Self-Parenting Journaling Exercise
by Dana Dunlap
My way of dealing with pain, for many years, was to remain very angry at my abusers and to spend most of my thoughts on self-criticism and abuse. One of the ways I learned to successfully resolve the anger and self-abuse was through a journaling exercise that I created. This exercise is also effective for relieving pent-up feelings.
It may sound like a strange process, and you might feel a little awkward in the beginning, but I promise you that if you stick with it, you’ll experience great amounts of freedom and relief from pain.
So, get out a pen and paper, or you can type on the computer if you’re more comfortable with that. I find pen and paper to be more effective because, at points, you might be expressing anger and you might even find yourself tearing the paper with your pen—and this can create a sense of release.
To start off, you will identify a few different parts of your personality. I’ve found that pretty much everyone who is experiencing depression, or who has experienced former childhood abuse or neglect, has these three parts as portions of their being...
My Sisters, My Family
by Marie Kenfak
We are miles apart, yet so close
We are so different, yet so connected
We have felt so isolated, now we have a family
We set up a zoom meeting
We exchange greetings and news
Then each of us does her thing...
Thoughts About the Social Experience of Living
by Becky Lewis
I think the toughest thing for me to survive has been something I share in common with refugees, migrants, immigrants, and survivors of domestic violence: I have had to juggle multiple sets of “social norms,” simultaneously, and the consequences for “messing up” have sometimes been dire, severe, and unforgiving.
It has been very confusing, even after accounting for my neurodivergent trait of not understanding some social cues because I no longer carefully copy the behavior of the people around me. I made this comment on Facebook, recently...
Intentional Performance of Particles
by Jane Engleman
It seems that particles are waves that cause movement in other particles and waves. I don’t know. Just seems we splash.
Everything in the particle is in the wave it is, particularly in physical dance and physical poetry. Everything that we do is contained in the dance, in the activated muscle, the bone and the integration of the sensory neurons, within the context of arterial systems and the Vegas nerve. Maybe particles move the way the Father becomes the Son and the Holy Ghost, the way that ice melts to waters that become steam. The way gifting moves from stillness to energy.
I am definitely not a dancer, performance in the art sense, in the dance sense. So why is meditation and Medicine Dance so important to me? For 25 years I was lost in self-care, studying origins without ever being here inside my own body. I was taught, without feeling, that I could heal...
Thoughts about Human Attachment
by Becky Lewis
In my own generation, scientific research is starting to catch up with something that has always caused agony for orphans and adoptees, even if they could not articulate it. Humility and grief are my responses. I wish I had understood the experiences of others around me as I grew up. I wish I could have made a difference for them.
We, as adults who forget what it was like to be infants, are learning about the ways that our biological drive for human attachment impacts us.
Nicolae Cousescu, dictator in Romania for decades, had many orphanages, in which the orphans, including infants, received very little or no human interaction...
