On Being with Krista Tippett

On Being Studios

Wisdom to replenish and orient in a tender, tumultuous time to be alive. Spiritual inquiry, science, social healing, and poetry. Conversations to live by. With a 20-year archive featuring luminaries like Mary Oliver, Thich Nhat Hanh, and Desmond Tutu, each episode brings a new discovery about the immensity of our lives. Hosted by Krista Tippett, Learn more about the On Being Project’s work in the world at onbeing.org.

  1. 22 HR AGO

    Gül Dölen – Psychedelic Science and Radical Healing

    From Krista: The word “trauma” is used so widely at present, arguably too widely. But it bespeaks a tenor of our shared reality. This episode is a journey inside what I've come to see as a parallel universe unfolding, where our species is unlocking knowledge about ourselves and capacities for radical healing of the most extreme trauma and distress. These findings are even giving rise to dramatic healing alliances across political and social lines that are inflamed in the culture at large.  At universities and research laboratories around the U.S. and the world, there are countless clinical studies, yielding results it’s hard not at times to call miraculous — for complex PTSD, long-term addiction, treatment-resistant depression. What I’m talking about are therapeutically-administered treatments with plant medicines and chemical compounds we call psychedelic or empathogenic. Use those words, and many of us — including me until not that long ago — might become wary. Like all forces of great power, these can cut in every direction — the dark and the light of the human condition. But the conversation you are about to hear, with one of the leading neuroscientists in this field, revolves around serious, important research in settings designed for careful, beneficial human effect. Gül Dölen's groundbreaking contribution to all of us is in her fascinating insight into what psychedelically-assisted therapies are revealing about the workings of the human brain and the brain's capacity to change and the human capacity for major transformation altogether. The potential consequences of this science are intimate and civilizational at once. I see them as a stunning ray of hope in a struggling world. I interviewed Gül Dölen at the 2025 Aspen Ideas Festival. Find an excellent transcript of this show, edited by humans, on our show page. Sign yourself and others up for The Pause to be on our mailing list for all things On Being and to receive Krista's monthly Saturday newsletter, including a heads up on new episodes, special offerings, recommendations, and event invitations. Gül Dölen leads the Dölen Lab at U.C. Berkeley, where she is a Professor and the Bob & Renee Parsons Endowed Chair in the Department of Neuroscience and the Department of Psychology at the Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics and the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute. She also maintains an Adjunct Professorship in Neuroscience and Neurology at the Johns Hopkins University, School of Medicine.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

    1h 8m

  2. 26 FEB

    Joy Harjo and Tracy K. Smith – "This world is full of everything good, everything beautiful."

    From Krista: These days I sometimes have to remind myself to keep breathing. I think this is true of human beings across all of our differences and divides. But in a room in New York City just before the turn of this year, I was regrounded by this fierce and joyous conversation with Joy Harjo and Tracy K. Smith.  I invite you to settle into your soft breathing body with these two wise women as companions and with a sense of poetry as a technology, as Tracy describes in her new book: a technology for rising to our truest, highest selves, even amidst grief and mystery and danger, and bearing witness to each other as we do so.  I think all of us in the room left a little more lighthearted and alive as this conversation unfolded. I hope that will be your experience too.  Tracy K. Smith and Joy Harjo are former U.S. poet laureates, beloved On Being guests, and friends. They are each wildly and deservedly awarded and not just as poets — Tracy also as a teacher and professor at Harvard, Joy as a saxophonist and painter. We were brought together at Symphony Space in Manhattan to celebrate their newest books: Fear Less by Tracy and Girl Warrior by Joy. Find an excellent transcript of this show, edited by humans, on our show page.  Sign yourself and others up for The Pause to be on our mailing list for all things On Being and to receive Krista's monthly Saturday newsletter, including a heads up on new episodes, special offerings, recommendations, and event invitations. Joy Harjo was the 23rd Poet Laureate of the United States. Among many honors, she has received the Poetry Society of America's Frost Medal and a National Humanities Medal. She is the inau­gur­al Artist-in-Res­i­dence for the Bob Dylan Cen­ter in Tul­sa, Okla­homa. She lives on the Musco­gee Nation Reser­va­tion in Oklahoma. Her new book of essays is Girl Warrior. Forthcoming in 2026 is her 12th book of poetry and a new album co-produced with esperanza spalding. Tracy K. Smith was the 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States. She teaches at Harvard University, where she is Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory, Professor of African and African American Studies, and Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute. Among her many honors, she has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry  and is a Chancellor of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her new memoir is Fear Less. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

