Intention is the seed that determines our behaviors and creates our experience. Tara Brach elaborates in her talk on The Liberating Power of Conscious Intention.

Emotions are powerful sources of information we can learn to use wisely. Listen to Josh Korda of Dharma Punx explain more here 

Rutger Bregman asks if we can we take our capacity for goodness more seriously in his book, Humankind: A Hopeful History. Listen to him  ​here.

Trending on Netflix this week was the 1996 film, The Mirror Has Two Faces, which explores an idea that has become novel in the last two decades: getting to know someone deeply over time. It doesn't have to be limited to the dating world, but this article on "Slow Dating" explores the idea in the realm of romance.

In psychoanalytic therapy, "the third" is the space where two different truths come together to form a new understanding that is shared between two people. Finding the third is a process of struggle and commitment, and the ability to find it coincides with a more evolved state of being for both participants. It means each person can make space for the other's truth while holding on to their own. Jad Abumrad explains it here in, How Dolly Parton led me to an epiphany.

"We can choose to walk through it, dragging our carcasses of our prejudice and hatred... our dead rivers and smokey skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it." Kirsten Dirksen's beautiful film takes us around the world to look at how people are living with and responding creatively to the pandemic. How will we live? Urban prepping and rural resilience.

Spending time in the natural world can be a valuable antidote to the psychological impacts of having to shelter at home. Consider this article from The Atlantic How to get high on soil

Stories about how we should live our lives can be seductive, they provide guidelines for achieving a supposedly happy life by appealing to the parts of us that want security and safety, usually through social acceptance. But they are limiting. Paul Dolan, social and behavioral psychologist at the London School of Economics, explores this in The money, job, marriage myth.

Power, culture, status, race, gender, hierarchies, identity, politics- we all shape and are shaped by the world around us. We have many theories for analyzing and talking about this, many of which perpetuate a sense of alienation. Instead, ​Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie uses story, which is universal. Listen to her below.
"Think of people as people, not as abstractions who have to conform to bloodless logic, but as people- fragile, imperfect, with prides that can be wounded and hearts that can be touched."