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A trauma conscious society and some art

Today’s post includes a few more drawings, a couple of poems, a few insights and ideas to perhaps ponder on from τhe Collective Trauma Summit that I jotted down while listening to talks. They are the gist of longer points, slightly paraphrased here. And finally, a reference to Gabor and Daniel Mate’s insights for the necessity of a trauma-informed society from their book, The Myth of Normal, which I’m slowly making my way through at the moment.

Drawings

Fences by Pam Mora

Mouths full of laughter, / the turistas (tourists) come to the tall hotel / with suitcases full of dollars.

Every morning my brother makes / the cool beach new for them. / With a wooden board he smoothes / away all footprints.

I peek through the cactus fence / and watch the women rub oil / sweeter than honey into their arms and legs / while their children jump waves / or sip drinks from long straws, / coconut white, mango yellow.

Once my little sister / ran barefoot across the hot sand / for a taste.

My mother roared like the ocean, / “No. No. It’s their beach. / It’s their beach.

 

Santiago by David Whyte

The road seen, then not seen, the hillside / hiding then revealing the way you should take, / the road dropping away from you as if leaving you / to walk on thin air, then catching you, holding you up, / when you thought you would fall, / and the way forward always in the end / the way that you followed, the way that carried you / into your future, that brought you to this place, / no matter that it sometimes took your promise from you, / no matter that it had to break your heart along the way…..

 

Insights from the Collective Trauma Summit

We have all been born in a traumatized world, which creates societal agreements, which creates social structures…. And all this has become normalized… we may not be aware of it or we may be resigned to it…

Forgiveness needs to look at power; we don’t want to reinscribe power or send the message that we don’t need to upend systems or structures…..

We co-regulate each other’s nervous systems / physiology… if you’re in a state of threat you can’t be a good regulator of anyone….  Often it’s our physiology that leads, not our good intentions….

The need for trauma informed media and journalism…….  fear mongering journalism takes peoples’ voice away … As we scare each other we lose our wonderful capacity of our own humanity.

We need a trauma informed approach to the News. As consumers of media all this dark material can create a sense of gloom and hopelessness, and a society in constant state of fight – flight….. It’s important to give journalists space to report joyful and positive material….. to propagate the understanding and reframing of trauma….

A Trauma-Conscious Society

One theme running through the various talks of the summit is the need for a trauma conscious society. In his new book Gabor Mate also explores the importance of a trauma conscious society at large. Below are some extracts referring to many fields and contexts that have a broad impact on our lives, and where a trauma informed perspective could potentially change the quality of everyone’s experience. Mate writes: “The implications of a society being trauma-literate could be immense. Since trauma is the core dynamic undergirding so much ill health, we need to develop the eyes and ears to spot it to begin with.”

Extracts from the book:

“A trauma-informed medical system, for starters, could help heal and prevent suffering on a scale and in ways inspiring to envision. Such a system would revamp how health care is delivered, aligning itself with the latest scientific findings. Published almost every week in leading science journals, these findings have yet to make much of a dent in mainstream medical thinking….. At present there remains powerful resistance to trauma awareness on the part of the medical profession— albeit a resistance more subliminal than deliberate, more passive than active. In the dozens of interviews I conducted with medical colleagues for this book, including recent graduates, virtually none of them recalled being taught about the mind-body unity or the profusely documented relationship between, for example, trauma and mental illness or addictions— let alone the links between adversity and physical disease. We doctors pride ourselves on what we call evidence-based practice while ignoring vast swaths of evidence that call into question central tenets of our dogma.

Can we next imagine a trauma-informed legal apparatus, one that could earn its title of “correctional system”? Such a system would have to dedicate itself to actually correcting things in a humane way, a far cry from what we have now….. Despite the documented fact that a large number of prison inmates committed their crimes out of dynamics originating in severe childhood suffering, legal training leaves the average lawyer or judge even more woefully trauma-ignorant than their medical counterparts. True to its other customary name, morally speaking, ours is a criminal justice system. A trauma-informed legal system would not justify or excuse harmful behavior. Rather, it would replace nakedly punitive measures with programs designed to rehabilitate people and not to further traumatize them.

