Illustrations by Vicki Turner
We have never been separate from the Earth. Yet our connection to the living world can be difficult to feel, even as ecological challenges reveal how deeply our lives depend on it.
Mind & Life is exploring Earth awareness: the understanding and lived experience of our interdependence with the living world. Building on our focus on interconnectedness and climate change, we bring people and perspectives together, support research, and share ideas and practices to help this emerging field grow. Central to this work is how contemplative practices can deepen our connection with the Earth and help us respond to the climate crisis with resilience, care, and responsibility.
Drawing on science, contemplative wisdom, and diverse ways of knowing, we examine how Earth awareness develops, how it can be studied and measured, and how it takes shape through everyday choices and collective action.
The SSIR Series
Belonging to the Earth in a Changing World
A special series from Mind & Life and Stanford Social Innovation Review, with generous support from the BESS Family Foundation.
What might change if we more fully understood ourselves as part of the living world? Across seven essays, discover ideas and practical approaches for bringing reciprocity into everyday life, integrating Earth awareness into teaching and learning, recognizing our agency to create change, and connecting inner development with efforts to transform systems. Together, these perspectives offer fresh possibilities for how we live, lead, and care for the Earth. The series launches November 16!
Inside the series
- A Missing Dimension of Climate Action — Shelly Chigier
- Living in Reciprocity — Karen Waconda-Lewis
- Is the Ecological Crisis a Meaning Crisis? — David R. Loy
- From Climate Anxiety to Collective Action — Philippe Goldin, Jyoti Mishra, Gail Wright & Elissa Epel
- Well-Being as Relationship — Amaya Carrasco-Torrontegui & Carlos Andrés Gallegos-Riofrio
- Scaling Change Through Fractal Agency — Karen O’Brien
- The Neglected Half of Change — Jamie Bristow & Rebecca Henderson
Continue Exploring
A few places to go deeper through freely accessible Mind & Life content.
Listen
- Social and Ecological Mindfulness — Jon Kabat-Zinn, Paula Ramírez Diazgranados & Liane Stephan
How mindfulness can help us engage with trauma, conflict, food systems, and ecological crisis - Human-Earth Connection — Dekila Chungyalpa
Indigenous wisdom, Buddhist values, science, and community as resources for understanding interdependence
Read
- What the Mind Has to Do with the Climate Crisis — Christine Wamsler
Inner capacities that can strengthen connection and support a more sustainable future. - Contemplative and Ecological Education — Pooja Sanhi
Rethinking how we nurture resilience, attention, and well-being among students.
Experience
- A contemplative Earth awareness practice, Body as Mountain, led by Lama Willa Miller.
How Mind & Life Is Advancing This Inquiry
Building community. We bring researchers, contemplatives, Indigenous knowledge holders, educators, artists, practitioners, and others together to exchange ideas and spark collaboration.
Supporting research. Through grantmaking and field-building, we support research into experiences of interdependence, practices that may cultivate Earth awareness, and connections to well-being, resilience, care, agency, and action.
Sharing knowledge. Through the Mind & Life Podcast, publications, public programs, and partnerships, we bring emerging knowledge and lived experience to broader audiences.
Stay Connected
To continue exploring these questions with Mind & Life, sign up for updates featuring new research, ideas, podcast episodes, events, and opportunities to engage across our work.
We are grateful to the BESS Family Foundation for its generous support and partnership
as we explore how Earth awareness can inspire care and action.
