James Autry is former Senior Vice President of Meredith Corporation and past President of its Magazine Group, a 500 million dollar operation with over 900 employees. He directed the operation of 22 special interest publications and 14 magazines, including Better Homes and Gardens, Ladies' Home Journal and Metropolitan Home. Mr. Autry has also been active in many civic and charitable organizations and most notably has worked with disability rights groups for 25 years. He served as chairman of the board of the Epilepsy Foundation of America. Other involvement has included his work with the White House Conference on Families, and the Des Moines Symphony. He is a founder of the Des Moines National Poetry Festival. He fulfilled his military service as a jet fighter pilot in Europe during the cold war. He holds three honorary degrees and in 1991, the University of Missouri-Columbia awarded him the Missouri Medal of Honor for Distinguished Service in Journalism, an award given for a long track record of excellence. Jim is the author of six published books, the most recent (Spring 1998) of which is Real Power: Business Lessons from the Tao Te Ching. In this unusual and exciting collaboration, Mr. Autry has worked with well-known poet and translator Stephen Mitchell in a business leadership interpretation of Mr. Mitchell's best-selling translation of the Tao Te Ching of Lao-tzu.

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Rachel Bagby, J.D., author of Divine Daughters, is a vocal artist, poet, composer, ecological activist, and mountain’s daughter. Bagby studied the nexus of belief and value systems, societal behavioral codes, and social change at Stanford Law School, from which she graduated in 1983. Her works articulate the challenges and joys of cultivating “homefulness:” restorative relationships between nature and culture. She’s contributed articles to several anthologies, including "Nature and the Human Spirit: Toward an Expanded Land Management Ethic" (Venture Publishing, State College, PA, 1995); "Circles of Strength: Community Alternatives to Alienation" (New Society Publishing, Phila., PA 1993); "Reweaving the World: The Emergence of Ecofeminism" (Sierra Club Books, San Francisco, CA 1990); and "Healing the Wounds" (New Society Publishing, Santa Cruz, CA: 1989).

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Anne Bartley is President and Trustee of the Rockefeller Family Fund and a founding Board Member of the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society.

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Leroy Little Bear is a member of the Small Robes Band of the Blood Indian Tribe of the Blackfoot Confederacy; born and raised on the Blood Indian Reserve. From 1975 to the end of 1996, Dr. Little Bear was a professor in the Native American Studies Department at the University of Lethbridge. In January of 1998 Dr. Little Bear became the Director of the Harvard University Native American Program. Dr. Little Bear has served in a legal and consultant capacity to many Indian Tribes, and organizations including the Blood Tribe, Indian Association of Alberta, and the Assembly of First Nations of Canada. His research interests include the study and comparison of Indigenous and Western sciences as pathways to knowledge.

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Eugene Callender is the reverend and preaching minister to the Christian Parish for Spiritual Renewal in Harlem. He serves as chairman of the board of the National Black Theater of Harlem, is senior advisor to the Global Board of Directors of the Hunger Project, and is advisor to many organizations working on the great challenges of our time. Dr. Callender serves on the Federal Council on Aging as appointed by the Speaker of the House of Representatives. Concurrently, he serves as a member of the Democratic National Committee. He was appointed commissioner of the New York State Division of Parole by Governor Cuomo and as director of New York's Cities in Schools program by President Jimmy Carter in 1980. He was also appointed to several presidential task forces by Presidents Johnson and Nixon concerning manpower, urban unemployment, and income policy. Eugene has practiced Siddha Yoga meditation since 1979 and has spoken internationally on how meditation can be a positive and powerful force in one's life.

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Robert Coles is a child psychiatrist, professor at Harvard University, and author of more than fifty books. He is best known for his explorations of children's lives and books that explore their moral, political, and spiritual sensibilities. He is also known as an eloquent spokesman for voluntary and community service -- the subject of his recent book, A Call to Service. In addition, he has written literary criticism, numerous biographies, reviews, poetry, social commentary, several children's books, and regular columns for the New Republic, New Oxford Review, and American Poetry Review.

