This week: Mental Health Awareness Month- You Are Not Alone!
May is Mental Health Awareness Month:
Each year millions of Americans face the reality of living with a mental illness. During May, NAMI joins the national movement to raise awareness about mental health. Each year we fight stigma, provide support, educate the public and advocate for policies that support people with mental illness and their families.
Why ‘getting back to normal’ may actually feel terrifying: (Nat Geo)
After a year of anxiety, anger, and burnout, many people are struggling with returning to pre-pandemic behaviors. Experts weigh in on ways to work through the trauma. Doctors are forecasting what some experts are now calling “the fourth wave” of the COVID-19 pandemic. Experts say the mental health impacts will be “profound and far-reaching,” likely outlasting the physical health impacts, and straining already-stretched mental health systems in the United States and worldwide.
Some 15 months of lockdowns, loneliness, Zoom calls, grief, illness, monotony, job loss, and economic hardship has caused “an extraordinary rise in anxiety and depression,” says Boston College developmental psychologist Rebekah Levine Coley. “The level of these disorders … are unprecedented.”
Shift Happens- A Prospective Response for All Communities:
The Future of Healing: Shifting From Trauma Informed Care to Healing Centered Engagement (Medium.com)
Healing centered engagement is asset driven and focuses on the well-being we want, rather than symptoms we want to suppress…
During the early 1990s experts promoted the term “resiliency,” which is the capacity to adapt, navigate and bounce back from adverse and challenging life experiences. Trauma informed care encourages support and treatment to the whole person, rather than focusing on only treating individual symptoms or specific behaviors.
The term healing-centered engagement expands how we think about responses to trauma and offers more holistic approach to fostering well-being.
A healing centered approach to addressing trauma requires a different question that moves beyond “what happened to you” to “what’s right with you” and views those exposed to trauma as agents in the creation of their own well-being, rather than victims of traumatic events. Healing centered engagement is akin to the South African term “Ubuntu” meaning that humanness is found through our interdependence, collective engagement and service to others…
Meet Eddie Jaku, a 101-year-old Auschwitz survivor who describes himself as “the happiest man in the world.” He recently opened up to NBC’s Harry Smith about the secrets of living a life with kindness and gratitude. “Where there is life, there is hope,” he said.
How Can You Be Sure Someone Has True Leadership Skills? Look for These 4 Signs
10 DEI Resolutions for 2021
Look to this day! For it is life, the very life of life. In its brief course Lie all the verities and realities of your existence: The bliss of growth; The glory of action; The splendor of achievement;
For yesterday is but a dream, And tomorrow is only a vision; But today, well lived, makes every yesterday a dream of happiness, And every tomorrow a vision of hope.
Look well towards this day…
-Kalidasa
An excerpt adapted from A Path with Heart courtesy of Ken B:
My teacher, Jack Kornfield, published a beautiful and poignant article today about how to confront the most difficult situations in our lives with grace and wisdom.
“Very often what nourishes our spirit most is what brings us face to face with our greatest limitations and difficulties. My teacher Ajahn Chah called this “practicing against the grain,” or “facing into one’s difficulties.” Every life has periods and situations of great difficulty that call on our spirit. Sometimes we are faced with the pain or illness of a child or a parent we love dearly. Sometimes it is a loss we face in career or business. Sometimes it is just our own loneliness or confusion or fear. Sometimes we are forced to live with painful circumstances or difficult people. In this time of pandemic these problems can become more intense. Yet in these very difficulties, we can learn the true strength of our practice. At these times, the wisdom we have cultivated and the depth of our love is our chief resource. To meditate, to pray, to practice at such times can be like pouring soothing balm onto the aches of our heart. The great forces of greed, hatred, fear, and ignorance that we encounter can be met by the equally great courage of our heart.
Freedom is born out of our capacity to work with any energy or difficulty that arises. It’s the freedom to enter wisely into all the realms of this world, the beautiful and painful realms, the realms of sickness and health, the realms of war and of peace. We can’t find freedom in some other place or some other time, we must find it here and now in this very life.
