Posts
Nothing is softer or more flexible than water, yet nothing can resist it.
- Lao Tzu
Monday, May 07, 2018
Containing Both
One good guy and one bad guy right? They kiss.” They’re two souls and they are saying, “One of us will play the good guy and one of us will play the bad guy.” See, you go up a triangle, you go up and you come to the point of one, after going from one and two, you come to three, at the point and along the way, the one includes the two, and the one includes good and bad. That’s who we are, that third, single point, containing both.
-Ram Dass
Article
Karen Stabiner
Coffee, always, in one of my cups. They’ve become fused: A great cup of coffee is equal parts beverage and vessel.
A dinner plate says, “Sit down next to me and let’s talk,” and each one has its own family stories to tell.
- Karen Stabiner
Article
Sylvia Bloom
Sylvia Bloom, a legal secretary from Brooklyn, worked for the same law firm for 67 years while quietly amassing a fortune. In her will, she left more than $8 million for college scholarships.
Jane Lockshin, the treasurer of the Henry Street Settlement’s board, said her aunt, Ms. Bloom, left $6.2 million to the settlement’s Expanded Horizons College Success Program, which helps disadvantaged students prepare for and complete college.
Ms. Bloom joins the ranks of unassuming and magnanimous millionaires next door, who have died with fortunes far larger than their lifestyles ever would have suggested. Like Ms. Bloom, Leonard Gigowski, a shopkeeper from New Berlin, Wis., who died in 2015, left his secret $13 million fortune to fund scholarships.
Grace Groner, who lived in a one-bedroom home in Lake Forest, Ill., and directed that her $7 million estate go to her alma mater when she died in 2010 at 100, shopped at thrift stores and chose to walk not drive.
Article
Cookie Power
My husband brought home two large chocolate chip cookies on Friday. His school baked them in the culinary department as a refreshment for an after-school Friday faculty meeting. Normally I do not have a sweet tooth. When he offered me a cookie on Saturday afternoon I said "this needs iced coffee," so I had a cookie with iced coffee and I stayed up until 2AM!
Cheers to Woonsocket YMCA
Sunday morning I heard many languages spoken among adults and children learning to swim at the YMCA pool. I'm so happy to see our Woonsocket YMCA become the fabulous multicultural welcoming center I knew it could be. Amen!
When We Feel Safe
When we feel safe our stress hormones (e.g. cortisol, adrenalin, norepinephrine) decline and the connecting hormones (like oxytocin) rise. Our emotional brain (amygdala) relaxes and our thinking brain (prefrontal cortex)is free to operate at its full potential allowing us to fully participate in learning and play.
We define mental health in early childhood as relating to a child’s healthy physical, cognitive, social and emotional development and their capacity within the context of their development, family, environment and culture to:
participate in the physical and social environment
form healthy and secure relationships
experience, regulate, understand and express emotions
understand and regulate their behaviour
interact appropriately with others, including peers
develop a secure sense of self.
―Hunter Institute of Mental Health and the Community Services & Health Industry Skills Council (2012) source
The Impact
The impact of societal femininity ideals on disordered eating behaviors in non-transgender women has been well described (Bordo, 1993; Thompson, 1999), but scant research has explored these processes among transgender women.
In spite of limited empirical work, social science scholarship suggests that disordered eating and unhealthy weight and shape control behaviors constitute an area of significant public health concern in this underserved population.
As feminist scholars have long noted, dominant Western constructions of the “ideal female body” are inextricably bound to historically contingent weight and shape ideals, as well as to long-standing hierarchies of gender, race, class, and physical ability (Bordo, 1993; Gilman, 1999).
The hegemonic 20th/21st century Western definition of “feminine beauty” requires a thin and young body, light skin, and straight hair (Bordo, 1993; Patton, 2006). From this vantage point, culture is “not simply contributory but productive of eating disorders” (Bordo, 1993, p. 50).
