are cultures of love. Here’s cultures of sympathy. Notice the Canadian’s vastly more sympathetic than the Americans. We could talk a lot about that. It turns out that there’s a band of enui that cuts across the Middle East. There’s a kind of feeling of like, “Ugh,” this expression, like that cuts right across the Middle East, across all of the communities that are actually, sometimes that are in conflict with each other. Here’s a picture of culture of sadness and what you discover is that the Americans are really angry and really sad, vastly more than anybody else. But I want to leave you with these, and I’ll just leave you with this last one. Here’s the kind of culture of anger. You can see America, America the angry. Now, two things I just wanted to suggest to you about this. Two interesting findings and then a leaving thought. The first finding is that the happiest societies, when you take this data and you correlate it with subjective, studies of subjective wellbeing at the national scale, and there’s a whole emergent field of studying how societies are doing from a wellbeing perspective, you discover that those societies that are the happiest are not the ones that here express the greatest happiness. They’re the ones that express the widest variety of emotions. There’s some correlation between emotional expressiveness and the range of emotional expressiveness and human wellbeing. And that’s early so this is very early work. The second thing is that one of those emoticons is an emoticon of awe, reverential awe. And what we found—and what the research has found is that those societies that showed the greatest use of reverential awe in the digital space were the most generous philanthropically in this space. There’s a connection between the expression of reverential awe and generosity. It’s born out by other research as well. Now, we can talk more about that. I can talk about it over lunch and I’m excited to chat with you. I’m using every minute to tell you rather than to have this conversation. But I wanted to suggest to you that as we go about encouraging a more spiritual civilization with all of our acts, with all of the work that we do in this room that we have the ability now to use some new and differentiated tools, and new ways of understanding, seeing, and sensing to see how we’re having an effect and whether or not our efforts are really leading us to this new place, and that’s a really exciting place to be. It only works when we tie our most ancient contemplative work, our deepest spiritual principles to our newest tools. So that’s the work that I’m working on. And with that I’ll just say thanks. It was great to be with you. Melissa Durda: Thank you so much, Andrew. We are going to use the time later over lunch and for the dialogue walk to engage more with Andrew because we have two more wonderful speakers that I want to make sure have enough time to give their presentations. So I’d like to introduce Ivan Tse, who is a GPC member, and he’s the Managing Director of a an organization called Global Friends, which is a social enterprise that is working with individuals, communities, and governance organizations to give them the tools and the resilience to deal with a rapidly changing world. And there was something that I liked in the description of the organization that I think resonates with today and yesterday’s discussion is that you’re looking to reinforce things like personal freedom, individual responsibility, cultural literacy, and a low-carbon economy. So these are all issues that I think that we’ve discussed over the past few days. Ivan Tse: Great. Thank you, Melissa. It’s sort of funny because when Melissa and I first spoke about asking me to speak today and I was trying to come up with my topic I tried to place this within the

context of last year’s gathering. And I remember it was Jerry Hirsch who very powerfully shared his story, personal story and how it transformed his philanthropy. And my initial comment was, “Well, gosh. I don’t have that personal story to tell. What would I talk about?” And so through the course of conversation Melissa and I decided that we would talk about the ecological civilization. And, I said, “Well, I can do that and just go straight into the work and talk about my thoughts on ecological civilization and our work in China. And it was in preparing for this talk and starting to do that I realized that I could do that. I could bombard you with my thoughts and make some noise but actually I didn’t think that it would make much sense, that somehow there wouldn’t be the right energy for there to be the understanding of ecological civilization. So I love these forums because I’ve been here since Thursday and every time one of us philanthropists get up to talk I think there’s a way in which we all sound a little bit vulnerable. I heard Steven Schwartzman speak on Thursday and he sort of, I don’t know if he knew he sounded vulnerable but he did. And then of course Esra shared something very powerful yesterday with her work and refugees. I’m going to sort of use that as a way, also to remember. As I was thinking about this last night the thing I wanted to sort of remind us of was, sort of I’ve been traveling for a couple of weeks and there’s a way in which we have busy schedules and a lot of meetings, and I take in a lot of information and you can’t quite process it all sort of in the moment that it’s happening. And later yesterday I was thinking