Often we see only two choices for dealing with our problems. One is to suppress them and deny them, to try to fill our lives with only light, beauty, and ideal feelings. In the long run we find that this does not work, for what we suppress with one hand or one part of our body cries out from another. If we suppress thoughts in the mind, we get ulcers; and if we clench problems in our body, our mind later becomes agitated or rigid, filled with unfaced fear. A second strategy is the opposite, to let all our reactions out, freely venting our feelings about each situation. This, too, becomes a problem, for if we act out every feeling that arises, all our dislikes, opinions, and agitations, our habitual reactions grow until they become tiresome, painful, confusing, contradictory, difficult, and finally overwhelming. What is left? The third alternative is the power of our wakeful and attentive heart. We can face these forces, these difficulties with loving awareness.
The maturity we can develop in approaching our difficulties is illustrated by the traditional story of a poisoned tree. On first discovering a poisoned tree, some people see only its danger. Their immediate reaction is, “Let’s cut this down before we are hurt. Let’s cut it down before anyone else eats the poisoned fruit.” This resembles our initial response to the difficulties that arise in our lives, when we encounter aggression, compulsion, greed, or fear, when we are faced with stress, loss, conflict, depression, or sorrow in ourselves and in those around us. Our initial response is to avoid them, saying, “These poisons afflict us. Let us uproot them; let us be rid of them. Let us cut them down.”
Other people, who have journeyed further along the spiritual path, discover this poisoned tree and do not meet it with aversion. They have realized that to open to life requires a deep and heartfelt compassion for all. Knowing the poisoned tree is somehow a part of us, they say, “Let us not cut it down. Instead, let’s have compassion for the tree as well.” So out of kindness they build a fence around the tree so that others may not be poisoned and the tree may also have its life. This second approach shows a profound shift of relationship from judgment and fear to compassion.
A third type of person, who has traveled yet deeper in spiritual life, sees this same tree. This person, who has gained much vision, looks and says, “Oh, a poisoned tree. Perfect! Just what I was looking for.” This individual picks the poisoned fruit, investigates its properties, mixes it with other ingredients, and uses the poison as a great medicine to heal the sick and transform the ills of the world.
How can we do this? We can develop the seeds of wisdom, peace, and wholeness within each of our difficulties. We can make our very difficulties the place of our practice. Then our life becomes not a struggle with success and failure but a dance of the heart. Where better to meditate, to steady our hearts, to practice patience, calm, generosity, compassion than in our tough times? This is where the straw becomes spun into the gold of love.
MEDITATION: REFLECTING ON DIFFICULTY
Sit quietly, feeling the rhythm of your breathing, allowing yourself to become calm and receptive. Then think of a difficulty that you face, whether in your spiritual practice or anywhere in your life. As you sense this difficulty, take your time. Notice how it affects your body, how it feels in the heart, its energy in the mind. Feeling it carefully, begin to ask yourself a few questions, listening inwardly for their answers.
How have I approached this difficulty so far?
How have I suffered by my own response and reaction to it?
What does this problem ask me to let go of?
What suffering here is unavoidable, is my measure to accept?
What happens if I bring tender compassion to all the parts of this difficulty?
What courage is asked as I respond?
What great lesson might it be able to teach me?
What is the gold, the value, hidden in this situation?
In using this reflection to consider your difficulties, the understanding and openings may come slowly. Take your time. As with all meditations, it can be helpful to repeat this reflection a number of times, listening each time for deeper answers from your body, heart, and spirit.
Meet America’s Newest Chess Master, 10-Year-Old Tanitoluwa Adewumi At 10 years old, Tanitoluwa Adewumi just became one of the youngest chess masters in the United States — and he’s not done yet. He says he hopes to become the world’s youngest grandmaster.
“Is this the beginning, or is this the end? When will I see you again…”
Hi all,
After 13+ years, and over 670 posts going every week, rain or shine, Soul Food Friday now needs a new home.
What started out as a weekly email to friends and fam, with the sole intention of putting some positive energy out into the universe has grown over the years to over 6,000 people all over the world on the email list, and is now in need of a bit of help.
