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fingonvaliant · 4 years ago

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An open letter to the Apostles

To the Leadership of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints:

I left because I didn’t believe anymore. There were too many promises that weren’t fulfilled, to many questions I was given false answers to, but more than anything else, I couldn’t take the stress of being a queer person in a space I didn’t feel like I belonged in. I could talk about Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, Mountain Meadows, the Kinderhook Plates, the stock portfolio, seer stones, blood atonement, “skins of darkness,” musket fire, “fence-sitters,” and a million things besides, but you know all that already.

I hope that with this letter, I can help the Church improve and change, because I still care about the Church, even though I no longer belong to it; that’s how I know it needs to change. It is still important to me. I am not trying to get people to leave the Church, that is not my goal. I’m not a Korihor trying to cause contention. But I need to tell my story.

While I was growing up, I believed it all. I was baptized at eight, regularly attended, served in quorum leaderships, and planned on going on a mission. Then, about when I was thirteen, I started experiencing what the Church calls “same-gender attraction.” I dislike this term greatly; it sounds like a disease. I prefer to say that I discovered I was bisexual.

I did not know what this was. My sexual education classes never covered it; I was never told what it was when I got “the talk”; my only experience with the word “gay” was in a middle school context, as an insult with no clear meaning. The only thing I did know was that this was not allowed. If marriage was ordained of God between a man and a woman, why did I have these -at the time- confusing feelings? If the only relationships I had any experience with were heterosexual, how was I even to know bisexuality existed?

And I didn’t, for years. As I wrestled with this, not even knowing what exactly I was feeling, I eventually, around age 16, learned the words to fit the feelings, to fit my identity. I knew who I was, what I was. By then, gay marriage had only just been legalized, and I -a couple months late- learned that this was a victory for me also.

This recognition put everything I thought I knew about marriage into a tailspin. I knew, I saw, and I was a part of, the Church’s effort to prevent this legalization. I read in Standards for Youth, (at the time called For the Strength of Youth) a short paragraph that made a huge impact on the rest of my life: “Homosexual and lesbian behavior is a serious sin. If you find yourself struggling with same-gender attraction or you are being persuaded to participate in inappropriate behavior, seek counsel from your parents and bishop. They will help you.” (Standards for Youth, Sexual Purity, emphasis added).

The thorough talking-to’s my closeted teen self received just before and after the legalization of gay marriage involved repetition of this paragraph ad nauseam. Breaking it down, it’s clear the degree to which this passage is shaped by uninformed conservatism. What does “behavior” mean? Since it’s a serious sin, you’d expect there to be clarification, right? Is hand-holding a serious sin? Hugs? An increased heart rate? A peck on the cheek? Or just sex? The way I was taught, it was clear the answer was “all of the above.”

The term “struggling” carries so much weight. The LDS church knew suffering, and still today in many places of in the world, members of the Church face repression. All people struggle with burdens, we struggle with disease, we struggle with sin, we struggle with conflict. Is “same-gender attraction” a burden, a disease, a sin, does it cause conflict? With the use of this word, the values are clear.

But in reality, the most painful part of this paragraph is the conclusion: “your parents and bishop … will help you.” They didn’t. They didn’t know how to, they still don’t. Because of the broad interpretation of unacceptable “behavior” and the belief that “same-gender attraction” is a “struggle,” they had no clue what they were dealing with.

Coming out was a traumatic experience. I was attending an all-boys boarding school at the time and caught feelings for a fellow student. We snuck around, living out a high school romance for a few weeks, until we were caught by the staff. Phone calls home were made, and I had the indescribable experience of having to explain to my parents both who I was, and what I had done, over the phone, one parent at a time, without seeing their faces.

Their immediate reaction was that I was too young to know if I was “really gay,” and that all sorts of strange feelings happen in boys my age. They didn’t really believe my description of myself; they negated my identity -they did not even recognize that this experience and these feelings were part of my identity- and mailed me a copy of The Miracle of Forgiveness. My experience with my bishop was likewise useless. He advised me that -through the atonement of Christ- all things are possible, and with suitable dedication to living the gospel, I could be made pure.

I never changed. I could not. It cannot be done. But I tried. I tried so hard.

Church attendance became more and more anxiety-inducing. I felt more and more guilty blessing the sacrament and giving blessings. I gave up on my childhood dream of being a missionary because I could longer believe the words I would have to say. I took temple preparation classes but could never bring myself to the bishop’s office to do the interview. When I started attending college and going to a YSA ward, I was no longer under my parent’s supervision. I kept going for a few months, until I was called as a ward missionary. I remember the day where I was on splits with the full-time missionaries, and we were going door-to-door in a neighborhood near my home. I just felt like we were harassing people in their homes on a Wednesday evening. It was the most uncomfortable experience of my life. I knew then that I didn’t believe in any of this anymore.

You know as well as I do that tens of thousands of people have had similar experiences that I have. We’ve felt the alienation, the sidelining, the people who don’t understand, the hand-wringing, the statement that all the burden lies on queer people to cure themselves, and it is the Church that must not change or cannot change. We keep being told “wickedness never was happiness,” (Alma 41:10) and that our lives of “unrepentant sin” are responsible for calamities and the disintegration of the family. We are being made into bogeymen in the closet, seeking “that all men might be miserable like unto [ourselves].” Endless inquiries are put forward, seeking to find the “cause of homosexuality” that we know are to find a “cure” for it. We are told we are suffering from these attractions, not that we have a unique identity, and certainly not that we are valuable.

But I know that these practices, and these doctrines, are not at the core of the Church. Members of the Church are commanded to “mourn with those that mourn … and comfort those that stand in need of comfort” (Mosiah 18:9). All Christians are told, that as a mark of their religion, they are to “love one another; as I have loved you” (John 13:34) and that “On [this] hang all the law and the prophets.” (Matthew 22:40). I know the Church can be better than it is right now; it is the Church itself that taught me that.

In nature, there is a direct correlation of both an organism’s and a species’ capacity for survival with its capacity for change. And I know the Church can change, because it has done it before, with interracial marriage, with polygamy, with African-Americans and the priesthood, with the Word of Wisdom, and with many things besides. Society changes all the time, and the Church changes with it.

#this was for an assignment technically #but i thought i'd share it here #queerstake #exmormon

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grandhotelabyss · 5 years ago

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Where the corporations fail literature, little magazines and small presses will emerge to fill in the gaps. Things may start to look a bit like they did one hundred years ago, and the time will be ripe for another aesthetic revolution.

Christian Lorentzen, “Literature”

(Is this true? My impression is that modernism’s small presses and little magazines were founded by eccentric independently wealthy people who had an actual interest in the arts for their own sake. I am not a sociologist of literature, though, so my cursory scan of Margaret Anderson’s and James Laughlin’s Wikipedia pages could be inadequate to the task. The “little” magazines and “small” presses that came later—see Juliana Spahr’s Du Bois’s Telegram for details—were and are funded by universities and/or by foundations that are often little better than intelligence cutouts. So the level of true independence is not going to be the same as it was in the days of Joyce and Stein.

Which leads me to a question: what are eccentric rich people doing with their money these days that they can’t throw me a few crumbs? Not that I am experimental in the requisite sense—this is the other problem with the dream of the modernist revival. Lorentzen rightly complains about Netflix-ready corporate-monopoly realist novels, but all the most strenuous gestures for resisting the realist novel—most of them born with the realist novel in the 18th century or even before—have hardened into a body of convention as rigid as such realism itself. Oh, your novel set inside the unraveling consciousness of a man without a memory wandering a nameless country that vaguely resembles Franco’s Spain doesn’t have paragraph breaks? How utterly utter. I prefer in my own fiction to present a surface you could almost think at first was conventional realism—not only do I use paragraph breaks, but I even notate dialogue with quotation marks—and then slowly unveil to you that you are in a dream or a nightmare, as fiction indeed should be, but not in a literal-minded way. Dreams and nightmares work because no matter how strange they get they feel real.

Two stray comments on the rest of the piece, for which please click.

First—pedantry alert!—but Lorentzen oddly doesn’t mention the most famous early-20th-century novel to have been touched by the 1918-19 flu pandemic, Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, in which eponymous Clarissa’s heart was “affected, they said, by influenza,” presumably four to five years before the narrative proper, which mirrors her cross-gender, cross-class day-double Septimus Warren Smith’s traumatic time in the trenches.

Second, I enjoyed the suggestive remarks about how much of “online” to incorporate into fiction. [What’s the point? To repeat my thesis, “online” will probably be gone in some number of centuries or even decades, so we had better get onto paper whatever we want to remember. I still have a comic book I drew on loose-leaf paper when I was seven; I don’t have my college essays, which are on some floppy disk somewhere, maybe in a dump, that no machine in my possession could access even if I had them, and only about half of my 2002-2006 livejournal still lives on archive.org., not that these are items of any value.] I don’t recommend imitation—Tweeted novels and the like. We can’t reproduce the suspense of doomscrolling in fiction, because the lure of the feed is precisely that it refers to reality. Direct competition with new media never works—Updike writing “cinematically” in the present tense now seems forced and silly and generally at odds with what was valuable in his sensibility—though neither does paranoia about not being influenced by new media, as if fiction had to be punitively interior or linguistically self-involved to avoid being too flashy or fun. As long as we��re doing something interesting with language or structure, our books will probably not be wholly reducible to TV or Twitter. And if our fiction is at least realist-adjacent, as in set in the present, it’s enough to write directly about characters’ interactions with the online world and how it affects their lives offline. This changes the content, but a change in content is a change in form: now we have a different kind of narrative interest.

