How The China-Based Sangha Retreat Promises Leadership When It Comes To Wellness

Taking the concept of spas to a new level is Sangha Retreat,  which has recently added to its immersive offering and is launching to an international traveller. Found in the historic garden city of Suzhou, China, west of Shanghai, it looks set to cause a frisson of excitement – or at least a nod of holistic approval – in the wellness industry and beyond. It is the first of its kind by the OCTAVE Institute, which was founded by international business leader, Frederick Chavalit Tsao.

The Octave Institute is a platform to help people find harmony and clarity in life, and its first retreat was conceived by Tsao, whose own inward journey of conscious awakening led him to "create a space for societal healing with the intention of fostering harmonious communities".  What does this actually mean in reality? In short, it is a 47-acre space which goes beyond the normal spa offering – from the At One clinic, offering Chinese and Western medical therapies, to The Village, an interactive learning community. Open to families, individuals and friends – the ethos here is that all are welcome – there's also a collection of Sangha Villas made up of 108 private residences.


While it initially quietly opened its doors in 2017, Tsao has spent the last two years finessing the offering and the retreat now offers an international team of doctors and wellness experts; an expansive healing spa, with a 12-stage hydrothermal circuit; movement studios and gym; a sound healing dome; a restaurant serving customized menus, featuring local, organic products; and a complete village to host quantum leadership retreats.

Talking of which, the international launch coincides with Tsao's first book Quantum Leadership: New Consciousness in Business, due to be published this July. In the title, he articulates Sangha Retreat's ethos as applied to the world of business. "By unleashing creativity, individuals, communities and businesses can begin to solve today's problems and challenges in a truly sustainable way," he maintains.

Inspired by the Sanskrit word for ‘community', Sangha Retreat, says Tsao, aims to be a pioneer of ‘conscious living'. Offering more than conventional spa and wellness concepts, it promises to be a visionary environment where travellers can have the opportunity to seek self-clarity, find harmony, and achieve a new level of consciousness within and beyond their hectic day-to-day lives.

Prayer to the Trinity a dynamic exchange

I've noticed as my prayer life evolves, I don't clutter prayer moments with as many words as I used to.

This seems strange, since words are what I do — you might even say to a certain extent, who I am — but I find when it comes to prayer, often less is more.

I wrote a talk on The Trinity not long ago and presented it to the We Are the Church gathering in Streator in April.

Even as I wrote, my ever-changing personal understanding of The Trinity in my life became clearer to me.

Even more, just like human relationships are different with each individual, the way I relate to each member of The Trinity is unique.

In short, this is how I find myself addressing each member of The Trinity these days, and the basic way I pray to each of them:


When I sit with Abba in centering prayer (with a goal of twice a day for 20 minutes at a time), I am learning to let go of the chatter in my head. Each time a thought or sensation comes to mind, I gently return to my key word "Abba." I am giving Abba the chance to silently work inside my heart, digging and scraping — in an ever so gentle way — all the old trauma that's buried there, and through that work creating a new heart within me, as he promises to do for each one of us in Scripture.

The transformation from this kind of prayer is ongoing. But in the time I've been doing it, I notice an overall calmer interior, a more joyful interior and exterior and feeling less of a need to speak my opinion when there is no reason to do so. In other words, Abba is teaching me humility. And I have a long way to go.

In short, centering prayer — and Abba's work through it — brings me an inner peace that grows ever deeper the more I engage in it.

There are as many ways to pray to Jesus as there are people. One of the best ways, of course, is to enter into the Gospel narratives and imagine you are there, part of the scene. Each time you do this, you might notice something different happening.

As perfect as a way of praying this is, I must admit I rarely do it.

Instead, as my relationship with Christ has developed over time, and I've heard the Gospel proclaimed at Mass every week, and I've read from it myself, I have come to know (at least in my mind, to the extent it is possible) who Jesus is, why he came and what he wants to do for each of us.

All of this boils down to the four words that boil up in my heart when I find myself most in need:


By cutting out all the noise, I affirm my belief in who Jesus is, and I assent to his healing work inside of me.

And over time, sometimes little by little, and sometimes in a big spectacular way, he does it.


In a similar way, my prayer to the Holy Spirit has simplified a great deal as I've experienced the extraordinary ways he has worked in my life, and therefore know there is no need for wordiness.

Once you open the door to the work of the Holy Spirit in your life, you can't help but be blown away by the power and love of this member of The Trinity, and how it drives you out into the world to share that Spirit with others.

A Comprehensive Comparison of Four Decentralized Exchanges

To date, over $1.3 billion have been stolen from centralized exchanged hacks. Hacks occur because centralized institutions hold the private keys of its users. With this knowledge, hackers only need to compromise the system of the exchange to access the private keys. They can then send stolen cryptocurrencies worth tens of millions of dollars to their preferred wallet destination. This glaring security weakness is a risk that most traders and investors take when buying and selling cryptocurrencies.