A trauma informed education…… because trauma affects kids’ ability to learn, a trauma-informed educational system would train teachers to be well versed in the science of development. Education in such a system would encourage an atmosphere where emotional intelligence is valued as highly as intellectual achievement. We would no longer evaluate kids based on performance goals that still mostly reflect and bestow social and racial advantage, but would provide settings where all were encouraged to thrive. “School programs could be designed to support healthy social and emotional development,” writes teacher and school psychologist Maggie Kline. “When students feel safe, the regions of the brain for language, thinking, and reasoning are enhanced.”

Beyond schooling, the potential implications of my friend Raffi Cavoukian’s vision of an entire society that honors the irreducible needs of children are both vast and simple. I leave it to you, the reader, to imagine what our world would look like if we placed young people’s well-being in the forefront. What would it mean for parenting and for support for parenting, for childcare and education, for the economy, for what products we sell and buy, for what foods we sell and prepare, for the climate, for the culture? What if our intention, as parents, as educators, as a society, was to raise children in touch with their feelings, authentically empowered to express them, to think independently and be prepared to act on behalf of their principles? A healthy society would also strive to close the largely artificial generation gap that makes it difficult for parents to relate to their kids and vice versa. As discussed in an earlier section on peer orientation, the natural human arrangement has a strong communal dimension, and the adult community is meant to work together to hold space for the development of the young. That does not mean lording it over our kids, nor dictating every aspect of their lives, only that we reclaim responsibility for creating and maintaining the container for their growth…..”

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The historical forces and events that shape us

“In the 21st century, we are facing an enormity of pressing challenges, many of which have at their source buried collective traumas, across cultures, throughout history, and spanning generations.” Thomas Hubl

“Trauma exists in the collective sphere, too, affecting entire nations and peoples at different moments in history.”  Gabor and Daniel Maté

“To take children from their families and their countries was an abuse; to strip them of their identity was an abuse; to forget them and deny them their loss was an abuse… Few tragedies can compare.” Margaret Humphreys

“Making an injury visible and public is often the first step in remedying it, and political change often follows culture, as what was tolerated is seen to be intolerable, or what was overlooked becomes obvious.” Rebecca Solnit

Today’s post is about collective and historical trauma.  I’m also including a new drawing and an extract from something I posted on April 19th, 2015 related to historical trauma, the silence around it and its impact on future generations. It’s like coming full circle back to these same topics.

Historical / collective trauma is the ocean we all swim in and the air we breathe whether we are aware of it or not. It’s the thread that ties us all together and gets knotted with our personal traumas. It impacts us and those around us, and it is interwoven with these other more personal wounds, which are always situated and influenced by the larger contexts we reside in and engage with. Gilan Hirschberger defines collective trauma as a cataclysmic event that shatters the basic fabric of society. Aside from the horrific loss of life, collective trauma is also a crisis of meaning. In the relevant literature around collective trauma it is supported that a collective trauma transforms into a collective memory and then becomes a system of meaning that has the potential to help groups to redefine who they are. For both victims and perpetrators, deriving meaning from trauma is an ongoing process that is continuously negotiated within groups and between groups.

For victims, the memory of trauma may be adaptive for group survival, but it can also be a reminder of existential threat. Unprocessed and unmetabolized this trauma is like secrets buried in the sand. It will manifest as disease, dysfunction, emotional pain, wasted opportunities, until reckoning and healing take place. It also requires the construction of a new collective self. For perpetrators, the memory of trauma poses a threat to their group / collective identity that may be dealt with either by accepting responsibility or by denying history, minimizing culpability for events, transforming the memory of the events. The dissonance between historical crimes and the need to uphold a positive image of the group may be resolved either by not identifying with one’s group anymore or by creating a new group narrative that acknowledges the crime committed, while working towards making amends.