For example, if you’ll indulge me, in my Quarantine of St. Sebastian House, the nameless narrator meets one of his neighbors for the first time, and she alludes by way of consolation to the relatively recent death of his mother, which she’d learned about by googling him before she knocked on his door. Later, another neighbor discloses that whatever she’d found out about the mother’s death on a local newspaper’s website was a planted official cover story concealing a much more nightmarish set of facts. This second neighbor discovered these facts almost by accident through chatter on 4chan about a secret video, intolerable to watch, that surfaces briefly from time to time on various sites before being quickly removed. In other words, what used to be a fictional character’s interior secrets are now exteriorized and discoverable by a dogged enough sleuth. Characters are built not on the old model of social facades concealing hidden depths; now they are—and experience one another as—layers upon layers of searchable data that less conceal than embody some mysterious, unreachable inner core paradoxically distributed over the network. The online world has pulled us inside out like a glove. In showing us this, fiction remains itself—usually at its best when investigating character, which it does better than rival art forms older and younger—but changed from what it was by new technology, alive to its time.)

#fiction #literature #creative writing #fiction writing #modernism #experimental fiction #christian lorentzen

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whentherewerebicycles · 5 years ago

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core texts for Fall 2020:

Eve Tuck, “Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities” and “Biting the University that Feeds You”

Linda Tuhiwai Smith, intro and chapter excerpts from Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples

Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts” + excerpts from Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women and Queer Radicals

Delgado Bernal, Burciaga, and Flores Carmonia, “Chicana/Latina Testimonios: Mapping the Methodological, Pedagogical, and Political”

Paulo Freire essay or chapter tbd but possibly “Creating Alternative Research Methods: Learning it by doing it”

The Texas After Violence Project, Life and Death in a Carceral State (short documentary and community report)

Ricardo Velasco (dir.), After the Crossfire: Memories of Violence and Displacement (short documentary)

Marlon Riggs’s Tongues Untied (experimental documentary blending archival material, poetry, music, dance, autobiography, popular culture representations of Blackness and queerness)

Excerpts from our grad fellows’ dissertation projects tbd

A collection of assorted excerpts tbd that center on defining one’s values & commitments as a scholar-activist (will most likely include: Cherrie Moraga, Gloria Anzaldua, Toni Cade Bambara, Paulo Freire, Raymond Williams, Saidiya Hartman, Audre Lorde, Grace Lee Boggs, Adrienne Rich, others tbd—I might ask grad students and returning undergrads to contribute their own ‘touchstones’)

Plus lots of model projects in the humanities and humanistic social sciences, including but not limited to:

The Survivance Game

The Undocumented Migration Project’s Hostile Terrain 94 installation

A People’s Archive of Police Violence in Cleveland

‘I’m Still Surviving’: A Women’s History of HIV

The Ojibwe People’s Dictionary

Looking at Appalachia

SeaTac/Seattle Minimum Wage Project

Refusing to Forget

ATX Barrio Archive

The Teaching Texas Slavery Project

The Carceral Studies Network Project

Southwest Virginia LGBTQ History Project

UT Racial Geography Tour

I haven’t named our thematic clusters yet, but I think they are, tentatively:

A cluster of readings, discussions, and activities exploring historical & ongoing violences of research (research as a tool of social control; research as a legitimizing apparatus for settler-colonialism, racism, sexism, homophobia; damage-centered research and deficit models; extractive and exploitative research; community mistrust of academic researchers)

A cluster of readings, discussions, speakers, and activities exploring alternative, reparative, and/or justice-oriented research methodologies, with a focus on different kinds of archival projects & archiving/storytelling practices (documenting histories of resistance and survivance; oral histories and testimonios; creative-critical storying and placemaking practices; “undisciplining” projects; ethical responsibility and answerability in retelling or documenting traumatic histories)

A cluster of readings, discussions, and speakers exploring scholar-activist identities & action research, ie participatory research that seeks to produce transformative change through simultaneously taking action, doing research, and engaging in critical reflection—I think this more pragmatic, action- and reflection-focused unit will bridge us into the more concrete project planning & skill-building work we’ll do over winter break and into the spring.

#teaching #syllabus design

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iraqtemper0 · 5 years ago

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Knee Brace After Surgery

Judah expanded his knowledge with concepts of structure and energy from Dr. Fritz Smith's "Core Zero Balancing," as well as Reiki, the Reconnection and Trigger Point therapy. Judah has also shared his knowledge, passion and experience with many students over the years. Judah taught as a deep tissue instructor at the Utah College of Massage Therapy (1992-1995), as an advanced massage technique instructor at the Virginia School of Technology (2003-2004) and as an anatomy and palpation instructor at the Cayce Reilly School of Massotherapy (2004-2007). Continually searching for ways to assist his clients, he brings a balanced approach to the table when practicing. Judah is an avid horseman and guitarist. A strain is an injury to a muscle. A strain can vary in severity from a mild stretch to a full rupture. In an abdominal muscle strain, any one of the four muscles can be injured causing extreme discomfort with any trunk movements as well as with coughing, laughing, deep breathing, or sneezing. An abdominal strain is fairly common in athletes and active populations because this group of muscles is constantly engaged to keep the athlete's core tight so that the athlete can perform and execute skills using his/her extremities and/or total body. Strong and healthy abdominal muscles only enhance an athlete's performance. However, injure these muscles, and the athlete will have significant difficulty trying to perform. Athletes more susceptible to an abdominal strain are those in sports that require strong rotational movements or flexion/hyperextension movements. They are usually acute (traumatic) injuries seen in athletes in the sports of baseball, softball, basketball, gymnastics, and track and field. 'The most common causes of abdominal strains are sudden twisting (i.e., swinging a bat) or sudden hyperextension of the spine (i.e., as seen during dynamic gymnastics movements)' (Anderson, M.K., Hall, S.J., & Martin, M., 2005). If ProJoint Plus formula of the movement is stronger than the fibers of the muscles can withstand, the muscle will begin to stretch. If the force continues, the fibers may begin to tear. Continued force could cause a complete rupture within the muscle or between the muscle and its fascial attachment. What can I do to prevent an abdominal strain? Athletes can prevent abdominal strains by maintaining the flexibility of their trunk and increasing the strength of their core muscles. The good thing is that many sports programs already include core strength training exercises as part of their conditioning program.

#Joint Pain Hack #Pain Management #Pain Relief Supplement #Vita Balance

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swvlswvl · 7 years ago

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Radiohead’s 2018 Summer Tour Is Their Best in Years

I'm pretty sure I saw Thom Yorke moonwalk last week. It happened on Tuesday, the first night of Radiohead's four-show residency at Madison Square Garden, and if it wasn't the full Motown 25, it was as close as this guy gets. He hit the groove in question during "Kid A," which really isn't a moonwalking kind of song on the 2000 album with which it shares a name. But there he was, doing a little backwards shimmy-glide thing in the middle of his spaced-out robot lullaby. He was lighter than air up there, smoother than physics. He was having fun.

Toward the end of the final Garden set on Saturday night, Yorke called this week of shows "a celebration of what has happened over all these fucking crazy years we've had together." That was exactly the vibe. This was the kind of party where you end up glancing back at your whole fucked-up existence on earth and realizing it's had some incredible highs, and right now is one of them. Radiohead have been touring in support of their most recent album, A Moon Shaped Pool, since its May 2016 release, and somewhere along the way they've figured out the answers to questions they've been tangling with onstage since the late Nineties. Even the songs about alienation and paranoia, which is about 80 percent of the songs at a Radiohead show, feel like sunshine bursting through the clouds now.

For starters, the 60-plus shows they've played in the last two years mean that they've perfected the songs from A Moon Shaped Pool in a live setting. The two halves of "Decks Dark" fit together better than they did when they played the Garden in 2016. "Desert Island Disk" and "Daydreaming" breathe more. "Ful Stop" thrashes harder. These songs have earned their place in the band's canon, outlasting the ones that didn't quite work onstage (see ya later, "Burn the Witch" – you were cooler in theory). The best new-era live song of all might be "Spectre," the gorgeous would-be James Bond theme they recorded around 2015 only for the movie's producers to reject it in favor of an instantly forgettable Sam Smith song. Yorke performed it alone at the piano on Saturday night, replacing Jonny Greenwood's strings with jazzy chords. It was eerie and beautiful, a worthy successor to "Pyramid Song" and "Like Spinning Plates," each of which played a similar role on Tuesday and Friday, respectively.

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The true emotional peaks for longtime Radiohead fans, of course, were the older songs. I'm talking "Lucky," "The Bends," "Fake Plastic Trees," "The Tourist" – huge, high-grade alt-rock anthems that were made to be played in arenas from Tokyo to Topeka. The first time they tried doing that, the experience was so traumatizing they made a movie about how much they hated it. They've continued playing these songs as treats for fans on all their subsequent tours, and they've always sounded great at whatever sports venue they're in that night. That's what those songs do. But the intangibles have shifted on this tour. The band is enjoying them in a new way – check how the core guitar trio of Yorke, Greenwood and Ed O'Brien are moving around the stage when they hit those riffs, striking rock-star poses like they're 25 again. ("Bodysnatchers," which is a full decade newer than those songs, is a retroactive addition to this category. It was never my favorite on In Rainbows, but at some point it snuck into the top tier of Radiohead guitar songs, and it was an unexpected highlight at all three of the Garden shows I saw last week.)

No song sums up the magic of this tour better than "Let Down." When I became a Radiohead fan, in the post-OK Computer era, there was a widely held belief that this extraordinary ballad was impossible to play live – something about Jonny playing his guitar in a different time signature from the rest of the band. Or maybe they just didn't like performing it. Whatever the reason, "Let Down" more or less vanished from Radiohead's setlists after the OK Computer tour, so I'd never seen it in concert before their July 26, 2016 encore at the Garden. That was a holy-shit, am-I-really-seeing-this moment. When it reappeared in the following night's encore, I was ecstatic.

And now? "Let Down" is a familiar part of Radiohead's live show in 2018. They played it at two of the three nights I attended at the Garden, slotted comfortably into the main set both times. It's a song about disappointment, obviously, but that's not what's radiating from the band these days, and Yorke in particular. They're basking in the joy "Let Down" brings to their fans. Musicians feeling something, audiences reflecting it back even stronger in an infinite feedback loop – this is what all great live shows do, and Radiohead are doing it right now like never before.

