How This Plague Ends (and What It Tells Us About Human Nature) | Nicholas Christakis

Having been raised in the Mormon faith, Thomas McConkie was feeling a little lost after he had a falling out with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, his family and his faith-based community. When he started going to a Zen meditation center in Salt Lake City, Utah, a daily practice became "a lifeline," McConkie said, and it eventually helped him make his was back to Mormonism, start a meditation center called Lower Lights School of Wisdom and launch his "Mindfulness+" podcast.

15 Aug 201852min

After having two kids, Elizabeth Cutler had a friend suggest she try spin classes as a way to lose weight and less than a year later, she and her business partner Julie Rice launched SoulCycle. After the pair sold the multimillion-dollar company in 2016, Cutler decided to take her family on sabbatical, pulling her kids out of school so they could take classes online as they traveled all over the world, and all the while she tried to keep a regular morning meditation routine.

8 Aug 20181h 2min

For a long time, Culture Abuse's 31-year-old frontman David Kelling didn't want to perform in public. As all five members of the San Francisco-based punk band opened up about things they've tried to work through, Kelling, who has Cerebral palsy, said he felt that the frontman is "supposed to be good looking, in shape and this and that ... and so it is hard" when he "didn't really have any examples" of lead singer/songwriters who played with disabilities, and now that the band goes on tour, he added that "it's also hard to be the person now that is an example."

1 Aug 20181h 13min

"There was more snowstorms than meditators in Alabama when I was growing up," said Light Watkins, who started a career as a working model before switching gears to become a yoga teacher and then dove into the world of Vedic meditation. With his newest book, "Bliss More, How to Succeed in Meditation Without Really Trying," Watkins, who is now a meditation teacher and lives as a nomad, said his mission is to "simplify the approach" to meditation "and help people start something that they can get excited about."

25 Juli 20181h 2min

Spring Washam was on a meditation retreat when she felt herself falling apart, so much so that she picked up "the red phone," screamed out "HELP." That moment launched Washam onto a "whole other journey" to work through her past and find sources of her suffering, which she details in her book, "A Fierce Heart: Finding Strength, Wisdom, and Courage in Any Moment."

18 Juli 20181h 8min

Spiritual leaders often have great influence over their followers but there are times, author Scott Edelstein says, when some leaders will use their position of power to manipulate, shame and abuse others. Edelstein discusses how spiritual leaders can "stray," even become predatory, and suggests ways for a healthy student-teacher relationships, which he lays out in his book, "Sex and the Spiritual Teacher."

11 Juli 20181h 5min

Jeremy Richman remembers his daughter Avielle as a fun spirit with "this unbelievable smile that she would just give out to anybody," who was as happy playing dress-up as a fairy at a ball as she was practicing Kung Fu and shooting a bow and arrow outside. Avielle was killed with 19 of her classmates and six educators in the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, and in her memory, the Richmans started The Avielle Foundation, which funds research on brain health and causations for violent behaviors.

4 Juli 20181h 3min

Her body badly broken in a horrific bus crash in Laos, Alison Wright was still trying to breathe as she realized that she may not make it out alive. But not only did she survive, the award-winning National Geographic photographer called upon her years of meditation practice to keep breathing as she re-learned how to walk, overcame months of debilitating pain, climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro and even got back on a bus in Laos, all of which she details in her memoir, "Learning to Breathe: One Woman's Journey of Spirit and Survival."

27 Juni 20181h 8min