The New School at Commonweal

Join TNS Host Irwin Keller for a conversation with artist and oceans activist Josie Iselin. Josie creates hauntingly beautiful artwork featuring the seaweed and kelp of our Bay Area coastline and ocean. Her research accompanies the image-making process and leads her ever deeper into the science and ecology of the near-shore ocean universe. Co-presented with The Mesa Refuge. https://mesarefuge.org...

~Co-presented with Point Reyes Books~ Commonweal invites all to join in the return of Frank Ostaseski, a renowned teacher, in discussion with his friend, student, and New School Host Steve Heilig. In recent years Frank has endured both heart and stroke incidents, and he will talk about living through those challenges, his long friendship with the late Ram Dass, and more. Frank has distilled hard-w...

For nearly three decades, Commonweal, through its Juvenile Justice Program, has been an active and influential advocate for reforms of the California juvenile justice system. Now, the Governor has signed historic legislation (SB 823) that will permanently close the state’s youth prisons system, shifting all state-committed youth to county facilities and programs. This webinar will explore the impa...

Join Michael Lerner in conversation with Thomas Yeomans, author of writings on psychosynthesis and spiritual psychology as well as three volumes of poetry and a children’s book. He presently consults to individuals and organizations in Europe and North America on issues of personal and social change and transformation. Thomas Yeomans, PhD is the founder and director of the Concord Institute. His b...

Join Michael Lerner in conversation with Chris Desser—environmental lawyer and community activist. From our podcast: For me meditation practice… creates a place for me of rock bottom truth. Which isn’t to say that true things aren’t unfolding in the process, but it is a place where one just knows. And that knowing is—it’s not just that it’s a comfortable place to be, it’s an essential place to be…...

Join Michael Lerner in conversation with nurse midwives Ariska Razak, RN, and Carol Densmore, CNM, talking about birth and the healing wisdom of earth-based traditions. Ariska Razak, RN, CNM, MPH Arisika’s work integrates the disciplines of Women’s Studies/ Women’s Spirituality, and Women’s Health and Spiritual Dance, through the incorporation of the teachings of earth-based spiritual traditions,...

Across the United States, thousands of people, most of them in low-income or minority communities, live next to heavily polluting industrial sites. In Sacrifice Zones: The Front Lines of Toxic Chemical Exposure in the United States, Steve Lerner tells the stories of twelve communities, from Brooklyn to Pensacola, that rose up to fight the industries and military bases causing disproportionately hi...

In celebration of the 35th anniversary of Commonweal Garden, founder Avis Rappaport Licht—and Regenerative Design Institute founders Penny Livingston Stark and James Stark—speak with Michael Lerner about their work with the earth and teaching hundreds of programs on permaculture, nature awareness, and leadership. Join them as they honor all those who have contributed to making the Commonweal Garde...

~Co-presented with the Mesa Refuge~ Please join New School host and Zen Meditation teacher Jaune Evans in conversation with Buddhist meditation and organic gardening mentor Wendy Johnson. This dialogue will be grounded in the examination of four core principles of Zen Buddhism and gardening: cultivating the way, maintaining fertility in your practice, propagating new life, and tending the earth. T...

(A posting of a conversation from 2014 TNS Archives) Join us for conversation and with TNS Host Oren Slozberg and Lennon Flowers, founder of The Dinner Party: a community of mostly 20- and 30-somethings who’ve each experienced significant loss and who get together over dinner parties to talk about it and the ways in which it continues to affect their lives. Together, they’ve pioneered tools and co...

Co-presented with The Resilience Project at Commonweal This year we have all witnessed how major global stressors—from climate change and income inequality to pandemics and autocracy—can impact each other and cause massive, cascading changes in our world. At the same time, other factors including pollution, artificial intelligence, population growth, and social media seem unstoppable forces that e...

~Co-presented with Real Food Media~ Just about twenty years ago, several dozen of the nation’s leading scientists, ethicists, and environmentalists gathered in Bolinas, California, at Commonweal to draft a declaration of principles for the regulation, policy, and commercialization of the emerging technologies of genetically engineered organisms. The result? The Pacific Declaration. Now, two decade...