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Rachel Cowan grew up in a Unitarian family in Boston. Her New England Roots trace back to the Mayflower . She received her BA in Sociology from Bryn Mawr, and her M.S.S. from the University of Chicago. After 16 years of marriage to the late writer, Paul Cowan, she converted to Judaism. She was ordained at HUC-JIR in New York in 1989.

Rachel and Paul are the co-authors of the books, Mixed Blessings: Untangling The Knots In an Interfaith Marriage and A Torah is Written.

Rabbi Cowan has spent many years leading workshops for interfaith couples and speaking out on the need for Jewish communities to be more open to non-Jewish spouses and to encourage their commitment to Judaism. She has worked for a number of years to support religious pluralism, social justice and environmental protection in Israel. Rabbi Cowan has previously served as the Director of the Jewish Life and Values Program at the Nathan Cummings Foundation in New York. Her interests also include Jewish healing and Jewish contemplative practice. She completed the two-year Mindfulness Leaders Training Program at Elat Chayyim with Sylvia Boorstein. She leads classes and weekend retreats on Jewish contemplative practice. She was twice named to the Forward's Top Fifty list of Jewish leaders.

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Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced "chick-SENT-me high"), a Hungarian-born polymath and the Davidson Professor of Management at the Claremont Graduate University, in Claremont, California has been thinking about the meaning of happiness since a child in wartime Europe.

His research and theories in the psychology of optimal experience have revolutionized psychology, and have been adopted in practice by national leaders such as Bill Clinton and Tony Blair as well as top members of the global executive elite who run the world's major corporations. Csikszentmihalyi is the author of several popular books about his theories, the bestselling Flow: The Psychology Of Optimal Experience; The Evolving Self: A Psychology For The Third Millennium; Creativity; and Finding Flow. The Wall Street Journal has listed Flow among the six books "every well-stocked business library should have."

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Harlon Dalton is a Professor of Law at Yale Law School where he teaches courses in Aids Law, law and theology, Civil procedure, law and psychology and critical race theory.  He is also Assistant Rector of the Episcopal Church of Saint Paul and Saint James in New Haven, Connecticut where he is postulant for Holy Orders in the Episcopal Church and Vice President of the Episcopal Church Publishing Company.

After receiving his A.B., from Harvard University (1969) and J.D., from Yale  University (1973) Harlon’s professional commitment to combating discrimination began while serving as Law Clerk to U.S. District Judge Robert L. Carter. Judge Carter is known for having provided council for the NAACP in the Brown vs. Board of Education trial.  Harlon then worked for the Legal Action Center, a law and policy organization that fights discrimination against people with histories of addiction, AIDS, and criminal records (1973-79). Then, as Assistant to the Solicitor General of the United States he helped to supervise and conduct government litigation in the United States Supreme Court. (1979-1981)   He has also worked for the Center for Legal Ed. And Urban Policy at CUNY (1979).

Harlon is a member of the Board of Directors of American Civil Liberties Union,  Legal Action Center, and Legal Affairs.  He is author of,  Racial Healing:  Confronting the Fear between Blacks and Whites; 1995, AIDS Law Today:  A New Guide for the Public (ed. With S. Burris and J.Mill); 1993 and AIDS and the Law (ed. with S. Burris); 1987.

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Ram Dass (Richard Alpert) taught and conducted research at the Department of Social Relations and the Graduate School of Education at Harvard University from 1958 to 1963. While at Harvard, his explorations of human consciousness led him to conduct intensive research with LSD and other psychedelic elements in collaboration with Timothy Leary, Aldous Huxley, Allen Ginsberg, and others. Because of the controversial nature of this research, Ram Dass and Leary were dismissed from Harvard in 1963. Nonplused, he traveled to India's Himalayas in 1967, studied yoga and meditation with guru Neem Karoli Baba, and transformed into Baba Ram Dass, or servant of God.