#Radiohead

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lirlovesfic · 7 years ago

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The Choice

A Doctor Who fanfic Summary: After GitF, the TARDIS brings the Doctor, Rose, and Mickey back to the estate to solve a problem involving the TARDIS herself. But when they see a familiar face, the face of someone who should not exist, they realize the problem is deeper than they thought and could endanger the Doctor’s very existence. Primary characters: Ninth Doctor, Tenth Doctor, Rose Tyler, Mickey Smith, Jackie Tyler. Genres: Romance, mystery, adventure, drama, character study, HN AU, fobbed!Nine, sick TARDIS. Pairings: Nine/Rose, Ten/Rose Rating: Adult

Warning: None for this chapter

a/n: I am currently working on editing this chapter-by-chapter, with the hopes of completing a chapter a day until I catch up with myself. As I mentioned in a previous post, I’m doing it to try to get back into the swing of writing and to build some momentum in order to finish this. Also, there have been some tiny things nagging at me for a while (grammar, punctuation, etc.) so I’ll be correcting as many of them as I can find as I go. The story will not change. In fact, most of the changes are going to be so minor that I doubt anyone (besides myself) will notice. But to keep me on target, I’ll be posting it all here as I go, with links to the other websites it’s on. I hope you enjoy it.

This chapter: on AO3, on TSP, on ffnet

Chapter Four—London, 7 July 2007 and 8 July 2007

On their way back to the TARDIS, Mickey decided not to go with them.

"We've been gone three months," he said. "I've got to check to see if my flat is still mine and find out where my stuff is."

"Do you want me to go with?" Rose asked.

"Nah," he said. "I figure I'd go back to the pub for a bit afterwards. Unless you wanna come with?"

She rolled her eyes. "Oh, yeah, I'd love to sit around and watch you watch more telly," she said sarcastically.

Once back at the TARDIS, the Doctor immediately began to work on the console, trying to get more information from the TARDIS's memory banks. For a while Rose sat on the jump seat, hands under her thighs, feet swinging back and forth, as she watched him work. Normally when he worked on the TARDIS he'd keep up a running commentary, explaining to her what he was doing and why, and even if she didn't understand a word he was saying she'd feel like she was a part of everything. But this time he was completely silent. She knew it was just an indication of how serious he felt the situation was, but she still felt oddly excluded in a way she hadn't ever felt with him before they had met Reinette.

After a few more minutes of staring at him staring at the monitor, she got restless and got up to get something to read. Months earlier, before he had changed even, the Doctor had given her her own storage space in the console room. It was a small compartment under one of the floor gratings where she could keep some of her own stuff so she wouldn't have to run back to her own room every time she wanted something. At the time it had felt almost as momentous as when he had given her a key to the TARDIS. The Doctor had blushed, actually properly blushed, when Jack had compared it to him emptying out a drawer in his bedroom for her.

Rose got out a paperback novel and returned to the jump seat, but she wasn't able to concentrate on it. Instead her mind kept returning to the tiny glimpse she had had of her first Doctor. She reread the same page three times, not remembering a single word of it, as his face swam in front of her eyes.

She threw the book down on the seat next to her.

"Stop it," she muttered to herself.

The Doctor looked up. "What did you say, Rose?"

"Nothing," she said. "Sorry."

He nodded and returned to what he was doing.

Well, there wasn't anything she could do here, she thought. Anything she did would just distract him, and she clearly needed a distraction as well. She considered going out to try and find Mickey, but she knew from experience that sitting around the pub would be as boring as sitting around the console room.

Lord, what had she done on Saturday nights on the Estate before she had run off with the Doctor?

Clubbing, she reminded herself. Mickey had been right. She had spent a lot of time clubbing with Keisha, Shareen, Susie and Rita. She briefly considered ringing one of them, maybe even getting together, but she quickly rejected the idea. She knew Susie and Rita had blokes and would want to be with them on a Saturday night. She wasn't sure whether Keisha and Shareen had boyfriends, but if they didn't, and if they were anything like they used to be, they'd probably want to go pub crawling or something. She didn't want to go with them to try and pick someone up at a club, that wasn't her anymore.

But even if they didn't want to go out, what would she talk to them about anyway?

What have you been up to the last couple of years, Rose?

Oh, I ran away with an alien from outer space. He has a time machine, and we've not only traveled millions of years in the future, but into the past as well. I've met a bodiless head in a jar, cat nun nurses, a woman who had had so much plastic surgery she had turned herself into a bitchy trampoline, and a werewolf from outer space. I've even met the Prime Minister and Queen Victoria.

No. The last time she had tried to talk to Keisha about what she had been up to she'd had to lie through her teeth about the Doctor, something Keisha hadn't noticed at the time because she was distracted by her own problems. She couldn't count on that this time.

She wandered the corridors for a bit, taking peeks into rooms she had never been in before—and why did the TARDIS have an entire room devoted to shoelaces, anyway? Finally, she watched a movie in the media room and went to bed.

Once there, though, she tossed and turned as her mind raced. Ever since Christmas in Cardiff in 1869, she had known that with a time machine the Doctor could take her into the past, where people long dead were alive again. But even after meeting Charles Dickens, Reinette, even her own father and herself as a baby, it had never occurred to her that she could ever see a past version of the Doctor himself.

As she fell asleep, her mind returned to the tiny glimpse she had had of him in the garage.

And longed for another one.

~oOo~

The Doctor huffed in irritation as he yet again watched the images on the small screen built into the TARDIS console. Nothing he did was clearing up the static in the display.

"Rose, this looks less like interference in the CCTV and more like actual damage to the TARDIS memory core. I can't figure it out. Any ideas?"

When Rose didn't answer, he looked up from the monitor. She wasn't there. He scanned his Time Sense only to realize to his surprise that it had been more than four hours since they had gotten back to the TARDIS. She must have gone to bed, he told himself.

Disappointed by her absence, he frowned and turned back to the screen.

~oOo~

"Exterminate! Exterminate!"

Beams of deadly light lit up the night. He could hear the sounds of explosions, of feet running, of desperate parents calling for their lost children.

"Exterminate! Exterminate!"

Giant pepper pots swooped out of the sky and floated above the ground, shooting everything in sight.

"Exterminate! Exterminate!"

Children screamed in fright and pain.

Fire. Fire everywhere. Burning everything in its path.

"No more," he muttered, his voice low and cold.

"Exterminate! Exterminate!"

"No more," he growled angrily.

"Exterminate! Exterminate!"

"NO MORE!" His voice rang out over the din. "NO MORE! NO MORE!"

Heart pounding and chest heaving, John shot up, instantly fully awake. This nightmare had been the worst yet. He reached over for his sketchbook, and stopped. His hands were shaking. Besides, there was nothing about this nightmare he wanted to remember.

In an effort to calm himself he closed his eyes and took in several deep lungsful of air, blowing them out slowly. Gradually his heart rate slowed.

The images made no sense to him. They had, could have, no basis in reality. But dream images often were symbolic of something else, he reminded himself. The dreamscape seemed clearly to be symbolic of a battle of some type.

For the first time, it suddenly occurred to him that he might have been a soldier.

He could have kicked himself. How could he have been so stupid? Why hadn't he thought of that before? The vast majority of the dreams he had were of war, albeit in a futuristic setting. Perhaps he was suffering from amnesia brought on by some form of post-traumatic stress disorder.

Knowing he wouldn't get any more sleep, he got out of bed and sat down in front of his computer. His fingers flew across the keyboard. In his effort to try to find out who he was, over the last several months he'd hacked into a half-dozen computer databases and created false accounts so he could easily enter any time he wanted. The first time he had broken into one of the websites, he had wondered where, how and why he had learned how to do it, but now he just accepted the fact that he could and was grateful for the skill set.

This time he broke into the websites of the armed forces rather than that of Scotland Yard or the NHS. It took no more effort for him than hacking into the others had. But several hours later he knew no more than when he had begun. Since the nightmare had featured a ground battle, he searched the army database for soldiers, regardless of name, matching his general description who were either retired or missing-in-action and presumed dead. When he had found nothing he had expanded his search to the navy and the RAF. Still nothing. A dead end.

John sat back and frowned at the computer. Now what?

What about the girl?

He had concentrated on searching for himself on the internet, but he hadn't searched for her, in part because there hadn't been a way of looking for someone based only on hair color. He hadn't known anything else about her, not her name, not what she looked like, not even if she was real. But now he knew she not only existed, but she was here, on the Powell Estate.

He retrieved his drawing and scanned it into his computer, but the photo recognition software couldn't get a match on the internet off of his drawing.

Another dead end.

He glanced at the clock and groaned. Not quite 8 am. And it was Sunday. He hated Sundays. They were so boring. The garage was closed on Sundays. And he had no odd jobs scheduled for the day. Maybe he'd go into work anyway, he decided.

Just as he was about to get up, the black cat jumped in his lap.

"You still here?" he asked with a quirk of one eyebrow. "You're not movin' in, you know." The cat butted her head against his hand and he sighed. "Alright, let's get you something to eat. But then I'm puttin' you out, because you're not movin' in."

The cat purred.

~oOo~

The next morning Rose slowly awoke in her room in the TARDIS. Although she couldn't rightly remember, she knew she had dreamed of her first Doctor. Right after the Doctor had regenerated, she had dreamed of his previous self every night, but it had been months since the last time.

She closed her eyes and buried her head back in her pillow, trying to recapture her dream. But there was no use. She was too awake.

Yawning widely, she sat up and stretched, wondering what time it was. She didn't have a clock in her room in the TARDIS. There was no real point. No job, no set schedule, and, as the Doctor frequently reminded her, no time in the conventional sense aboard the TARDIS either. With time travel, she could wake up only to find herself on a planet that was entering its nighttime hours or vice versa. When she had first begun traveling with him she had developed a killer case of jet lag trying to keep track of where and when they were, until the Doctor told her not to worry about it and work within her own circadian rhythms.