Albert Bandura, who developed the concept of moral agency, which is manifested in both the power to refrain from behaving inhumanely and the proactive power to behave humanely, suggests that in order for those who have committed violations against a group or community to accept the responsibility it is necessary for the self-regulatory mechanisms governing moral conduct to be activated; however, there are many psychosocial maneuvers by which moral disengagement can occur.  Moral disengagement may center on the cognitive restructuring of inhumane conduct into a worthy one by moral justification, disavowal of a sense of personal agency by displacement of responsibility; sanitizing language;, disregarding or minimizing the injurious effects of one ‘s actions; dehumanization of those who are victimized, etc. He writes that “Many inhumanities operate through a supportive network of legitimate enterprises run by otherwise considerate people who contribute to destructive activities by disconnected subdivision of functions and diffusion of responsibility. Given the many mechanisms for disengaging moral control, civilized life requires, in addition to humane personal standards, safeguards built into social systems that uphold compassionate behavior and renounce cruelty” (Bandura A. (1999), Moral disengagement in the perpetration of inhumanities, Personality and Social Psychology Review, 3(3), 193–209. / SAGE).

Public acknowledgement and conversations around events that have traumatized communities and peoples allow people to process and make sense of what has happened and it opens up space for healing. It disrupts narratives and processes of moral disengagement. Hopefully, through this process and dialogue less dysfunction is projected on to others and fewer traumas are passed down to younger generations. In a talk show the Greek actor, Yiannis Bezos, recently noted that for instance, here in Greece there has been no public discussion or evaluation yet about the impact that the seven year dictatorship has had on the evolution of our society, our education system and culture, and how the legacy of those years has stifled growth and maturity in many areas.  Oppressive regimes create fear of expressing one’s views. People in Greece have during various historical eras been punished, exiled, imprisoned, tortured and killed for their beliefs and views. This fear, even unarticulated, is passed down from one generation to another creating a certain kind of fearful citizen, blocking expression and progress in general. We end up, as Bezos noted, with people being afraid of all sorts of things like microphones, being visible, public speaking, and so on.  Public discussions remove the veil of secrecy and free up energy for change and better ways of living and co-existing.

The need to write about these topics today partly arose as I was reading about the apology to the Indigenous peoples in Canada from Pope Francis. In relation to this historical trauma in his new book, The Myth of Normal, Gabor; Maté and son, write: “… trauma exists in the collective sphere, too, affecting entire nations and peoples at different moments in history. To this day it is visited upon some groups with disproportionate force, as on Canada’s Indigenous people. Their multigenerational deprivation and persecution at the hands of colonialism and especially the hundred-year agony of their children, abducted from their families and reared in church-run residential schools where physical, sexual, and emotional abuse were rampant, has left them with tragic legacies of addiction, mental and physical illness, suicide, and the ongoing transmission of trauma to new generations….. Nearly 30 percent of the jail population in this country is composed of Indigenous people, who make up no more than 5 percent of the general population. …., the inheritors and carriers of a toxic colonial legacy of extermination and expulsion….”

Maté writes this period is “known as “the Sixties Scoop,” when the Canadian child-welfare system abducted thousands of First Nations children from their homes and placed them with non-Indigenous families; atrocious living situations on reservations; ongoing multigenerational trauma; and the persisting encroachment on and pollution of Indigenous lands for economic projects that profit distant corporations. In 2021 the world was horrified at the discovery of thousands of small bodies at the former sites of residential schools across Canada. Many other thousands are known to have disappeared whose remains are yet to be found and whose deaths, deeply etched and grieved in the consciousness of their families and communities, have not until recently been formally acknowledged by the governmental and ecclesiastic institutions responsible. Nearly two thousand unmarked graves have been identified as of late 2021. Another five thousand to ten thousand such graves likely exist and await finding.”