Jewish mystical traditions offer the adept a rich array of practices and paradigms supporting personal and communal healing and renewal. These include text, sacred time, sensory experience, meditation, imagination, play, and teshuvah—an annual and ongoing process of realigning the self with the cosmos. Join TNS host Irwin Keller in conversation with scholar and mystic, Rabbi Elliot Ginsburg, as th...

Oncologist Dr. Donald Abrams is a true pioneer on many important fronts—AIDS care, medical cannabis research and policy, the “right to die,” and integrative cancer care. He has also participated in a number of Commonweal’s projects, providing invaluable expertise. A full professor of medicine at UCSF, he has just retired after a long career and will talk about some of the many issues he has confro...

Join TNS Host Steve Heilig and Anna O’Malley in a conversation exploring the role of physician in society at this planetary moment, community resilience in the face of COVID, and allyship with nature. Anna O'Malley, MD Anna is an integrative family and community medicine physician, founded and directs Natura Institute for Ecology and Medicine in the Commonweal Garden, and cultivates the medicine o...

The Learning Community Series at The New School Join TNS host Steve Heiig with two long-time members of the Commonweal community, Rachel Naomi Remen, MD, and Marion Weber. Rachel is a master story-teller and co-founder of the Commonweal Cancer Help Program. She is the author of Kitchen Table Wisdom and My Grandfather's Blessing, both international best-sellers. Marion is a pioneer of the healing a...

The Learning Community Series at The New School Join TNS Host Michael Lerner in a webinar conversation with Lisa Simms Booth, the executive director at the Smith Center for Healing and the Arts. The Smith Center is a Washington, DC-based health, education, and arts nonprofit that develops and promotes physical, emotional, and mental resources for people affected by cancer. Lisa Simms Booth: In add...

The Learning Community Series at The New School Join TNS Host Michael Lerner in webinar conversation with Carl Safina, writer, marine conservationist, PBS host, and MacArthur fellow. Carl Safina’s lyrical non-fiction writing explores how humans are changing the living world, and what the changes mean for non-human beings and for us all. His work fuses scientific understanding, emotional connection...

The Learning Community Series at The New School During this liminal time, where many old borders seem to have vanished, we are all trying to re-imagine how we might serve as hospice workers for the old, and midwives of the new. Join us for this webinar from The Learning Community series at The New School at Commonweal featuring TNS Host Michael Lerner in conversation with journalist, teacher, entr...

The Learning Community at The New School Join us for a webinar conversation with TNS Host Michael Lerner and hospice and palliative care physician and educator BJ Miller about grief, public versus personal health, managing social distance while keeping the felt world alive, self-deliverance, and what to look for on the other side of the pandemic. Dr. BJ Miller has been on faculty at his alma mater...

The Learning Community Series at The New School What have we learned? How do we bring deep healing work online? For 35 years, the Commonweal Cancer Help Program has offered week-long retreats for people with cancer. For the past five years, Healing Circles has developed circles for a wide range of people and problems. With COVID-19, we have brought much of our Healing Circles work online. Our frie...

Part of The Learning Community Series at The New School Join TNS Host Michael Lerner in a two-part spiritual biography series with Sandra Maitri — artist, author, enneagram teacher, and long time teacher of the Diamond Approach to Inner Realization. The conversations follow her remarkable journey in spiritual work and provide insight into her work with both Claudio Naranjo and Hameed Ali, the foun...

Part of The Learning Community Series at The New School Join TNS Host Michael Lerner in a two-part spiritual biography series with Sandra Maitri — artist, author, enneagram teacher, and long time teacher of the Diamond Approach to Inner Realization. The conversations follow her remarkable journey in spiritual work and provide insight into her work with both Claudio Naranjo and Hameed Ali, the foun...

Part of The Learning Community Series at The New School “There are some experiences,” Brother David Steindl-Rast once said, “where only poems can carry the freight.” The myths of original peoples were often chanted and held in memorized poems. The great religious and spiritual texts are often poems. Join Rachel Naomi Remen and New School Host Michael Lerner in the next conversation in The Learning...

Join TNS Host Steve Heilig in this webinar conversation with Marvin Mutch, Ladybird Morgan, and Sandra Fish—co-founders of the Humane Prison Hospice Project, a new program at Commonweal. They will share inspirational, some might say revolutionary, firsthand accounts of prisoners finding great light and healing in the most unlikely of places. Marvin Mutch Marvin is spokesperson, liaison with prison...