Enter decentralized exchanges (DEX).

Decentralized exchanges solve this security problem by eliminating the third-party service provider (centralized exchange) to facilitate the trade. Instead, trades occur directly between users through a peer-to-peer system. Without the need to deposit funds to a centralized exchange, users control their funds and their private keys all the time. Under this system, hackers need to compromise the system of thousands, if not millions of users, to steal millions of dollars worth of cryptocurrencies. That’s just not worth the effort.

DEX appears to be the magic bullet that can solve security problems and possibly pave the way for mass adoption. The promising potential of a DEX motivated us to look into Binance DEX, Resistance DEX, eFin, and Bisq to see what the future may hold.

Entrepreneurship Education: Viable Tools for Opportunity Youth

As opportunity youth continue to struggle to connect to the economy, entrepreneurship offers a chance for them to learn the skills and mindset needed to thrive in today’s economy. Opportunity youth, the 4.6 million young people who are neither in work nor in school, often encounter significant barriers to education and employment, and entrepreneurship programs may offer solutions to the challenges they face.

Through the Opportunity Youth Forum (OYF), the Forum for Community Solutions (FCS) works with a network of over two dozen urban, rural, and tribal communities seeking to reconnect opportunity youth to employment and education opportunities. FCS looks for myriad ways to create these pathways, which was the basis behind the launch of the Youth Entrepreneurship Fund (YEF) in 2017.

Through funding support from the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, YEF responded to the interest expressed by OYF communities and youth leaders in exploring entrepreneurship as a pathway to economic self-determination and wealth-building in low-income communities.

The YEF seeks to promote racial and economic equity by ensuring that youth experiencing barriers to participation in the economy – including youth of color, Native American, and rural youth, as well as youth who are low-income and reside in public housing – are provided with a full range of opportunities to develop an entrepreneurial mindset and skills that can help them thrive in today’s economy, as well as access to tools and resources needed by aspiring entrepreneurs.

A new publication, Creating Entrepreneurship Pathways for Opportunity Youth, co-written with FIELD at the Aspen Institute, examines the potential for using these YEF programs to engage and create pathways for opportunity youth by exploring results from OYF communities that received YEF grants and have entrepreneurship initiatives now in progress.

Mali Linton, 22, worked with Bay Area Community Resources (BACR) and HOPE SF Initiative last year and said the experience allowed her to acquire knowledge she couldn’t have learned on her own.

The focus in the Bay Area provided entrepreneurial education, mentoring, financial literacy training, business development classes, and wrap-around supports to youth residing in public housing, who are among the most marginalized of San Francisco residents and do not have a path into the rich entrepreneurial ecosystem of the city.

"I learned how to be creative and innovative while building my business from the ground up," Mali says. "I’ve also learned that entrepreneurship isn’t for everybody. I had to be comfortable being uncomfortable a lot."

One of the goals of the YEF is to not just teach young people the tools to create businesses, but to use entrepreneurial education to develop skills that can support them in whatever career they choose.



"People starting their own businesses start to feel empowered, they believe in themselves and their ability to take control of their destiny," he says. "I’ve seen entrepreneurship spark excitement in the eyes of these young people, the ability to be their own boss and make their own money goes hand and hand with the street mentality we develop in our community."

Canadian higher education in review

Mental health on campus
What role do faculty have in supporting student mental health? How should university administrators respond to reports of worrisome behaviour on campus? Questions on the perennial issue of mental health never seem to fade, especially as demand for help on campus rises. In this vein, our writers have also discussed the emotional toll of teaching, cultivating resilience in students and an appeal to professors to err on the side of trust when it comes to sick notes.

Cannabis policies
It is hard to ignore the sweeping impact cannabis legalization has had on many sectors, including higher-ed. Before the law was set to take effect, researchers were gearing up to track the social, economic and health effects of this historic change in public policy. Universities were in a pinch to come up with campus cannabis policies with the onset of a new academic year. And, student journalists at four institutions took notice of the complicated patchwork of guidelines in place.

Equity, diversity and inclusion
The federal government has made no secret of its interest in bringing about change in equity, diversity and inclusion in research. For a long view of gender and full-time faculty in Canada, here are six charts that tell a partial history. This past summer, after the launch of the Canada Research Coordinating Committee, consultations began on the new $275-million tri-council fund, which included discussions of EDI. Consultations also kicked off for a ‘made-in-Canada’ Athena SWAN program, which will go beyond gender equity, and NSERC aims to unveil details of a pilot in 2019. With the federal budget coming up in the spring, university groups have EDI on their radar as well in their pre-budget submissions.