    1h 9m

  3. 19 FEB

    A New Season for a Tender New Year

    Five new On Being episodes will begin to roll out next week … We begin with the delightful beloved poets (and friends) Joy Harjo and Tracy K. Smith in conversation together with Krista. We move on to the neuroscientist Gül Dölen; a community of Israelis and Palestinians who will expand your heart and moral imagination; philosopher rabbi Shai Held; and, because we can't get enough of him, a wonderful new sit-down with Krista and Jason Reynolds on hope in this time and in friendship with the young in our world. All of them offer beauty and pragmatic nourishment for ourselves and for witnessing each other's hurt and each other's promise. There is searching and pondering on what love really means and how it works and what hope can mean in this world in which hopelessness feels so reasonable. And be prepared to be amazed in an introduction to majestic learning underway about new, transformative healing of our brains and our lives emerging from the frontier of psychedelically-assisted therapeutic treatments. Please help us spread the word, and join us! Sign yourself and others up for The Pause to be on our mailing list for all things On Being and to receive Krista's monthly Saturday newsletter, including a heads up on new episodes, special offerings, recommendations, and event invitations. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

    1 min

  4. 03/10/2025

    Jane Goodall, In Memoriam — What It Means to Be Human

    The great primatologist and humanitarian, Jane Goodall, died on October 1, 2025, at the age of 91. It is a joy and a comfort to revisit our last broadcast of her 2020 conversation with Krista.  Jane Goodall began her epic work studying chimpanzees in the Gombe forest without even a college degree. The science she proceeded to do recalled modern western science to the fact that we are a part of nature, not separate from it. She spent the last decades of her life on the road, often with the young, tending to human fear and misunderstanding. In this beautiful conversation from pandemic lockdown, she shared the moral and spiritual wisdom that emerged in her extraordinary life — and the hope that, to the end, sustained her. Jane Goodall was the founder of the Jane Goodall Institute and its youth program, Roots & Shoots. She has been the subject of many films and documentaries, including “Jane Goodall: The Hope.” Her many books include In the Shadow of Man, Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey, and most recently, The Book of Hope: A Survival Guide for Trying Times.  Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org. This show originally aired in August, 2020. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

    51 min

  5. 22/07/2025

    Joanna Macy, In Memoriam — Beauty and Wisdom and Courage (and Rilke) to Sustain Us

    This rich, gorgeous conversation will fill your soul. The singular and beloved Joanna Macy died at home at the age of 96 on July 20, 2025. She has left an immense legacy of beauty and wisdom and courage to sustain us. A Buddhist teacher, ecological philosopher, and Rilke translator, she taught and embodied a wild love for the world. What follows is the second and final conversation Krista had with Joanna, together with Joanna’s friend, psychologist and fellow Rilke translator Anita Barrows, in 2021. Joanna and Anita had just published a new translation of Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet. At the turn of the last tumultuous century, Rilke was prescient in realizing that the world as he’d known it was passing away. Joanna’s adventurous life and vision took shape in the crucibles of the history that then unfolded. Relistening to her now is to experience a way of standing before the great, unfolding dramas of our time — ecological, political, intimate. We stand before the possibilities of what Joanna called “A Great Unraveling” or “A Great Turning” towards life-generating human society. All of this and so much more comes through in the riches of this life-giving conversation.  Sign yourself and others up for The Pause to be on our mailing list for all things On Being and to receive Krista's monthly Saturday morning newsletter, including a heads-up on new episodes, special offerings, recommendations, and event invitations. Joanna Macy was the root teacher of The Work That Reconnects. Her books include Active Hope and four volumes of translated works of Rainer Maria Rilke, together with Anita Barrows: Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God;  In Praise of Mortality; and A Year with Rilke. Krista's previous "On Being” episode with her is “A Wild Love for the World.” That’s also the title of a lovely book of homage to Joanna that was published in 2020.  Anita Barrows’s most recent poetry collection is Testimony. She is the Institute Professor of Psychology at the Wright Institute in Berkeley, California, and also maintains a private practice.