Epidemiological and psychological research with young cisgender (i.e., non-transgender) women has supported the claim that gendered societal thinness ideals contribute to body dissatisfaction (Paquette and Raine, 2004; Stice and Whitenton, 2002), which in turn contributes to unhealthy weight and shape control behaviors (Grigg et al., 1996; Sonneville et al., 2012).
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5241136/
Sunday, May 06, 2018
Are You Living in a Puddle?
The most effective self-care is not about what we do for ourselves, but how we are being with ourselves — the kind of company we keep inside, the flavor of the conversation we conduct with ourselves inside our own minds.
The truth is that it is only when we feel well taken care of, when our feelings have been properly heard and cared for, that we have adequate caring resources to offer others. When our well is full, we are our most selfless and can fully experience our goodness and our inherent desire to be of service.
The ability and willingness to empathize with our own experience is precisely what allows us to empathize with the experience of others.
Paradoxically, taking care of ourselves is what makes us unselfish. On the other hand, when we reject or ignore ourselves, we cannot be truly compassionate with others, certainly not to our full capacity, as a large part of our heart is closed off and inaccessible. This is not to say that we cannot be kind human beings without being kind to ourselves, but without the ability to relate lovingly with our own experience, we’re severed from the real depth of our loving potential. It’s as if we are living in a puddle when we could have access to the ocean.
-Nancy Colier from this Article
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/inviting-monkey-tea/201712/are-you-your-own-side
Nancy Colier: We Can’t Keep Abandoning Ourselves in the Service of Taking Care of Ourselves
Taking the step that is joining our own side, finding the courage to face whatever comes when we speak our truth, is a profound shift in a human being. It doesn’t happen in one fell swoop but rather in little moments and small challenges (that can feel gigantic). In order for this change to happen, we have to have had enough of the suffering that comes with not being on our own side, remaining silent, abandoning ourselves, or accepting blame for having a truth that another person doesn’t like.
Our own heart has to break—for ourselves—for what we’ve actually been living, and believing. We have to stop self-blaming and forgive ourselves for needing what we need—for our truth. When this happens, it’s no longer possible to turn our back on ourselves, disappear, in order to keep the peace or status quo.
The moment comes when we say enough, not from our head, but from our deepest guts. We are done, not as an idea but as a profound knowledge.
This process can feel like an act of grace, like something far larger than just our personal self has intervened, offering us the strength and clarity to change how we’re living and who we are. At last, we find ourselves holding our own heart.
Furthermore, the courage to speak our truth involves a shift in allegiance or purpose. Our goal transforms from maintaining the situation/relationship—at all cost—to living from the truth—at all cost. But in order to find this courage, this reverence for and trust in the truth, we have to get okay with any outcome that might transpire, including the one we’ve most feared. We must be willing to let it all burn up in the fire of the truth.
To do this, we have to release the belief that the only way to keep ourselves safe, keep our life proceeding as it needs to, is to control our experience and thereby create a certain outcome.
It’s a process, really, of turning it over, truth’s will not my will, trusting (or at least being willing to try trusting) that the truth will take us where we need to go, even if it’s not where we think we should be going.
At the deepest level, what I’m describing is an experience of awakening and surrender—knowing that we can’t keep abandoning ourselves in the service of taking care of ourselves. And, that it’s safe to let go of the reins, that the truth will take care of us. And ultimately, that the truth is the only real safety we have.
-Nancy Colier from this Article
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/inviting-monkey-tea/201803/when-we-can-no-longer-silence-our-truth
Choosing Love
To live from love not fear, on a practical level, is to shift from a goal of protecting our ego, being right, winning the argument, being not to blame, and move into actually being kind, being loving—in our actions. It is to be willing to stop proving that we’re a good person and actually be that good person—to be courageous enough to open our heart and be love even when our ego is screaming in fear.