about how amazing that musical performance we had in the middle of the day with Michael when he gave the tribute to his grandfather and sang a song that he composed and was titled Gratitude. And I was thinking about sort of the energy of that piece on gratitude and sort of the act of having gratitude is a spiritual activity in itself. But really it was the way he sang that song and, and the energy that he put into it and the heart. And I was thinking last night that, if we could just stay in that space, linger in the moment in the way he sang that song, well I wasn’t really sure that there was really that much more to say, actually. I mean it was very conscious and, and I think a sure sign that he arrived. So I’m going to take you on a little journey in trying to connect the spiritual with the ecological. And I was standing I think in a Whole Foods the other day buying my food and checking out and there was a new issue of Newsweek magazine, a special edition, titled “Spirituality Now.” And I thought, “Well, this is sort of interesting.” So I picked it up and I looked at it and sort of flipping through the pages and see there’s a chapter on crystals, and there’s a chapter on exotic cultures. And I thought, “Well this is sort of interesting because this is how sometimes in popular culture we think about spirituality. We tend to place it somewhere in the external. And my take on spirituality is that it couldn’t be closer. It’s our true selves and I think, me, you, and everyone in this room, we’re 100% spiritual. And the reason that we can’t often see it is because the clear fact that it’s just too close, too close to us. And so I want to bring people into an experience that probably most of us know about and some of us have had - near-death experiences. Some of us have read about people who’ve had near-death

experience, or just been in the position in which you’ve been lucky enough to be a caretaker for a loved one, a family member, sort of in those last moment of their days before they leave this world. And that’s a space I think that’s sort of where the material world and the spiritual world, there’s a bit of forced movement. And I’ve had the privilege of being with grandparents and other people who’ve been in those last moments and they often report seeing people who’ve already passed on. They’re able to see others, people, and visit with them, and actually fill in that space. But, you know, in reading about people who’ve had near-death experiences we often hear about people who are able to see light, or able to see themselves in a different kind of way and so I just want to sort of take us on a little journey and just get in that space a little bit. I want you to imagine for a minute that you’re in that space and you’re lying comfortably and at home in bed—and I think we’d all rather be in those moments at home not in the hospital—and sort of just float a little bit above your body and take an aerial perspective so that you can sort of see your body, see yourself lying there comfortably on your bed and the parameters of the room around you. And notice when you’re sort of remarking that, “Well, you know, this is sort of interesting because I have this aerial perspective and I can see myself lying there.” And somehow there’s the notion that, “Well, I’m not my physical body. And my brain is in my body so there’s something about me that’s not fully just in the mental state either. And, probably at these periods of time people say they have flashes of their life so they see important moments in their lives or they see glimpses of that space. And I think if you really get in that mood you begin to realize that, “Well, all of that’s true. We know that’s true. We have had moments in life where we believed and have come to that knowledge. And, and wouldn’t it be remarkable, you know, that if we had this awareness not just at the end of our lives but much earlier on, and so that we could realize that we live in this space and on a normal day-to-day level, right. We think of ourselves as bodies. We think of ourselves as minds and invest a lot of energy in those identities. But actually there’s something more spiritual about it, and that’s fundamental. So I’m going to shift a little and tell you about how I came to that acknowledgement of self. I’m the son of a man who passed away when he was 32 years old from a cerebral aneurysm. My dad was 32 and I was three and a half when he essentially had a stroke. And, and it was very sudden and sort of there were five days between the start of his stroke and then when they decided that they would essentially think that life support couldn’t help him any longer. And to compare and contrast of those five days was remarkable. He was very young and the scene was sort of that my mother was in the hospital and of course he was in the hospital and I was three years old and so I was being cared for by my grandparents. I was at home with the staff. And, from everything that my grandparents have told me and the sort of family something remarkable happened during those five days. Again, I was three years old and I suddenly learned language and vocabulary about hospitals. And, generally, I was full of spirit. I was very lively during those days. And so actually we have a picture of me at my father’s funeral, which was at the end of that week, sort of the before the funeral and then after the funeral. And before the funeral I was all aglow. I was in very high spirits.