Pope Frances delivered a historical apology, with differing responses. An apology is a first important step, but what happens after that, what steps are taken to help people who have been robbed of so much and who are marginalised, impoverished, dislocated, reduced in numbers. Apologies need to be accompanied by restoration and compensation. The Pope apologized for abuses and took responsibility for the church’s cooperation in generations of horrendous abuse and cultural suppression of indigenous children at Catholic residential schools across Canada. Pope Francis has said he is on a “penitential pilgrimage” to atone for the church’s role in the residential school system, in which generations of Indigenous children were forcibly removed from their homes and forced to attend church-run, government-funded boarding schools to assimilate them into Christian, Canadian society. More than 150,000 Native children were taken from their homes from the 19th century until the 1970s and placed in the schools in an effort to isolate them from the influence of their families and culture. The Canadian government has stated that physical and sexual abuse were rampant at the schools, with students being beaten for speaking their native languages. The Pope’s apology has come after the apologies delivered by the current and previous prime minister of Canada. Some people have welcomed the apology as useful to their healing and others believe it is the first step to a much needed longer process of reconciliation for institutional wrongs dating back centuries. The Pope acknowledged that the wounds and injustices will take time to heal.

Below is an extract from a longer post I wrote in 2015:

….. One topic I am interested in is that of child emigration policies and practices of breaking families and forced adoption that took place throughout the 20th century even up until the late sixties in many countries. I have referred to films and books in previous posts, but, I will briefly, make some reference here again. To begin with, like Margaret Humphreys I believe that few tragedies can compare with ‘taking children from their families and their countries and stripping them of their identity and then denying that their loss was an abuse’ because as she says ‘our sense of background or heritage is an important part of our identity’ (Margaret Humphreys, Empty Cradles, 1994). In her book, Empire’s Children: Child Emigration, Welfare and the Decline of the British World, Ellen Boucher writes ‘in the 1980s the silence surrounding the subject of the lost families started to be broken. The decade witnessed a rapid growth of advocacy groups dedicated to raising awareness about the history of child emigration and to seeking redress for men and women who had been hurt by the policy. One of the first was the Child Migrant Friendship Society of Western Australia, founded in 1982 by a group of former migrants who aimed to relieve ‘the suffering, helplessness, distress, misfortune, poverty, destitution and emotional disturbance’ that they believed  the initiative had produced…,

Five years later Margaret Humphreys, a Nottingham based social worker established the Child Migrants Trust, which campaigned to pressure the emigration charities, as well as the British and Australian governments, to acknowledge the trauma endured by former migrants. Humphreys documented her experience and work in her book Empty Cradles. The Trust was instrumental in the release of a 1989 award winning documentary, Lost Children of the Empire by Joanna Mack, which looks at the fate of some of the 150,000 British orphans, who – often without their parents’ knowledge and consent – were shipped abroad to be brought up in children’s homes and many were exploited and abused. Children are the most vulnerable members of society, and as such, have been victimized and exploited across time. Children have also, across time and especially during the 20th century, been institutionalized, taken away from their mothers and adopted illegally….

This practice began at the turn of the century, but children were still deported overseas up until 1967! Joanna Mack produced and directed a documentary, uncovering the story of child migration from the UK under which children as young a three were shipped to Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the former Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). The film’s broadcast in the UK and Australia, and the subsequent book of the same name written by Philip Bean and Joy Melville, helped secure the foundation of the Child Migrants Trust and their work supporting families separated by these practices. The Leaving of Liverpool (John Alsop, Sue Smith, Penny Chapman), an award-winning television mini-series produced by ABC/ BBC in 1992, is a dramatized account of unaccompanied child migration from Britain to Australia. It was screened in Britain and in Australia and was mentioned in parliamentary inquiries in both countries .It had a significant impact in putting child migration ‘on the map’ in terms of awareness among the general population and those people who had been sent to Western Australia as child migrants.

