To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This. The Opposite of Rape Culture is Nurturance Culture | Dating Tips for the Feminist Man. The opposite of masculine rape culture is masculine nurturance culture: men* increasing their capacity to nurture, and becoming whole. The Ghomeshi trial is back in the news, and it brings violent sexual assault back into people’s minds and daily conversations. Of course violence is wrong, even when the court system for handling it is a disaster. That part seems evident. Triggering, but evident. But there is a bigger picture here. A meme going around says ‘Rape is about violence, not sex. Violence is nurturance turned backwards. These things are connected, they must be connected. Compassion for self and compassion for others grow together and are connected; this means that men finding and recuperating the lost parts of themselves will heal everyone. 1. 2.
To heal rape culture, then, men build masculine nurturance skills: nurturance and recuperation of their true selves, and nurturance of the people of all genders around them. In Ursula K. These things seem connected to me. Six Ways To Show Your Love. How To Practice Compassion In Relationships. A couple asked me recently what the Buddhist view is on marriage. They were planning their wedding and in the process of writing their vows. I don’t know what the Buddha would have said, but what occurred to me in that moment was how committing to loving one person for the rest of your life is taking compassion practice to a whole new level. In the Buddhist teachings there are many guidelines and methods to help us become more compassionate people. Compassion has three aspects, a feeling of warmth, a sense of openness, and a pervading wisdom that sees through the illusion of separateness and duality.
Vaguely Relephant Reads: I Hope he Loves you like This. You’re Not Broken: What Therapists want us to know about the Human Experience. Before you get started, remember that to genuinely be compassionate to another, you must begin by extending that kindness to yourself. Generosity Generosity is centered upon selfless motivation. Discipline Patience. Fox’s Garden: A Tender Wordless Story About the Gift of Grace and the Transformative Power of Kindness to Those Kicked Away. By Maria Popova A gentle reminder that life can be a cold wasteland of cruelty or a whimsical wonderland of grace, depending on the generosity of spirit with which we approach it. The question of human nature — whether we are born full of goodness or spend our lives concealing our inherently rotten souls — is perhaps the most timeless and most significant of humanity’s inquiries. A subtle and infinitely heartening answer comes in Fox’s Garden (public library) — a breathtaking wordless picture-book by French artist Princesse Camcam, born Camille Garoche, whose lyrical cut-paper illustrations tell a story of cruelty redeemed by kindness, of coldness melted away by the warmth of compassion that is our true nature.
One cold winter night, the fox loses her way in the forest and stumbles into a village. Images courtesy of Enchanted Lion Donating = Loving Bringing you (ad-free) Brain Pickings takes hundreds of hours each month. Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter. Share on Tumblr. Rewriting the Book of Belonging: Anne Lamott on the True Gift of Friendship and the Uncomfortable Art of Letting Yourself Be Seen. By Maria Popova “Trappings and charm wear off… Let people see you.” Beyond having written one of the finest books on writing ever published, Anne Lamott embraces language and life with equal zest, squeezing from the intersection wisdom of the most soul-stretching kind. Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace (public library | IndieBound) shines a sidewise gleam at Lamott’s much-loved meditations on why perfectionism kills creativity and how we keep ourselves small by people-pleasing to explore the boundless blessings of our ample imperfections, from which our most expansive and transcendent humanity springs.
The welcome book would have taught us that power and signs of status can’t save us, that welcome — both offering and receiving — is our source of safety. Illustration from 'Hug Me' by Simona Ciraolo. Illustration from 'Little Boy Brown.' A few women in the community reached out to me. Trappings and charm wear off… Let people see you. Donating = Loving Share on Tumblr. John Maeda on Creative Leadership, Talking vs. Making, and Why Human Relationships Are a Work of Craftsmanship. By Maria Popova “You make relationships. One at a time. With the same painstaking attention to craft that you knew as a maker.”
