A few people have been asking me what happened to the Urbanmonks emails? Well, the Urbanmonks Thinktank is young and still finding our rhythm and it seems like our general year schedule is shaping up to look something like this:

January through July - research books, write books, edit books (the reclusive monk portion)
August through December - hit the streets with the cart, sell books, write post on the website (the social portion) (the outreach portion)

We have a whole slew of new items available at the street cart (and on this website). I will introduce them over the next few weeks. Today I will start by introducing The Weather of the Mind. This is the first book in the Urbanmonks Wisdom Curriculum. In this book I explain my methods for studying wisdom over the past dozen years and I explain why wisdom ought to be a subject in our schools, universities, workplaces, and families.

Keep in mind the main mission of the Urbanmonks Thinktank is to coordinate a proactive and system-based approach to emotional health. The goal is to sell The Weather of the Mind to schools, colleges, book clubs, and individuals who want to have techniques for understanding their emotions.

We ran an initial printing of the book but we will be run a large run next week. Please pre-order a few(!) copies for you and your friends and read them together. It includes a six-week emotional education course where you chart your emotions three times a day.

We think this book will reach many people, but it will spread grassroots-style in the beginning, which means we rely on you to help spread the word and to buy some books. But trust me, this book is damn good. I guarantee it.

Here is a sample of the first section of the book: Weather Sampler. Order a copy of the book here: the store.

Doug and the Urbanmonks Crew

It is a sticky, muggy evening. Late night, in fact. I am one of those characters who enjoys the late nights, for it is during the late night hours where we can wander in our thoughts for hours, uninterrupted. I simply enjoy a few hours of quiet time at the end of the day. This is where I digest my days.

I got mostly knocked out of the Urbanmonks orbit for a month there as I went to up to Cornell to help teach Green Cities. While this difficult course compressed into three weeks became a bit more all-comsuming than I expected, it was worth it. I recorded all the lectures and hope to produce some nice audio files and a few street books based on the class. Green Cities, the course designed by Dr. Rob Young, has been going strong for fifteen or twenty years, traveling with Rob around the country, from Cornell, to U of Oregon, to U of Texas. Half of the students were from various parts of the United States and half the students were from various parts of China. This mix made for outstanding dialogue on the urban design response to our environmental challenges.

I am currently finishing up editing and layout for this year's new books from Urbanmonks Press.

Here is an excerpt from the Urbanmonks Handbook, Part I, where I describe an epiphany I had in the waiting room early on in my challenges with anxiety.

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In the beginning of counseling, it was my anxiety I was dealing with. It was solely my own problem. In the midst of this intense struggle, this loneliness, this isolation of me dealing with my struggles seemed to amplify all my troubles. One quickly grows insane fighting a battle that only exists inside one’s head.

Then one day as I sat in the waiting room for fifteen minutes or so before my therapy session, I looked around and felt this overwhelming solidarity with the other folks in the room - those who were coming, those who were going, a seven-year-old and his mother, an older bearded guy, a teen-age girl. We may not have been there to have the same conversation, we may not have been struggling in the same way, but we were all in there, humbling ourselves, admitting that our minds were unhealthy, that our current mental states were unsustainable.

That waiting room provided the space for a shared refuge of humility, where an unspoken common-ness of cause buoyed my spirits. The waiting room supported me and in that refuge I began to receive the first hints of the wide scope of this anxiety, this depression, this mental discomfort, and I realized that this struggle may not be solely my own.