Awakin Calls are weekly conversations that share insights and inspiration from various corners of the ServiceSpace ecosystem.
Awakin Call
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5.0(8 reviews)
81 episodes
Updated Bi-weekly
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Podcast Overview
Awakin Calls are weekly conversations that share insights and inspiration from various corners of the ServiceSpace ecosystem.
Language
🇺🇲
Publishing Since
5/16/2020
1 verified contact email on file for Awakin Call
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Recent Episodes
June 22, 2024
Victor Koo -- The Power of Contemplative Practices: A Tech Entrepreneur's Journey of Scaling Inwards
Victor Koo is a familiar face in China's tech industry. In the 90s, he was president of Sohu, China's second-largest search engine. Subsequently, he founded YouKu, China's largest online video platform with 500 million monthly users (commonly called the "YouTube of China" and later sold to Alibaba). Surprisingly, his journey of scaling began to turn inwards at a tech conference in Sun Valley in 2016, when a networking conversation with a young entrepreneur soon turned towards meditation. Upon hearing that Victor had always wanted to try it, the young entrepreneur let go of the opportunity to network with others, instead guiding Victor to an hour-long meditation. That was the first hour of meditation in Victor's life, a seed that he continues to cultivate through a daily practice now spanning several years. Along the way, on a trip to Thailand, he casually walked into a breathwork course without any context. That session, led by a teacher who had survived Stage-4 terminal cancer through breathwork practice, further opened up his inner world in a striking way. "If I never believed in chakras and energy body within each of us, that session blew all of that disbelief away based on direct experience that lasted over a day." As Victor's inner journey took root, it has also decidedly altered the course of his work in the world. After transitioning from his role at Youku, Victor shifted his focus to inner-purpose-driven service and investing. In late 2016, he co-founded Tianren Culture - a social platform based out of Hong Kong that aims to promote "One Wisdom, One Health" by encouraging and enabling contemplative practices and healthy lifestyles. It focuses especially on those practices and lifestyles with roots in spiritual and natural wisdom and non-dualistic philosophies, positing that human physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health and wellness is interconnected with the health of the broader environment and ecosystem. Tianren Culture partners with foundations, NGOs, and businesses to put in place effective social innovation initiatives to improve physical wellness through overall food system transformation, as well as mental, emotional, and spiritual wellness by supporting scientific research and promoting meditation and breathwork practices. The Tianren team is actively volunteering time for Servicespace's AI-related initiatives, including CompassionGPT. Related to Tianren's work, Victor is also a board director of Good Food Fund and on the advisory board of Global Wellness Institute. Victor's exposure to multiple cultures has been formative in his journey - he was born in Hong Kong, and apart from twenty-five years in China, he has lived extensively in Australia, US, and Japan - with Japan being his current home since the pandemic. He received his BS degree from University of California, Berkeley, where he was also a Regent's scholar and MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he currently serves on the Advisory Council. Victor's professional experience lies mostly at the intersection of the technology and media sectors, as well as private equity and venture capital investments. He continues to serve as Chairman of Heyi (his company that incubated Youku), which now focuses on disruptive innovation and social impact investments in areas such as health, genome, and new protein. He is also a senior advisor of Texas Pacific Group and a business advisor of DeCheng Capital. "If there was one thing I wish I had known before I started my company, it is meditation (by far!) because of the calm and equanimity that it brings you, and really helps you question the purpose of why you're doing what you're doing." It's a piece of advice that Victor can often be found paying forward now to b-school students and young founders. Join us in conversation with this founder-turned-server, as we learn more about his journey of scaling inwards, or as he loves to quote Bruce Lee, to "be like water". The call will be hosted by Xue Devand and Birju Pandya. Xue formerly founded one of the "50 most innovative companies of the world" and now currently runs The Space Between, a venture capital fund aiming to be a "sacred hospitality" company that helps inspire wealthholders to transition their consciousness from being owners of money to being the stewards of money. Birju is Chief Mindfulness Officer/Managing Director at Mobius.life, an integrated capital family office, and a long-time volunteer with Servicespace.