And then at some point I think people just thought that my mood and the surroundings, the event of what was happening was a little bit inappropriate. I think somebody ended up smacking me. I think it was probably my mother. And I have this image of after the funeral was the appropriate time. And so let’s fast forward, 25 years and my mother never remarried and I had this notion that I had grown up without having a father. And it was in my late 20’s when my grandfather passed away and I came to be in the position that I am now, which is having a foundation to run and other things, and having to take a little bit time to take stock and really figure out what I want to do with my life and how this was going to change things. And in this more reflective period of time I met a yoga teacher named Rodney Yee. And Rodney introduced me to the science of yoga and something about that yoga practice opened something in me spiritually. I’m not quite sure what. But, during that time I was suddenly able to remember those five days and how it felt in those five days, and even stranger still I gained new knowledge, new information about my father’s family, about my father that I couldn’t locate. Nobody had told me about this information, I hadn’t read about it. I just knew. And I came to the conclusion that during those five days he and I were essentially one, that our spirits were united. And having that window open in my life made me curious to discover what else was there. Obviously there’s a part of me now that is there and… that’s a part of me but I couldn’t find the language for it. And it was actually in the practice of yoga and meditation that of course I slowly developed language for this. And during a meditation retreat I was sitting down and these words, “We are beauty” flashed in my head. And it happened a number of times so I made a note of it, and that’s what I started to call it. I took it to mean that we are beauty, as in human beings are beauty and therefore I am beauty and therefore, we are beauty. And it’s been a journey and I’ve just created a company that basically follows the path that I went through in order to better understand my inner landscape and explore. And so there are a couple of guided journeys that we’ve curated for those people who want to explore, just gently explore their inner landscape. If you want to rewrite your life’s narrative or you can come to turns with the final chapter of life, that chapter between life and death. And we also have one for philanthropy, one about simply aligning one’s life story with their philanthropy. And so what does this have to do with the ecological civilization? Well, this was my journey of how I woke up and I think I learned to have a different relationship with my ego in a way that has been very meaningful. I think until we do that it’s difficult to realize things in multiple dimensions. So, first of all, you have to realize yourself in multiple dimensions and then from there you can get beyond sort of duality thinking that many of us in the rest of the world do. The third part I want to talk about is ecological civilization. Our family foundation has been working in China for 30 years. Broadly, my grandfather wanted the foundation to help China modernize. And the ecological civilization is the vision that we have for a post-modern China. And, it’s somewhat emergent so people often ask, “What is it and how do we get there, and, and what does it mean to be ecological?” I’m going to answer that obliquely by saying that in 2015, as many of us know, the UN came out with something called the Sustainable Development Goals, these 17 goals, separate goals with a 2030 timeline. And it’s interesting following that process because just last year,

many of us who were trying to just become familiarized with those goals and sort of learning the different numerology, and the colors, and realizing that, you know, for instance, STG 6 has to do with fresh water, and STG 13 is climate change, and STG 1, of course, is about eradicating poverty. And the conversation in NGO circles was, of course, you know, “How do we… prioritize what we’re doing and how do we choose?” And the conversation this year, and there’s only been this year, has moved forward into discussing how do we actually treat the STGs not as 17 distinct goals but as one system goals. How do we create that situation in which they essentially were able to address all of these goals? And that requires a different way of thinking, a different ability to think. So, in working on our spiritual selves we of course become more spiritual, but we also become more human. And I think much about the future of the world and that the future of our civilization depends on our being able to access more of our humanity. And this practice that we’re all engaging in, and I’m very glad to be speaking today to this group, is the most important thing that we can actually do in order to sort of give birth to this new reality that is waiting to happen. So it’s moved from something that is kind of extracurricular to really the central conversation. And so I really applaud everyone here who’s already doing this work, who’s already on a spiritual path and bringing this to their philanthropy. I’m very glad Andrew’s here, about the ecological civilization, we’re going to be continuing this conversation at the Garrison Institute and I’m not even sure what the dates are, maybe you’d like to say, but I think it’s some