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Watch: What really matters

“All of us need a reason to wake up – for me it just took 11 thousand volts.” BJ Miller is a palliative care physician at the Zen Hospice Project. His aim is to create a dignified, graceful end of life experience for his patients. In this talk he asks the big questions about our attitude to life and death, drawing on his own near death experience after a game of ‘dare’ with a commuter train went wrong. As he says “that night I began my formal relationship with death…”

 

Read: Living in non-reaction

“Many of us have mastered the art of living in reaction instead of living in non-reaction.”

In this article writer Jana Moreno argues that our sense of right and wrong, can actually keep us from experiencing inner peace… because many of us have a habit of reacting against what we feel is wrong. She suggests we should watch our mind more than outside people or situations.

 

 

Listen: Rumi

“Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.”

The Persian-born writer Rumi, who lived and died 800 years ago, is one of the best-selling poets in America today. Contemporary artists as diverse as Madonna and Philip Glass acknowledge their debt to him. Radio 4 presenter Ernie Rea find out more from Fatemah Keshavarz, Director of the Roshan Institute for Persian Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park; Alan Williams, Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Religion at the University of Manchester; and Shahram Shiva, a Rumi Translator and scholar.