Gordon Brown apologized in 2010 to the children immigrants that were sent to Australia, a practice that lasted over 40 years right up until the late 1960s. The Prime Minister of Australia Julia Gillard delivered a national apology to victims of forced adoption in 2013. Kevin Rudd also apologized to the 500, 000 Forgotten Australians and their families.

The following small extracts are from his apology:

“Sorry that as children you were taken from your families and placed in institutions where so often you were abused. Sorry for the physical suffering, the emotional starvation and the cold absence of love, of tenderness, of care. Sorry for the tragedy the absolute tragedy of childhoods lost’…. ‘To those who were told they were orphans but were taken here without their parents consent, we acknowledge the lies you were told, the lies told to your mothers and fathers and the pain the lies caused for a life time’.

In previous posts I have also referred to films like Rabbit-Proof Fence by Christine Olsen, based on the book published by Doris Pilkington, the daughter of the real Molly Craig, and songs about The Stolen Generation in Australia…… In a nutshell, the film is about an Aborigine girl’s long walk home after she and her sister are taken forcefully from their mother and placed in a camp a thousand miles away, as part of the state policy of removing girls from aboriginal communities and educating them separately, in order to eradicate their aboriginal identity and raise them ‘white’. Thousands of children were forcefully removed from their families and placed in foster families, children’s homes or missions between 1890s and 1970s. In 2008 the Australian government apologised to The Stolen Generation. Of course, apologies alone may not be sufficient to erase or heal years of loss and pain, but at least it is one small step towards the recognition of wrong and unethical practices, and it also contributes to breaking social denial and secrecy surrounding practices like this around the world. At least some governments have been forced by survivors’ activism and society’s demand to take responsibility for dark chapters in history and work towards reconciliation and restoration.

They took the children away (Archie Roach) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IL_DBNkkcSE

Unfortunately, such practices and policies did not take place only in Britain and Australia, but in many countries in the 20th century. For instance, in Greece thousands of children were removed from their families and placed in camps known as Queen Frederica’s ‘children’s towns’ after the civil war. Since 1950 there have been revelations about thousands of illegal adoptions of these children abroad, especially, in the USA. However, in Greece silence has not been broken officially and no government so far has made any attempt to investigate, discuss or apologize. These topics have remained taboo subjects because as in most cases they were the result of past government policies and initiatives and a lot of people were involved, including authorities, charities and the Church……..

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Edited / I will be posting a new drawing soon

Impermanence, life’s unpredictability and change and enjoying the good that  lasts……             

“Panta rei  / Everything flows” Heraclitus

“We should not complain about impermanence,
because without impermanence, nothing is possible.” Thich Nhat Hanh

“To live on this shifting ground, one first needs to stop obsessing about what has happened before and what might happen later. One needs to be more vitally conscious of what is happening now. This not to deny the reality of past and future. It is about embarking on a new relationship with the impermanence and temporality of life. Instead of hankering after the past and speculating about the future, one sees the present as the fruit of what has been and the germ of what will be.” Stephen Batchelor

“If we can be open…we find that life’s unpredictability is full of interesting and invigorating challenges. These challenges engage us in unexpected and unanticipated ways and allow for the freedom of unscripted responsiveness….” Mark Epstein

The idea for today’s post came to me after a brief conversation in a shop I visit weekly. The person there greeted me as usual and asked “How are you?” to which I joyfully responded “Fine”. To my surprise they commented on how it would be more precise to say: “I’m fine, right now, but I don’t know what might happen to me tomorrow”. I was initially taken aback, and then I inserted some humor into our casual brief chat, but afterwards I gave it some more thought and pondered on impermanence and continuity, and whether it is helpful to go about one’s daily life in constant dread of all the bad things that might be awaiting us at every corner. In reality unless we’re living in a war zone the risk of being run over by a car or something of the sort happening to us would probably be relatively low. And this comes from someone who has been hit by a car and has come out of the experiences alive and relatively unscathed. This mental process eventually led to this post.