But they were on the Estate. There was actual linear time here. If they ended up stuck here for a while she might actually need a clock. She shuddered in disgust. She hadn't needed a clock since she had worked at Henrik's.

After showering and getting dressed, Rose stopped by Mickey's room. He wasn't there. Nor was he in the kitchen. Neither was the Doctor. After having a much needed cup of tea from the perfectly hot, never empty pot on the counter, she looked around for Mickey a bit more before wandering into the TARDIS console room.

The cavernous room appeared to be empty as well. Only the telltale whirr of the Doctor's sonic screwdriver told her he was there somewhere.

She found him sitting on the floor, wedged under the console. Disconnected wires, bits of electronics, and other things that looked more grown than made emerged from the bottom of the console and hung loose around his head and shoulders.

He was sonicking something that looked a bit like a glowing aubergine. Nearby was a box containing a half-dozen more of the egg-shaped things, and another lay on the grating next to him. Unlike the others, that one had a smoky appearance to it, resembling nothing more than a giant, burned-out light bulb.

She stood there for more than a minute before he realized she was there.

"Oh, Rose," he said when he finally noticed her. "You're up."

Well spotted, she thought, biting back the sarcastic reply. She was still irritated by his ignoring her the previous night. But that wasn't fair to him, she reminded herself. He was busy with a crisis, and it wasn't his job to pay attention to her. "What are you doing?" she asked instead.

"Replacing some ganglionic circuits from the TARDIS's neural net," he told her. He pointed the sonic at a couple of the hanging wires. They moved towards one another, twisting themselves together and reattaching themselves. When they were finished, it was impossible to see where one had ended and the other had begun. "And I'm almost finished. Unfortunately the static in the CCTV playback was more than static. It was actual damage to the TARDIS's memory core itself." He pointed his sonic screwdriver at the aubergine thing again. As the sonic whirred, its glow brightened.

"Do you know where Mickey is?" she asked.

"Did you check his room?"

She rolled her eyes. "Yes."

"Kitchen?"

"Yes."

"Game room?"

"Yes."

"Swimming pool?"

"He's really not much of a swimmer," she told him.

"Library? No, he wouldn't be there," the Doctor said, answering his own question.

Before Rose could defend him, Mickey burst into the TARDIS, breathing hard as if he had just run a long distance flat out. He bent over, putting his hands on his knees, and gasped for air.

"I am so out of shape," he complained.

"Where were you?" she asked.

"My flat," he told her. "I found out someone paid my rent for six months in advance. But that's not important." He turned to the Doctor. "I know where he is."

~oOo~

"I was just walkin' down the street, on my way back to the TARDIS, when I saw him," Mickey said for the fifth time as they stood across the street from the auto repair shop. Unlike the day before, since it was Sunday morning the street was almost deserted. "He was comin' out of the bakery eatin' a doughnut and carryin' a cup of coffee so I followed him."

"And he went into the garage," the Doctor said. It was clear he wanted less to clarify what Mickey had said than to just stop him repeating himself again.

"Yeah," Mickey answered.

"Hmm." The Doctor cocked his head and stared at the garage thoughtfully. "Well, assuming he's still in there, this is probably my best chance to get a good look at him. What's the best way to get in there unnoticed?"

"Through the office?" Rose suggested.

"It'll be locked," Mickey warned, "and before you suggest unlocking it with your sonic, there's an alarm. Same as the back way."

"I could silence the alarm," the Doctor said, "but he'd still hear the door open and close."

"Y'know, if all you want is to take a look at him, there's a couple of windows in the back. They've got bars across them, but we always keep them open at least a little for ventilation."

The Doctor's mouth twisted into a small grin. "That might work," he said. "You two stay here."

Darting between two parked cars, he took off across the street. Rose started to follow, and Mickey grabbed her arm.

"He said to stay here," he said.

"And since when did either of us ever listen to him?" she asked. She shook off his hand and followed the Doctor, and after a moment's hesitation Mickey followed her.

In the alley behind the garage, the Doctor was standing on a dustbin which had been rolled against the wall and was looking into one of the narrow windows along the eaves. Rose quickly climbed up next to him. She could hear the quiet strains of classical music filtering through the open window.

The Doctor didn't show any surprise at seeing her there.

"Did you see him?" she whispered. He placed a finger over his lips and then gestured at the window. She peeked in.

At first she couldn't see anyone, but then she spotted someone's legs sticking out from under the bright red Vectra in the repair bay directly in front of them. Although it was impossible to see who it was, she knew it was him, if for no other reason than she recognized his heavy black work boots.

"You think that's the man you saw yesterday?" the Doctor whispered.

Rose moved her mouth close to the Doctor's ear. "Yeah, that's him."

"Are you certain?"

"Yes," she said firmly. "Do you feel that echo you were talking about?"

The Doctor shook his head. He pulled his sonic out of a pocket and aimed it through the window. The tip lit up in blue, but she couldn't hear its familiar whirr. In the distance, a dog began to bark.

"What are you doing?" she asked.

"The sonic is capable of producing sounds that Time Lords can hear but are far above the range of human hearing," he told her.

Rose looked back in the window. John Smith hadn't moved from his position under the car.

"One more scan," the Doctor said in a low voice. This time the sonic made a quiet whirr, barely audible to Rose even though she was right next to it. The Doctor's brow furrowed as he examined the readings. "He's not a Time Lord. He's completely, one hundred percent human."

"So that's not you after all," Rose said. "He just looks like the old you." She was surprised to feel a wave of disappointment.

"It's a little more complicated than that," the Doctor began, but he was interrupted by a loud crash. They turned as one towards the source of the sound. Mickey had rounded the corner and tripped over a wheelie bin. It had upturned and spilled its contents all over the alley.

Rose heard a sound coming from the inside of the garage and turned back to the window. John Smith had rolled out from under the car he had been working on and was headed towards the back entrance. She nudged the Doctor.

"Time to go!" he said. He hopped off the dustbin and caught Rose as she jumped off. The three ran, rounding the corner just before the back door opened. As they ran, Rose heard a familiar voice coming from the alley behind her.

"What a mess," John said loudly. "Stupid apes."

~oOo~

Back at the TARDIS, the Doctor immediately returned to his position underneath the console. "It's even more important now that I find out exactly what happened," he told them. He quickly replaced the remaining burned out globules.

"Because he wasn't you?" Rose asked.

"No," he replied. "Because he was."

"What?" Rose gaped at him. "But… but… you said he was human. One hundred percent human. If he's human, how is he you?"

"I don't think I can recover all of the missing CCTV footage," the Doctor said, ignoring her question. He pulled his glasses out of his pocket and pushed them on as he stood. With one slender finger he flipped a switch on one of the control panels and the whole room went black except for the console. The faint glow cast odd shadows around the room and gave his skin a bluish cast. "Most of the sections that are missing are too badly damaged to recover, but I don't think I really need them. The most important bit is at the end. I have managed to enhance the footage we've already seen, though. If I can just get an additional second or two to play back in addition to that, it might be all we need."

"Doctor, if he's you, why is he human?" Rose asked.

He looked up and met her eyes. "That's what I'm trying to figure out."

"Right." Stupid question, she thought, silently chastising herself.

The Doctor threw a lever forward. A hologram of the very room they were in superimposed itself on the real console room, making the room look like a 3-D movie being watched without the special glasses they always gave you. Rose was surprised to see minute changes had been made over time, changes she had never noticed. A switch and a dial were currently reversed from their original placement on the console. The door leading deeper into the TARDIS was a different shape than it had been. And the jump seat was not only a foot away from its original location but it was larger as well.

The holographic TARDIS door opened and the translucent shape of Rose's first Doctor walked into the room and crossed to the console. He wandered around it, flipping switches carelessly. He stopped in his tracks and winced before continuing to program in the next set of coordinates.

"Stop," said the current Doctor, and the image froze. He walked to the console and examined the controls. "Looks like I just programmed the coordinates for the Powell Estate."

"So… if the coordinates are set for the Estate, is this when you were coming back for me?" Rose asked.

"Yeah, must be," he told her. He looked up at the ceiling. "Forward, normal speed."

The holographic Doctor began to move again. Grimacing, he rolled his left shoulder and tilted his head left and right as if he was trying to relieve a cramp in his neck.

Smoke began to rise from somewhere within the console, and for a second Rose thought it was real. She only realized it was part of the holographic display when the younger Doctor reacted to the sight.

"No, no, no, no, no!" he shouted. He rushed around the console, appearing to run through the current Doctor. He pulled his sonic screwdriver out of the pocket of his leather jacket. As he began to sonic one of the control panels, his TARDIS lurched. He leaned forward and grabbed onto a protrusion near the central column while he continued to use his screwdriver on the panel.

"Freeze," the current Doctor said. He leaned through the hologram of his previous self and examined the controls. "Hmm. I seemed to have bumped the chrono-temporal relay switch. Reset the arrival time for… Huh. New Year's Eve, 2006." He frowned.

"That was six months ago!" Mickey exclaimed.

"But… but we were on the Estate then," Rose said to the Doctor. "We didn't leave until a few days after that." She gestured at the holographic Doctor currently sprawled all over the console. "Do you mean that you and… you were both there at the same time?"

He looked over his glasses at her. "Me? I don't mean anything." He looked puzzled for a moment. "No, that's The Restaurant at the End of the Universe," he said. He glanced at the ceiling. "Forward."

The entire image shimmered and was replaced by static. The Doctor pulled his sonic screwdriver out of his pinstriped pocket and aimed it at one of the controls. The holographic console room reappeared. The leather-clad Doctor was hunched over in pain. He staggered a few steps forward and fell to his knees before collapsing on the floor. In the background they could hear the Cloister Bell ringing, but weakly, as if from a far way off. The helmet that the Doctor had shown her before dropped from the ceiling and fitted itself to the holographic Doctor's head.