How you might consider helping:
If you have WordPress and/or MailChimp skills, I could use some help preparing and posting the content each week
If you see this blog as a force for good and positivity in your life, you might consider underwriting part of the expense of hosting the site and the monthly subscription fees (both relatively modest) to keep this going
If you would like to sponsor the site- recognizing that I refuse to be beholden to any agenda or ideology besides recognizing the positivity in humankind, and speaking truth to power when we are not modeling that- I am happy to chat further
If you would like to keep receiving this weekly missive in the meantime, please subscribe on the Soul Food Friday website, so I know the lemon is worth the squeeze, and I will keep on keeping on
If you believe that each of us can make a difference of consequence, do amplify positivity in the world with your gifts, talents, strengths and interests- we are better together!
For everything there is a season, and if this is the sunset of one thing for the sunrise of something else, so be it.
Should, on the other hand, this be a perennial then I am happy to play on, with a little help from my friends!
This week, I was featured on the Play Your Position Podcast that is available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
It was a fun interview with Mary Lou Kayser which is kind of a “best of” interview as it speaks to so many of the topics that matter deeply to me and influenced by so many of you over the years.
Thanks this week go to all my supports and influencers over the last 13 years, too many to mention each and every one of you, including but not limited to, Danny F, Alan D, the Conscious Leaders Men’s Group, the Far Future Design Society, the Bright Lights, the Mission Fed team, NCPC and the local philanthropic community, Steve S and the Chamber of Purpose pathfinders, all my nonprofit partners and friends changing the world through social mission work, Aoinagi Ken Shu Kai bringing the wisdom traditions to the UC San Diego campus ecosystem for nearly 4 decades, Tim D and the Port team, all our amazing partners and luminaries in education both in the K-12 districts, in the private and charter community, and the social entrepreneurs like John C, and last and certainly not least, my family that have taught me to love better and wider.
The list is long and if I left you out, my apologies. Please know that you made a difference in my life and that of others…
Pay it forward!
Love All,
Neville
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” –Viktor Frankl
When I was about fourteen I was seized by enormous waves of grief over my parents’ breakup. I had read somewhere that running would help dispel anguish, so I began to run to school every day down Park Avenue in New York City. I was a great big overgrown girl (5 feet eleven by the age of eleven) and one day I ran into a rather frail old gentleman in his seventies and knocked the wind out of him. He laughed as I helped him to his feet and asked me in French- accented speech, “Are you planning to run like that for the rest of your life?”
“Yes, sir” I replied. “It looks that way.”
“Well, Bon Voyage!” he said.
“Bon Voyage!” I answered and sped on my way.
About a week later I was walking down Park Avenue with my fox terrier, Champ, and again I met the old gentleman.
“Ah.” he greeted me, “my friend the runner, and with a fox terrier. I knew one like that years ago in France. Where are you going?”
“Well, sir.” I replied, “I’m taking Champ to Central Park.”
“I will go with you.” he informed me. “I will take my constitutional.”
And thereafter, for about a year or so, the old gentleman and I would meet and walk together often several times a week in Central Park. He had a long French name but asked me to call him by the first part of it, which was “Mr. Tayer” as far as I could make out.
The walks were magical and full of delight. Not only did Mr. Tayer seem to have absolutely no self-consciousness, but he was always being seized by wonder and astonishment over the simplest things. He was constantly and literally falling into love. I remember one time when he suddenly fell on his knees, his long Gallic nose raking the ground, and exclaimed to me, “Jeanne, look at the caterpillar. Ahhhh!” I joined him on the ground to see what had evoked so profound a response that he was seized by the essence of caterpillar. “How beautiful it is”, he remarked, “this little green being with its wonderful funny little feet. Exquisite! Little furry body, little green feet on the road to metamorphosis.” He then regarded me with equal delight. “Jeanne, can you feel yourself to be a caterpillar?”
“Oh yes.” I replied with the baleful knowing of a gangly, pimply faced teenager.
