Uploaded August 2025 | Updated September 2026, 1 hour ago
We’re opening a reflection/course experience curated by Krista and drawing upon her conversations with several visionary humans: adrienne maree brown, Naomi Shihab Nye, Ocean Vuong, Joy Harjo, Joanna Macy, and Ross Gay. Together, they extend rich and actionable invitations for a muscular, reality-based hope. They offer ways of seeing and living to lay our hands and our hearts, our imaginations and life force on the generative possibilities of life in this time.
Journaling Prompts for Session
We’ve created a beautiful journal for the whole seven weeks, with full-size printable pages, that you can download for free (onbeing.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Journal-full.pdf).
Preparing inwardly after listening, ask these questions:
Right now, today, what is filling you with despair? And what is giving you hope?
What is hope? Answer this question through the story of your life.
Who have been the “live human signposts” of muscular hope in your life across time? Hold their faces and the qualities of their presence in your heart and in your mind’s eye in the days to come.
A Possible Way to Organize This Experience
Take each week’s brief listening offering, each around 15 minutes long, as a meditation to move through the week ahead. And as none of the great virtues — and certainly not hope — is meant to be carried alone, we encourage you to undertake this experience alongside others, perhaps your life partner or family or colleagues or friends, book group or study group.
For example, you could:
Listen to one Wisdom Practice (roughly 15 minutes) — together or separately — around the same time each week. Listen again and/or read the transcript as often as is useful.
Carry the ideas, invitations, and journal prompts for the session into your ordinary interactions of the days that follow.
Commit to some time journaling every day, even if just for a few minutes or a few words.
Meet with or Zoom/call your companion(s) at the end of the week to share, converse, commune.
The Hope Portal and this series are adventures in opening the deep enduring teaching that lives inside the 20 years of On Being. We would be so grateful if you would let us know how it goes for you and how it might be refined, by writing to us at mail@onbeing.org.
We’re opening a reflection/course experience curated by Krista and drawing upon her conversations with several visionary humans: adrienne maree brown, Naomi Shihab Nye, Ocean Vuong, Joy Harjo, Joanna Macy, and Ross Gay. Together, they extend rich and actionable invitations for a muscular, reality-based hope. They offer ways of seeing and living to lay our hands and our hearts, our imaginations and life force on the generative possibilities of life in this time.
Journaling Prompts for Session
We’ve created a beautiful journal for the whole seven weeks, with full-size printable pages, that you can download for free (onbeing.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Journal-full.pdf).
Preparing inwardly after listening, ask these questions:
Right now, today, what is filling you with despair? And what is giving you hope?
What is hope? Answer this question through the story of your life.
Who have been the “live human signposts” of muscular hope in your life across time? Hold their faces and the qualities of their presence in your heart and in your mind’s eye in the days to come.
A Possible Way to Organize This Experience
Take each week’s brief listening offering, each around 15 minutes long, as a meditation to move through the week ahead. And as none of the great virtues — and certainly not hope — is meant to be carried alone, we encourage you to undertake this experience alongside others, perhaps your life partner or family or colleagues or friends, book group or study group.
For example, you could:
Listen to one Wisdom Practice (roughly 15 minutes) — together or separately — around the same time each week. Listen again and/or read the transcript as often as is useful.
Carry the ideas, invitations, and journal prompts for the session into your ordinary interactions of the days that follow.
Commit to some time journaling every day, even if just for a few minutes or a few words.
Meet with or Zoom/call your companion(s) at the end of the week to share, converse, commune.
The Hope Portal and this series are adventures in opening the deep enduring teaching that lives inside the 20 years of On Being. We would be so grateful if you would let us know how it goes for you and how it might be refined, by writing to us at mail@onbeing.org.






![Sylvia Boorstein – What We Nurture
Sylvia Boorstein says spirituality doesn’t have to look like sitting down and meditating. A Jewish-Buddhist teacher and psychotherapist, Boorstein says spirituality can be as simple as “folding the towels in a sweet way and talking kindly to the people in [your] family even though you’ve had a long day.” And she insists that nurturing our inner lives in this way is not a luxury but something we can do in the service of others — from our children to strangers in the checkout line at the grocery store. (Original Air Date: May 5, 2011)
About the Guest:
Sylvia Boorstein is a founding teacher of Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Woodacre, California. Her books include “That’s Funny, You Don’t Look Buddhist” and “Making Friends with the Present Moment.”
Visit our website to read the transcript, download the episode, or listen to the unedited interview: https://onbeing.org/programs/sylvia-boorstein-what-we-nurture/
Visit our On Being Classics Library, where this episode is featured:
https://onbeing.org/libraries/classics/
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Becoming Wise: https://onbeing.org/series/becoming-wise/ Sylvia Boorstein – What We Nurture](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/eHi3gqpKd7Q/mqdefault.jpg)