June 8, 2024
Stacey Lawson -- Conscious Bridging: Leading with Heart in Times of Change
I believe humanity is undergoing a profound transformation in consciousness. What the world needs most is for each of us to shine our light, love and genius into the realms we inhabit...and to share stories, examples, discovery and practices that will support humanity in taking its next evolutionary step. -- Stacey Lawson Sitting in a corporate board meeting and planning quarterly targets nearly 20 years ago, Stacey Lawson recalls a strange vision: "We were talking about the next quarter of -- 300 million or 500 million or a billion, and all of a sudden I had this vision of this cascading series of quarter ends, that just never ended. And I thought -- that's the exact illusion, the sort of matrix that we're living in right now and this can't be the true reality." She quit her job, "stopped everything" and planned a trip to India. On the eve of the trip, she serendipitously attended a talk by a visiting spiritual teacher from India. When meditating under his guidance, she had a sensation of "I've done this many times before." As she recounts, "All of a sudden, even though my eyes were closed, I could see all of the people in the room and I saw them not as bodies, but this absolutely gorgeous, luminous light. I could literally see each light in the room where everyone was sitting -- the bodies of pure essence, pure source, pure love. In an instant, my body and the bodies in that room, the fullness of that light collapsed into one. This little grain of sand that was Stacey kind of just melted into the distance." She then visited the teacher's ashram while on her planned trip to India -- serendipitously on the date of a great gathering there -- and by the end, realized that she had studied with this teacher before, perhaps in a prior life. A lifelong student of the world's wisdom and mystical traditions, Stacey is crafting deep bridges between her inner practice and her outer work. As an entrepreneur and agent of change, she is also building bridges between heart intelligence and the corporate business world. Her belief that humanity is facing an unprecedented time of transformation (accelerating AI innovation, climate disruption, and social/political conflict) has led to her most recent passion project -- The Human Evolution Project (THE Project). Drawing from 20+ years as a speaker and teacher of meditation, inner transformation, and self-realization practices, THE Project aims to bridge ancient science with modern technology to foster a transformative community dedicated to the upliftment of humanity. As part of this effort, Stacey recently co-created the Benevolent AI Future coalition with leading developers and voices in Artificial Intelligence (AI). The coalition focuses on Wisdom + AI, bringing together builders and funders of AI solutions that incorporate deeper levels of wisdom in service to the public good -- solutions that may not be naturally addressed by commercial markets but are crucial and necessary for a positive future. Stacey grew up in a rural logging town in Washington state. Unsure what she wanted to do in life, she earned a B.S. in Chemical Engineering, and began working in Silicon Valley. A "big picture" thinker, Stacey quickly realized engineering was not her calling. Her father, a truck-driver-turned-entrepreneur, may be credited for her "entrepreneurial inklings." Stacey made her way to Harvard Business School where she earned an MBA and then spent 15 years as a senior executive in the high-tech industry. To balance the dominant paradigms of efficiency and scale found in the corporate world, Stacey has taken several sabbaticals for meditation and spiritual exploration. From 2004 and 2011, she spent about six months of the year with her spiritual community in India -- a balance that allowed her to dedicate time to deep inner work while continuing her journey as a leading California businesswoman and conscious leader. In 2012, Stacey ran for the U.S. Congress in California's 2nd congressional district where she advocated for critical economic, environmental, and social justice initiatives. Then, in 2018, shortly before her 48th birthday, Stacey learned she had breast cancer. While moving through the emotions of fear and dread, she also felt it was "a wake-up call from the universe." Stacey decided against conventional treatment, instead opting to work with her care team to design a personalized plan that ultimately healed her from cancer. A deep interest in energy healing and biofield research has led to advisory positions with Agastiya Biotech and Siddha Bioscience. She has won multiple awards including being named "one of the most influential women in business" by San Francisco Business Times and recognized as a "California Visionary Leader" by the California Endowment and California Vision 2020. Today, Stacey continues to work at the intersection of entrepreneurship, sustainability, and conscious leadership, most recently as co-founder, Vice Chairman and CEO of Ygrene Energy Fund, a clean energy finance company which has deployed over $1B in financing for 120,000+ renewable energy and climate resiliency projects. She also currently holds advisory roles with SDG Impact Fund, Second Time Founders, SRM University (India), and Pillai Center for Mind Science. She is an active board member of The Shift Network, Institute for Noetic Sciences (IONS), and Tripura Foundation. "At heart, I'm a change agent and believe every one of us can make positive change. A change agent is someone who can see others as whole and perfect and powerful. I believe those who recognize and call forth the greatness in others will be the architects of our future," said Stacey. Join us in conversation with this heart-centered pioneer of change on June 8, in conversation with Kimberly Daniel.
