thinking thursday.

December 20, 2012 in General

mind

Please don’t.
Need a run-down of the year’s top scientific achievements? YOU ARE IN LUCK!
I have been thinking a lot about denial recently. It is such a powerful defense mechanism–and we all practice it: “Denial functions to protect the ego from things that the individual cannot cope with. While this may save us from anxiety or pain, denial also requires a substantial investment of energy.” Denial serves a purpose, until it doesn’t: “Denial is the path of psychological and moral least resistance.“
I found this very interesting, particularly in view of the light that many humans eat animals: new model of empathy.

body

I’m still eating raw, vegan food (my 30-day trial will end December 30), but if I add any cooked foods to that, one of them will have to be this roasted broccoli.
And I want to eat this RIGHT NOW.
This is also on my agenda.

spirit

A lot of people are talking about masculinity and violence. This is a very interesting article about why boys become killers, written in response to the Newtown killings: “Although all our instincts urge us to dissociate from the killer, achieving better understanding requires us to put ourselves in his shoes no matter how frightening and distasteful that may be.” The author goes further: “How do we go about this process of ‘making sense,’ not as a way of excusing but as a path to understanding and preventing violence? We start by recognizing that many young Americans (and other young people around the world) develop and carry with them a kind of moral damage, which I have come to call ‘the war zone mentality.’ However it develops, they grow up with a damaged sense of reality. They view the world as if they are soldiers confronting a hostile environment that they perceive to be full of enemies. Once they get fixated on this damaged world view, they may hatch the delusion that even teachers and young children are their enemies…. The mental health problems that result from emotional damage require more, not less, social support, and not just from parents, who may be overwhelmed and ashamed of their offspring. The boys and young men can be socially isolated because their damage makes peers and the community turn away from them, and that only compounds their problems.” I hope we can have these conversations before it’s too late, before another Newtown, before.
Thanks to my friend Maxine for pointing me to this: “Every moment of experience is contingent on a vast complex of myriad conditions. Nothing exists in and of itself as ‘this’ or ‘that,’ ‘self’ or ‘other.’ Everything is what it is only in relation to what it is not. To recognize this emptiness is not to negate things but to glimpse what enables anything to happen at all.” – Stephen Batchelor, “Nagarjuna’s Verses from the Center”

word

“Your silence will not protect you.” –Audre Lorde

(image from here)

Patti Digh is an author, speaker, and educator who builds learning communities and gets to the heart of difficult topics. Her work over the last three decades has focused on diversity, inclusion, social justice, and living and working mindfully. She has developed diversity strategies and educational programming for major nonprofit and corporate organizations and has been a featured speaker at many national and international conferences.