Of course, it is true that bad things happen to people all over the world every day and that impermanence and change are an inherent part of living on this planet. Nobody really knows whether they will actually wake up the next day. There is also a lot in life that we have no control over, from wars to the destruction of the natural environment to heart attacks and a myriad of other things that happen to us through the course of our life. Also, nothing really stays exactly the same even if on the surface people and things may seem the same over maybe short periods of time. But it’s good to remember that there is also the impermanence of pain, and that many changes are also positive and highly desired. Without change and impermanence there would be no possibility, no change, no growth, no learning, no recovery.

One of the basic teachings in Buddhist philosophy is impermanence and that by recognising this we can deal with change and human suffering with more ease and grace. Of course it is difficult for humans to accept both change and death, and it requires practice.  But by practising acceptance of this fact we can better appreciate each moment of life, and maybe make the most of it to the extent that we can. It shakes us out of our habit of taking life for granted, which is only available in the present moment, and it also increases our sense of gratitude. Thich Nhat Hanh, the Buddhist monk, peace activist and poet write: “It is not impermanence that makes us suffer. What makes us suffer is wanting things to be permanent when they are not. We need to learn to appreciate the value of impermanence. If we are in good health and are aware of impermanence, we will take good care of ourselves. When we know that the person we love is impermanent, we will cherish our beloved all the more. Impermanence teaches us to respect and value every moment and all the precious things around us and inside of us. When we practice mindfulness of impermanence, we become fresher and more loving.”

Science also demonstrates that change is inherent to life. Some time ago I read a blog by an undergraduate student doing research, whose name I can’t recall, in which she  said something along the lines of it being important to approach everything even research from a perspective of impermanence because as she explained the goal was not to maintain any status quo of rigid certainty, but to do work that would aid change and transformation. Through advancements in technology and medicine and scientific observations we now know that change takes place in our bodies every minute. Consider all the activity taking place in our bodies and organs as we obliviously go about each day. Something like 330 billion cells are replaced daily, and in about 90 days 30 trillion will have replenished, which is the equivalent of a new you. Consider the millions of synapses coming into being even as they disperse every moment. In describing the brain in his book, Neurodharma, Rick Hanson writes: “Like the mind, the brain is impermanent: Each day, hundreds of new baby neurons are born in a process called neurogenesis, while other brain cells die naturally. There is ongoing rebuilding of existing connections between cells and structures within cells. New synapses form, while less used ones wither away.  New capillary tendrils— the tiny tubes that supply blood to our tissues— grow and reach into particularly active regions to bring them more fuel. Individual neurons routinely fire many times a second. And molecular processes cascade like falling dominoes over the course of a single millisecond….”

On the other hand, we do experience a sense of stability and continuity within constant visible and invisible changes that take place in our bodies, our identities, our sense of self, our circumstances, our relationships, our natural environment.  My son and his girlfriend stayed with us for a while over the summer and we looked at old photo albums. Everyone had changed, parents had aged and kids had grown older and much bigger, and grandparents had died. And yet it was also true that most people were still alive, some aspects of their personalities had not changed, and there was continuity in their identity and life story.  In one photo I saw that our front patio was full of pots of plants.  Now it is empty and some of the many potted plants I had when I moved here have died, but most of them have taken roots in the garden. They have transformed into bushes and tall trees. Places visited in the past are still there. Cities have probably grown bigger and denser and the beaches in the photos have undergone subtle changes over the years, many due to more recent environmental changes, but they are all still in place, recognizable, familiar. Even our house, which has gone through change, some inevitable deterioration and restoration over the last twenty six years, is still here, providing us with shelter and accommodating our changing needs. It is in some sense both the same house and a very different one.

