On Being with Krista Tippett

We need a modicum of vitality to simply be alive in this time. And we're in an enduringly tender place. The mental health crisis that is invoked all around, especially as we look to the young, is one manifestation of the gravity of the post-2020 world. How to name and honor this more openly? How to hold that together with the ways we've been given to learn and to grow? Who are we called to be moving forward? Dr. Vivek Murthy is a brilliant, wise, and kind companion in these questions. He's a renowned physician and research scientist in his second tenure as U.S. Surgeon General. And for years, he's been naming and investigating loneliness as a public health matter, including his own experience of that very human condition.

It is beyond rare to be in the presence of a person holding high governmental office who speaks about love with ease and dignity — and about the agency to be healers that is available to us all. There is so much here to walk away with, and into. This conversation quieted and touched a room full of raucous podcasters at the 2023 On Air Fest in Brooklyn.

There are many resources for mental health support. If you're in the U.S., find some of them here.

Vivek Murthy is the 21st Surgeon General of the United States. He also served in this role from 2014 to 2017. He hosts the podcast House Calls with Dr. Vivek Murthy. And he’s the author of Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

___________

Sign up for The Pause to receive our seasonal Saturday morning newsletter and advance invitations and news on all things On Being.

And: if you can, please take a minute to rate On Being in this podcast app — you'll be bending the arc of algorithms towards this adventure of conversation and living.

The British psychologist Kimberley Wilson works in the emergent field of whole body mental health, one of the most astonishing frontiers we are on as a species. Discoveries about the gut microbiome, for example, and the gut-brain axis; the fascinating vagus nerve and the power of the neurotransmitters we hear about in piecemeal ways in discussions around mental health. The phrase “mental health” itself makes less and less sense in light of the wild interactivity we can now see between what we’ve falsely compartmentalized as physical, emotional, mental, even spiritual. And so much of what we’re seeing brings us back to intelligence that has always been in the very words we use — “gut instinct,” for instance. It brings us back to something your grandmother was right about, for reasons she would never have imagined: you are what you eat. There is so much actionable knowledge in the tour of the ecosystem of our bodies that Kimberley Wilson takes us on this hour. This is science that invites us to nourish the brains we need, young and old, to live in this world.

Kimberley Wilson has a private psychotherapy and nutrition practice in central London. She co-hosts the BBC Radio 4 podcast Made of Stronger Stuff and is the author of How to Build a Healthy Brain. She came to the attention of many as a finalist in an early season of The Great British Bake Off. She grew up, as she tells it, eating both the West Indian food of her family and over-processed modern British fare.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

And, this week, an invitation: As you may have heard, after twenty years (!), we are transitioning On Being from a weekly show to a seasonal podcast. We hope you’ll help us celebrate these first two decades, by sharing how you’ve made this adventure of conversation your own.

Is there a guest, an idea, or a moment from an episode that has made a difference, that has stayed with you?

We’ve made it easy (and fun) to record your reflection — and at the same time sign up to stay on top of what’s happening next: onbeing.org/staywithus. Krista will be offering some of her defining memories, too: in a special online event in June, on social media, and more. So — please and thank you — go to onbeing.org/staywithus.

How to embrace what’s right and corrective, redemptive and restorative — and an insistence that each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve done — these are gifts Bryan Stevenson offers with his life. He’s brought the language of mercy and redemption into American culture in recent years, growing out of his work as a lawyer to people unfairly on death row, people who are mentally ill and incarcerated, and children tried as adults. Krista draws out his spirit and his moral imagination.

Bryan Stevenson  – is the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama and Aronson Family Professor of Criminal Justice at New York University School of Law. He is the author of The New York Times bestseller Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

This phrase recurs throughout Clint Smith's writing: "in the marrow of our bones." It is an example of how words can hold encrypted wisdom — in this case, the reality that memory and emotion lodge in us physically. Words and phrases have carried this truth forward in time long before we had the science to understand it.

Clint Smith is best known for his 2021 book, How the Word Is Passed, but he is first and foremost a poet. He and Krista discuss how his various life chapters have been real-world laboratories for him to investigate the entanglement between language and the intelligence of the body — and the related entanglement between history and place. His poetic sensibility has singularly opened readers to approach a generative reckoning with American history — on whatever side of that history our ancestors stood.

Clint Smith has a way of making reckoning possible at a humanizing, softening, bodily level — in the marrow, you might say, of our bones.

Clint Smith is a staff writer at The Atlantic. His narrative nonfiction book, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction and many other honors. His poetry collections are Counting Descent and Above Ground.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

______

Sign up for The Pause — a Saturday morning companion to the podcast season.

One of the great challenges of life is to learn to be alone peaceably, at home in oneself. And now, by way of a virus, we have been sent inside physically and emotionally, even if we’re not home on our own. We’re forced to work out the difference between isolation and loneliness or solitude. With teachers across the ages and drawing on his life from monasticism to marriage, Buddhist writer and scholar Stephen Batchelor teaches how to approach solitude as a graceful and life-giving practice.

Stephen Batchelor teaches seminars and leads meditation retreats worldwide. He’s a co-founder and faculty member of Bodhi College, which is focused on the study and practice of early Buddhism. His many books include Buddhism Without Beliefs, The Faith to Doubt, and most recently, The Art of Solitude. 

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org