no pain, no gain???

That belief comes from our competitive, patriarchal (sorry guys), on-the-way-out interpretation of the world. But it is only a belief, an idea, the idea that we must struggle to overcome and win, struggle to be worthy of whatever, battle uphill to make the progress we want.  Pain and soreness and lots of sweat, in this belief system, are proof that we've worked hard and deserve a stronger body, more abs, more muscles, more endurance, more stamina.

When I think of traditional Asian practices like qi gong or yoga, though not the Westernized competitized yoga versions, you are taught to listen to your body, to honor it.  These practices are gentle on the body, yet very effective in removing energy blockages, and strengthening body and mind gradually over time.  The instructions are specifically to work with your body instead of forcing it into something that hurts or that the muscles are not yet ready for. 

It's a fundamentally different approach, one of respecting and loving your body, of connecting and cooperating with it, of tuning into it.   If you've had an injury, honor that, and be gentle in that area. Your muscles are stiffer in the morning, acknowledge that when you work out early.  It's not because your workout buddy is able to do something that you have to compete with her and prove that you can too.  Ballroom dancing, by the way, is great exercise.  It is cooperative, relaxing, non-competitive, social, and a great right-brain left-brain balancer. Very beneficial for both body and mind. 

every bit helps

A few days ago I saw a small, unassuming house with just a few solar panels on the roof.   Sometimes you leave your reusable shopping bags at home when you go the supermarket and have to pick up one of those flimsy single-use plastic bags that often end up in the trees.  The other day I forgot to bring water to my exercise class and had to buy a bottle.

It's ok.  It's the willingness that counts, the growing awareness.  When you remember most of the time it slowly becomes part of your culture.   It matters if you care and do a little bit often.  

Caring for the environment, even just a bit, on this Earth Day weekend, is what our planet needs so much from all of us at this time.

a whole new aesthetic

A few people in our town have complained about the looks of an enormous solar field that powers the entire school district, but also about a small residential two-panel solar installation alongside a country road.  While many residential solar rooftop applications disappear into the roof design, the larger solar installations are usually purely functional and not particularly attractive. 

Yet aesthetics is important because beautiful things enhance the quality of life.  Wouldn't you rather look at something attractive than at something ugly? 

When it comes to renewable energy applications and their architectural expressions we are still in virgin territory because these technologies are relatively new. But if the expression of, say, a solar installation matches its environmental benefits by being skillfully integrated into the architecture, we are creating a whole new aesthetic.  A whole new sense of what we call beautiful or attractive. Instead of form following function, then function will follow form. 

solar louvers at Hotel Augustus in Montegrotto Terme/Italy - photo by SMF

healing as an art form

The term healing arts has been around for a while but those physicians who truly practice this kind of art are few and far between.  Most of them go into the field to help, but then buckle under the system's culture and forget their original quest.

Healthcare in general has become so bureaucratic, so computerized, so impersonal, so technological and technical, so pharmaceutical, and of course so incredibly expensive.  Where did the healing touch go?  Where the compassionate conversation in supporting the patient emotionally?  Where the deep understanding of an affliction and how to heal it uniquely and individually?  Standard treatments instead.  Private practices are becoming ever bigger, and doctors often take as little as ten minutes to come up with diagnosis and treatment.  Next! Hospitals are no better.  Heartless money making machines, not temples of healing. 

Victoria Sweet, MD, writes on healing as an art in Spirituality & Health Magazines's article, "The Secret of Healing Touch," which is excerpted from her book Slow Medicine.  Sweet talks about the art of her touch, knowing just what the patient needs, and the importance of compassionate bedside manner.  We yearn for doctors like her, who practice healing as an art form, combining science and inner wisdom.   

When we acknowledge the importance of touch, deep dialogue, compassion, and true understanding of what ails a patient, when we make healing holistic again through human connection, when we integrate the scientific with the holistic diagnosic process, then healing is an art form.  

too much too early

Several years ago Germany switched from their traditional 13-year to a 12-year school system in order to follow the international standard.  Now there is a general backlash against the 12-year system and in many places students are already offered a choice to return to the 13-year program.  For one, many parents think that the 12-year program is too intense.  The other consideration comes from the universities that complain that the students are just not mature enough after the 12-year program to handle higher academic thinking.

Rudolf Steiner, the creator of the Waldorf education movement, whose curriculum is based on the natural emotional and psychological maturation of the child, stated that we mature in seven-year cycles.  Hence Waldorf schools in Germany, and elementary schools in Scandinavia in general, encourage waiting with first grade until around age 7.  When the school system is more in tune with the natural developmental and psychological maturation cycle of the child it benefits everyone - not only the children, who are less frustrated and more eager, but teachers, professors, and the entire system down the line because the children are at their best, and the teachers have a better sense of accomplishment. 

When I came over here it struck me that during the first two college years material is taught that is generally covered in high school in Europe.  And in France students oftentimes attend a prep school year before tackling the entrance exam to one of the better universities, elongating the 12-year school instruction to 13 years.

Over here we have pushed academics on the kids ever earlier, and it's been frustrating for children and teachers alike.  As much as we may try, we can't accelerate the natural maturation and personal developmental process.  Our son went to a Waldorf Kindergarten and could not read or write when he entered the traditional first grade. Yet, he excelled and became the fastest and most prolific reader in his grade in a matter of months. 

we've got it backwards

The farmers I buy my produce from are some of the most important people in my life.  What they grow goes into my body and literally becomes me.  How they grow their produce has a direct influence on my health and wellbeing. 

The nursery and preschool teachers who nurtured and taught my children were some of the most important people in their young lives.  Together with my husband and me they were instrumental in forming their early impressions and life experiences. 

