To access all our features

Open the Goodpods app
Close icon

On Being with Krista Tippett

On Being Studios

Star filled black icon

4.9

(49)

A season of big, new, beautiful On Being conversations is here. Adventures into what can replenish and orient us in this wild ride of a time to be alive: biomimicry and the science of awe; spiritual contrarianism and social creativity; pause and poetry and more towards stretching into this world ahead with dignity, wisdom — and joy. On Being, which began on public radio, has been named a best podcast by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, the Webbys, iHeart Radio — with more than 400 million downloads. From Feb 2: three months of soaring conversations to live and grow with — with an eye towards emergence. Tune in now.

 ...more

65 Listeners

All episodes

Best episodes

Top 10 On Being with Krista Tippett Episodes

Best episodes ranked by Goodpods Users most listened

episode art
play

12/12/19 • 51 min

Star filled black icon

5.0

“Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet / confinement of your aloneness / to learn / anything or anyone / that does not bring you alive / is too small for you.” David Whyte is a poet and philosopher who believes in the power of a “beautiful question” amid the drama of work as well as the drama of life and the ways the two overlap. He shared a deep friendship with the late Irish philosopher John O’Donohue. They were, David Whyte says, like “two bookends.” More recently, he’s written about the consolation, nourishment, and underlying meaning of everyday words.

David Whyte is an associate fellow at Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford. His books include The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America, Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment, and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words and The Bell and The Blackbird. His latest collection is David Whyte: Essentials.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org. This show originally aired in April 2016.

7 Listeners

4

bookmark
share episode
episode art
play

05/26/22 • 50 min

Star filled black icon

5.0

It has ever and always been true, David Whyte reminds us, that so much of human experience is a conversation between loss and celebration. This conversational nature of reality — indeed, this drama of vitality — is something we have all been shown, willing or unwilling, in these years. Many have turned to David Whyte for his gorgeous, life-giving poetry and his wisdom at the interplay of theology, psychology, and leadership — his insistence on the power of a beautiful question and of everyday words amidst the drama of work as well as the drama of life. The notion of “frontier” — inner frontiers, outer frontiers — weaves through this hour. We surface this as a companion for the frontiers we are all on just by virtue of being alive in this time.

David Whyte is the author of many books of poetry and prose. He grew up with a strong, imaginative influence from his Irish mother among the hills and valleys of his father’s Yorkshire. He now makes his home in the Pacific Northwest of the United States. He holds a degree in Marine Zoology and has worked as a naturalist guide in the Galapagos Islands. His books include The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America, Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words, and The Bell and the Blackbird. His latest collections are David Whyte: Essentials and Still Possible.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

This show originally aired in April, 2016.

5 Listeners

1

bookmark
share episode
episode art
play

04/23/20 • 51 min

Star filled black icon

5.0

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

4 Listeners

5

bookmark
share episode
episode art

Foundations 2: Living the Questions

On Being with Krista Tippett

play

10/20/22 • 7 min

Star filled black icon

5.0

We live in a world in love with the form of words that is an opinion, and the way with words that is an argument. Yet it is a deep truth in life — as in science — that each of us is shaped as much by the quality of the questions we are asking as by the answers we have it in us to give. Precisely at a moment like this, of vast aching open questions and very few answers we can agree on, our questions themselves become powerful tools for living and growing.

"If you are faithful to living a question, that question will be faithful back to you."

Experience the whole collection of four Foundations for Being Alive Now on the On Being Project website.

4 Listeners

1

bookmark
share episode
episode art
play

06/23/22 • 50 min

Star filled black icon

5.0

“What a time to be alive,” adrienne maree brown has written. “Right now we are in a fast river together — every day there are changes that seemed unimaginable until they occurred.” adrienne maree brown and others use many words and phrases to describe what she does, and who she is: A student of complexity. A student of change and of how groups change together. A “scholar of belonging.” A “scholar of magic.” She grew up loving science fiction, and thought we’d be driving flying cars by now; and yet, has found in speculative fiction the transformative force of vision and imagination that might in fact save us. Our younger listeners have asked to hear adrienne maree brown’s voice on On Being, and here she is, as we enter our own time of evolution. This conversation shines a light on an emerging ecosystem in our world over and against the drumbeat of what is fractured and breaking: working with the complex fullness of reality, and cultivating old and new ways of seeing, to move towards a transformative wholeness of living.