In an article with the title, Enjoy the Good that Lasts [https://www.rickhanson.net/enjoy-the-good-that-lasts/], Rick Hanson writes: “Look around and see things you like that were here yesterday – and maybe here many years ago as well. For me writing, this includes a desk, a collage on the wall that I made a long time ago that continues to guide me, and trees and hills seen through a window. As you look around, recognize the relative stability of so many things. Sure, most if not all will pass away eventually – the universe is nearly 14 billion years old, so “in the long run” ………. but for all practical purposes, there is so much lasting good literally within reach of your hands and feet right now. …… Allow a natural sense of reassurance, perhaps relief, to emerge. Perhaps a calming, a relaxing, a sense of the security of those things that are stable. Notice anxious doubts if they come up, and let them change and pass away, knowing that the future will be whatever it is but meanwhile whatever good that is true is really actually true right now. …..

Consider people in your life and the good that’s lasting there….  Consider the good in your past. It will always have been good, even if it is here no longer. Your own accomplishments, personal disasters avoided, crazy good fun times with friends, the ripples of your own sincere efforts large and small – nothing at all can ever erase what actually happened. How about the durable good inside you? Talents and skills, moral values, neat quirks, so much knowledge: it’s all real. Enjoy the felt recognition of it…”

And yes, we now know through science that life might eventually after billions of years become extinct on this planet. Then even the natural laws and the nature of things will not be true anymore. In relation to this, physicist Brian Greene says that we believed that if we uncovered more of how the universe works we would be touching something that was always true. … He explores the degree to which even this is true or ultimately has any purpose in the absence of human beings, or in the absence of a life form that can contemplate a deep equation or Einstein’s theory of relativity, for instance.  He says that he eventually came to grips with this level of impermanence by realizing that instead of grasping for future certainty it was wiser to focus on the here and now “as that is the only place in which value and meaning can actually have an anchor.”

And meanwhile, we can still trust in the nature of things and the natural laws we are aware of currently, in the web of life, in the sun rising in the east and setting in the west, in nature, in the present moment and in all that makes us humans, and in our instinctual clinging on to survival in order to see the sun rise yet another day, I watched a film with many women behind the scenes recently: Where the Crawdads Sing. Amongst its many themes there was this central theme of survival running through the whole story, of our own and other species’ biological drive, inner mandate, in some sense, to live against all odds even in dangerous or hostile environments. And we can still trust in love and in our wishing wellbeing to those we love, and hopefully, to all humanity, in our putting in some effort every day despite and inspite of it all. We can remind ourselves to live more in the now, not necessarily in a timeless, mystical now, but to quote Stephen Batchelor, to view / experience the now as “an unflinching encounter with the contingent world as it unravels moment to moment.”

I will end this post with another extract from Rick Hanson’s article mentioned above:

“See the durability of life itself. It’s been going on locally on our planet for at least 3.5 billion years. Things have changed and will change, and I am not trying to minimize bad changes, especially those involving human hands. Still, life will keep going in one form or another as long as the Earth keeps going (which should be at least a few more billion years, until our sun gradually expands and BECOMES a red giant, swallowing up Mercury, Venus, and us – but that’s a while from now)…….. Enjoy it all. The more we recognize impermanence, the more we can take refuge in the good that lasts.”

Also, I’d like to share a few things I’ve engaged with this last week.

Rick Hanson, PhD, talks about trust and its roots in our early years, mistrust and healing, the inevitability of change in people and circumstances, and finally, things we can deeply trust like love, life, the present moment, our own and other people’s natural goodness, the nature of things. So, the topics of the talk are to some extent related to some of the ideas in the piece I’ve written above [https://www.rickhanson.net/meditation-talk-trust-mistrust-and-deep-trust/].

Physician and auhtor Dr. Gabor Maté talks about the nature of addiction, trauma, and illness in a toxic culture, which is often at odds with true healing, the denial of children’s developmental needs in the culture, as well as the adult needs for connection, belonging, authenticity, autonomy, meaning, mastery, actualization, etc, and more, at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEpD2o6MZOk