Farmers and early childhood teachers should be compensated royally for the importance of their role in our lives.  Yet, the sad reality is that these are some of the least compensated professions, as a recent NY Times article states about kindergarten teachers, while the average farmer salary  is between $24K and $31K according to ziprecruiter.com.  Instead, we pay movie stars, football players, business and financial people, or tech start-ups, fortunes.  But how much do they contribute to our immediate health and wellbeing, or to building the minds of the next generation?

What is behind this incredible distortion?   A crumbling value system.  We've really got it backwards.  We worship entertainment and making money more than forming the next generation's minds or what we put in our bodies.  What do you think?

perspective is everything

You probably know that famous saying about not seeing the forest from the trees.  Perspective is crucial.  When you see the thyme on the picture above you might presume that there is thyme, thyme, and more thyme.  But zooming out you discover that there is more to the wild thyme, that the pictures is actually not about wild thyme at all, but that the wild thyme is merely a background for the stone heart. 

You may have seen one of the famous zooming out videos, where the perspective changes as you go up, up, up.  The details keep receding and every new close-up soon enough grows smaller and becomes background, until it too disappears, then makes way for yet another perspective at yet a higher level.

A few days ago NY Times reporter Nicholas Kristof wrote a beautiful article on how 2017 was the best year ever.  Huh?  Really?  You doubt that it was?  I devoured the article and felt so uplifted.  You have to read it.  Perspective is everything.  We tend to get so bogged down in details and pettiness.  Granted, we don't necessarily have the statistics available for as sweeping an assessment of our state of affairs as the one Kristof provides.  But really, let's acknowledge how much better things have become.  Let's acknowledge how distorted our view can be if we stay in the trenches.  Come up for air every once in a while to get inspired and to readjust your perspective.  And may 2018 be even better than 2017, as Kristof hopes to find out.

transparency promotes trust

My son recently went to a car dealership about a recall as well as a muffler issue.  The recall fix was of course free, but the muffler repair was to be $1200, they said.  I am so tired of corporate rip-offs, of corporate padding, the relentless push to pack on the costs, but also the plain disregard for our pocket books.  This behavior sows distrust. 

Having done his research, and knowing that not everything was broken that the dealer wanted to "fix," my son went to a small mechanic, who he knew he could trust, and who did the muffler repair for $540. 

With regard to price shopping the internet is bringing out one of the millennial values, transparency.  Of course, this pricing transparency can also turn into its flipside - ever smaller profit margins because the competition is so large, which can make things more difficult for small local merchants.  But all in all our ability to do our research on the internet and understand what's what, promotes honesty, accountability, trust and transparency.  Transparency promotes trust.

gender fluidity's significance

In the Western world we are coming from a long mainstream tradition of two distinct genders.  So it is not difficult to understand the underlying cultural resistance in general, and that of more conservative people in particular, to the expansion of gender boundaries and the diversification of family structures. 

However, many indigenous cultures are way ahead of us, and have lived with three, and even five, genders forever, modeling a non-binary gender system.  Not that there is necessarily total acceptance on all fronts, together with complete equality of status and full legalization.  Minorities always seem to have it rougher, unfortunately.  But the fact that these gender fluid roles exist in other cultures openly, and are part of the cultural fabric, is cause for reassurance. 

While their situation is not easy - they are pioneers in many ways - the role gender fluid people have accepted to play in our culture is extremely valuable.  They model a more open and accepting gender definition; they show us that people don't only come in black or white, but in all colors of the rainbow; that families don't have to be wedged exclusively into the mom/dad/kids model, but that the idea of family can also encompass all colors of the rainbow so to speak (see a previous blog post on increasing family structure fluidity).  After all, love is love, human is human, and on a spiritual soul level there is no gender, period. Besides, we all carry our individual mixes of feminine and masculine in us.  Some women are extremely feminine, others much less so.  Some guys are real he-men, others feel more comfortable expressing their feelings.  It's about defining the boundaries less rigidly, allowing for more fluidity, no longer boxing people into a simplifying and simplistic gender definition that is becoming quickly outdated.

We live in culturally extremely creative and exiting times, if perhaps unsettling for more traditional thinkers, when many values are being questioned and redefined, and boundaries pushed out. If we can begin to see the humanness in whatever expression people chose to live, the sheer endless creativity we humans are able to express, we are better for it, we'll have expanded our tolerance and our consciousness. 

Remember, on the food front we have moved so far beyond meat and potatoes in just a century.  We now have so many wonderful choices from all over the world, and we are so much richer for it.  You don't have to like it all.  But let your mind be blown open in amazement and wonderment and acceptance at the beauty and diversity of the human condition and its incredible diversity.

feminine rising

Despite much noise out there from the other side, the feminine is rising.  The French leftist daily Libération just wrote that the French language deliberately removed all feminine semantics starting in the 17th century.  Only when the feminine is becoming more prominent would such research even be conducted and published.

The confluence of sexual harassment revelations, not only in the US but in Europe as well, is a sign of the feminine rising.  Whether in the corporate or entertainment world, in politics, on college campuses, the revelations are accumulating, flying open, and are no longer able to be contained.

Among millennial parents a lot more intentional co-parenting is happening.  And in my larger social circle I have watched how a proportionately very significant number of women are divorcing and becoming independent later in life, asserting their power, freedom, creativity and courage.

These developments are of course threatening to the white male power base and eroding its stronghold, hence it all plays out in real life and time like a cultural tectonic plate shift.  A better yin-yang balance is better for the environment, better for our culture, and healthier in general.