“A leader’s real ‘authority’ is a power you voluntarily give him,” David Foster Wallace wrote in what remains the wisest meditation on leadership I’ve ever encountered, “and you grant him this authority not with resentment or resignation but happily.” But for many people in creative fields — artists, designers, filmmakers, writers — “leadership” remains an alienating notion that belongs in the business world or, worse, politics. And yet in an age of increasing creative collaboration and a world where any creative person putting a piece of herself out there is a “marketer,” whether willingly or not, the question of how a creative person can also be a great leader without sacrificing her art is an increasingly urgent one. When you make things with your hands, you force something into being. As a leader, you are alone — and accountable for the needs of the whole.
The Ethics of Family Relationships, with Robin Grille and Pam Monaco, PhD. Meanwhile: An Illustrated Love Letter to the Living Fabric of a City and Our Shared Human Longing to Be Understood. By Maria Popova A tender reminder that however vast our differences, we are bonded by the yearning to feel seen for who we are. I’ve written before that every city needs a love letter. Though Meanwhile, in San Francisco: The City in Its Own Words (public library) by illustrator extraordinaire and frequent Brain Pickings contributor Wendy MacNaughton — who gave us the wonderful Lost Cat, one of the best books of 2013 — may be “about” a city, in the sense that the raw inspiration was drawn from the streets of San Francisco, it is really about the city, any city — about community, about subcultures and belonging, about the complexities of gentrification, about what it means to have individual dignity and shared identity.
We meet the Mission Hipsters, who might as well be the Williamsburg Hipsters*, or the Insert-Any-City’s-Neighborhood-That-Has-Become-Synonymous-With-Hipsters Hipsters, an affectionate portrait of the cultural trope, down to “hand-knit dog sweater #62″: Donating = Loving. Love Undetectable: Andrew Sullivan on Why Friendship Is a Greater Gift Than Romantic Love. By Maria Popova Reflections on the cornerstone of our flourishing. “A principal fruit of friendship,” Francis Bacon observed, “is the ease and discharge of the fulness and swellings of the heart, which passions of all kinds do cause and induce.” Thoreau would “sometimes awake in the night and think of friendship and its possibilities.” St. Augustine described friendship as “sweet beyond the sweetness of life.” Sullivan writes: For me, friendship has always been the most accessible of relationships — certainly far more so than romantic love. He argues that our world has failed to give friendship its due as “a critical social institution, as an ennobling moral experience, as an immensely delicate but essential interplay of the virtues required to sustain a fully realized human being.”
You can tell how strong the friendship is by the silence that envelops it. Reflecting on the tragedy of loss that prompted his meditation, Sullivan adds: Love is a supremely jealous thing. Donating = Loving. Why Love Needs Space: Applying the Benjamin Franklin Effect to Romantic Relationships. A Psyche the Size of the Sea | Craig Chalquist, Ph.D. A foundational observation of ecopsychology is that mental health is intertwined with the health of our planet. As Theodore Roszak, a spokesman for the field, stated in his 1992 book The Voice of the Earth: "Ecopsychology holds that there is a synergistic interplay between planetary and personal well-being. The term 'synergy' is chosen deliberately for its traditional theological connotation, which once taught that the human and divine are cooperatively linked in the quest for salvation.
The contemporary ecological translation of the term might be: the needs of the planet are the needs of the person, the rights of the person are the rights of the planet. " Andy Fisher expressed this concisely in his book Radical Ecopsychology: "Ecopsychology is a psychological undertaking that essentially says 'we too are part of nature.'" Why, then, don't we feel responsible for how we treat nature, place, and Earth?
One might start with two simple questions: How do I feel my attachment to the sea? In Pieces: French Illustrator Marion Fayolle’s Wordless Narratives About Human Relationships. By Maria Popova Fragmentary glimpses of humanity at the intersection of the funny, the philosophical, and the confounding. In Pieces (public library) is an uncommon piece of visual poetry by French illustrator and comic artist Marion Fayolle that calls to mind at once the surrealist whimsy of Codex Seraphinianus, the visual neatness of Gregory Blackstock’s illustrated lists, and the vignettes of Blexbolex — and yet Fayolle’s is a sensibility unlike anything that ever existed. Sometimes funny, sometimes poignant, sometimes light, and sometimes deeply philosophical, Fayolle’s beautiful wordless narratives are anything but silent, speaking of love and loss, passion and betrayal, longing and lust.