“Then think of your own metamorphosis.” he suggested. “What will you be when you become a butterfly, une papillon, eh? What is the butterfly of Jeanne?” (What a great question for a fourteen-year-old girl!) His long, gothic, comic-tragic face would nod with wonder. “Eh, Jeanne, look at the clouds! God’s calligraphy in the sky! All that transforming. moving, changing, dissolving, becoming. Jeanne, become a cloud and become all the forms that ever were.”
Or there was the time that Mr. Tayer and I leaned into the strong wind that suddenly whipped through Central Park, and he told me, “Jeanne, sniff the wind.” I joined him in taking great snorts of wind. “The same wind may once have been sniffed by Jesus Christ (sniff). by Alexander the Great (sniff), by Napoleon (sniff), by Voltaire (sniff), by Marie Antoinette (sniff)!” (There seemed to be a lot of French people in that wind.) “Now sniff this next gust of wind in very deeply for it contains.. . Jeanne d’Arc! Sniff the wind once sniffed by Jeanne dArc. Be filled with the winds of history.”
It was wonderful. People of all ages followed us around, laughing—not at us but with us. Old Mr. Tayer was truly diaphanous to every moment and being with him was like being in attendance at God’s own party, a continuous celebration of life and its mysteries. But mostly Mr. Tayer was so full of vital sap and juice that he seemed to flow with everything. Always he saw the interconnections between things—the way that everything in the universe, from fox terriers to tree bark to somebody’s red hat to the mind of God, was related to everything else and was very, very good.
He wasn’t merely a great appreciator, engaged by all his senses. He was truly penetrated by the reality that was yearning for him as much as he was yearning for it. He talked to the trees, to the wind, to the rocks as dear friends, as beloved even. ‘Ah, my friend, the mica schist layer, do you remember when…?” And I would swear that the mica schist would begin to glitter back. I mean, mica schist will do that, but on a cloudy day?! Everything was treated as personal, as sentient, as “thou.” And everything that was thou was ensouled with being. and it thou-ed back to him. So when I walked with him, I felt as though a spotlight was following us, bringing radiance and light everywhere. And I was constantly seized by astonishment in the presence of this infinitely beautiful man, who radiated such sweetness, such kindness.
I remember one occasion when he was quietly watching a very old woman watching a young boy play a game. “Madame”, he suddenly addressed her. She looked up, surprised that a stranger in Central Park would speak to her. “Madame,” he repeated, “why are you so fascinated by what that little boy is doing?” The old woman was startled by the question, but the kindly face of Mr. Tayer seemed to allay her fears and evoke her memories. “Well, sir,” she replied in an ancient but pensive voice, “the game that boy is playing is like one I played in this park around 1880, only it’s a mite different.” We noticed that the boy was listening, so Mr. Tayer promptly included him in the conversation. “Young fellow, would you like to learn the game as it was played so many years ago?”
“Well. . .yeah. sure, why not?” the boy replied. And soon the young boy and the old woman were making friends and sharing old and new variations on the game—as unlikely an incident to occur in Central Park as could be imagined.
But perhaps the most extraordinary thing about Mr. Tayer was the way that he would suddenly look at you. He looked at you with wonder and astonishment joined to unconditional love joined to a whimsical regarding of you as the cluttered house that hides the holy one. I felt myself primed to the depths by such seeing. I felt evolutionary forces wake up in me by such seeing, every cell and thought and potential palpably changed. I was yeasted, greened, awakened by such seeing, and the defeats and denigrations of adolescence redeemed. I would go home and tell my mother, who was a little skeptical about my walking with an old man in the park so often, “Mother, I was with my old man again, and when I am with him, I leave my littleness behind.” That deeply moved her. You could not be stuck in littleness and be in the radiant field of Mr. Tayer.
The last time that I ever saw him was the Thursday before Easter Sunday, 1955. I brought him the shell of a snail. “Ah. Escargot.” he exclaimed and then proceeded to wax ecstatic for the better part of an hour. Snail shells, and galaxies, and the convolutions in the brain, the whorl of flowers and the meanderings of rivers were taken up into a great hymn to the spiraling evolution of spirit and matter. When he had finished, his voice dropped, and he whispered almost in prayer, “Omega …omega. . .omega..” Finally he looked up and said to me quietly, “Au revoir, Jeanne”.