time in November right after Thanksgiving. So I hope that you’ll want to join us and of course contribute to that conversation. Thank you. Melissa Durda: Thank you, Ivan. Thank you for sharing your personal story with us. It was so touching and we will certainly circulate once you have more information on the work that you’re doing with Garrison to the group to engage more members. Thank you so much. Okay, we have one more member talk. Maite Arango is one of our members from Spain. She’s from Mexico, her family’s from Mexico, so Mexico and Spain, and many of you heard her last year talk about the work she’s doing on the Wellbeing Project. This is an initiative where there are several partner organizations that are involved in it, including Synergos, Fetzer, Esalen, and Ashoka, and it’s an evolving partnership and there’s a lot of exciting new information that is coming out of the research that we thought could be a wonderful update for all of you to learn about. Maite Arango: Hello. Thank you… So, last year we presented the Wellbeing Project to a group of you but some of you weren’t there so we thought that we would do a really quick recap of what this project’s about and then leave you with what we think and we hope is coming in the future. The most amazing thing about this project is that from the onset it’s a co-creation, it’s a collaboration. There’s no one individual standing out or leading. It’s a collaboration among some organizations that you will see that had never been talked before or had never shared a common project before. And it doesn’t have a structure. There’s no legal structure behind it’s. It’s not an NGO. It’s not an organization. It’s very open and it’s constantly changing. And I say this because I have never been involved in a project like this before and I also say this because I want to personalize it just for two seconds and say that this project came to be because of a social change

maker who is here in the room with us today, he was a very young change maker and he went through a burn out in his 20s, was empowered to take a sabbatical and in that sabbatical his thoughts, because he’s an entrepreneur, were, “So if this is happening to me, you know, I have dedicated my life to change, to create social impact and I’ve forgotten myself in the process, what is happening to other people in the world of social impact?” So this is how the Wellbeing Project was born. There are clear objectives to it. It’s cultivating a shift in the field of social change toward one that is healthier and more supportive of inner wellbeing and catalyzing the development of a new infrastructure to better support everyone working in the field. And Len and I will go into a little more depth into this. But what we are finding is that there is a direct correlation between healthier lives and more sustainable and collaborative organizations. But as we’re finding this out we will take you into the core of the project, which is a process, an 18-month process that 60 incredible women and men, also social change makers, also social entrepreneurs, are taking personally and what those changes are meaning for them also as individuals. There are changes happening in the organizations, but there are incredible changes happening in them as individuals. it’s fantastic because out of all these organizations two of them are in the room. Well, Synergos, and Len is going to be helping me explain the project. He’s playing an extraordinary role in this process and I will let Len talk about it. But I did want to say from our part that it is such an honor to have Synergos on board and to see the incredible threads that they are weaving into this project. And we also have Bob Boisture, who presides at the Fetzer Institute that is in charge of the research that is being done. Let me go into the structure of the project, very quickly. So there’s four pillars. There’s the inner development program, and that’s the core of the project. We are taking 60 women and men, all social change makers, coming from organizations like Ashoka, Skoll, and Synergos, through an 18-month process of individual work on inner wellbeing. There are three, during those 18 months, essentially one-week retreats and then each man and woman is accompanied individually with whatever they need in the process that they are going through. There’s a research and evaluation pillar that Fetzer leads and where we are looking at the connect between personal development and the quality and effectiveness of social change. It’s a very innovative kind of research where the researcher is implanted into the participants experiences. So the researchers go through the process with the participants. And I would like, Len, for you to speak about the learning and convening part. I might just go into the storytelling and then leave you with the learning and convening because that’s the richness of the project. So we are collecting and broadly sharing the changes that we are seeing in the participants, but not only in the participants. As Len will explain, we have been able in this year and a half of the life of the project to create an ecosystem of almost 200 of the key organizations of social impact in the world. And so we have, on the one hand, the change and the transformation of the participants, but on the other hand, the changes that are being implemented in these organizations as they leave the project. So Len, I’ll leave you with learning and convening.

