Awakin Readings

Remembering the Sacred

Every week, we post a short reading from various wisdom traditions that points to the sacred. Each excerpt is also accompanied by an audio recording, an illustration and translations. Subscribe Here.

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We Can See Only What We Can Think

Michael Lipson

Fortunately or not, everything we do is led by our thinking. There's just no way around it. Even if I say, "I'm going to stop thinking and let feeling be my guide" -- that's...

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16K reads, 13 comments

Sharing Someone Else's Wound

Ariel Burger

My son was on a trip, a semester-long program in Israel, and then they traveled to Poland for 10-days.  On this program, he made a good friend, a new friend, named Mason. And when they got t...

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13K reads, 15 comments

Looking Through A Window

Sam Harris

Everyone has had the experience of looking through a window and suddenly catching sight of his own reflection staring back at him from the glass. At that point, he can use the glass as a window, to se...

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13K reads, 6 comments

Gratitude Is More Than Thank You

Robin Wall Kimmerer

Gratitude is so much more than a polite “thank you.” It is the thread that connects us in a deep relationship, simultaneously physical and spiritual, as our bodies are fed and spirits nour...

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13K reads, 8 comments

Perfume Of Wholeness

Vimala Thakar

A new challenge awaits us at the beginning of the twenty-first century: to go beyond fragmentation, to go beyond the incompatible sets of values held even by serious-minded people, to mature beyond th...

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12K reads, 4 comments

"I"

Rabindranath Tagore

The color of my consciousness made the emerald green, and the ruby red. I gazed at the sky, and the light dazzled in the east and the west. I turned to the rose and exclaimed - ‘it’s...

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11K reads, 12 comments

Gymnastics Of Attention

Menka Sanghvi

I once tried an improv class to see if that would finally help calm my stage nerves. It didn't. But I did learn something amazing. If an actor is trying to show the audience that they love some...

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10K reads, 12 comments

Why Do We Send Flowers?

Alisha Gorder

Why do we send flowers? To make up for what is intangible? Those feelings we can’t hold in our hands and present as a gift to our loved ones? And why is it that the placeholders we choose &mdash...

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10K reads, 12 comments

Embracing Deep Transitions With Wisdom

Vanessa Andreotti

As we stand at the precipice of endings—of species, ecosystems, organizations, and systems themselves—the work of hospicing is to move beyond fear and embrace the deep transitions ahead wi...

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10K reads, 12 comments

Between Knowing And Not Knowing

Ruth Ozeki and Ezra Klein

Ezra Klein: I sometimes play with the idea — and recognizing that I know nothing in these areas — that a lot of what is being described here is simply unreliableness. And that sounds negat...

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9K reads, 8 comments

Staying True To Your Heart Is The Essence Of Life

Kerri Lake

You know how people will lament when they say, "Time to get back to reality,"" or "...yeah, but that's not how the real world works"? What is the real world? Who suggested...

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9K reads, 9 comments

The Best Day Of My Life

Douglas Harding

The best day of my life—my rebirthday, so to speak—was when I found I had no head. This is not a literary gambit, a witticism designed to arouse interest at any cost. I mean it in all seri...

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9K reads, 15 comments

Live As You Like But Renounce Internally

Siddharameshwar Maharaj

Reality is without attributes: it is not color, it is not music, it is not yellow or black, etc. What you see is only the qualified consciousness just as you see that bangles or armlets are both made ...

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9K reads, 5 comments

ABOUT AWAKIN READINGS

Awakin Readings started in 1996 as a way to remind ourselves of universal truths. Soon after, it began to be utilized as a discussion topic in weekly Awakin Circles in living rooms around the globe. Different artists and photographers offer a unique image for every reading; an audio recording is offered each week; and many volunteers collaborate to translate it into various languages. Our repository has over a thousand readings.

What is perhaps noteworthy about this effort is that it is entirely volunteer-run, and non-commercial, and has stayed that way for the last 25 years. For the many dozens of volunteer who contribute every week, this website is a labor of love.

We are grateful to Somik Raha, Liz Helgesen, and Rupali Bhuva for their consistent service for more than a decade. This website wouldn't be possible without the pioneering example Dinesh and Harshida Mehta's Awakin Circle of 25 years, and the larger field of ServiceSpace. Thank you.

To get engaged, join our newsletter or join the ServiceSpace community to explore volunteering.

"Compassion is a spontaneous movement of wholeness. It is not a studied decision to help the poor, to be kind to the unfortunate. Compassion has a tremendous momentum that naturally, choicelessly moves us to worthy action. It has the force of intelligence, creativity, and the strength of love. This vast intelligence that orders the cosmos is available to all. The beauty of life, the wonder of living, is that we share creativity, intelligence, and unlimited potential with the rest of the cosmos. To realize that we are not simply physical beings on a material planet, but that we are whole beings, each a miniature cosmos, each related to all of life in intimate, profound ways, should radically transform how we perceive ourselves, our environments, our social problems. Nothing can ever be isolated from wholeness." --Vimala Thakar