In this conversation, Kazu Haga—activist, trainer, and author of Fierce Vulnerability: Healing from Trauma, Emerging Through Collapse—joins host Serena Bian to explore why healing is so essential to radically reimagining the worlds we wish to build in the midst of collapse.
Part of the Listening to the Soul of Conflict Series
Facilitator and writer Shilpa Jain deeply understands the nature of being human. She is well known in her East Bay community for hosting more than 250 “Yes Jams!” over the last decade, encouraging laughter and play as she facilitates groups through conflict. Working with change makers—activists, artists, healers, executives, and young people—she helps them navigate conflict from a place of freedom and joy.
Part of the Listening to the Soul of Conflict Series
Part of the Listening to the Soul of Conflict Series
Join host Serena Bian in conversation with Anne and Terry Symens-Bucher, founders of Canticle Farm, a land-based community in Oakland, California, inspired by Franciscan spirituality and Joanna Macy’s body of teachings known as the Work That Reconnects.
Part of the Listening to the Soul of Conflict Series
Join TNS Host Serena Bian in conversation with Norma Wong, Zen priest and teacher about the art of war and conflict, who recently served to help facilitate a mutual path through the conflict between native culture and western discovery science during the construction of a telescope on Mauna Kea.
Part of the Listening to the Soul of Conflict Series
In this series, join Host Serena Bian in speaking with three people who bear witness to the best and worst of humanity, holding a courageous moral imagination. Working and witnessing the front lines of injustice, war, climate change, these peacebuilders, mystics, and storytellers hold space for the miraculous to emerge, refusing to be bound by a perceived reality of “what is possible.”
Part of the Listening to the Soul of Conflict Series
Bringing with her the traditional Aboriginal practices of dadirri—a sacred practice of deep listening, reflection, stillness and connection to the land—and yarning—a conversational practice used by indigenous Australians to share knowledge, stories, and culture, Dr. Catherine Olweny offers another pathway to Mastering the Art of Being. Cultivating this presence is a gift she found in her own life, one she shares with other clinicians, and one we can learn from as well. Follow along with Commonweal New School’s Summer 2026 Visiting Scholar Catherine Olweny journey as resident through her writings, podcasts, and exercises gathered during her visit.

One of our most beloved voices, Rachel Naomi Remen, died August 8, 2026. We offer this course in honor of her presence, which will be greatly missed. Rachel spent a lifetime at the threshold between medicine and mystery. This course gathers recordings from her decades at Commonweal New School, inviting you to sit with her not as a distant authority but as a companion—someone who spent her life listening closely to what it means to be human.
Jeanine M. Canty is a visionary scholar whose groundbreaking work illuminates the profound connections between consciousness, thought, and our relationship with the natural world. Her teaching weaves together social justice, ecological wisdom, and transformation. By reading her writings and watching or listening to recordings of her time in residence, you can explore how mind and spirit intersect with ecological healing in your own life.
Jeffrey J. Kripal holds the J. Newton Rayzor Chair in Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University. In this ongoing series of conversations, Jeffrey talks with Host Michael Lerner about his body of work—more than 13 groundbreaking books about the mystical and the erotic, the relationship of mind and matter, and parapsychological phenomena. Michael has been reading, talking, and meeting with Jeffrey for more than a year now, immersing himself in the consciousness worldview that Jeffrey presents in his books and teaching. Follow Michael's journey through these conversations.
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