Since then, he has pursued a variety of spiritual practices and has written many books, including Be Here Now (1971) and Journey of Awakening (1990). In 1974, Ram Dass created the Hanuman Foundation, which has developed many projects, including the Prison-Ashram Project, designed to help inmates grow spiritually during incarceration. He also helped develop the "Living/Dying Project", with Stephen Levine which provides support for the conscious dying. In 1978 Ram Dass co-founded and became a board member of the Seva Foundation, an international organization dedicated to relieving suffering in the world.
Ram Dass suffered a serious stroke in 1997 and is recovering. "The stroke made me aware of silence," he said. "Of the vulnerability of my body...how fragile my faith is." His latest book, Still Here: Embracing Aging, Changing, and Dying (2000), examines conscious aging. "The next message you need," he advises, "is right where you are."

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Marian R. David is the director of Sustaining the Soul that Serves. She worked as a consultant with the Fetzer Institute from 1997 to 2000 to develop the project. Prior to this, she worked for six years with the Children's Defense Fund (CDF) as director of Freedom Schools; director of the CDF-Bennettsville, South Carolina Educational and Youth Leadership Development Project, and curriculum writer for Freedom Schools. In 1996, Marian was selected as a Community Fellow in the Department of Urban Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). There she worked to develop a project to incorporate spiritual renewal practices into youth programs, which subsequently became the foundation for her current work. Marian has had over 12 years of experience in the public schools as a teacher, guidance and career counselor.

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Richard Davidson is Vilas Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Research in his laboratory is focused on cortical and subcortical substrates of emotion and affective disorders, including depression and anxiety. He studies normal adults and young children, and those with, or at risk for, affective and anxiety disorders. He uses quantitative electrophysiology, positron emission tomography and functional magnetic resonance imaging to make inferences about patterns of regional brain function. A major focus of his current work is on interactions between prefrontal cortex and the amygdala in the regulation of emotion in both normal subjects and patients with affective and anxiety disorders.

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Howard Gardner is best known for his theory of multiple intelligences, a critique of the notion that there exists but a single human intelligence that can be assessed by standard psychometric instruments. During the past fifteen years, he and colleagues at Project Zero have been working on the design of performance-based assessments, education for understanding, and the use of multiple intelligences to achieve more personalized curricula, instruction, and assessment. Most recently, Gardner has been carrying out intensive case studies of exemplary creators and leaders; he and colleagues on the Good Work Project have launched an investigation of the relationship between cutting-edge work in different domains and a sense of social responsibility. Gardner is also chairman of the steering committee of Project Zero and adjunct professor of neurology at Boston University School of Medicine. Gardner is the author of eighteen books and several hundred articles

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A Tibetan refugee since 1959, Gehlek Rimpoche gave up monastic life to better serve the lay community of Tibetan Buddhist practitioners. He has edited and printed over 170 volumes of rare Tibetan manuscripts that would have otherwise been lost to humanity, and continuously worked to preserve Tibetan culture during this time of communist persecution.

In the late 1970s, Gehlek Rimpoche was directed by both the Senior and Junior Tutors to His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Kyabje Ling Rimpoche and Kyabje Trijang Rimpoche, to begin teaching Western students. Since that time he has taught Buddhist practitioners throughout the world. He is an example of kindness, generosity, good humor and inspirational insight. He is particularly distinguished for his thorough knowledge of English, his familiarity with modern culture, and his special effectiveness as a teacher to Western practitioners of Tibetan Buddhism.

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Daniel Goleman consults internationally and lectures frequently. He is founder of Emotional Intelligence Services, an affiliate of the Hay Group in Boston. A psychologist who for many years reported on the brain and behavioral sciences for The New York Times, Dr. Goleman's 1995 book, Emotional Intelligence (Bantam Books), argues that human competencies like self-awareness, self-discipline, persistence and empathy are of greater consequence than IQ in much of life, that we ignore the decline in these competencies at our peril, and that children can -- and should -- be taught these abilities. Emotional Intelligence was on The New York Times bestseller list for a year-and-a-half, with more than 5,000,000 copies in print and was translated into nearly 30 languages. Dr. Goleman is a co-founder of the Collaborative for Social and Emotional Learning at the Yale University Child Studies Center (now at the University of Illinois at Chicago), with the mission to help schools introduce emotional literacy courses. Dr. Goleman is co-chairman of The Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations at Rutgers University. Dr. Goleman has received two nominations for the Pulitzer Prize for his articles in the Times, and a Career Achievement award for journalism from the American Psychological Association. He was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Dr. Goleman received his M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard in clinical psychology and personality development.