Reckoning with reconciliation
“Reconciliation” was always a hefty word with action needed to back it up. In response to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s calls to action, universities continue to work toward a shared commitment to closing the Indigenous education gap. One of those efforts: law schools are revamping their programs to respond to what one dean calls “the most significant shift in the Canadian legal landscape in our lifetimes,” Kerry Banks reports. Columnist Sheila Cote-Meek remarked on the need for structural changes at universities rather than quick fixes that don’t stand the test of time. And, at the most recent Building Reconciliation Forum, the theme was Ts’its’u’ watul tseep, meaning “to help one another” in the HUL’Q’UMI’NUM’ language.

Poem of the week: Sonnet – September 1922 by Ivor Gurney

Sonnet – September 1922 isn't quite, at first glance, the kind of poem we associate with Ivor Gurney. He was a consummate poet of place and particularity, celebrating in The Dearness of Common Things a litany of domestic and pastoral favourites, from "Beech wood, tea, plate shelves / And the whole family of crockery" to "Earth fine to handle, / The touch of clouds" and "Wool, rope, cloth, old pipes / Gone warped in service / And the one herb of tobacco". A song of self-knowledge, that candid statement of his ars poetica underlies a previous poem of the week by Gurney, The Mangel-Bury. This week's choice doesn't turn its back on the resources of place and detail, but layers them with more abstract ideas.

Even before a traumatic experience of the first world war, Gurney showed symptoms of the illness that would lead to his hospitalisation, and which would now very likely be categorised as bipolar disorder. The dating of the poem strongly suggests that he wrote it around the time he was certified insane. It was written on 28 September, in the same year that Gurney was transferred from a mental asylum in his native Gloucester to the City of London mental hospital in Dartford, Kent, where he was to spend the last 15 years of his life.

His real life as a poet was to continue, and the decision to write in the sonnet form at this intensely emotional moment signals, perhaps, a quiet mustering of resources. Authenticity, realised through innovative formalism, is the first of these.

The sestet complicates the thought, and concerns self-perception. As the earth "Forgets protestation in its turning", the toad, threatened by the harrow, forgets or is forgotten by "toadiness"– the state of being a toad, but, implicitly for the person in that crushed condition, the dishonourable state of playing the toady. The sense of self is undermined more radically in the butterfly's reaction "when that clanking thing goes by" (the harrow, the ambulance?) but then rectified ("And's not distressed"). The last two-and-a-half lines shift magnificently to the metaphorical and colloquial, introducing, with a characteristic wry, down-to-earth humour, the grocer's easily falsified bill. While being "twisted" physically connotes painful distortion and death, acquiescence might include possibilities of self-preservation and even escape (twisting free). The concluding aphorism mingles gravity and insouciance. Protest fails: time is handed the natural victory, which might also bring a welcome cessation of mockery or betrayal, "And no history of November keeps the guy."

Culture secretary Jeremy Wright reveals his love of Lego

The culture secretary, Jeremy Wright, has said he has a large Lego collection, which he uses to relax when in need of a break from the rigours of government.

"In my view, it’s a great way of putting your brain into neutral, which sometimes we all need to do," he said, describing his Lego collection. "It’s very large indeed. My wife would say far too large but I find Lego therapeutic," the Conservative MP told talkRADIO.

"I think everybody who does any difficult or stressful job needs a way to switch off. We all have different ways. Mine is Lego."

Wright said he had built a recreation of the Death Star from Star Wars using 4,500 bricks. "Putting Lego together and pulling it apart again is a very therapeutic process. Some of the new stuff is very good and the engineering capabilities of those who build and design Lego sets is quite amazing."

Earlier this week, Wright, who is responsible for overseeing the media industry, told a meeting of newspaper editors that he did not subscribe to any British newspapers or magazines. Instead, he relied on a summary of the news from his aides.

The digital, culture, media and sport secretary, who did not have an active Twitter account when he took the job, insisted his comments had been misinterpreted to suggest he didn’t consume any news: "To suggest that I don’t read newspapers is complete nonsense. Of course I do."

Michael LeCount, the owner of the Lego shop Bricks and Bits in Sheffield, told the Guardian that Wright’s hobby was not unusual: "There is quite a big community of adult fans who are into Lego or have come back to it."

Their extra spending power enabled them to build larger collections and buy themed Lego sets based around films or comic book series.

In recent years, Lego Serious Play workshops had become a regular feature at corporate and government team-building events, encouraging individuals to work together creatively.

LeCount said adults had always been drawn to making models and Lego meant "you can create what you want, you don’t have to be constrained".

"It’s partly a nostalgia thing – they remember having it as a child – and the sets they’re doing are more appealing to adults," added LeCount, who earlier this year bought a second home to house his Lego collection.