--

In this time of new suns here at On Being, we are in learning mode — listening to the world, and listening to you.

Would you take a few minutes to visit onbeing.org/survey and answer a few questions that will help us know who you are and how On Being can accompany you in the time ahead?

We would be so grateful... 🙏

--

adrienne maree brown is the author of wildly influential books including Emergent Strategy, We Will Not Cancel Us and Pleasure Activism, as well as a workbook for facilitation and mediation, Holding Change. She is the co-editor of Octavia’s Brood and co-hosts several podcasts, including Octavia’s Parables and How to Survive the End of the World. She is the writer-in-residence at the Emergent Strategy Ideation Institute, which she founded.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

4 Listeners

2

bookmark
share episode
episode art

Bryan Stevenson — Love is the Motive

On Being with Krista Tippett

play

12/03/20 • 50 min

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.

4 Listeners

bookmark
share episode
episode art
play

05/12/22 • 50 min

Few books have been more eagerly passed from hand to hand with delight in these last years than Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass. Krista interviewed her in 2015, and it quickly became a much-loved show as her voice was just rising in common life. Robin is a botanist and also a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. She’s written, “Science polishes the gift of seeing, Indigenous traditions work with gifts of listening and language.” An expert in moss — a bryologist — she describes mosses as the “coral reefs of the forest.” Robin Wall Kimmerer opens a sense of wonder and humility for the intelligence in all kinds of life we are used to naming and imagining as inanimate.

And, this week, an invitation: Krista recently announced that in June we are transitioning On Being from a weekly show to a seasonal podcast. We hope you’ll help us celebrate this threshold, and 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 created a way for you to record your reflection simply — 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.

Robin Wall Kimmerer is the State University of New York Distinguished Teaching Professor at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse. She is founding director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment. She works with tribal nations on environmental problem-solving and sustainability. Part of that work is about recovering lineages of knowledge that were made illegal in the policies of tribal assimilation which did not fully end in the U.S. until the 1970s. Her books include Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses and Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

This show originally aired in February 2016.

3 Listeners

bookmark
share episode
episode art
play

05/19/22 • 50 min

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.

14 Listeners

bookmark
share episode
episode art
play

01/21/21 • 50 min

In so many stories and fables that shape us, cold and snow, the closing in of the light — these have deep psychological as much as physical reality. This is “wintering,” as the English writer Katherine May illuminates in her beautiful, meditative book of that title — wintering as at once a season of the natural world, a respite our bodies require, and a state of mind. It’s one way to describe our pandemic year: as one big extended communal experience of wintering. Some of us are laboring harder than ever on its front lines and also on its home front of parenting. All of us are exhausted. This conversation with Katherine May helps.

Katherine May is an author of fiction and memoir whose titles include Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times, The Electricity of Every Living Thing, and Burning Out. She is also the editor of an anthology of essays about motherhood, called The Best, Most Awful Job.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org

3 Listeners

1

bookmark
share episode
episode art
play

08/01/19 • 51 min

Star filled black icon

5.0

Forms of religious devotion are shifting — and there’s a new world of creativity toward crafting spiritual life while exploring the depths of tradition. Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie is a fun and forceful embodiment of this evolution. Born into an eminent and ancient rabbinical lineage, as a young adult he moved away from religion towards storytelling, theater, and drag. Today he leads a pop-up synagogue in New York City that takes as its tagline “everybody-friendly, artist-driven, God-optional.” It’s not merely about spiritual community but about recovering the sacred and reinventing the very meaning of “we.”

Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie is a rabbi and founding spiritual leader of Lab/Shul in New York City. He’s also the founding director of Storahtelling.

This interview originally aired in July 2017. Find the transcript and more at onbeing.org.

2 Listeners

1

bookmark
share episode

Show more

Toggle view more icon
























































Comments

4.9

out of 5

Star filled grey IconStar filled grey IconStar filled grey IconStar filled grey IconStar filled grey Icon
Star filled grey IconStar filled grey IconStar filled grey IconStar filled grey Icon
Star filled grey IconStar filled grey IconStar filled grey Icon
Star filled grey IconStar filled grey Icon
Star filled grey Icon

49 Ratings

Star iconStar iconStar iconStar iconStar icon

Review or comment on this podcast...

Post

Generate a badge

Get a badge for your website that links back to this

Select type & size
Open dropdown icon

Copy