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Paul Gorman is currently the Executive Director of the National Religious Partnership for the Environment, an interfaith coalition working to create a religious response to environmental problems. Organized in 1992, the partnership includes the U.S. Catholic Conference, the National Council of Churches of Christ, the Coalition for the Environment and Jewish Life, and the Evangelical Environmental Network. In a long career in public life, Gorman has worked as a congressional staffer, as speechwriter and press secretary for Senator Eugene McCarthy's 1968 presidential campaign, as a public radio host, and as an author and college teacher.

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Amy Gross is the former editor-in-chief of O, the Oprah Magazine. Before joining O, The Oprah Magazine, Gross was a writer for a wide variety of magazines, including Good Housekeeping, Martha Stewart Living, Food & Wine, Talk, Mademoiselle and Modern Maturity, where she also served as an editorial consultant. From 1988-1993 she was a founding editor of Mirabella. She went on to serve as Mirabella's editor-in-chief from 1995-1997. She also concurrently served as editorial director of Elle magazine from 1993-1996, overseeing its redesign. Earlier, Gross was features editor and special projects editor of Vogue, where she worked for 10 years (1978-1988). With Dee Ito, she has co-authored two books: Women Talk about Breast Surgery: From Diagnosis to Recovery (1990) and Women Talk about Gynecological Surgery: From Diagnosis to Recovery (1991). Gross is also a student of meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg.

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Paul Hawken is a business leader, environmentalist, and author. He is considered one of the leading architects and proponents of corporate reform with respect to ecological practices. Paul Hawken founded several natural foods companies in the late 1960s and early 1970s. He went on to co-found Smith & Hawken, the retail and catalog company in 1979, Metacode, a content management software company, in 1995, and in 2000, Groxis, a software company providing enterprises and individuals information navigation, visualization, and organization capabilities. He has written such bestselling books as The Ecology of Commerce and Growing a Business. The latter became the basis of a PBS series that has aired in 115 countries. Paul Hawken served as co-chair of The Natural Step-International, a non-profit educational foundation whose purpose is to develop and share a common framework comprised of easily understood, scientifically based principles that can serve as a basis to move society toward sustainability. The Natural Step assists business and government leaders throughout the world in establishing a long-term commitment to environmental sustainability as a core part of their overall policies. He has served on the board of many environmental and nonprofit organizations, including Point Foundation (publisher of the Whole Earth Catalog), the Center for Plant Conservation, Conservation International, the Trust for Public Land, and the National Audubon Society.

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Jon Kabat-Zinn is the founder of the nationally acclaimed Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts Memorial Medical Center in Worcester, Massachusetts. Since 1979, the clinic has served more than 11,000 patients in the form of an eight-week long course. Prominently featured in the Bill Moyers' PBS special "Healing and the Mind" in 1993, the clinic and its research has continually demonstrated that most participants in its programs achieve long-lasting improvements in both physical and psychological symptoms, as well as major positive changes in health attitudes and behaviors. Kabat-Zinn is the author of the best-selling Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness and Wherever You Go, There You Are.

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Fr. Thomas Keating is a Cistercian monk and former abbot of St. Joseph's Abbey, Spencer, Massachusetts. He is the former president of the Temple of Understanding, the founder of Contemplative Outreach and the Snowmass Interfaith Conference, and the former chair of the Monastic Interreligious Dialogue. Fr. Keating is the author of numerous books and articles on Christian contemplative practice and on dialogue with other religions.