Len le Roux: Thank you, Maite. It’s been an interesting construct in terms of how this has been put together and what Maite described between the journey that an individual goes through and tracking that and researching that. And the feedback loop around us is actually bringing that data and that information into a group of organizations that have a part vested interest in this field or working or networking with a significant number of social change makers, and what does it mean for those leaders within those organizations, how do they make sense of that, what are the organizational implications that one would encounter. We’re doing it in two ways—one is by setting up a key learning partner group, and I’m not going to run through every single member but these are the members of that learning partner group and they have gone through a journey as well. It involves a number of face-to-face meetings. In fact, we’re having our next face meeting at the Fetzer Institute that Bob is kindly hosting next week, and where we’ll be bringing the leaders of these groups together to really investigate some of the data and to actually make meaning out of that data and what it means for their organizations. And the journey that we’ve designed for that, and it also involves a number of contacts through conference calls. And there’s a journey that really engages them, first of all, at the personal level, brings them in on an organizational level, and eventually we will be looking at how does it impact the entire system. The second piece is really a network of organizations within the ecosystem of social change networks and bringing them together, a larger group, maybe not going into the learning experience as deep as the learning partner group, but certainly making use of the data and information that’s coming out of the research that we’re doing, and also putting that into a slightly broader ecosystem. And these are just a list of the numbers of organizations. They also go through a series of workshops and conference calls. And between the two of these streams we have set up this learning and convening group. Maite Arango: And you can see on the list there’s Danone, the company worldwide was with us from the very start and they’re working on the wellbeing of their employees and they are looking at the results of the research with us and sharing what has come out. Every organization is sharing how the Wellbeing Project and its results are impacting them directly or indirectly. There are some beautiful stories. Although a lot of the fellows are from Ashoka, when we first started the project Ashoka was not reticent but they were concerned about how much we would take the fellows participating from being totally centered on their projects. Today, almost two years later, Ashoka has taken the heroes story from the core of what their social entrepreneurship should be and they are bringing in this work to the more than 370,000 fellows around the world. And stories like that are happening. Impact Hub Global is working with Echoing Green on inner wellbeing. Impact Hub is in more than 70 countries and they have started a meditation program free two or three times a week in all their different hubs around the world for anybody who is using or renting the space. So there are many, many stories like this. I don’t know, Len, if you would like to share another one or… Len le Roux: If we look at the emerging one I’ll talk a bit about that.

Maite Arango: Very good. So this would be moving forward. So where are we going? The Wellbeing Project has a beginning and an end. It’s going to be around three years long approximately, so what comes next? What is the future? What are we seeing happening? We are seeing extraordinary things happening in the organizations that are part of this beautiful process. We are seeing extraordinary things happening with the 60 change makers that are going through the process. And we’re looking at what shape this movement will this become. How will we keep co-working and co-creating moving forward? And maybe you could share some more on that, Len. Len le Roux: There are a number of significant initiatives that are coming out of this and I’m just going to reflect on two. First of all, there’s a centers initiative whereby 50 of the leading centers that focus around inner work and wellbeing are coming together and they’re really shifting the way they are starting to work and doing a subtle shift from working purely just with the individual, but actually starting to shift and making their capacity available to change makers. That is becoming more intentional and more focused around change. So, one could imagine that with 50 of these significant organizations doing this shift, thousands of potential change makers could be going through this program, being exposed to it, and then being much more intentional about social change. The second piece, or the second one that I’m going to reflect on is a global sector survey. And this is where two fairly large networks, the Ford Foundation and Impact Hub have come together and they are going to be surveying all their members, either their grantees in the case of Ford Foundation or their actual individual members in the case of Impact Hub. And this going to be a survey that’s going to go across all of their members around wellbeing within these institutions, the organizations that they represent, and it’s going to be global. And this is going to be significant in terms of gathering information around wellbeing right across the ecosystem of social change makers, and it could be fairly significant in the work that it’s going to do. And this is just starting up. I think the first survey is going out in a couple of months´ time. Maite Arango: So I guess the question is, moving forward, what do we do as a collective to take the project from being on the agenda to becoming a lived reality in our world. And I would like to close with something I shared yesterday but I think it’s a very beautiful and personal symbol of this project. I’m very lucky to be a participant. I’m in the second cohort of 60. People have been divided into groups of 20, three groups of 20. My cohort has had one year of personal accompaniment in whatever we’re working on individually. And we have met as a group three times already for one week. If I were to pick a symbol of what is happening with these men and women as they go through this process, as they connect with themselves, as they are seen as individuals beyond their projects, because these are men and women living projects that affect thousands and millions of people sometimes, how the change in themselves is incredible and how then it affects whatever they do. So my image that I leave with you today is of an incredible change maker. She’s a woman in her 70’s. She comes from a country where women have basically no rights. And so the image was on our last retreat when I saw her dance for the first time in her life. So I leave you with that and thank you very much.