Diwali Celebration Foods

 https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/howto/guide/top-10-recipes-to-celebrate-diwali

To prevent burnout when exercising daily for your mental health, you need to shift your focus from high-intensity output to sustainable movement and active recovery. When physical activity becomes a rigid or punishing obligation, it loses its psychological benefits.

Practical Strategies to Avoid Burnout

Lower the Intensity on Hard Days: You do not need to sweat buckets or push to exhaustion every single day to get the mental health benefits. Swap high-intensity workouts for low-intensity movement like a slow walk, stretching, or restorative yoga. 
Redefine "Daily Exercise" as "Movement": Daily doesn't have to mean a formal gym session or a grueling run. It can mean gardening, a brisk 15-minute walk, or light mobility work. Consistency matters far more than intensity. 
Break It Up Into Chunks: Instead of a single long block of exercise that feels like a chore when you are tired, split your movement into smaller segments (such as a 10-minute walk in the morning and a 10-minute walk later in the day).
Listen to Your Body's Warning Signs: Pushing through severe muscle soreness, persistent fatigue, dread, or emotional exhaustion turns exercise into a stressor rather than a reliever. If your body is screaming for rest, honor it. 
Ditch All-or-Nothing Thinking: Missing a day or scaling back does not ruin your mental health progress. Be flexible and kind to yourself when life gets busy or your energy dips. 
Vary Your Routine: Doing the exact same high-impact workout every day leads to mental and physical fatigue. Mix aerobic exercise with strength work, flexibility, or outdoor recreation to keep things fresh. 
Check Your Motivation: Ensure you are exercising to care for your mind rather than using it as an rigid coping dependency or punishment. 

For more guidance on keeping physical activity restorative, review the Exercise Burnout Guide or explore tips on Over-exercising and Mental Health. 

Stop waiting for others to change is the turning point where you reclaim your personal agency and emotional peace. Expecting un-self-aware or inconsiderate people to suddenly become responsible only traps you in chronic disappointment.  How to Shift Your Focus  • Accept people as they are: Realize that explaining your pain or dropping hints will not force someone to grow up if they are not ready. See the situation for what it actually is rather than what you wish it would be. • Set firm personal boundaries: Boundaries are not about controlling other people's behavior; they are clear choices about what you will and will not tolerate in your space. • Detach your peace from their accountability: You do not need an apology, an acknowledgment, or a change of heart from someone else to start healing or moving forward. • Reinvest in your own life: Redirect the mental energy waiting for others back into your own life. Counselors emphasize that true relief comes when you stop tying your well-being to external change. You cannot make someone become more considerate, more responsible, or more loving simply because you have explained your pain clearly enough. At some point, you have to decide what you will do with the situation as it actually is. Growth begins the moment we stop waiting and start taking responsibility for our own choices, emotions, and direction. We don't have to wait for a parent (or anyone else) to come to acknowledge their behavior. We can give that acknowledgement to ourselves.

Estranged means having lost former closeness, affection, or contact with someone you were once close to, such as a family member, spouse, or friend.

 I have a friend, uh, who's a writer. And he says that his writing is the antidote to the chaos of the world around him. I think, that's a good description. He retreats into that world. That becomes more important to him than the world he sees. I suppose, some people might not think that's such a great thing but he thinks it is. It's all real, it's just what you choose to establish as the core of your being. He makes the core of his life - oh, an act of imagination. Is it escape or is it liberation? I don't know. You tell me, I don't know, I have no idea, I don't know anything about these things. For him, that person, writing - is a, it's a - resolution of his life. It makes his life solid and real. Without, that the world would overwhelm him with its chaos. So is it escape to become sane? Or - or is the insanity of the world - so which is the escape? I don't know. Philip Glass

 They preferred to swallow poison than open their eyes and heart.

