Known as the Axial Age, the second half of the millennium before the birth of Jesus was a time of great human flourishing and spiritual curiosity. It was a field day for thought leaders and renegades, some of whom are well known to us today. This was the environment in which Socrates drank poison hemlock rather than accept the traditional philosophies insisted upon by the Greek state. It was the time when Confucius clarified moral and ethical meaning for a civilized world, Hebrew prophets used poetic rhetoric to encourage individual accountability, and the Yogis challenged ritual sacrifice that dictated how and when they could commune with the divine.

It was also the environment in which Siddhartha Gautama meditated his way to enlightenment under a tree after renouncing the caste system and his own material wealth and privilege that shielded him from the real suffering in the world. The Buddha's awakening coincided with awakenings that swept the globe and changed the way ordinary people considered how they might best live their lives.

It's hard to know how history will view our current times without a couple thousand years of hindsight, but it's not hard to feel and see the numerous data points currently shaping our own sort of axial moment. The pandemic and the concurrent socio-political-economic upheavals of the last few years have shifted the axis of the status quo. For some of us, life has done a 180; for a few, not much has changed; and for many, it's somewhere in the middle. Regardless, huge shifts are vibrating in and all around us, affecting everything from how we work professionally and how we relate inter-personally, to how we co-exist with nature and how we organize our civil structures. Like the Buddha and thousands of his contemporaries, we need embodied practices, supportive community, and wisdom-driven opportunities to settle our minds to help us ride these waves of change.