They are fragmentary yet meaningful, much like the brain fuses together disjointed pieces of the world into a cohesive image, an impression, a story. Donating = Loving Bringing you (ad-free) Brain Pickings takes hundreds of hours each month. Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter. The Eightfold Path to a Truly Great Hug. ~ Bryan Reeves. Via Bryan Reeveson Mar 10, 2014 A truly great hug is a rich experience that has you pull another human body deliciously tight into yours as a way of saying, “I so deeply value your presence that I’m taking this exact moment to feel you, smell you, breathe with you—essentially stamp your being into my cellular memory so that even though we may be soon apart, you will in fact always be with me in the living fabric of my existence.”
Also, hugs are physically and emotionally healthy for you—ocytocin, dopamine, bonding, decreased stress, etc. Sooooo… 1. Hugging some people is like embracing a telephone pole. A great hug can quickly turn creepy hug when you feel your partner initiate the disconnect but you won’t let go. 2. The act of hugging is an inherently vulnerable act. 3. 4. Once the embrace has begun, rather than immediately unplug the hug before an authentic embrace has even happened, simply take a deep breath. 5. 6. 7. A truly great hug is a deeply mindful practice. 8. 9. P.s. Leo Buscaglia on Education, Industrialized Conformity, and How Stereotypes and Labels Limit Love. By Maria Popova “Labels are distancing phenomena.
They push us away from each other.” In the winter of 1969, shortly after a young woman he considered one of his brightest and most promising students committed suicide, Leo Buscaglia decided to deal with the flurry of confusion by starting an experimental class at the University of Southern California where he taught, exploring the most essential elements of existence — “life, living, sex, growth, responsibility, death, hope, the future.” The obvious common tangent, “the only subject which encompassed, and was at the core of all these concerns,” was love. So he simply called his course “Love Class.” The book opens with an adaptation of a magnificent lecture titled “Forward to Love,” which Buscaglia delivered in 1970 at a school in Texas, focusing on a more oblique and abstract but no less crucial aspect of love: how the laziness of stereotypes stifles its spirit and labels limit its transcendent power.
Donating = Loving Share on Tumblr. Simon Sinek: Why good leaders make you feel safe. A Permaculture *of* Community. Take dandelions. You can plant a perfect lawn but if your neighbors don’t eradicate their dandelions, you’ve got them again. Or take the common cold. You can take vitamins, eat great food, work out, but if your co-workers have the flu or if your kid’s kindergarten has the flu, you’ll likely get it.
We are told we are all powerful individuals. Community is the only sensible context for change-making. Personal change is necessary but not sufficient for building the scale and depth of the change we need. The era of hyper-individualism – for all the creativity and empowerment it brought us – is waning. Living in a small village on an island teaches me this every day. I’m trying out “a permaculture of community” to hold this perspective. I’m now part of a permaculture club. Truth and Tenderness: Ralph Waldo Emerson on Friendship and Its Two Essential Conditions.
By Maria Popova “A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere.” It’s been argued that friendship is a greater gift than romantic love (though it’s not uncommon for one to turn abruptly into the other), but whatever the case, friendship is certainly one of the most rewarding fruits of life — from the sweetness of childhood friendships to the trickiness of workplace ones. This delicate dance has been examined by thinkers from Aristotle to Francis Bacon to Thoreau, but none more thoughtfully than by Ralph Waldo Emerson.