 

The Story of the Week

by Joshua Mehigan

Experience was nothing that day. That day was Sunday.   It was impossible to transcend the Western Tradition of Sunday. But he did not demand a better world.   This he left to the moon, the moon’s day, Monday.   Saturday he was maudlin, and may have been in love. Friday he got phone calls, but wasn’t there to answer.   Wherever he was he was not falling in love.   Thursday was bunk. The sack of his heart emptied. Wednesday was symmetry, a thimbleful of nothing.   What seemed most decisive, redemptive, was Tuesday. Suffering really meant something to him then.   Monday, last Monday, he felt sure he’d found the catch in the course of circular motion.   Sunday he did not demand a better world.

__________

From The Optimist, Ohio University Press, 2004, by JOSHUA MEHIGAN.

Waiting for someone to "grow up" usually means putting your own life, emotional well-being, or relationship milestones on hold while hoping an emotionally immature partner, family member, or friend will eventually mature.  The Reality of Waiting  • You cannot force maturity: Personal growth is an internal choice. If someone lacks the self-awareness, accountability, or desire to change, waiting months or years rarely yields a different result. • The cost to you: Time spent waiting is time you cannot get back. While you wait for someone else to step up, you often absorb chronic stress, broken promises, and unequal emotional labor. • Aging vs. growing up: Time causes people to age, but maturity requires active self-reflection, taking responsibility for mistakes, and doing the hard work to change behavior—something not everyone chooses to do.  A Healthier Approach  • Focus on current reality: Judge people by who they are right now, not by their potential or who you hope they could become. • Set firm boundaries: Decide what behaviors you will and will not accept rather than waiting for the other person to realize they need to act differently. • Choose yourself: Life is short, and your energy is better invested in relationships with people who are already emotionally available and mutually accountable.

Traumatic events can overwhelm your body and mind, leaving a lasting mark on your mood, relationship, and sense of self long after the trauma has ended. When trauma impairs your ability to develop full emotional maturity, this is known as arrested psychological development. Trauma can “freeze” your emotional response at the age you experienced it. When you feel or act emotionally younger than your actual age, this is known as age regression. Age regression means that, later in life, child-like behavior patterns can appear again when we feel unsafe or when we encounter triggers related to previous trauma — even if we’re unaware that we’ve been triggered.  “When an individual is traumatized, especially early on in life, the memory of the trauma is stored both in the brain and the body,” explains Carla Marie Manly, PhD, a clinical psychologist, trauma specialist, and author based in Sonoma, California. “As a result, if healing does not occur, the traumatic incident can impede healthy development.  “In essence, depending on the severity of the trauma, [your] entire way of being may be formed around the traumatic incident,” Manly adds.  This is because, on a neurobiological level, the trauma is not properly processed. It can rewire your brain in such a way that ultimately influences your thought patterns and behavioral responses as you get older, she says.  According to 2015 research, age regression can happen in children and adults. A small-scale 2007 study notes that regression may be more common in younger adults than older adults.  Though many therapists and counselors believe that trauma can cause age regression and leave people stuck at a certain age, few research studies are looking into its validity and usefulness in trauma therapy. source

Thursday is my Friday and Friday is my Saturday and Saturday is my Sunday and Sunday is my Monday. I like it. 

For regular swimmers, the rhythm of a session becomes an anchor for mood and mental clarity.

Skipping a swim day feels tough because routine, muscle memory, and the mental reset of the water become a powerful habit.  Why It’s So Hard to Miss a Swim  • The "Feel for the Water": Swimmers often feel a little off or restless if they go more than 48 hours without getting into the pool or open water. • Low-Impact Recovery: Swimming relieves joint pressure, loosens tight muscles (like stiff ankles from running or biking), and acts as a built-in stress reliever. • Mental Momentum: For regular swimmers, the rhythm of a session becomes an anchor for mood and mental clarity. Regular swimmers feel restless when they miss a couple of days in the water.

Bounty 

by Robyn Sarah

Make much of something small.
The pouring-out of tea,
a drying flower’s shadow on the wall
from last week’s sad bouquet.
A fact: it isn’t summer any more.

