Sharing

1. Bullying is the theme of a recent post from Rick Hanson’s newsletter Just One Thing (https://www.rickhanson.net/writings/just-one-thing/). He writes ‘abuse of power can be called many things, including intimidation, fraud, discrimination, and tyranny. I’ll use a term that’s down-to-earth and gets at our nature as social primates: bullying’. He goes on to say that bullies and bullying are common ‘from homes and schoolyards to boardrooms and presidential palaces, they create a vast amount of human suffering’. He describes bullies as ‘a) Dominating; b) Defensive – Never wrong; fault and scorn others; avoid personal responsibility; c) Deceptive – Manipulate grievances to gain support; blame scapegoats; cheat; hide truth since power is based on lies’. He writes deep down ‘the mind of a bully is like a hell realm of fended-off feelings of weakness and shame always threatening to invade’ so this suffering deserves our compassion. He also makes suggestions of how to deal with bullying at all levels from naming the bullying for what it is and confronting their lies and their denial of the harm they’re doing to confronting enablers that are complicit in bullying to engaging the legal system and so on. And finally, he reminds us to see the bigger picture and the fact that ‘bullying is enabled and fostered by underlying conditions’.
2. I am currently engaging with a journaling process called Morning Pages from Julia Cameron’s book The Artist’s Way, which I am currently going through. I hope to describe the process in some future post. Meanwhile, here’s a short extract from her book of the many un/conscious negative core beliefs that we often carry: ‘In this week, we will work at uncovering our negative beliefs and discarding them. Here is a list of commonly held negative beliefs: I can’t be a successful, prolific, creative artist because: Everyone will hate me. I will hurt my friends and family. I will go crazy. I will abandon my friends and family. I can’t spell. I don’t have good enough ideas. It will upset my mother and/or father. I will have to be alone. I will find out I am gay (if straight). I will be struck straight (if gay). I will do bad work and not know it and look like a fool. I will feel too angry. I will never have any real money. I will get self-destructive and drink, drug, or sex myself to death. I will get cancer, AIDS—or a heart attack or the plague. My lover will leave me. I will die. I will feel bad because I don’t deserve to be successful. I will have only one good piece of work in me. It’s too late. If I haven’t become a fully functioning artist yet, I never will. None of these core negatives need be true. They come to us from our parents, our religion, our culture, and our fearful friends. Each one of these beliefs reflects notions we have about what it means to be an artist’.