Dear friends,

I write this brief missive from India, where I arrived in the middle of last night — my very first trip here, after many years of longing to visit — a trip that was first planned for 2020 and several times delayed. I'm joining a Compassionate Leadership Summit with His Holiness the Dalai Lama and a group of spiritual teachers, social innovators, and young global leaders. One of those, by the way, is Kristin Lin, who developed and wrote The Pause in its earliest days! She's now at the New York Times. The summit proceedings will be recorded and posted on YouTube and on the Healthy Minds Innovations website — look for those around the 20th or 21st. Our producer/sound designer Zack Rose is with me, and we will be recording audio to possibly share in some form later.

Several exciting things unfolded just as I was leaving. News came through that On Being friends and former guests Drew Lanham and Robin Wall Kimmerer have been awarded prestigious MacArthur Foundation fellowships. This is so richly deserved. We are all incredibly fortunate to have their true genius — and deep goodness — in our human midst. 

And, we just released the beginning of a special, short four-part series in the On Being podcast feed: On Being Foundations. It's a different kind of offering than the show — a much shorter listen, for starters, with each session touching on a teaching and invitation for pondering and practice in the ordinary interactions of life. This is also a way for us to pull back the veil on how we're getting grounded in our core values and insights gleaned over two decades as we prepare for a season of new, big On Being conversations in the new year and build out the Lab for the Art of Living. The Foundations series emerged as a muscle we've gained through the Lab's ongoing Wisdom app experiment, and may be familiar to some. It is designed for journaling with, if you're so inclined — and you might consider inviting someone, or even a few others, to listen and walk through the four sessions with you. And let us know what you think and how this works for you, either in our social media channels or at artofliving@onbeing.org.