In an essay on the subject, found in his altogether soul-expanding Essays and Lectures (public library; free download), Emerson considers the intricate dynamics of friendship, beginning with our often underutilized innate capacities: We have a great deal more kindness than is ever spoken. Barring all the selfishness that chills like east winds the world, the whole human family is bathed with an element of love like a fine ether. Our impatience is thus sharply rebuked. Julian Treasure: 5 ways to listen better. My Teacher Is a Monster: A Sweet Modern Fable About Seeing Through the Otherness of Others. By Maria Popova A gentle illustrated reminder that we can’t love what we don’t know.
“Love,” wrote Leo Tolstoy in his poignant letters to Gandhi on why we hurt one another, “represents the highest and indeed the only law of life, as every man knows and feels in the depths of his heart (and as we see most clearly in children)…” Tolstoy believed that if only we managed to see through our superficial differences and our fear of the other’s otherness, we’d recognize instantly the universe’s basic “law of love” — something to which we are born attuned, only to forget as we enter adulthood. Kids, of course, can often be especially cruel in their inability to accept otherness — but that’s why it’s especially enchanting to witness, let alone spark, the precise moment in which a child lets go of some learned bias and sees in another person his or her intrinsic goodness, a return to innocence and Tolstoy’s “law of love.”
Suddenly, the leisurely environment strips them of their weekday roles. Five Habits of Truly Effective Communicators. Dave Meslin: The antidote to apathy. Quantum Physics Tells Us Separation Is Only An Illusion. Masters of Love. Gottman wanted to know more about how the masters created that culture of love and intimacy, and how the disasters squashed it.
In a follow-up study in 1990, he designed a lab on the University of Washington campus to look like a beautiful bed-and-breakfast retreat. He invited 130 newlywed couples to spend the day at this retreat and watched them as they did what couples normally do on vacation: cook, clean, listen to music, eat, chat, and hang out. And Gottman made a crucial discovery in this study—one that gets at the heart of why some relationships thrive while others languish.
Throughout the day, partners would make requests for connection, what Gottman calls “bids.” The wife now has a choice. People who turned toward their partners in the study responded by engaging the bidder, showing interest and support in the bid. These bidding interactions had profound effects on marital well-being. How Relationships Refine Our Truths: Adrienne Rich on the Dignity of Love. What Highly Sensitive People Can Teach Us All About Kindness. The fastest way to fight prejudice? Open up. Recognizing Each Other in the Commons: The Basis for an Alternative Political Philosophy of Systemic Change? | Kosmos Journal. System of Systems. Taming the Mammoth: Why You Should Stop Caring What Other People Think | Page 2 of 2 | Wait But Why | Page 2. A “Dynamic Interaction”: Leo Buscaglia on Why Love Is a Learned Language. How to Navigate the Murky Waters of Workplace Friendships: Wisdom from Adam Smith and Aristotle.
George Saunders on the Power of Kindness, Animated. The Science and Philosophy of Friendship: Lessons from Aristotle on the Art of Connecting. Buddhadharma In Everyday Life. ~ via Linda Lewis. 3 Bad Habits That Can Derail Any Relationship. Einstein on Kindness, Our Shared Existence, and Life’s Highest Ideals. Five Communication Mistakes Almost Every Couple Makes. Meanwhile: An Illustrated Love Letter to the Living Fabric of a City and Our Shared Human Longing to Be Understood. How to interact with the introverted.
How Being Humble, Kind, and Calm Will Make Your Life Easier. The “I” of the Beholder: What Is the Self? The science of love: How "positivity resonance" shapes the way we connect. WATCH: What Happened When A Kid Asked Her, 'Are You A Boy Or A Girl?' | TEDTalks. Happy Birthday, Jack Kerouac: The Beat Icon on Kindness, the Self Illusion, and the “Golden Eternity” Brené Brown on Vulnerability, Human Connection, and the Difference Between Empathy and Sympathy, Animated. The Science of Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect. A Simple Tool That Will Improve Every One Of Your Relationships. Amanda Palmer on the Art of Asking and the Shared Dignity of Giving and Receiving. What makes something better is Connection. {Viral Video}