Culture Class

03/07/2020

because three Japanese ladies doing aerobics on a phrase like "I got a bad case of diarrhea" is a bit unusual..

Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.

06/06/2020

Lions and cheetahs vs. liars and cheaters:
Quick and dirty on compassionate mind theory.

Like so many others today, health care workers working with people at the end of life are exposed to high levels of distress. To effectively engage and handle distress without feeling overwhelmed by it, a sense of inner confidence, authority, strength and courage is inevitable. Compassion may help nurture this resource, helping care providers to take a nonjudgmental attitude and help people in need to rid themselves of self-destructive self-criticism.

The basic principles of compassionate mind theory, an approach with Paul Gilbert and Christine Neff among the key players, may help to increase dignity in care, and nurture your compassion: a sensitivity to the suffering of self and others (and its causes), with a commitment to relieve and prevent it.

The three circles model:
The drive system is drive and achievement focused: Wanting, pursuing, achieving and consuming and associated with excitement, vitality and activation.
The threat system is about threat focused protection and safety seeking activating/inhibiting and associated with anxiety, anger and disgust.
The soothing system is affiliative-focused and about caring, safety, and kindness. Soothing and calming it is about content and feeling safe and connected.

Understanding the difference between the Old Brain and the New Brain may help understand, where good old self-criticism comes from, given that it does not help you feel confident.

The Old brain is associated with the conditioning paradigm: learning as a consequence of positive or negative outcomes. These outcomes used to be in the outside world and framed in terms of survival or the fulfilment of needs.

Facilitated by the absence of the old physical external threats, the new brain’s ability to imagine and think, helped people today to become their own primary threat. Today’s external threats are social and psychological in nature: the risks of abandonment and rejection. The new brain enables us to reflect and fear, what others might think about us and we need to prevent. People beat themselves therefore up for not living up to their own and others’ expectations. Modern suffering is a mixed up result from the old brain responding to the new brain’s capabilities.

However, do note, we did not do anything wrong to deserve these brains, the suffering associated. Neither did we design or ask our brain to produce stress and suffering. People did not actively create the experiences that shaped their memories and taught them to stress out. However, this does not say at all, you can never be held accountable or choose your actions. On the contrary!

Understanding and accepting you have far less control over past and future paradoxically increases control. It is a critical step to take useless pressure of your back. Only in the eye of the storm, you can comprehend all that is happening around you, oversee and decide between your options within the available limits.

Thus, compassion helps to relieve and handle stress. Without stress, problem solving becomes easier. Mindfullness helps by directing attention consciously.`, thereby also intercepting fear induced scenarios. Thoughts have a natural tendency to drift off. Especially in moments of fear, scenarios start developing, whilst fear shuts out your common sense. Should your thoughts drift off, then gently take note of what they are about and then gently guide them back to what is real now.

A bit food for thought:
• How able do you feel to pay attention to your own suffering, or to someone else’s suffering?
• What might help you to engage with the distress of a friend, who appears more distracted and disconnected than usual.

08/05/2020

: Why is teaching is more difficult than learning

Teaching is not more difficult than learning, because teachers must always have ready a larger store of information, but because teaching asks for this: to let learn. The real teacher lets nothing else be learned than – learning. This conduct often produces the impression that we properly learn nothing from him, if by “learning” we understand merely the procurement of useful information. The teacher has still far more to learn than his apprentices, because he has to learn to let them learn. The teacher must be capable of being more teachable than the apprentices. The teacher is far less assured of his ground than those who learn are of theirs. If the relation between the teacher and the taught is genuine, there is never a place in it for the authority of the know-it-all.

In other words: can challenge accepted roles and make conscious, ‘authentic’ decisions about the way they will engage with learners. Such teaching demonstrates authenticity, encouraging learners to drop stock learner roles and fully open themselves to the learning situation. Authentic teaching and learning opens individuals to new ways of being, but can also be perceived as a threat to the establishment.

27/03/2020

And People Stayed Home

And the people stayed home. And read books, and listened, and rested, and exercised, and made art, and played games, and learned new ways of being, and were still. And listened more deeply.

Some meditated, some prayed, some danced. Some met their shadows.

And the people began to think differently. And the people healed.

And, in the absence of people living in ignorant, dangerous, mindless, and heartless ways, the earth began to heal.

And when the danger passed, and the people joined together again, they grieved their losses, and made new choices, and dreamed new images, and created new ways to live and heal the earth fully, as they had been healed themselves.” - Kitty O’Meara.