"Freeze," the pinstriped Doctor said again. He walked over to his previous self and knelt beside him. He pointed at the helmet. "That's a Chameleon Arch. Has the capability of rewriting a Time Lord's entire biology, changing every cell and turning him into a completely different species. This piece," he pointed out a circular part in front, "stores the Time Lord's true identity while he's in another form. It appears that the TARDIS used the Chameleon Arch to turn me human for some reason." He grimaced. "Could have been worse, I suppose. She could have turned me into anything. Could have ended up a Denebian slime devil or a Canidine Rosikan or something. Could have even ended up as a Slitheen."

Rose slowly walked over to the hologram of her first Doctor and crouched next to him. Now that she could get a closer look at it, she realized the Chameleon Arch didn't really look much like a helmet at all. The metal structure had a main arch that stretched across the top of his head from side to side, held in place with horizontal bars that clamped onto the sides of his head and large disks that pressed against his temples. Another secondary arch stretched from the central arch to his forehead, holding the circular thing the Doctor had pointed out tightly against his younger self's forehead. It appeared to be a silver fob watch, not unlike the one her great-grandfather had had, but this one had the Doctor's circular language engraved into the lid.

Despite being unconscious, the holographic Doctor's face was twisted in pain. Biting her lower lip, she reached out a hand as if to touch him before pulling it back. She drew in a shaky breath.

"Wouldn't that hurt, changing species like that?" Mickey asked

"Yes," the Doctor said shortly. He began to wander the room, ducking his head to look under the jump seat and behind the coral struts. "The only reason she would do something like this is if there was no other choice. The real question is what that was."

At his matter-of-fact tone, Rose stared at him in disbelief. He sounded as if he didn't care what the other Doctor had gone through. Same man, she reminded herself finally. He might not remember it, but he's the one who went through it.

"What are you lookin' for?" Mickey asked.

"The TARDIS locked me out, therefore she's been injured. I'm trying to figure out what could have caused it. I'm also looking for anything out of place," the Doctor answered. "Like this." He pointed under the console. A holographic sonic screwdriver lay on the grating under it. "I must have dropped it when I collapsed."

Mickey and Rose joined in the search, but they couldn't find anything.

"Forward, one quarter speed," the Doctor said.

The Cloister Bell resumed its weak tolling. As they watched, the holographic Chameleon Arch detached itself from the younger Doctor's head and withdrew into the ceiling of the console room, leaving the fob watch on the floor in front of the Doctor's face. The light illuminating the holographic console room flickered, briefly turning mauve before returning to its normal color. The grating under the Doctor rose up on one end, causing him to roll towards the door. It opened by itself.

As the holographic Doctor rolled from one section of grating to another, new sections of the floor would rise up, slowly forcing him towards the door and out of the TARDIS. Then the door shut behind him. The light began to flicker in mauve again.

"Stop!" the pinstriped Doctor yelled, and the image froze. He rushed to the door and knelt down, staring at something on the floor. When he looked up again, his face was visibly pale, made worse by the mauve light shining on his face.

"What is it?" Rose asked.

"The fob watch. It got stuck on the floor between the ramp and the threshold of the door. It's still in the other TARDIS, and as long as it's there, he can't change back."

#The Choice #revised #ficandchips #minor revisions here #but nothing major #I'd do more today #but the day is going to be busy #and I may not get back to editing #until tomorrow morning #we'll see #I really want to get this done #and now that I'm doing it this way #I am anxious to continue

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goodbonesassembling · 7 years ago

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Justice Big LWB Project

Like I said when we did Strength, I’m basing my order on a Rider-Waite-Smith deck rather than a Marseilles or Thoth deck, so Justice is next. This is the position set up that I most frequently see them in but I do acknowledge that this still considered the “wrong” way by some readers. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, this article does a great job of explaining it!

Justice was very much a card I didn’t understand for a long time as a reader. It falls in a weird place in the Major Arcana cycle, in between two big moments of transition. It’s a balancing point, but not quite in the same way that Temperance is, thought I think they have a lot in common. I guess it’s more of a reset than a balancing, less about making things even and more about making things fair. This difference can be hard to grasp at first.

Meanings in Readings

Upright: At its core, the Justice card represents absolute honesty with ourselves. Often it will be defined in guidebooks as appearing when things are going to turn out right, though less in the sense of how we want them to go and more in the sense of as it ought to go. However focusing on the idea of honesty as the starting point of this card feels like a clearer path in connecting this card to others in a reading. There are two parts to this honesty, the knowing what is right as it unfolds and the coming to understand how we are both affected by and affect this action. This duality can be difficult to understand in the moment and often in readings Justice deals with things that are not yet fully resolved. Make sure to consider, when this card appears, what things are still in the process of resolving and how you fit into their completion.

If we consider where Justice falls in the second line of the Major Arcana, the line that focuses most heavily on turning within ourselves and dealing with inner matters, it stands as the reminder that nothing occurs in a vacuum. We cannot separate ourselves fully from the outer world experience, we continue to exist inside of it no matter how much we wish to separate ourselves from it. I think Justice in a reading can be a strong reminder to keep yourself connected to where you reside inside your larger community and how your actions affect those around you. This can feel exhausting, especially in a the current environment we live within. There is a non-stop inundation of information about how we are at fault for destroying the planet, how our choices or lack of action affect others with less privilege than we may have. Justice comes forward to remind us both that we must remain accountable for our actions and that when we do and when we hold others accountable to theirs the world becomes a more fair place.

The Slow Holler deck has renamed this card Intersection and I think this is a more connective mentality for our modern age. How do we make sure Justice occurs in our spaces? By being actively aware of how we connect with others and where our responsibilities reside. Adrienne Marie Brown talks about the mycelium roots of mushrooms as a framework for understanding both how we are all connected and how we can use these connections to create the kinds of justice within our communities that is so desperately needed in her book Emergent Strategies. I think this image so perfectly encapsulates the idea behind Intersection and what the Justice card means.

Reversals: Reversed, Justice warns of an imbalance or unfairness in the environment and suggests we consider how our understanding of where we fit in a system may be affecting how we understand and affect a situation. Consider if you are blaming a problem on a single root issue rather than seeing the larger systemic problems. Look for places where you feel you are unable to voice your needs out of fear of how it will affect others.

Important Quotes:

“The principle of social justice, however, properly belongs to the Emperor, directly above Justice. Card 11 indicates that the psychic laws of Justice, by which we advance according to our ability to understand the past, depends on seeing the truth about ourselves and about life. The Tarot Justicia, therefore, wears no blindfold.” -Rachel Pollack, 78 Degrees of Wisdom (x)

“Justice confronts us with the knowledge that life contains a succession of pleasures, obligations, and problems. We need to accept that it imposes restrictions which have to be accommodated. The less we have done this in the past, the more traumatic that confrontation with Justice will be.” -Karen Hamaker-Zondag, Tarot as a Way of Life (x)

“Intersection ask you to recognize yourself as the co-creator of the worlds you inhabit, to accept the consequences of your decisions. Think of a spreading fungus in a forest whose dense, interweaving network rebalances energies from abundant places to those that need it. How are you intuitively or unintentionally affecting the balance of energies in your environment?” -Slow Holler Tarot Guide (x)

How do you understand Justice in your life? Does this card reflect how you connect with your community or is this more difficult to understand? Tell me about it!

#biglwbproject #tarot cards #tarot study #tarot readings #learning to read tarot #tarot community #divination study #divination community #The Slow Holler Tarot #the Wooden Tarot #the Wildwood Tarot #RWS deck

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benningtonalumnirelations · 8 years ago

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A 2017 Bennington Alumni Reading List!

As 2017 wraps up, we’re looking towards a new year full of great books! Here’s a year-in-review of some of the new releases of 2017 by or about Bennington alumni.

- Lydia ’19

From Rockaway (re-release) and Swell by Jill Eisenstadt ’85

"With tremendous tenderness, Eisenstadt captures the traumatized Rockaway of the early 2000s in swirling Technicolor....A whimsical portrait of a still-raw community." --Kirkus Reviews

Honeysuckle Drift by Virginia Johnson, MFA ’12

“The scent of honeysuckle that pervades Honeysuckle Drift is sweet in the in the way things are just before they rot. The story that unfolds for the young, well-meaning protagonist, Ellen, will be both a tragedy and a chance to overcome it. In this fine debut novel Virginia Johnson beautifully evokes the place, the era, and the terrible ties between parents and children, ties that, while invisible, can strangle as well as bind.”—Jim Krusoe, author of The Sleep Garden

Botticelli's Muse by Dorah Blume (Deborah Bluestein ’65)

“Blume’s interpretation of master painter Sandro Botticelli is at once a florid love story and a chilling political drama. Sensuous and provocative as well as mysterious, the novel follows Sandro’s troubled relationship with Florence’s ruling Medici family.” --Publisher’s Weekly

Shock Wave by Florian Louisoder ’82

“Shock Wave took me immediately with it's premise because I love time travel related stories...It's a great journey for the imagination to see how one event can alter the future in so many "shocking "ways. Louisoder has an uncanny knack for fleshing out his characters and making them live and breathe on the page. I really look forward to the next in the series.” --Amazon Customer Review

The Other Island: Ben’s Story by Barbara Kent Lawrence ’65

“The Other Island is as much a reflection and refraction of her first novel as it is a sequel. Islands of Time traced the love affair between Becky Granger, a summer visitor to Mount Desert Island, and Ben Bunker, a year-round resident of Little Cranberry Island — from Becky's point of view. In The Other Island, Lawrence gives voice to Ben's side of the romance: "She's told you her story," he states at the novel's start. "Now I'll tell you mine. They are wound up in me like the way I was in her from the moment I met her."” --The Penobscot Bay Pilot

Sally’s Genius by Brooks Clark, a biography about pioneering educator Sally Smith ’50

