Spirit and Change

10/28/2024

This episode of Butterfly Arose continues learning from Doctor Danielle Ofri in her book When We Do Harm, A Doctor Confronts Medical Error. Where the last episode looked at procedural errors, this one looks at cognitive errors, the harm they can cause and what, if anything, can be done about them.

Listen now | This episode of Butterfly Arose continues learning from Doctor Danielle Ofri in her book When We Do Harm, A Doctor Confronts Medical Error.

09/25/2024

After two episodes of Butterfly Arose in which I looked at the case of David Reimer, the boy who was raised as a girl through the experiences of both the patient and the doctor, I transitioned to a deeper look into the complex world of medicine. How do we minimize the likelihood of medical errors?

Using the book When We Do Harm by Danielle Ofri, MD I begin to look at the complex world of medicine and how we try to navigate it to get the best outcomes for everyone.

06/10/2024

This is a link to the About page of my Substack where I post podcasts once or twice a month. You can subscribe for free to listen to all of them, almost all 20 minutes or less in length.

An invitation to live your deepest values and my podcasts and writing where I live my own. Click to read Sacred Gyre Substack, by Emily Pittman Newberry, a Substack publication. Launched a year ago.

06/10/2024

I am going to go off Facebook soon. If you want to keep up with the work I am doing as a writer you can find me on LinkedIn or go to mu Substack at emilypnewberry.substack.com. or just google Sacred Gyre Substack.

06/01/2024

I just finished watching this video on cancel culture. I thought it was thoughtful, funny at times, and a more balanced view than you sometimes see in the media.

Watch The Turning Point: XCLD: The Story of Cancel Culture (Season 1, Episode 1) of XCLD: The Story of Cancel Culture or get episode details on NBC.com

05/19/2024

An article on the 20th anniversary of the first-ever state-sanctioned weddings between same-sex couples in Massachusetts, I send you this article by Dr. Jesse Ehrenfeld on how the right to marry for gay and le***an couples has made our country a better place for us all.

05/19/2024

Episode 15, Pax by Annie Lighthart, is now live.

In Episode 14 of Sacred Gyre I said I would read a selection of poems from Annie Lighthart's new book Pax, and it is now live. As I say in the opening, I think the connection Annie has to nature and humanity is why, as the blurb on the back or her book says, "Pax is a book of peace, a book of love poems to the world." And, I would add, qualities that come through her as a friend. I offer my readings from her book as an introduction to Annie and her poetry.

In preparation for this episode of Sacred Gyre, I asked Annie to read these poems again, for herself, and to send me a word or phrase that came up for her on each one. She did, and so after I tell you the name of the poem, I will relate her words as well as something about the poem that is meaningful for me.

I hope you enjoy my reading of her poems and that it helps you encounter them in a way that reading them to yourself does not. And please go to the Sacred Gyre Books and Links section of my website at emilypnewberry DOT Substack DOT com to be directed to her website and her book. Or you can just Google Sacred Gyre Substack.

I read a selection of poems from her new book. I hope you get as lost in them as I did.

05/09/2024

I was challenged emotionally by the content of an episode for my Butterfly Arose podcast and was worried those feelings might come through in the way I wrote the content for it. I am pausing Butterfly Arose to do two episodes of Sacred Gyre so I can help myself stay connected to my deepest values. In this episode I explain why, and in the next Sacred Gyre I will do a reading from a poetry book. In a short 12 minutes I explain why.

The book Finding Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi can be found HERE. A Youtube video on Flow by GrowthMindset can be found HERE. And HERE is a TED talk by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

05/01/2024

A well reasoned article on free speech.

The tables have turned. But cancel culture is still bad for democracy.

04/30/2024

This writer I think eloquently writes about why both antisemitism and islamophobia are on the rise in America, and why it is important to oppose both if we are to live up to our ideals as a liberal democracy.

The two hatreds have similar causes and thus must be jointly opposed

03/30/2024

I found this video an easy watch because it talks about the complex question of what underlies human happiness on a country by country basis in terms understandable to the average person. One conclusion I found to be most positive in terms of hope for the future is that a high rate of life satisfaction does not require some idea of a "perfect" country.

When UnPopulist Senior Producer Landry Ayres moved to Finland three years ago, he'd heard it was the happiest country in the world as deemed by the UN's Worl...

03/22/2024

We humans are complicated beings, with the potential for doing both good and harm to each other and two the world in which we live. This is a story of racism, rebirth, courage and perseverance among other things.

When a captain took on an illegal cargo of slaves, he couldn’t foresee the ramifications