Well worth the read. Michael is a special person.
Excerpts
The 1970s-1990s was an era of cultural convulsions. There was both awareness of the destructive social and environmental trends but also hope that we might achieve a better future. “Look at Mother Nature on the run in the 1970s,” the song went. Earth Day was established in 1970. The hope that we might “save the earth” reached its apotheosis around the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, when there was still some hope of a North-South contract for sustainable development. We sent a delegation of eight people to the Earth Summit. It never happened. Those hopes, while still extant, have increasingly been subsumed by the growing cadence of social, environmental, technological, economic, and political-military crises.
It is difficult to be healthy people on a sick planet. It is challenging to have hopes for a better future when natural and social systems are collapsing all around us.
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My world fell apart in 1983. My dog died, my father developed cancer, my marriage ended, and Commonweal’s funding collapsed. I had to lay off virtually the entire Commonweal staff including myself.
I discovered Integral Yoga. It fundamentally changed my mind map of healing and the mind. The transpersonal became real for me. The non-dual view that truth is one, paths are many, became real. The reality that a life of dedication is the path to inner peace became real. The Integral Yoga Community introduced me to Dean Ornish, MD. His work showing that yoga-based retreats could reverse coronary artery disease was a revelation. Dean and I and others began to imagine what other diseases we could test this approach with. We decided to try retreats at Commonweal for systemic lupus disease because it has good markers for regression. We did two lupus retreats with good results. We then did two retreats for the elderly with good results.
Then after my father developed cancer I decided I wanted to try working with cancer. This so frightened the Commonweal board of directors that they demoted me, turned power over to the business manager as executive director, and told me I could keep a powerless title as president. It was an interesting experience. I note it here only as a significant developmental stage. But then in 1984 I was awarded a MacArthur Prize Fellowship, grants began to flow in, the board forgave me, and I rebuilt Commonweal with the yoga-inspired vision of Commonweal being a flexible instrument for human service.