Well Being: Complementary Healing Alternatives

07/01/2022

Here's one good thing to celebrate this July. Festive fireworks not required. https://mailchi.mp/frameofmindfilms/tg14_birthday_airdates_on_pbs?e=92695fd987

06/05/2022

Apropos a segment of our Spiritual Potluck this afternoon this intriguing discussion just popped up.

A rat in a cage with a bottle of water and another laced with either he**in or co***ne will almost always prefer the drugged water and almost always kill itself very quickly within a couple of weeks. So there you go.

Bruce Alexander: “Well, hang on a minute. We’re putting the rat in an empty cage. It’s got nothing to do. Let’s try this a little bit differently.”

So Bruce built Rat Park that is like heaven for rats. Everything your rat about town could want. Lovely food, got loads of other rats to be friends and have s*x with, loads of colored balls. Everything your rat could want. And the same normal and drugged water bottles.

The fascinating thing is that now they don’t like the drugged water. They hardly use any of it. None ever overdose. None ever use in a way that looks like compulsion or addiction.

Bruce showed that both the right-wing and left-wing theories of addiction are wrong.

The right-wing theory is that drugs are a moral failing, you’re a hedonist, you party too hard.

The left-wing theory is that drugs take you over, your brain is hijacked.

Bruce says it’s not your morality, it’s not your brain; it’s your cage. Addiction is largely an adaptation to your environment.

We have created a society where significant numbers of our fellow citizens cannot bear to be present in their lives without being drugged, right?

We have created a hyperconsumerist, hyperindividualist, isolated world that is, for a lot of people, much more like that first cage than it is like the bonded, connected cages that we need.

The opposite of addiction is not sobriety. The opposite of addiction is connection. And our whole society, the engine of our society, is geared towards making us connect with things not people. If you are not a good consumer capitalist citizen, if you’re spending your time bonding with the people around you and not buying stuff—in fact, we are trained from a very young age to focus our hopes and our dreams and our ambitions on things we can buy and consume. And drug addiction is really a subset of that.

https://www.ted.com/talks/johann_hari_everything_you_think_you_know_about_addiction_is_wrong
** About the work of Bruce K. Alexander

05/10/2022

ITHACA, NY -- On May 11, 2017, Tenzin Taklha — secretary to His Holiness the Dalai Lama — wrote to the Namgyal Monastery Institute of Buddhist Studies in Ithaca, approving

04/19/2022

04/09/2022

Life isn't a contest. No one wins first place. Pace yourself.

03/05/2022

🖤💙💚

-

[Image Description:

A background with a blend of blue and green with a Tweet in the middle by Ursula Wolfe-Rocca that says, “It can be overwhelming to witness/experience/take in all the injustices of the moment; the good news is that they’re all connected. So if your little corner of work involves pulling at one of the threads, you’re helping to unravel the whole damn cloth.”]

-

Via .Hill on IG

02/24/2022

02/19/2022

01/27/2022

— Ernest Hemingway

01/11/2022

"We say, 'Oh, I know.' But we don't know. We don't know anything." - Pema Chödron

Man says owl led him through blizzard to campsite

01/04/2022

“The world is increasingly designed to depress us. Happiness isn’t very good for the economy. If we were happy with what we had, why would we need more? How do you sell an anti-ageing moisturiser? You make someone worry about ageing. How do you get people to vote for a political party? You make them worry about immigration. How do you get them to buy insurance? By making them worry about everything. How do you get them to have plastic surgery? By highlighting their physical flaws. How do you get them to watch a TV show? By making them worry about missing out. How do you get them to buy a new smartphone? By making them feel like they are being left behind. To be calm becomes a kind of revolutionary act. To be happy with your own non-upgraded existence. To be comfortable with our messy, human selves, would not be good for business.”

- Matt Haig, in "Reasons to Stay Alive".

12/23/2021

At Freetown Farm, members of the community can learn the names of medicinal herbs and harvest vegetables, all while developing a deeper relationship to the land and local community.

12/08/2021

If you don't define what "enough" means, you'll never have it - Timber Hawkeye.
Do the work. 🙏

11/30/2021

"Turn your demons into art, your shadow into a friend, your fear into fuel, your failures into teachers, your weaknesses into reasons to keep fighting. Don't waste your pain. Recycle your heart.”-Andrea Balt

Can you turn your demons into art?

11/26/2021

Happy 82nd birthday to Margaret Atwood.

"The moment when, after many years
of hard work and a long voyage,
you stand in the centre of your room,
house, half-acre, square mile, island, country,
knowing at last how you got there,
and say, I own this,

Is the same moment the trees unloose
their soft arms from around you,
the birds take back their language,
the cliffs fissure and collapse,
the air moves back from you like a wave
and you can’t breathe.

No, they whisper. You own nothing.
You were a visitor, time after time
Climbing the hill, planting the flag, proclaiming.

We never belonged to you.
You never found us.
It was always the other way round."

~ Margaret Atwood

Photo credit to Tim Walker

10/27/2021

In Arras, France, a city council member is making history as the city’s public official in charge of inclusion and happiness. Éléonore Laloux is the first and only person with Down syndrome to be elected to public office in the country. Laloux was recently awarded membership in the National Orde...

10/08/2021

Your ego says you are stuck in traffic, the truth is that you ARE traffic!

10/01/2021

Here’s some beauty for your timeline: a stunning and ancient globular cluster captured by the venerable Hubble Space Telescope. The telescope’s Wide Field Camera 3 and Advanced Camera for Surveys was used to take this picture of ESO 520-21 (also known as Palomar 6), which is located about 25,000...

09/27/2021

09/24/2021

It took me a while to understand this is where I was going wrong: I was bitter, angry, and pessimistic, yet wondering why I couldn't find love or joy, for example... 🤦‍♂️ It's so obvious now that we see the world as we are, so I needed to stop being bitter in order for life to be sweet 🙏

09/19/2021

“We do not become healers.
We came as healers.
We are.
Some of us are still catching up to what we are.
We do not become storytellers.
We came as carriers of the stories that
we and our ancestors actually lived.
We are.
Some of us are still catching up to what we are.
We do not become artists. We came as artists.
We are.
Some of us are still catching up to what we are.
We do not become writers.. dancers.. musicians.. helpers.. peacemakers. We came as such.
We are.
Some of us are still catching up to what we are.
We do not learn to love in this sense.
We came as Love.
We are Love.
Some of us are still catching up to who we truly are.”

~Clarissa Pinkola Estes

art: Caroline Maniere

09/18/2021

Opportunity knocks for Practitioners

Learn the healing power of somatic therapy with the world's leaders in trauma healing and recovery.

09/12/2021

09/11/2021