“In 1967 Sally Smith needed a school for her son Gary, who suffered from dyslexia, among other learning disabilities. Finding none, she founded one, the Lab School of Washington. In the process, she developed the Academic Club Methodology, by which children with learning disabilities can be engaged and inspired in school, where they had previously suffered only frustration and defeat. While directing the Lab School, Smith taught her system and ran the master's program in special education at American University for 32 years, inspiring a new generation of teachers to pioneer innovations in education. Smith also wrote books, starting with "No Easy Answers" in the late 70s and in various editions thereafter, that serve as the definitive works in the special education field. Smith was driven, creative, unique, and unforgettable.”--Lulu.com

How Do I Explain This to my Kids? by Ava Siegler ’59

“Child psychologist Dr. Ava Siegler brings together stories by authors and writers...about the conversations they are having with their children in the current political climate...as well as how to raise them to be engaged citizens.” --Bill Moyers & Company

Positive Art Therapy Theory and Practice: Integrating Positive Psychology with Art Therapy co-authored by Gioia Chilton ’89

"Wilkinson & Chilton are synonymous with positive art therapy – I am excited about this book and its potential to revolutionize art therapy theory and practice! It’s a wonderful and much needed contribution to the literature, promoting strengths-based and relational approaches to art therapy practice grounded in positive psychology.”-- Donna Betts, PhD, ATR-BC, president, American Art Therapy Association, associate professor, Art Therapy Program, George Washington University

Heart Smart for Women by Jennifer Mieres ’82

“A terrific, potentially life-saving book that’s a must read for all black and Latina women.” --Jane Chesnutt, Editor-in-Chief, Woman’s Day

Thinking with the Dancing Brain by Rima Faber ’65

“a must read book for educators, artists, and scientists. This gem is revolutionary in its structure. Current brain research and valuable educational theories are interspersed in every chapter with simple movement explorations that make the research understandable and the theories memorable. The book proves once and for all that the body and brain work as one unit and that thought cannot take place without movement.” --Anne Green Gilbert, founding Director of Creative Dance Center

Blue Money by Janet Capron ’69

“Capron writes with the fearless, experiential drive of a Beat poet… This intense, electrifying memoir explores a life of prostitution in 1970s New York City.” --Shelf Awareness

Going to Wings by Sandra Worsham ’06

“Sandra Worsham’s humor, clear-eyed honesty stitch this amazing quilt of meaning and experience together in a wonderful way.” --Kirkus Reviews

I’m the One Who Got Away by Andrea Jarrell, MFA ’01

"Though the settings of Jarrell’s stories range from Camden, Maine, to Italy and Los Angeles, the author’s small-town Americana tone is reminiscent of Joyce Carol Oates. The work’s lasting message is that love, like Jarrell’s prose, is both painful and beautiful. A stunning series of recollections with a feminist slant." ―Kirkus Reviews STARRED REVIEW

Maya Healers by Fran Antmann ’69

“Fran Antmann’s work in Maya Healers, years in the making, is imbued with the depth and texture only great photography can achieve; where the images transcend being mere documents but reach great art. Many of the images, especially of the people in their daily lives, are transcendent and absolutely gorgeous, revealing an empathy and visual perception that is timeless.” --Ed Kashi, international prize-winning photojournalist

Sign of the Apocalypse: Ruminations and Wit from an American Roadside Prophet by John Getchell ’86

“Friends, neighbors, and passersby from all over the country can’t fail to miss “The Sign’s" constantly changing humor and insight. On occasion, The Sign of the Apocalypse (SOTA) traffics in the earnest, but at its heart is rooted in a deep-seated desire to express the sarcastic and snort-worthy. This, and a love of haiku, pizza, Latin, double entendre, and the worst puns ever crafted.” --Amazon

We and She, You and Then, You Again by Leah Tieger ’03

“Leah Tieger examines the human condition with a stark elegance and passion of language that allows us to inhabit the ragged husks of bodies—of seeds—and gives us hope even in our emptiness. Like a gentle farmer, she removes our desiccated husks and listens as we long for more than blankets, for shelter from the sun. She writes the necessary poems of minutia, of lovers forcing approximate passions, of unraveling sweaters hanging in silent closets. She watches the waiting parts in us and reveals them, allowing the small spaces of our lives to shine through, into insightful—and honest—existence.”-- Josh Gaines

Bloodline by Radha Marcum ’96

“Congratulations to Radha Marcum. Her debut poetry collection, Bloodline...delves into the difficult family history of the work of Marcum's grandfather on the Manhattan Project, building the first atomic bombs in Los Alamos, New Mexico, during World War II—and how that both brave and heavy legacy has affected the women in her family, both then and now.” --WinningWriters.com, Subscriber News July 2017

The Myrtlewood Cookbook: Pacific Northwest Home Cooking by Andrew Barton ’09

"This cookbook is unabashedly PNW to its core, from the cutting boards carved from native Myrtlewood trees to the mushrooms that pop up in soup, risotto, and pizza. Unlike most cookbooks, Barton’s recipes read more like an actual book; each dish spans multiple pages with paragraphs in the place of ordered steps. Barton’s conversational tone is certainly homey, as is the food itself." -- Seattle Met

#books #book recommendations #2018 reading list #bennington college #poetry #fiction #memoir #nonfiction #cooking #photography

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kstanley400spatial · 5 years ago

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Brief; rewritten

The built context of our environments is an accumulation of a communities collective history, culture, economics and often trauma. Architecture as a practice is, at its core is a response to a human need, a need for shelter, infrastructure or expression. Architecture in its form is a reflection, its construction, detail, style and habitation all act as anchors to place any building in a time, culture, economy and site. As a building ages these reflections in its materiality become like layers, damage, extension, or rehabilitation all ways of capturing a moment or time experienced in the built context. Then just as we project into our architecture, architecture begins to project back onto us. Often without noticing it we absorb the information surrounding us, noticing the age of the building, the quality, the influence of its design and often the damage or trauma which it has withstood.

In Wellington our architecture has been well tuned and defined by the history of the area and the community. Most predominantly Wellington buildings reflects a long difficult history with earthquakes. Wellington dwellings continued to be made timber long after the rest of New Zealand had switched to the more modern and long lasting brick construction, this was a direct response to city’s history with earthquakes and the flexibility of timber to handle the shakes. Many don’t realise the significance of Wellingtons villa populated hills being a huge part of our collective identity, as a community before us made a site responsive decision to try and preserve our built environment.

By the late 90s Wellington CBD was populated with closely packed, multi storey brick and concrete buildings, a social and economic response to the growing population of the capital city and reflected the need to build bigger, faster and cheaper as the cost of land and living skyrocketed. These new more brutal modern buildings were not built with consideration for site, or history and after a series of major earthquakes in the Kapiti region from 2003 to 2016 many of these less considered buildings are now impacting city life and inhabitants wellbeing directly through their own evident trauma.

In the wake of disaster wether natural or manmade, damage to the physical infrastructure has ripple effect outwards, causing disruption and even displacement in peoples living, working, social and environmental rhythms. Sociological support systems can be damaged extensively in communities where services and built contexts are suddenly halted or made unfamiliar. Its easy to under estimate the effect of negative stimulus in our environment, but just as architecture can reflect poverty, wealth, culture and time once a built environment has absorbed a traumatic experience like natural disaster it will project that experience back into its context.

My site between Manners Street and Wakefield Street has several building extensively damaged by the earthquakes, after minimal efforts were made to rehabilitate them the Amora Hotel, and James Smith parking complex have been left to fester. Condemned for structural failures these buildings have deteriorated, the vacant and neglected buildings have created an atmosphere of discomfort so strong it is actively avoided by some residents and considered somewhere you shouldn’t go alone. There have been several surface level attempts by Wellington City council to lift the genius loci of Opera House Lane, however due to lack of up keep the street art and installations have started to blend into the general state of disrepair.

Sites such as this one are detrimental to the wellbeing of the city and its inhabitants, mental health and wellbeing is shown to be directly effected by the condition of our environment and the long term impacts on a community left unable to heal and resolve after disaster are hugely problematic, social divides, crime, high stress and environmental depression are all outcomes.

My question is can spatial practices of adaption and intervention/installation be used in conjunction with historical and contemporary site specifics to reinvent and revitalise the condemned surroundings of Opera House Lane? What behaviours and relationships would change between this built context and those who experience it?

#brief

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bookzio · 5 years ago

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Corrosion

A mysterious Iraq war veteran with a horribly scarred face…A disturbed young man in a strange mountain town…A masked preacher with a terrible secret…Amidst a firestorm of violence, betrayal and horror, their three worlds will eventually collide in an old mining shack buried deep in the mountains. Corrosion, the shattering debut novel by Jon Bassoff, is equal parts Jim Thompson, Flannery O’Connor and William Faulkner, and an unforgettable journey into the underbelly of crime and passion. Drawn from the darkest corners of the human experience, it is sure to haunt readers for years to come. Praise for CORROSION: “Bassoff confronts directly the traumatic stress disorder of our world today and tears off its mask, even if the face must follow.” —New York Magazine “Corrosion is a beautifully bleak noir novel that stretches the boundaries of the genre to its breaking point. A virtuoso performance by the terrific Jon Bassoff.” —Jason Starr, international bestselling author of The Craving “Like some unholy spawn of Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God and Donald Ray Pollock’s The Devil All the Time, Corrosion offers pungent writing, a cast of irresistibly damaged characters, and a narrative that’s as twisted and audacious as any I have read in a long while. A dark gem.” —Roger Smith, author of Dust Devils “Sharp, original, fierce, a real gut-ripper. Corrosion is one of the most startlingly original and unsettling novels I’ve read in ages. It ramps your pulse, it claws at your sweet spot. Bassoff has a career ahead of him brightly lit by a very bad star.” —Tom Piccirilli, author of the Edgar Award-nominated novel The Cold Spot “Imagine Chuck Palahniuk filtered through Tarantino speak, blended with an acidic Jim Thompson and a book that cries out to be filmed by David Lynch, then you have a flavor of Corrosion. The debut novel from the unique Jon Bassoff begins a whole new genre: Corrosive Noir.” —Ken Bruen, Shamus Award-winning author of The Guards “Jon Bassoff gives new meaning to the phrase ‘Hell on earth’ in his debut novel, Corrosion. It’s a harrowing page-turning tale of lost, misplaced, and mangled identity that barrels its way to breakdowns and showdowns of literal and figurative biblical proportions.” —Lynn Kostoff, author of Late Rain “Jon Bassoff’s stream of conscious novel sports Faulkner-like as this dark tale is told in first person timelines. It will grip and engage and ultimately leave you shaken to the core. Not for the tenderhearted… not no way, not no how. Corrosion is the tale of a man on a mission from God… or is it the Devil? Dare to find out.” —Charlie Stella, author of Johnny Porno “Talk about a book starting one way and then springing something on you…[Bassoff’s Corrosion] is dark and funny and sick, a book as much about identity as it is about crime.” —Bill Crider, author of the Sheriff Dan Rhodes series “Corrosion is a fever dream, a lucid nightmare. It is at once poetic and brutal; hypnotic and vicious; empathetic and heartless. It is the most effective kind of horror—the kind you believe. Reading it is a deeply uncomfortable experience in the best possible way.” —Marcus Sakey, author of The Two Deaths of Daniel Hayes “An archetypal, nightmare journey down a hall of mirrors. Corrosion will burn your eyeballs. Keeps you reading relentlessly to the end.” —Jonathan Woods, author of A Death in Mexico

