Aslan Institute

02/04/2026

“Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the overcompensations for misery. And, of course, stability isn't nearly so spectacular as instability. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune, none of the picturesqueness of a struggle with temptation, or a fatal overthrow by passion or doubt. Happiness is never grand.”

Aldous Huxley

Art: Old Japanese book cover 1922

01/31/2026

01/30/2026

When someone lacks emotional maturity, the breakup doesn’t come clean — it comes confusing. Needs turn into “demands.” Boundaries become “drama.” Silence replaces honesty. And you’re left trying to make sense of behavior that never made room for real repair.

But clarity is part of healing. Seeing how their emotional limitations shaped the relationship helps you stop internalizing what was never your failure. You weren’t asking for too much — you were asking the wrong person to meet you where they weren’t capable of going. And that awareness is how you begin choosing differently next time.

01/30/2026

“What is commonly called 'falling in love' is in most cases an intensification of egoic wanting and needing. You become addicted to another person, or rather to your image of that person. It has nothing to do with true love, which contains no wanting whatsoever.” —Eckhart Tolle

01/29/2026

Keep the dates!
Feb 2nd - Feb 16th 2027
Knysna retreat
More to come!!

Let Charisse or Lyndall know if you interested.
Cost $5500.00 per person.

01/29/2026

Keep the dates
February 2nd - February 16th.
Knysna retreat.

Spots limited. Please let Charisse or Lyndall know asap if you are interested. Cost without airfare is $5500.00. More later!!!

01/29/2026

Emotional disconnection doesn't happen overnight. It builds slowly through patterns of avoidance, dismissal, and surface-level interaction. You stop sharing. They stop asking. Intimacy becomes transactional. Connection fades into coexistence.

If you recognize multiple signs here, it's not too late to address it. But it requires both people being willing to acknowledge the distance and actively work to close it. One person can't rebuild connection alone.

Like this if you've felt this disconnect and follow for more on reconnecting when emotional distance takes over.

01/29/2026

Simple, circular, and quietly radical — Finland has reimagined the mall as a place not to buy, but to give.

In these “reverse shopping” centers, visitors arrive not with lists, but with items to donate, repair, or share. Broken toasters, outdated clothes, unused bikes — all find new life through mending stations, upcycling workshops, and swap shelves. There are no sales, no plastic bags, no checkout lines. Just space to exchange, restore, and rethink what value truly means.

Where shopping once meant accumulation, these malls offer something gentler: a return to usefulness, a pause from waste — and a community stitched together by generosity.

01/28/2026

Adulthood offers permissions long before it delivers clarity.

Doris Lessing wrote the line in Walking in the Shade, the second volume of her autobiography, published in 1997, when she was looking back at the years after her early success as a novelist and her move from Southern Rhodesia to post war London. By then, she had already made the decision that would define much of the public discomfort around her life: leaving her two young children behind in Africa in 1949 in order to write, think, and live freely. Lessing never disguised the severity of that choice. She described it plainly, without apology and without seeking absolution. The remark about understanding parents belongs to that same unsparing register.

Age alone does very little. That is the quiet insistence behind the sentence. You can grow older while remaining fixed in grievance or self-justification. You can accumulate years without acquiring the ability to see the people who raised you as anything other than obstacles or failures. Understanding, as Lessing frames it, requires something harder than time. It requires an encounter with limitation, including one’s own.

Lessing’s parents were marked by forces that predated her and shaped her childhood decisively. Her father returned from the First World War amputated and disillusioned, clinging to dreams of prosperity through colonial farming. Her mother carried Edwardian expectations of order and moral authority into a place that resisted both. Lessing wrote sharply about her mother’s emotional control and about the suffocating atmosphere of that household. As a younger woman, she saw those traits primarily as personal failings. Later, they appeared as historical and social ones as well, not excuses, but explanations that sat alongside the damage.

What complicates the line, and gives it its weight, is that Lessing did not speak from the position of an injured child alone. She also spoke as someone who had failed her own children in a way she never tried to redeem. Leaving them was, by her own account, a decision driven by necessity and ambition, but also by a belief that she would be destroyed by the life available to her as a wife and mother in colonial Rhodesia. Understanding parents, in this light, becomes less a moral achievement than a reckoning. You begin to see how people act when the options feel intolerable, even when the cost is unmistakable.

Culturally, the idea unsettles a familiar story about progress. Each generation likes to imagine itself clearer sighted than the last, less constrained, less cruel. Lessing’s life resists that comfort. She watched political ideals harden into dogma, especially within British Communism, which she eventually rejected. She was sceptical of movements that promised moral purity, including strands of feminism that sought to claim her unconditionally. Her writing keeps returning to the same unease: certainty rarely improves human behaviour.

Psychologically, understanding parents demands a shift away from the child’s central position. Harm no longer stands alone as the organising fact. Context intrudes. Pressure appears. The shape of a life emerges, narrowed by economics, gender expectations, war, or geography. This does not undo injury. It reframes it. Lessing never suggested that understanding should lead to reconciliation. Sometimes it leads only to a colder, more accurate view.

Literarily, the remark fits her broader refusal of consolation. Lessing admired writers who stripped away illusion, and her own prose does the same work. The sentence does not offer hope. It offers discipline. You do not outgrow misunderstanding automatically. You earn understanding, if you earn it at all, through self-scrutiny and an unwillingness to sentimentalise either your parents or yourself.

A small, uncomfortable recognition often marks the shift. You notice how quickly moral judgement simplifies a story. You catch yourself defending a choice that once seemed unforgivable. Standing in a queue, watching an older woman argue with an administrator over a rule that has clearly changed without her, something flickers. Systems move. Lives lag. Decisions get made inside narrowing corridors.

Doris Lessing received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007, praised for her scepticism, her range, and her insistence on facing what is difficult rather than what is comforting. The line about parents belongs to that legacy. It does not ask for sympathy. It asks for accuracy. Understanding arrives not with age, but with the courage to see how lives, including our own, are shaped by forces we did not choose and choices we must still own.

© Echoes of Women - Fiona.F, 2026. All rights reserved

01/28/2026

THE EPIDEMIC OF VIOLENCE
I feel a need to say a few words about the terrible violence that’s happening in
Minneapolis. If we step back, we can see that more and more violence has been erupting all over the world as well. Violence everywhere, like weakened cells exploding in the global body at random—in our streets, in our homes, in our airports, in our grocery stores. Like you, like everyone, I don’t know what to do with all this. It’s heartbreaking.

The truth is we need each of us to stay strong and kind and useful and not to
become what is done to us. The truth is we live in a modern world in which so many of
us have lost our direct connection with life. Why is it important to be directly connected to life? Because when deeply connected, we feel a reverence for life. And when we feel a reverence for life, we can’t do harm.

When cut off and adrift, we go numb. And the need to be connected in a
meaningful way—with ourselves, each other, and life—doesn’t go away. In many ways, violence is a desperate attempt to feel.

Every soul has faced this. Every family has faced this. Every age has faced this.
What to do when cut off and numb and feeling less than? We can break the things
around us or we can strengthen our connections.

Our job, today, every day—in our lives, in our cities, in all our struggles—is be the
last good gesture standing. For every authentic exchange is healing. And we have to be the healthy souls at work in the global body.

01/28/2026

Adults often discover, a little too late, that intelligence can become a hiding place. The sharper the mind, the easier it is to explain away what hurts, to narrate over it, to tidy it into something respectable. Alice Miller’s work circles this uneasy truth without softening it, and nowhere more clearly than in The Drama of the Gifted Child, first published in German in 1979, a book that quietly altered how many people thought about childhood, achievement, and emotional survival.