23/01/2020

https://youtu.be/2Qa9YDgtcaM

Jukin Media Verified (Original) *For licensing / permission to use: Contact - licensing(at)jukinmediadotcom

14/10/2019

Self-compassion: a little self-test.

It may be tempting at times to be unnecessarily more critical towards yourself. The following scale measures fears and blockades in treating yourself with self-compassion. Self-compassion can be divided into three scales.
Below a little test to test how self-compassionate you are . You can answer each question on a scale from 0 (completely disagree) to 4 (completely agree).
Scale 1: expressing compassion for others.

• People will take advantage of me if they see me as too compassionate
• There are people who do not deserve compassion
• I worry that certain people are pulling me down and mean
could suck out emotional resources
• People need to help themselves instead of waiting for others who
help them
• I am afraid that if I am sympathetic, other people will become dependend on me
• Being too compassionate makes people soft and easy to take advantage of
• For some people discipline and punishment are more helpful than
compassion

Scale 2: to accept compassion from others
• To need others who are kind to you is a weakness
• I fear that when I need understanding and compassion from others,
I do not get it and get disappointed
• I am afraid of becoming dependent on the care of others
if they are understanding and compassionate
• I fear that if people are friendly and distrustful, they will come
too close
• I am afraid that others are only nice and friendly to me
they want something from me
• When people are friendly and compassionate with me, it makes me
sad and lonely

Scale 3: expressing compassion towards yourself:
• I think I do not deserve to be nice and forgiving with myself
• If I really think about it myself nice and friendly too
it makes me sad
• If you want to achieve something in life you have to be tough
• I'm afraid if I'm less self-critical and nicer with myself
my standards are falling
• I'm afraid that being self-compassionate will make me weak
• I fear becoming selfish and being rejected by others
when I become self-compassionate
• I have never felt self-compassion and no idea where
to start

Source: Gilbert, P. et al. (2011): Fears of Compassion: Development of three self-report measures, Psychology and Psychotherapy).

19/03/2019

We need more wabi-sabi and mushin!

Kintsugi became closely associated with ceramic vessels used for chanoyu (Japanese tea ceremony).One theory is that kintsugi may have originated when Japanese shōgun Ashikaga Yoshimasa sent a damaged Chinese tea bowl back to China for repairs in the late 15th century. When it was returned, repaired with ugly metal staples, it may have prompted Japanese craftsmen to look for a more aesthetic means of repair. Collectors became so enamored of the new art that some were accused of deliberately smashing valuable pottery so it could be repaired with the gold seams of kintsugi.

Philosophy

As a philosophy, kintsugi can be seen to have similarities to the Japanese philosophy of wabi-sabi, an embracing of the flawed or imperfect. Japanese aesthetics values marks of wear by the use of an object. This can be seen as a rationale for keeping an object around even after it has broken and as a justification of kintsugi itself, highlighting the cracks and repairs as simply an event in the life of an object rather than allowing its service to end at the time of its damage or breakage.

Kintsugi can relate to the Japanese philosophy of "no mind" (無心 mushin), which encompasses the concepts of non-attachment, acceptance of change, and fate as aspects of human life.

“ Not only is there no attempt to hide the damage, but the repair is literally illuminated... a kind of physical expression of the spirit of mushin....Mushin is often literally translated as "no mind," but carries connotations of fully existing within the moment, of non-attachment, of equanimity amid changing conditions. ...The vicissitudes of existence over time, to which all humans are susceptible, could not be clearer than in the breaks, the knocks, and the shattering to which ceramic ware too is subject. This poignancy or aesthetic of existence has been known in Japan as mono no aware, a compassionate sensitivity, or perhaps identification with, [things] outside oneself. ”
— Christy Bartlett, Flickwerk: The Aesthetics of Mended Japanese Ceramics

Types of joinery

There are a few major styles or types of kintsugi:
- Crack (ひび), the use of gold dust and resin or lacquer to attach broken pieces with minimal overlap or fill-in from missing pieces
- Piece method (欠けの金継ぎ例), where a replacement ceramic fragment is not available and the entirety of the addition is gold or gold/lacquer compound
- Joint call (呼び継ぎ), where a similarly shaped but non-matching fragment is used to replace a missing piece from the original vessel creating a patchwork effect
(Source: Wikipedia)

23/10/2018