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Joan Konner is Professor and Dean Emerita of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. She served as Dean from 1988-1997 and as Publisher of the Columbia Journalism Review from 1988-1999.

Before going to Columbia, Ms. Konner worked in both public and commercial television for 26 years. During that time she produced and wrote more than 50 documentaries and served as Executive Producer of several major public affairs series. Her work has been honored by almost every major award for broadcast journalism, including 16 Emmys, the George Foster Peabody Award and the Alfred I. duPont-Columbia Award for Excellence in Television and Radio. As President and Executive Producer of Public Affairs Television Inc., in partnership with Bill Moyers from 1986-1988, Ms. Konner produced Moyers: In Search Of The Constitution, God And Politics, and Joseph Campbell And The Power Of Myth.

During her 12 years as a writer, director and producer with NBC News from 1965-1977, she produced such documentaries as Danger! Radioactive Waste; Mary Jane Grows Up; Marijuana In The 70's; Of Women And Men; The Search For Something Else and New World Hard Choices: American Foreign Policy In 1976. In recognition of her body of work, she was awarded the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism's Alumni Award in 1975 and the New Jersey Press Women's Association Award for Outstanding Accomplishment in 1990.

In 1977, Ms. Konner joined WNET/13, public television in New York, as Executive producer for National Public Affairs Programs. She served as Executive Producer of Bill Moyers Journal until 1981. From 1981 to 1984, she was Vice President, Director of Programming and Executive Producer for the Metropolitan Division of WNET/13. Among the programs she conceived and produced were New York & Co; Hizzoner; My New York; Walt Whitman And Friends; Innovation and Currents. Under her leadership, the station earned numerous honors, including 11 Emmy Awards.

A graduate of Sarah Lawrence College and the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, Ms. Konner began her journalism career as a reporter, editorial writer and columnist for The (Bergen) Record, Hackensack, NJ. For 10 years, she served as chairman of the Alfred I. DuPont-Columbia Awards, as a member of the Pulitzer Prize Board and as a juror for the National Magazine Awards. She is currently chair of the John Oakes Award for Distinguished Environmental Reporting. She also served as an advisor to the Markle Commission on the Media and the Electorate and on several committees of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communications.

Ms. Konner has also been a Trustee of Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence College, the Rockland Center for the Arts, Radio and Television News Director's Foundation and the Religion Newswriters Foundation. At present she is a Board member of the Providence Journal, Providence, RI. She is also a trustee of the Florence and John Schumann Foundation.

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Michael Lerner is the president and founder of Commonweal, a health and environmental research institute in Bolinas, California, near San Francisco. He is the co-founder with Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D., of the Commonweal Cancer Help Program, a week-long residential support program for people with cancer, featured on Bill Moyers' PBS series "Healing and the Mind." He is also president and co-founder of Smith Farm, a center for the healing arts in Washington, D.C., which offers the Cancer Help Program on the East Coast.

Lerner is the author of Choices in Healing: Integrating the Best of Conventional and Complementary Approaches to Cancer, from MIT Press. He is also deeply engaged with environment and health issues. A former member of the Yale faculty, he received a MacArthur Prize Fellowship for contributions to public health in 1983. He also works with several foundations.

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Rabbi Jonathan Omer-Man is a writer, religious guide and spiritual counselor. He is founder and former president of Metivta: a center for contemplative Judaism, which is dedicated to the renewal of the Jewish wisdom tradition and to the deepening of personal religious quest. Metivta is a continuation of Jonathan Omer-Man's life-long work as a guide and mentor to Jews who feel that their Judaic religious and spiritual needs have not been met within the traditional forms available to them.

He has lectured at universities, colleges, and seminaries throughout the United States. In 1990 he visited the Dalai Lama in India, a journey that was described in Rodger Kamenetz' best-selling book, The Jew in the Lotus. His work and ideas are also described in some detail in Kamenetz' most recent work, Stalking Elijah: Adventures with Today's Jewish Mystical Masters. For more than 25 years Jonathan Omer-Man lived in Jerusalem, where he worked and studied with some of the greatest contemporary Jewish teachers -- including Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz and Professor Gershom Scholem -- and was editor and publisher of Shefa Quarterly, a prestigious journal of Jewish thought and study. He was also revising editor of the Encyclopaedia Judaica. Among his published writings are numerous articles about spirituality and mysticism in the Jewish tradition, and some verse and fiction.