Say that December sun
is pitiless, but crystalline
and strikes like a bell.
Say it plays colours like a glockenspiel.
It shows the dust as well,

the elemental sediment
your broom has missed,
and lights each grain of sugar spilled
upon the tabletop, beside
pistachio shells, peel of a clementine.

Slippers and morning papers on the floor,
and wafts of iron heat from rumbling rads,
can this be all? No, look — here comes the cat,
with one ear inside out.
Make much of something small.

Click here for more information about Canadian writer Robyn Sarah. This poem is from A Day’s Grace, published in 2003 by The Porcupine’s Quill.

 

Zero Holding

by Robyn Sarah

I grow to like the bare trees and the snow, the bones and fur of winter. Even the greyness of the nunneries, they are so grey, walled all around with grey stones— and the snow piled up on ledges of wall and sill, those grey planes for holding snow: this is how it will be, months now, all so still, sunk in itself, only the cold alive, vibrant, like a wire—and all the busy chimneys—their ghost-breath, a rumor of lives warmed within, rising, rising, and blowing away.

__________

From The Touchstone: New and Selected Poems, House of Anansi Press, 1992, by ROBYN SARAH.

“Shame is the deepest of the “negative emotions,” a feeling we will do almost anything to avoid. Unfortunately, our abiding fear of shame impairs our ability to see reality.”
― Gabor Maté, When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress

“Whether we realize it or not, it is our woundedness, or how we cope with it, that dictates much of our behavior, shapes our social habits, and informs our ways of thinking about the world.”
― Gabor Maté, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture

“So self-acceptance does not mean self-admiration or even self-liking at every moment of our lives, but tolerance for all our emotions, including those that make us feel uncomfortable.”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder – The International Bestseller

“Emotional competence requires the capacity to feel our emotions, so that we are aware when we are experiencing stress; the ability to express our emotions effectively and thereby to assert our needs and to maintain the integrity of our emotional boundaries; the facility to distinguish between psychological reactions that are pertinent to the present situation and those that represent residue from the past.

What we want and demand from the world needs to conform to our present needs, not to unconscious, unsatisfied needs from childhood. If distinctions between past and present blur, we will perceive loss or the threat of loss where none exists; and the awareness of those genuine needs that do require satisfaction, rather than their repression for the sake of gaining the acceptance or approval of others. Stress occurs in the absence of these criteria, and it leads to the disruption of homeostasis. Chronic disruption results in ill health.

In each of the individual histories of illness in this book, one or more aspect of emotional competence was significantly compromised, usually in ways entirely unknown to the person involved. Emotional competence is what we need to develop if we are to protect ourselves from the hidden stresses that create a risk to health, and it is what we need to regain if we are to heal. We need to foster emotional competence in our children, as the best preventive medicine.”
― Gabor Maté, When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress

I feel this way about swimming

“Music gives me a sense of self-sufficiency and nourishment. I don’t need anyone or anything. I bathe in it as in amniotic fluid; it surrounds and protects me. It’s also stable, ever-available and something I can control - that is, I can reach for it whenever I want. I can also choose music that reflects my mood, or if I want, helps to soothe it…music-seeking offers excitement and tension that I can immediately resolve and a reward I can immediately attain - unlike other tensions in my life and other desired rewards. Music is a source of beauty and meaning outside myself that I can claim as my own without exploring how, in my life, I keep from directly experiencing those qualities. Addiction, in this sense, is the lazy man’s path to transcendence.”

― Gabor Maté, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction

 “We see that substance addictions are only one specific form of blind attachment to harmful ways of being, yet we condemn the addict's stubborn refusal to give up something deleterious to his life or to the life of others. Why do we despise, ostracize and punish the drug addict, when as a social collective, we share the same blindness and engage in the same rationalizations?”
― Gabor Maté, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction

“No society can understand itself without looking at its shadow side.”
― Gabor Maté, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction