Betterment and Praxis

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/18172576

A hilarious video explaining how not to look like a Not-So nice guy if you're giving a speech to many people!

To be in shape for the long haul, we have to get our minds and spirits ready, as well as jump into action.

When we’re in bad shape, our power is diminished — we’re less creative, more reactive, and less able to plan strategically. If we intend to stay active and effective in the world, we have a responsibility to tend to our spirits.

Here are 7 behaviors we can use right away to strengthen ourselves, so we can keep taking more and more powerful and strategic actions.

Maybe you’re wondering, “What should I do in these times?” What we have put down here are some meaningful places to start — doable, local, impactful, and important.

It is not intended to be inclusive of all options — we’re trying to offer places we see people making impacts and avenues that as experienced organizers thinking about these times we see as worth going down.

Where possible, we offer names of groups who are organizing such things and can help you plug in to their strategy.

No matter where you come from, here are some ideas if you want to help stand for a world with tolerance and love, racial justice and acceptance of all people.

Hello everybody.

Since about half a year, i am recovering from a set of psychological problems (self worth problems, porn addiction, lonelyness, etc) - and i have made great success by repeatedly listening to affirmations, meditation and hypnotherapy. I specifically want to highlight one professional clinical hypnotherapist whose work i enjoy a lot. The link is from their blog, where you can buy a few things to listen to.

But they also have a youtube channel, which i recommend. Some files i enjoyed a lot:

• 10 Minute Guided Meditation - I love My Body https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJZHi0aTWfM
• Train Your Brain To Focused On The Long Term Goal Hypnosis https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jl_6CUOATlg
• Freedom From Perfectionism Hypnotherapy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52N-DBA2FCo

how and why does it work?

(i am not a professional, my explanation might be slightly wrong)

when you have psychological problems like bad self worth, then this is also implemented in a set of thoughts in your brain. So your brain believes deeply that it makes sense to have a bad self worth. When you listen to positive suggestions that say otherwise, the brain thinks this is not true and rejects that. However, this control mechanism by the brain can be reduced/turned off when you are deeply relaxing.

Like: while sleeping, your brain is sometimes very active. This is the subconscious, that tries to process things in dreams for instance. There, the control mechanism are obviously shut down. When you are deeply relaxed, this state is not similar to sleep, but similar to a state right before sleeping.

And hypnotherapy first have a deep relaxation part to reduce the brains control mechanism where the suggestions are more effective. However, the subconciousness also has some protections, which means listening to bad things will still be rejected by the brain. so you are safe.

And secondly: the brain learns through repetition, so thats why repeatedly listening to the affirmations (even while doing sports or hanging up washed clothes!) makes your brain believe things over time. The resistance protecting the bad self worth will be reduced over time, making it easier to overwrite it with something healthy.

In general, it works a lot with your imagination. So for instance, the link about perfectionism is about you writing examples of perfectionism on some board and then you imagine to clean the board again and feel relief. Then you start write new things you want to learn instead.

how has it helped me?

• my addiction kicks in when i feel especially bad about myself. for instance when i feel not beautiful and attractive. The "i love my body" affirmations are great for remembering to care about myself. This worked wonders.

bad things?

yes! hypnotherapy is not magical and you have to be careful. For instance, i have once listened to a hypnotherapy file from this person where you would try to feel strongly about the bad things you want to cut ties with (in my case, my porn addiction), and then stuffing everything into a backpack and boxing it and walking away from it (i think). While great in theory, it didn't work for me and i was left with the strong imagination on my porn addiction, leading to a relapse.

Basically, it strongly depends on your specific situation. These files are not specifically for your triggers, for your situation and therefore some might not work.

Therefore, i made more success with the positive hypnotherapy/meditation/affirmations stuff.

So be careful. I recommend to first listen to things while having full attention and looking inside your heart, how you feel what the person says. When it feels great, you can do it while relaxing.

Mōrena buzzy bees!

I've been off hunting beach treasures on some more remote beaches in the area. The amount of fishing and building waste is unreal! , buoys, treated timber posts and framing. A lot of plastic crab pot pieces and rope ends. We even found a piece of a pontoon which I'll be making into a new garden bed! We also saw a dead albatross, which was fascinating, but with the birdflu, we decided it was best to keep our distance.

Fellow dumpster divers and rubbish gremlins, what has been your favourite find?

Kia ora and happy new year 🎉

What are our hopes and dreams for 2025, and how are we going to work towards making them happen?

A helpful guide on how to be less frustrating towards people of color.

With recessions and political hardship around the globe, this holiday season is feeling a bit rough for a lot of us. I've been thinking of ways we can try and make minor improvements on a microscale. Here are some of my thoughts and please share yours in the comments:

More casual no or low-cost gatherings. As it's summer in Aotearoa, we are doing weekly meet-ups in the local park for shared kai. It's bring what you can and shame free for those who forgot or couldn't afford to bring anything. We are also continuing our workshop events with free reusable gift wrap making and summer holidays sewing and crafts club.

On a more personal mission, this holidays I am starting a new calendar/journal to keep track of birthdays and likes/dislikes of the people around me so I can start my newest project, "Max happiness", where I try to maximise the happiness stats of everyone around me through flowers, baking, and produce from my garden. I plan to focus on growing favourite flowers or produce next year so I have casual low/no cost gifts and can show my appreciation with gifts that are meaningful and not a burden on our planet. I'll be starting with something a bit more achievable in the next 4 weeks with home baking for friends and neighbours.

For those who don't already have an established community, I recommend going to some mutual aid events for distributing food or resources into your community. You might also find shared spaces holiday events through your library, community garden, or community workshop. These are the sorts of places where community thrives and I'm sure you will find yourself right at home 🥰

This is the original source for the link I posted in [email protected]. I hope it can help someone in our community.

This is depression, alcoholism; it's getting pretty late-stage. All of this is wrong, and everything I've gone through insists they're fucking Reifenstahl.

Yes, I have mentioned her twice this week. It's because it's germane. I'm using that word a lot more, too. It holds a certain connotation.

But that aside, I do not want 988. I want a solution, not some attempt to make me believe rich people shall be my saviors.

On a summer afternoon in 2019, nurse Charlotte Lay got ready for her night shift as normal but "wasn't feeling quite right".

Within a short space of time she had decided to end her own life close to a West Yorkshire railway station.

...

I found this interesting and relevant. Nothing actionable, but oddly comforting.

Covers way more than just the title, but an interesting experiential take.

Pretty cool guide.

The guy says that he only recently realized that cleaning isn't intuitive so people need to be taught. This is for people who maybe haven't been taught how to clean or want to freshen up on their skills :)

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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how, with things exactly as they are (so, without the community resources, policy changes, and ideas that would ideally exist in the future) I might want to respond to a situation in which I feel threatened. There is not a particularly strong sense of community in my geographic area, and I cannot think of any ‘people i know’ who I would feel comfortable calling for help were I to need it. I’m thinking primarily of abusive people, threats to my safety, dangerous behavior, and the like - I think drugs are a medical issue and being robbed would suck but that’s also not necessarily going to become personal if it’s just about money. Has anyone here read about, or practiced, any methods for deescalating, defending against, or getting out of such situations without having to ask the police? I would like have some of these ideas thought through and waiting in the back of my mind before I actually need them.

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/8863969

Folks who know me closely know that I'm kind of a geek for patterns - I see them in behavior, in housing, in gardens and natural structures, everywhere. They are at play all around us at varying levels of scale, and anyone who's ever said "oh this again" can hopefully relate.

Christopher Alexander (author along with others of A Pattern Language, The Nature of Order, Notes on the Synthesis of Form), the speaker in this video, has been formative in my understanding of patterns in a way few others have. His approach to design as a conduit for improving the lives of people and the world writ large have been an inspiration.

I want you to forget that he's talking to a room full of programmers. Some of it is abstract, and heady, but think about the patterns in your lives and how even slight alterations to them can influence the course of things. I'm coming to this talk from the aspect of a gardener, of a nursery owner interested in restoration ecology, of someone who wants each of us to have a closer connection to the natural systems at play. Bring who you are to this, and (hopefully) let it inspire you. I'll leave you with this quote from the talk (punctuation mine):

"I want you to help me. I want you to realize that the problem of generating living structure is not being handled by architects or planners or developers or construction people now; there is no way that they're ever going to be able to do that because the methods they use are not capable of it.

The methods that you have at your fingertips and deal with every day in the normal course of events are perfectly designed to do this ... if you have the interest, you have the capacity, you have the means.... And what I'm proposing here is something a little bit different from that which is a view of ~~programming~~ as the natural genetic infrastructure of a living world which you are capable of creating, managing, making available - and which could then have the result that a living structure - in our towns, houses, workplaces, cities - is an attainable thing. Which it has not been for the last 50 to 100 years.

That is an incredible thing! I realize that you probably think I'm nuts because this is not what I'm supposed to be talking about to you. And you may say, 'gosh great idea but we're not interested' but I do think you are capable of that and I don't think anybody else is going to do this job.

Here's a Ted-talk from 12 years back on the topic of vulnerability as a method of reconnecting with self. Just a refresher for anyone who hasn't seen it yet. Highly recommended!