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insteadhere · 5 years ago

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Avoiding cultural trauma: climate change and social inertia

While in a ‘let me share parts of articles I love’, here are some excerpts from one of my favourite pieces from the past year or so:

Robert J. Brulle & Kari Marie Norgaard (2019): Avoiding cultural trauma: climate change and social inertia, Environmental Politics

Overall, the way they theorize ‘social inertia’ and even resistance to action w.r.t. climate change also applies very well to a variety of issues we’re dealing with today.

While in a ‘let me share parts of articles I love’, here are some excerpts from one of my favourite pieces from the past year or so:

Robert J. Brulle & Kari Marie Norgaard (2019): Avoiding cultural trauma: climate change and social inertia, Environmental Politics

Overall, the way they theorize ‘social inertia’ and even resistance to action w.r.t. climate change also applies very well to a variety of issues we’re dealing with today.

ABSTRACT

The failure of societies to respond in a concerted, meaningful way to climate change is a core concern of the social science climate literature. Existing explanations of social inertia display little coherence. Here, a theoretical approach is suggested that integrates disparate perspectives on social inertia regarding climate change. Climate change constitutes a potential cultural trauma. The threat of cultural trauma is met with resistance and attempts to restore and maintain the status quo. Thus, efforts to avoid large-scale social changes associated with climate change constitute an effort to avoid cultural trauma, and result in social inertia regarding climate change at individual, institutional, and societal levels. Existing approaches to social inertia are reviewed. An intellectual framework utilizing the work of Pierre Bourdieu is proposed to integrate these different levels of social interaction. Social processes that maintain social order and thus avoid cultural trauma create social inertia regarding climate change.

There has been insufficient mobilization and engagement to affect the level of public urgency and even interest that the predictions of climate scientists would warrant. Rather, efforts to address climate change have encountered substantial social inertia, the interrelated cultural, institutional, and individual processes that inhibit actions to address this pressing issue. Why is this?

The failure to realistically address climate change is a dominant theme across the social science literature. However, explanations for social inertia vary widely across disciplines and remain piecemeal, and the interdisciplin- ary conversation remains dominated by natural science and economic perspectives. As shown by Brulle and Dunlap (2015, p. 5–14), these approaches suffer from substantial limitations. What has emerged is, by and large, a confused mixture of disciplinary perspectives that fails to cohere into a comprehensive approach capable of explaining the present paralysis or guiding future action. Extending earlier attempts to develop a comprehensive approach to understanding social inertia (see Leahy et al. 2010), we seek here to develop a conceptual framework and theoretical argument to explain the interrelated social processes that drive different levels of cultural inertia on climate change.

We focus our theoretical examination on the notion of avoidance of cultural trauma. Cultural trauma is a social process that involves the sys- tematic disruption of the cultural basis of a social order. The individual routines, institutional behaviors, ideological beliefs, and overall regime of practice become subject to questioning and uncertainty, resulting in pro- found challenges to routine, taken-for-granted ways of interacting (Alexander 2004, 2012, Sztompka 2004). We argue that climate change constitutes a potential cultural trauma in two senses. First, the unusual natural events linked to climate change, such as fire and flood, can serve as a direct disruption of social practice and thus create potentially traumatic outcomes. Second, climate change constitutes a profound symbolic challenge to the existing social order and is thus a potentially traumatic threat (Zizek 2010, p. 326–327, Hamilton 2012, p. 728). This is because the social con-struction of climate change as a collective concern challenges the underlying narratives of collective identity and invokes a symbolic process of meaning construction based on a new narrative of the social order. The risk of cultural trauma is met with resistance and attempts to restore and maintain the status quo. These actions to avoid cultural trauma result in social inertia on climate change at the individual, institutional, and societal levels.

Cultural trauma and social change

Given the interlocking operation of cultural order and social reproduction, social transformation is for the most part an incremental process. However, societies can experience periods of social destabilization that take the form of cultural traumas. Cultural trauma is a social process that involves the systematic disruption of the cultural basis of a social order. The individual routines, institutional behaviors, ideological beliefs, and overall regime of practice become subject to questioning and uncertainty, resulting in pro- found challenges to routine ways of interacting, which are normally taken for granted (Alexander 2004, 2012, Sztompka 2004).

There are two related approaches to understanding the development of cultural trauma. The first is centered on the occurrence of major disruptive events. For Sztompka (2004, p. 164) cultural traumas are events or situa- tions that produce ‘dislocations in the routine, accustomed ways of acting or thinking’. They occur when members of a specific social group are subjected to an event that creates an indelible impression and shifts the group consciousness fundamentally, such as the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Additionally, environmental events exert a prolonged and cumula- tive pressure that can eventually reach a point where it induces cultural trauma (Sztompka 2004, p. 158). Eyerman (2015, p. 9) expands this per- spective by showing that the failure of a meaningful response to Hurricane Katrina undermined citizens’ expectations of government protection and thus led to a cultural trauma among those most impacted. While examining different types of events, both authors center on external phenomena as driving forces behind the creation of cultural trauma.

A second approach developed primarily by Alexander (2004, 2012), centers on the social construction of a cultural trauma. For Alexander, events in themselves do not create cultural traumas. Rather, cultural traumas are socially constructed narratives that challenge the existing social order and notions of collective identity. They take the form of a narrative of ‘some fundamental injury, an exclamation of the terrifying profanation of some sacred value, a narrative about a horribly destructive social process, and a demand for emotional, institutional, and symbolic reparation and reconstitution’ (Alexander 2012, p. 16). This alternative narrative challenges the taken-for-granted narrative, leading to a symbolic struggle. In this process, the nature of dominant cultural beliefs is brought into question, and these challenges to the cultural system are then reflected in ongoing institutional interactions and at the everyday level of the habitus. They serve to dislocate the social reality that anchors individual identities and social interactions. Thus in this perspective, cultural traumas are not attributable to a particular event, but to how that event is perceived and reflected in collective understandings of the event (Alexander 2004, p. 10).

In both perspectives, cultural traumas can be seen as a systematic dis- ruption of the cultural basis of a social order. The individual routines, institutional behaviors, ideological beliefs, and overall regime of practice become subjected to questioning and uncertainty, resulting in profound challenges to routine ways of interacting. In response, new cultural per- spectives and regimes of practice develop and expand (Sztompka 2004, p. 194), these changes in turn precipitate clashes between cultural practices of the adherents socialized in the old and new cultural systems. These clashes produce disruptions across all levels of the social order, leading to cultural transformation (Sztompka 2004, p. 194, Eyerman 2015).

Climate change constitutes a potential cultural trauma as defined by both theories. First, the unusual natural events linked to climate change can serve as a direct disruption of social practice and thus potentially create cultural trauma. Eyerman’s (2015) analysis shows how the failure of an adequate government response to Hurricane Katrina led to the creation of cultural trauma among severely impacted populations.

Second, climate change has provoked an alternative narrative to the continuation of business as usual. Advanced by climate scientists, this climate change narrative describes the massive damage caused by carbon emissions to both humans and natural systems. This narrative also demands profound changes in the practices connected to carbon emissions and, as used in the Climate Justice discourse, reparations for damages caused by fossil fuel use. Thus the alternative narrative of climate change constitutes a fundamental challenge to the existing social order and has the potential to emerge as a major cultural trauma (Zizek 2010, p. 326–327, Hamilton 2012, p. 728). In a highly incisive analysis, Smith and Howe (2015) see the climate change symbolic contest as a social drama. This symbolic struggle builds on Alexander’s (2012, p. 16) insight about the social construction of climate change as a potential cultural trauma. Smith and Howe (2015) demonstrate that the intensely emotional debate about climate change is an effort to construct and advance a new narrative that would bring about a severe dislocation of existing social practice. This alternative narrative is opposed by efforts to avoid large-scale social changes and thus maintain the status quo.

#culturaltrauma #theory #environmental activism

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fitnesshealthyoga-blog · 6 years ago

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New Post has been published on https://fitnesshealthyoga.com/yoga-poses-for-teenagers-yoga-journal/

Yoga Poses for Teenagers - Yoga Journal

Learn how to start a yoga practice in your teenage years.

David Martinez

The first stage of massive hormonal changes takes place during the turbulent years of adolescence, when the brain’s neurochemical circuitry is getting established and both brain and body go through the undulating levels of estrogen and progesterone that make adolescent girls fertile. The fluctuating hormones of puberty can result in impulsive behavior, as the amygdala, a part of the limbic system involved with emotions, is infused with hormonal fuel. And the general hormonal flux can bring on buzzing energy, mood swings, and troubled skin as well as a new focus on communication, social connections, and sexuality. Girls are increasingly sensitive during this time and often unsure of how to deal with sexual attention from others. Yoga can help teens be more at peace with their bodies, according to Carol Krucoff, a yoga therapist at Duke Integrative Medicine in Durham, North Carolina. “The practice of postures, breathing, and meditation helps achieve emotional equilibrium,” she says, “allowing teens to truly hear the messages of their own heart and make choices that resonate with their personal values.”

