On Being with Christa Tippett is supported in part by the John Templeton Foundation,

funding research and catalyzing conversations that inspire people with awe and wonder.

Learn about the latest discoveries in the science of hope and optimism, forgiveness and free will at

Templeton.org. A few years ago, I was invited to do an event in Detroit, a city in flux in an

age of flux, on the theme of raising children. The conversation that resulted with the Jewish,

Buddhist, teacher and psychotherapist Sylvia Borstein has accompanied me from that day forward.

Here it is again as an offering from Mother's Day. In a world still in flux and where the

matter of raising new human beings feels as complicated as ever before. I remain so grateful for

Sylvia's gift of teaching that nurturing children's inner lives can be woven into the fabric of our

days and her insistence that nurturing ourselves is also good for the children in our lives.

Nobody tells you that they don't say when they hear and say, oh, you know, brace yourself,

they say congratulations because you know, Chris, it's both. This congratulations. It's the most

amazing thing we can do to create a new life that comes out with fingernails and eyelashes and all

of all its fingers and toes. It's an amazing thing and it's extremely awakening in the sense of

knowing how vulnerable we are. I'm Chris to Tipit and this is on Being. I spoke with Sylvia Borstein

with a live audience in 2011 at the invitation of WDET Detroit Public Radio and Metro Parent

Magazine. I stumbled across your book about 10 years ago. I think when I was first having the idea

for the show, her book, that's funny. You don't look Buddhist because Sylvia is one of the people

who literally brought Buddhism to the West to the United States in the 1970s and was Jewish like

a lot of the people who brought Buddhism to the West in the 1970s. A lot of people who we still are

sort of household names with Buddhism in the United States. But she's also written over the years

about how she has come back to really richly integrate that with her Jewish identity,

...