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By Valerie Brown, JD, MA, PCC Recently, I was part of a webinar in a year-long online learning course on transformational leadership.  We opened the session with a ritual practice  For a moment, I was stunned.  In my rushed and productive life, moving breathlessly from thing to thing of a never-ending list, I had forgotten, lost track of […]

Cultivating a kinder world by reorienting your vision.

Ghost Ranch is a place that gives voice to ‘your whole self’, to ponder the big questions of life purpose, meaning, and direction.

“Our goal is to create a beloved community, and this will require a qualitative change in our souls as well as a quantitative change in our lives.” – Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. On their shoulders, we stand. We step forward because of the vision, the life, and the legacy, of people like, Rev.Dr. Martin […]

The effectiveness of mindfulness practices on students and teachers is supported by hundreds of empirical studies and many organizations specialize in helping teachers and students bring mindfulness into the classroom and other learning environments. However, my experience in co-writing The Mindful School Leader: Practices for Your Leadership and School (Corwin, 2014) is that school leaders […]

The clearness committee, developed by members of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), is an individual and communal process of spiritual discernment, an instrument to understand the movement of God (in Quaker terms) in a person’s life, and a way for a community to offer support and guidance at critical times. The Light Within is one […]

It was a long day on El Camino, The Way of Saint James, the famed thousand-year old pilgrimage route across the north of Spain. I set out at daybreak and now the sun was setting low on the dusty hills. As I rounded the final bend of the day, my back- pack and boots heavy, […]

Fly-fishing looks effortless but that’s deceiving. It’s an intensely complex process. The angler needs to know exactly the right ‘fly’ to cast to lure fish.  She needs to know how to cast, when to cast, and where to stand in the stream. She needs to understand the depth and speed of the water, and be mindfully aware of […]

Tamika, an assistant principal in a large urban school, is strong; she’s been told this for as long as she can remember. For Tamika, being strong is a heavy load, a burden that she has carried selflessly and silently nearly all her life, a burden she can’t put down. She is the consummate workaholic who […]