Miller trained as a psychoanalyst in Switzerland and spent years inside the profession before turning against much of it. Classical psychoanalysis, with its emphasis on instinct and fantasy, seemed to her to miss something obvious and devastating: children adapt to the emotional limits of their parents, and those adaptations can harden into adult personalities that look successful, rational, even admirable, while remaining strangely hollow. The “gifted child” of her title was not simply bright or talented, but emotionally attuned, quick to sense what was expected and willing to become that person in order to stay connected.

The line about personal truth and intellectual wisdom lands so heavily because it refuses the comforting idea that understanding alone heals. Miller is skeptical of insight that never disturbs the body or rearranges a life. She is describing a fork in the road. One path leads through a slow reckoning with feelings that were once unsafe to have. The other offers a kind of polished clarity that feels enlightened but keeps everything important at a safe distance.

The pain she refers to is not abstract. It has texture. It might show up as a tightness in the chest when an old memory finally loosens, or the sudden anger that arrives years after it was forbidden. Anyone who has ever stood on a train platform watching a reflection flicker in the dark window and felt an unexpected surge of grief knows something about what she means. The pain is not the goal, but it is the toll. Without it, the freedom on the other side never quite materializes.

Miller’s criticism of intellectual wisdom is not anti-thinking. It is anti-substitution. Thought can become a proxy for feeling, a way to stay impressive and composed while remaining untouched. In educated cultures that prize self-control and verbal fluency, this substitution is rewarded early and often. Children learn that being articulate, agreeable, or exceptional can secure love more reliably than being angry, sad, or confused. Decades later, the same skills can keep real self-knowledge at bay.

The phrase “sphere of illusion and self-deception” sounds severe, but she is naming something ordinary. Illusion here is not delusion or fantasy. It is the quiet belief that one is already whole because one can explain oneself so well. Self-deception does not require dishonesty. It thrives on coherence. A life can make perfect sense on paper and still feel wrong from the inside.

Miller’s insistence on personal truth put her at odds with much of her field, and later, with her own public image. She broke formally with psychoanalysis and became an outspoken critic of practices she believed minimized or denied the reality of childhood emotional abuse. Her views were influential and controversial. Some clinicians felt she overstated the role of parental harm or dismissed complexity in family dynamics. More painfully, her son Martin Miller later wrote about his own childhood, describing a gap between her theories and her capacity for emotional presence. The tension does not invalidate her ideas, but it complicates them. The woman who warned against illusion was not immune to it.

That complication may actually deepen the quote’s force. Miller was not writing from a position of serene mastery. She was writing from conflict, conviction, and blind spots included. The freedom she gestures toward is not a permanent state. It is a widening of options, a loosening of old reflexes. One can glimpse it and still lose it. One can advocate for truth and still struggle to live it fully.

The cultural afterlife of her work is easy to spot. Conversations about people pleasing, emotional neglect, and inherited patterns echo her arguments, even when her name goes unmentioned. Thinkers like bell hooks and writers like Maggie Nelson, in very different registers, have continued to ask what it costs to grow up adapting to other people’s needs, and what it takes to recover a more honest inner life. The questions persist because the conditions do.

What makes Alice Miller’s formulation endure is its refusal to flatter the reader. She does not promise ease, nor does she offer a clever framework that keeps pain theoretical. The long process she describes cannot be optimized. It resists productivity culture and quick fixes. It asks for patience with discomfort and a willingness to feel foolish, ungrateful, or disloyal as old narratives fall apart.

Freedom, in her sense, does not arrive with fireworks. It might look more like a smaller reaction, a truer no, a pause where a reflex once lived. It might show up as the strange relief of no longer being impressive all the time. The illusion she warns against is seductive because it is tidy. The truth she points toward is messier, slower, and harder to summarize. It is also, for those willing to risk it, more alive.

© Echoes of Women - Fiona.F, 2026. All rights reserved

Image: laurietobyedison. com