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Starting a Practice as a Teenager

Christiane Northrup, a physician and the author of Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom, thinks adolescence “lends itself to a strenuous yoga practice”—a vigorous sequence of Sun Salutations and vinyasa flow to allow teens to channel their intense energy. But yoga for teens shouldn’t be all jumping around, cautions Krucoff, who has seen firsthand how difficult it is for teens to be still in Savasana (Corpse Pose). “They’ve grown up texting while watching TV, IM’ing while listening to CDs,” Krucoff says. “They are so wound up and stressed out, they don’t know how to just be.” Start off with a dynamic sequence to release energy, then quiet the body and mind with seated poses and forward bends.

See also Tap into Your Authentic Voice with this Sequence From Jessamyn Stanley

Real Experience

As Lindsey Jean Smith, who was 19 when she modeled the poses on these pages, can attest, learning to watch the breath and stay in the moment can improve concentration, help teen girls interact with others more mindfully, and empower them with the tools to ride the emotional wave of their monthly cycle more smoothly. Difficult poses can build self-esteem, and restorative poses can help with PMS. Smith says yoga saved her during the “traumatic, emotional roller coaster” of her senior year of high school. The stress of applying to college was isolating. “I felt so alone. I was a mess,” she recalls. Then she signed up for yoga classes offered through the PE program. “With the first pose, my body thanked me. I built strength. My body and mind became more flexible, and stress melted off,” says Smith, who was then a freshman at Stanford University.

3 Yoga Poses Will Help You Get Through Your Teenage Years

Upward Bow Pose (Urdhva Dhanurasana)

Benefits: Increases confidence and teaches surrender during turbulent times.

Lie on your back with your knees bent. Bring your hands on the floor next to your ears, elbows facing up, fingers pointing toward your toes, and hands spread wide. On an exhalation, lift your tailbone toward the ceiling and bring your buttocks off the floor. Take 3 deep breaths. From here, press into your hands, firm your shoulder blades onto your back, and come onto the crown of your head. Your arms should still be parallel to each other. Take 3 deep breaths. Next, press your hands and feet firmly into the floor, and on an exhalation lift your head off the floor and straighten your arms, coming into the full backbend. Lengthen the tailbone toward the back of the knees and turn the upper thighs slightly in. Once again firm your shoulder blades onto your back. Stay for 3–10 breaths and slowly lower down.

See also A Safe, Core-Supported Backbending Sequence

About the Author

Nora Isaacs, a former editor at Yoga Journal, is the author of Women in Overdrive: Find Balance and Overcome Burnout at Any Age. Learn more about her writing and editing work at noraisaacs.com.

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#Ayurveda #Women #yoga basics #yoga classes #Yoga Exercises

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healthavenueblog · 8 years ago

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So A Minister, A Rabbi And A Buddhist Took Drugs For Science…

On April 20, 1962, a group of theology students and professors gathered outside Boston University’s March Chapel, waiting for Good Friday services to begin. These particular services were to be unlike any other: On their way into the chapel, Harvard psychiatrist Walter Pahnke administered the group a dose of psychedelic mushrooms.

Those services would go down in history as the “Good Friday experiment.” As part of his Ph.D. thesis under Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (aka Ram Dass), Pahnke sought to test his hypothesis that psychedelic drugs, taken in a religious setting, could provoke a genuine spiritual experience.

He was right. Nine out of the 10 students who took the mushrooms reported having a mystical experience. One of those students was the historian Huston Smith, who went on to write Cleansing the Doors of Perception, a classic philosophical work exploring the potential of psychedelic drugs as entheogens, or “God-revealing chemicals.”

“The experience was powerful for me, and it left a permanent mark on my experienced worldview,” Smith, who passed away in December, reflected. “I had believed in God… but until the Good Friday experiment, I had no personal encounter with God of the sort that bhakti yogis, Pentecostals and born-again Christians describe.”

Today, another research project is taking up where the Good Friday experiment left off ― this time, with modern research tools and leaders from not just the Christian faith but an array of world religions.

As part of a small pilot study, psychologists at Johns Hopkins and New York University are giving psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, to spiritual leaders. Their aim is to demystify the transcendent and deeply meaningful experiences that people often report having under the influence of psychedelic drugs.

A Zen Buddhist roshi and an Orthodox Jewish rabbi have embarked on consciousness-expanding journeys in the name of science, along with Episcopal, Presbyterian and Eastern Orthodox Christian clergy. The research team is about halfway done with the study, which will include a total of 24 participants. (They’re still looking for Muslim imams and Catholic and Hindu priests.)

“They’re helping us map out this landscape of mystical experience with their incredible training and experience,” Dr. Anthony Bossis, project director of the NYU Psilocybin Religious Leaders Project, told The Huffington Post.

By working with leaders of different faiths, the researchers hope to learn something about the shared mystical core of all the world’s major religions ― what the author Aldous Huxley called the “perennial philosophy.” Understanding these mystical experiences might also shed light on the therapeutic benefits of psilocybin and other psychedelic drugs, which researchers are exploring as treatment options for post-traumatic stress disorder, end-of-life anxiety and depression, addiction and other psychological conditions.

“If you give psilocybin psychedelics to 20 different people, you get 20 different experiences,” Bossis said. “But there is a common mystical experience… It seems that the efficacy of these medicines is in their ability, pretty reliably in the right set and setting, to activate or trigger this mystical experience.”

This experience of deep connection with the sacred can have long-lasting effects. Mushroom-triggered mystical experiences have been linked with positive changes in behavior and values, and with lasting increases in the personality domain of openness to experience, which encompasses intellectual curiosity, imagination, adventure-seeking and engagement with music and art. People commonly report that the experience is one of the most personally and spiritually meaningful of their lives.

“They’re helping us map out this landscape of mystical experience with their incredible training and experience.” Dr. Anthony Bossis, clinical assistant professor, NYU School of Medicine

Finding Words for the Indescribable

The term “mystical experience” might not sound especially rigorous, but it’s something that has actually been studied in depth. Psychologists define the experience based on its major components, including a sense of sacredness, feelings of unity, ineffability, peace and joy, transcendence of time and space and feelings of being confronted with some objective truth about reality.

The experiences are often said to be impossible to put into words. But Bossis and his colleagues hope that the unique expertise of these spiritual leaders will provide greater insight into their workings.

“One of things I was struck by, doing this research, was the experience of love that they spoke of,” he said. “It’s quite striking to witness… people speak about this overwhelming experience of love ― loving-kindness to self, love towards others, and what the Greeks called agape, this kind of universal, cosmic love that they say permeates everything, and which recalibrates how they live.”

You may feel tempted to brush off this sort of talk as mere drug-induced reverie. (One thinks of the Onion article “Universe Feels Zero Connection To Guy Tripping On Mushrooms.”) But early research and anecdotal reports suggest that chemically induced mystical experiences may not be so different from those that occur as a result of years of meditation and prayer.

Mystical experiences, whether drug-induced or spontaneously occurring, seem to connect the individual with the mystical core of all the world’s major religions ― a sense of unity, oneness and interconnection with all beings.

“I think to understand the depth of religion, one needs to have firsthand experience,” said Jewish Renewal movement leader Rabbi Zalman Schacter Shalomi in an interview published in 2005. “It can be done with meditation. It can be done with sensory deprivation. It can be done a number of ways. But I think the psychedelic path is sometimes the easiest way, and it doesn’t require the long time that other approaches usually require.”

The Psychedelic Renaissance

The psychedelic path has led many people, including the American Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield, to take up more traditional spiritual practices as a way to stay connected in their daily lives to the sorts of insights and sensations they first experienced with psychedelics.

“In spiritual communities, we need an honest exploration of this delicate and sometimes taboo topic,” Kornfield wrote in 2015. “Let us approach the use of these drugs consciously.”

While psychedelics may have a stigma attached in today’s culture, altered states of consciousness have long been an aspect of human spirituality, and they’ve featured in religious rituals around the world for thousands of years.

For the past several years, entheogens have been quietly making their way into modern medicine. A landmark study from NYU and Hopkins, published last month in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, showed a single dose of psilocybin to be effective in relieving death-related anxiety in cancer patients.

“A return to entheogens for the treatment of psycho-existential suffering may signal that medicine has come full circle to embrace the earliest known approach to healing our deepest of human agonies.” Dr. Craig Blinderman, director of adult palliative care services at Columbia University Medical Center/New York-Presbyterian Hospital

In a majority of the patients, the psilocybin triggered a mystical experience, which may be largely responsible for the renewed sense of meaning and relief from existential distress described by the patients. In fact, the extent to which the patients experienced reductions in depression, anxiety and fear of death correlated directly with the intensity of the mystical experience.

“Increasingly, it appears that the mystical-type experiences measured immediately after a session is predictive of enduring positive effects,” Dr. Roland Griffiths, a psychologist at Johns Hopkins and one of the study’s lead authors, told HuffPost. “That’s consistent across studies of healthy volunteers, addicted cigarette smokers, and in psychologically distressed cancer patients. There’s something about the nature of those experiences that is predictive of subsequent positive effects.”

Dr. Craig Blinderman, director of adult palliative care services at Columbia University Medical Center/New York-Presbyterian Hospital, said the research presents an exciting meeting of the minds between modern medicine and ancient healing modalities.

“A return to entheogens for the treatment of psycho-existential suffering may signal that medicine has come full circle,” Blinderman wrote in a commentary published in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, “to embrace the earliest known approach to healing our deepest of human agonies, by ‘generating the divine within.’”

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So A Minister, A Rabbi And A Buddhist Took Drugs For Science… syndicated from http://ift.tt/2k1vXuK

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