“Au revoir, Mr. Tayer,” I replied, “I’ll meet you at the same time next Tuesday.”
For some reason. Champ, my fox terrier didn’t want to budge, and when I pulled him along, he whimpered, looking back at Mr. Tayer, his tail between his legs. The following Tuesday I was there waiting where we always met at the corner of Park Avenue and 83rd Street. He didn’t come. The following Thursday I waited again. Still he didn’t come. The dog looked up at me sadly. For the next eight weeks I continued to wait, but he never came again. It turned out that he had suddenly died that Easter Sunday but I didn’t find that out for years.
Some years later, someone handed me a book without a cover which was titled The Phenomenon of Man. As I read the book I found it strangely familiar in its concepts. Occasional words and expressions loomed up as echoes from my past. When, later in the book, I came across the concept of the “Omega point.” I was certain. I asked to see the jacket of the book, looked at the author’s picture, and, of course, recognized him immediately. There was no forgetting or mistaking that face. Mr. Tayer was Teilhard de Chardin, the great priest-scientist, poet and mystic, and during that lovely and luminous year I had been meeting him outside the Jesuit rectory of St. Ignatius where he was living most of the time.
I have often wondered if it was my simplicity and innocence that allowed the fullness of Teilhard’s being to be revealed. To me he was never the great priest-paleontologist Pere Teilhard. He was old Mr. Tayer. Why did he always come and walk with me every Tuesday and Thursday, even though I’m sure he had better things to do? Was it that in seeing me so completely, he himself could be completely seen at a time when his writings, his work, were proscribed by the Church, when he was not permitted to teach, or even to talk about his ideas? As I later found out, he was undergoing at that time the most excruciating agony that there is—the agony of utter disempowerment and psychological crucifixion. And yet to me he was always so present—whimsical, engaging, empowering. How could that be?
I think it was because Teilhard had what few Church officials did—the power and grace of the Love that passes all understanding. He could write about love being the evolutionary force, the Omega point, that lures the world and ourselves into becoming, because he experienced that love in a piece of rock, in the wag of a dog’s tail, in the eyes of a child. He was so in love with everything that he talked in great particularity, even to me as an adolescent, about the desire atoms have for each other, the yearning of molecules, of organisms, of bodies, of planets, of galaxies, all of creation longing for that radiant bonding, for joining, for the deepening of their condition, for becoming more by virtue of yearning for and finding the other. He knew about the search for the Beloved. His model was Christ. For Teilhard de Chardin, Christ was the Beloved of the soul.
Years later, while addressing some Jesuits, a very old Jesuit came up to me. He was a friend of Teilhard’s—and he told me how Teilhard used to talk of his encounters in the Park with a girl called Jeanne.
Jean Houston Pomona, New York March, 1988
“The day will come when, after harnessing space, the winds, the tides and gravitation, we shall harness for God the energies of love.
And on that day, for the second time in the history of the world, we shall have discovered fire!”–Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
What the Supermoon Looked Like Around the World: The moon is nearly as close as it gets to Earth on its orbit, creating a spectacular sight!
5 Nudges That Work Better Than a Vaccine Mandate, According to an Employment Law Expert: You have incredible influence to nudge your team to get their Covid shots. Don’t be shy about exercising it.
Julie Lythcott-Haims’s new book, Your Turn: How to Be an Adult, is a handbook on adulthood. Her 2017 memoir, Real American, is the story of her coming to terms with her biracial identity. She is the former dean of freshmen and undergraduate advising at Stanford, where she earned her B.A. She also earned a law degree from Harvard and a master’s in fine arts and writing from California College of the Arts.
Thanks this week go to Mehrad N for the Dr. Tayer story, and to lovers of humanity everywhere!
Please pay it forward.
Love, Neville
“When you squeeze an orange, orange juice comes out — because that’s what’s inside. When you are squeezed, what comes out is what is inside.” — Dr. Wayne Dyer: Motivational author and speaker
Happy Soul Food Friday! 