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Dean Ornish, MD, is the founder, president, and director of the non-profit Preventive Medicine Research Institute in Sausalito, California, where he holds the Safeway Chair. He is Clinical Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. Dr. Ornish received his medical training from the Baylor College of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, and the Massachusetts General Hospital. He received a B.A. in Humanities summa cum laude from the University of Texas in Austin, where he gave the baccalaureate address.

For the past 28 years, Dr. Ornish has directed clinical research demonstrating, for the first time, that comprehensive lifestyle changes may begin to reverse even severe coronary heart disease, without drugs or surgery. He is the author of five best-selling books, including New York Times’ bestsellers Dr. Dean Ornish's Program for Reversing Heart Disease, Eat More, Weigh Less, and Love & Survival. He recently directed the first randomized controlled trial demonstrating that comprehensive lifestyle changes may affect the progression of prostate cancer.

The research that he and his colleagues conducted has been published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, The Lancet, Circulation, The New England Journal of Medicine, the American Journal of Cardiology, and elsewhere. A one-hour documentary of their work was broadcast on NOVA, the PBS science series, and was featured on Bill Moyers' PBS series, Healing & The Mind. Their work has been featured in virtually all major media, including cover stories in Newsweek, Time, and U.S. News & World Report.

Dr. Ornish is a member of the boards of directors of the U.S. United Nations High Commission on Refugees, the Quincy Jones We Are the Future Foundation, and the Wheelchair Foundation. He was appointed to The White House Commission on Complementary and Alternative Medicine Policy and elected to the California Academy of Medicine.

He has received several awards, including the 1994 Outstanding Young Alumnus Award from the University of Texas, Austin, the Jan J. Kellermann Memorial Award for distinguished contribution in the field of cardiovascular disease prevention from the International Academy of Cardiology, the Golden Plate Award from the American Academy of Achievement, a Presidential Citation from the American Psychological Association, the Beckmann Medal from the German Society for Prevention and Rehabilitation of Cardiovascular Diseases, and a U.S. Army Surgeon General Medal. Dr. Ornish has been a physician consultant to The White House and to several bipartisan members of the U.S. Congress. He is listed in Who’s Who in Healthcare and Medicine, Who’s Who in America, and Who’s Who in the World.

Dr. Ornish was recognized as “one of the most interesting people of 1996” by People magazine, featured in the “TIME 100” issue on alternative medicine, and chosen by LIFE magazine as “one of the 50 most influential members of his generation.”

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Robert A. F. Thurman holds the first endowed chair in Buddhist Studies in the West, the Jey Tsong Khapa Chair in Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies at Columbia University. After education at Philips Exeter and Harvard, he studied Tibet and Tibetan Buddhism for almost thirty years as a personal student of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. He has written both scholarly and popular books, and has lectured widely all over the world. His special interest is the exploration of the Indo-Tibetan philosophical and psychological traditions, with a view to their relevance to parallel currents of contemporary thought and science.

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Dr. Andrew Weil is a leader in the integration of Western medicine and the exploding field of alternative medicine. A graduate of Harvard Medical School, he teaches at the University of Arizona in Tucson, specializing in alternative medicine, mind/body interactions and medical botany. He is the founder of the Program in Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona Health Sciences Center in Tucson, where he is training a new generation of physicians. Dr. Weil is the author of seven books: The Natural Mind (1972), The Marriage of the Sun and the Moon (1980), From Chocolate to Morphine (with Winifred Rosen, 1983), Health and Healing (1984), Natural Health, Natural Medicine (1990), Spontaneous Healing (1995) and his most recent best-seller, 8 Weeks to Optimum Health.