    51 min

  6. 10/07/2025

    Ross Gay — Hope Portal, Episode 7

    Ross Gay is a poet, community gardener, and teacher who brings another way of wisdom to the conviction that we have to know what we love and what delights us. And that we have to tend to that as fiercely as to what is broken and what we’re called to make better, what we’re called to make more just. Knowing what we love and knowing how to take delight is fuel even — and especially — in times of great challenge. This is something we can practice moment to moment, he teaches, through every ordinary day. Journaling prompts for Session 7 Give your curiosity and your journaling during this week over to a practice of delight. As you move through your smallest interactions, look for moments/sightings/experiences that bring flashes of light into your day. Do you notice “unambiguously pleasant public physical interactions”? What is pleasant and sweet and tender? Can you feel how attending to delight as seriously as hardship nourishes a reality-bending imagination and passion for justice and hope that is as joyful as it is fierce? We've created a beautiful journal for the whole seven weeks, with full-size printable pages, that you can download for free HERE. 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.  Sign yourself and others up for The Pause to be first to know about all things On Being and to receive Krista's monthly Saturday morning newsletter, including a heads-up on new episodes, special offerings, recommendations, and event invitations.

    10 min

  7. 03/07/2025

    Joy Harjo — The Hope Portal Ep. 6

    Our teacher this time is the extraordinary Joy Harjo. She is a musician, a visual artist, a member of the Muscogee Creek Nation, and she’s also former Poet Laureate of the United States. From the beginning of her life, from childhood and even before, she has carried and retained a sense of space and time and life that is so much vaster than present circumstances. She uses this evocative phrase for the sense of time she knows and lives. She calls it “the whole of time.” It is stunning to be present to Joy Harjo and see someone who holds this sense of time. She’s always known it — never lost it — and she beckons us to enter and relearn. Journaling prompts for Session 6 Summon your 200-Year present. Take your mind back to the youngest age you can remember and to the oldest person you remember holding you. Roughly calculate the year of their birth and the history that shaped their lifetime. And who is the youngest person you have held in your arms most recently? Imagine a robust life for them — both the age and year to which they could live. Try to inhabit this expanse of history that you have literally touched and been touched by. Can you feel in your body, in your imagination, a more spacious grasp of time itself and of possibility and agency? What difference might it make? We've created a beautiful journal for the whole seven weeks, with full-size printable pages, that you can download for free HERE. 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.  Sign yourself and others up for The Pause to be first to know about all things On Being and to receive Krista's monthly Saturday morning newsletter, including a heads-up on new episodes, special offerings, recommendations, and event invitations.

    17 min

  8. 26/06/2025

    Joanna Macy — Hope Portal, Episode 5

    Our teacher and inspiration for this session is Joanna Macy. What she embodies is a wild love for the world and a fierce hope that rises irrepressible from that. And she carries and lives an important reminder to us that when we love, we will also know pain, and we will know grief that can feel too awful to bear. When we talk about the muscle of hope being reality-based, that means that it does not call us to be brimming with optimism where that is not warranted. What we’re called to do is stay present. And when you’re present, there will be grieving to do, but that this — strangely, interestingly, kind of miraculously — increases our capacity to love this world. And it unleashes intelligence and ingenuity to sustain that love across a lifetime, as Joanna Macy has. Journaling prompts for Session 5 What is the love on the other side of your pain? What is a loss you have perhaps not quite acknowledged? The despair that you began to write about at the outset of this experience, the despair you may be feeling for the world today — what would it mean to stand reverently before your grief? Can you imagine what it would mean — to sit with what it would mean — to turn it into a mourning that brings you more deeply into the love that lies just on the other side of your pain? We've created a beautiful journal for the whole seven weeks, with full-size printable pages, that you can download for free HERE. 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.  Sign yourself and others up for The Pause to be first to know about all things On Being and to receive Krista's monthly Saturday morning newsletter, including a heads-up on new episodes, special offerings, recommendations, and event invitations.

    12 min
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Wisdom to replenish and orient in a tender, tumultuous time to be alive. Spiritual inquiry, science, social healing, and poetry. Conversations to live by. With a 20-year archive featuring luminaries like Mary Oliver, Thich Nhat Hanh, and Desmond Tutu, each episode brings a new discovery about the immensity of our lives. Hosted by Krista Tippett, Learn more about the On Being Project’s work in the world at onbeing.org.

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