May 25, 2024
Christian McEwen -- In Praise of Listening, Slowing Down, and Creativity
Traversing through time and space, and through humanness to the beyond, listening is a powerful and underrated practice. So says author, educator, and cultural activist Christian McEwen. She prefers to use the word "listening" not simply for the work of our ears, but as an extended metaphor for openness and receptivity - less actual than symbolic, less physical than metaphysical - rippling out from the self-centered human to the farthest reaches of the non-human world. In her latest work, In Praise of Listening (2023), she offers many accounts of listening as a pathway to realities forgotten and hidden, ranging from intimate anecdotes about family and friends to transformational social narratives from researchers, healers, activists, and more. The book tracks the endangered practice of listening through literature, Buddhism, nature writing, science, and sociology, including interviews with writers and therapists, naturalists, storytellers, and musicians. Christian's latest work might be seen as a cousin to her earlier, popular book, World Enough & Time: On Creativity and Slowing Down (2011), now in its second edition. "From the beginning, I was concerned with how slowness might intersect with happiness, and then again with creativity," Christian writes in World Enough. "Like the English composer Brian Eno, I wanted to find a way of living in 'a Big Here and a Long Now.' It was obvious from the start that this would not be easy." Strewn with a delicious assortment of quotes on slowing down - ranging from Lily Tomlin to Gandhi to Rumi - World Enough also gave rise to a separate book of quotes celebrating slowness, aptly titled The Tortoise Diaries. Growing up in the Scottish countryside, perhaps it was the quietude of her childhood - or its contrast with the fast-paced life in New York she witnessed as a young adult - that drew her life to dedicate her life to listening. Even in her early work as a poet, listening was key to expressing what is experienced beyond the immediately visible. Her writing draws attention to minute everyday subtleties and deeply felt personal experiences. Pausing to listen to a snail as it munches on a leaf, or to a hyacinth growing loudly in its pot, she brings together many different stories of people who've learned to listen and attune. Her work grapples with a range of topics, including gender. In 2004, she co-produced a video documentary titled Tomboys! that celebrates "tomboys of all ages" - highlighting real-life stories of feisty girls who grew up to be spirited women. At the start of the documentary, you can hear Christian's crisp, enchanting voice, "When I was a child, I was what people called a tomboy. The word itself seemed magical to me: fiery, disobedient, gloriously untidy." She's also written a play Legal Tender: Women & the Secret Life of Money (2014), based upon personal interviews with more than fifty women about their relationship with money - intended as a creative catalyst, modeling courage and honesty for its listening audience, both through the play itself and through a linked project known as "The Money Stories" workshops. Christian's thesis as a writer and producer is simple: stories give rise to other stories, and courage and clarity inspire more of the same. She has edited four anthologies, including The Alphabet of the Trees: A Guide to Nature Writing and Sparks from the Anvil: The Smith College Poetry Interviews, based on a series of interviews she conducted with visiting poets. She has written for The Nation, The Village Voice, and numerous other journals, including The Edinburgh Review of Books and the Shambhala Sun. Growing up in the Borders of Scotland "in a big old-fashioned house" with "beautiful shabby rooms and scented gardens" and "a perpetual drone of adult anxiety about school fees and taxes and the latest heating bill," Christian first came to the United States on a Fulbright Scholarship. She has taught poetry and creative writing at a number of venues, including Williams College in Massachusetts, the Zen Mountain Monastery in Upstate New York, and the Scottish Poetry Library in Edinburgh. She has also worked as a writer-in-the-schools for ALPS and the Teachers & Writers Collaborative. Christian has been a fellow, several times, both at the MacDowell Colony, and at Yaddo. In 2011, she received a grant in playwriting from the MA Cultural Council. In all her work, she continues to encourage the reader to take a moment to stop and listen. "In a world of racket and distraction, generous, expansive listening is increasingly under siege. But it remains a skill worth honoring, worth passing on...Many an old story begins with the words, 'Long ago, when animals could speak....' Perhaps the corollary would be just as good an opening.... 'Long ago, when people could listen.'" Join us for a slow conversation with this ardent listener, as we co-create a circle to reclaim this ancient medicinal practice.
81 total episodes available
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This podcast updates bi-weekly.
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