And amazingly, in the moments when we have the strength to choose love over fear, we are rewarded not only with the knowledge and confidence that we have done something incredibly challenging and beautiful, but also, with the gift of experiencing ourselves as love, and something infinitely more than just the small, fragile ego we thought we were and so desperately needed to protect. We are rewarded with a freedom that surpasses all other freedoms. Ultimately, it is through our willingness to stop defending our idea of ourselves that we discover our true and indestructible self.
- Nancy Colier
Nancy Colier, LCSW, Rev. is a psychotherapist, interfaith minister and the author of the book The Power of Off: The Mindful Way to Stay Sane in a Virtual World.
In Print:
The Power of Off: The Mindful Way to Stay Sane in a Virtual World (link is external)
Online:
Website
http://nancycolier.com/
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/inviting-monkey-tea/201802/choosing-love-not-fear
The Silence: The Legacy of Childhood Trauma
Personal History
April 16, 2018 Issue
The Silence: The Legacy of Childhood Trauma
I never got any help, any kind of therapy. I never told anyone.
By Junot Díaz
I’d always assumed that if I ever returned to that place, that island where I’d been shipwrecked, I would never escape; I’d be dragged down and destroyed. And yet, irony of ironies, what awaited me on that island was not my destruction but nearly the opposite: my salvation.
During that time I wrote very little. Mostly I underlined passages in my favorite books. This line in particular I circled at least a dozen times: “Then darkness took me, and I strayed out of thought and time, and I wandered far on roads that I will not tell.”
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/04/16/the-silence-the-legacy-of-childhood-trauma
Saturday, May 05, 2018
Trash Day Blessings or Toothpick Jesus
Last night Bill and I took Romeo for a walk down Hazel Street. We said hi to Manny who was hanging out in his man cave. We walked over and he squatted down to greet Romeo. As we turned the corner I spotted a painting in the trash. I picked it up. It was a portrait of Jesus made from a collage of fabrics. His face and hands were drawn with colored pencil on white fuzzy fabric. The sacred heart was drawn on white card stock and carefully cut out and glued on his chest. His cloak was black velvet. Toothpicks and glitter formed the words bendito esta familia below the portrait. The frame was completely covered with natural toothpicks, arranged in diamond patterns, even on the back. It was genuine outsider art. "Let's give it to Manny," I said. We turned around. "Manny, would you like this? We just found it and thought you might like it," I said. His face lit up. "Bless this family," he read aloud.
"Now your man cave is blessed," I said.
"Thank you," Manny replied.
"This made my day," I said.
"Now your man cave is blessed," I said.
"Thank you," Manny replied.
"This made my day," I said.
Thursday, May 03, 2018
Sketchbooks
Yesterday I was looking at a students sketchbook at the local arts high school. I told one student:
I love sketchbooks sometimes even more than seeing the finished art. Keeping a sketchbook sharpens your eyes. Don't judge, don't cross out, just keep going. You will look back years later and appreciate a drawing that originally embarrassed you. Meanwhile your eye hand coordination will continue to improve.
She had drawn her cat.
He kept moving, she said.
Yes but you captured the motion, it's wonderful.
I drew half a bat until I realized bats don't look like that, she said.
I love your narration, you could write that below the sketch. Your narration reminds me of the book "The Little Prince."
I love sketchbooks sometimes even more than seeing the finished art. Keeping a sketchbook sharpens your eyes. Don't judge, don't cross out, just keep going. You will look back years later and appreciate a drawing that originally embarrassed you. Meanwhile your eye hand coordination will continue to improve.
She had drawn her cat.
He kept moving, she said.
Yes but you captured the motion, it's wonderful.
I drew half a bat until I realized bats don't look like that, she said.
I love your narration, you could write that below the sketch. Your narration reminds me of the book "The Little Prince."
Tuesday, May 01, 2018
Carin Meyer
For me, art and creativity engenders hope, even in the deepest of bipolar depressions. The very act of putting words onto a page—nonsensical or not—compels my brain to focus on something beyond my own misery, and instead I feel empowered by my own courage to create something, and then to share it.
Article
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