Aslan Institute

01/15/2026

When I ask a question like this, I’m flooded with comments asking, “what is a healthy way to express anger?” Well, in general, it’s anything that doesn’t hurt you or someone else. If you’re still confused by that explanation, I would say you are not alone. There is a balance that can be hard to master.

Learning how to model emotional intelligence is one of the more complex and difficult challenges of parenting responsively. I think that is because we’re carving out a new path here. Most of us don’t have a prototype or a model for what that looks like. Many of us rarely see expressions of anger that don’t hurt others.

Do you enjoy my posts about parenting? This post made the cut for my latest book. It’s a concept I’ve never seen before and I’m excited to be the first content creator to do this. I’ve taken my posts and created a book. The book is visually appealing and easy to read, just like when we scroll online or read a book to our child. You can read one post or a whole section. I know I’m bias but it is a must have for all parents who enjoy this page. It is also a way to pass on the knowledge you have gained from this account, to someone else.

Title: Love Grows: A Collection of Works By J. Milburn

Link in comments

01/14/2026

Many of us are feeling a deep, almost unbearable despair right now, with the news coming out of Minneapolis layered on top of everything else already weighing on the world.

There is no bright side to an innocent woman being shot in her car by law enforcement on a quiet suburban street. We are not meant to look at something like that and somehow find a way to feel okay about it. We are not meant to witness the worst of humanity on display and quickly “reframe” it into something palatable.

That instinct - to transcend too fast, to stay positive, to look for the lesson - is a form of avoidance, and this is not a moment that can be bypassed.

What’s happening right now is horrific. Full stop.

If your heart feels like it’s breaking, that is not a failure or a weakness. It’s a signal. If your nervous system recoils, if your chest tightens, if grief or rage comes in waves, that is your humanity intact. That breaking feeling in your chest is your heart center activating. It’s your heart communicating with you.

Don’t numb it.
Don’t outrun it.
Don’t intellectualise it away.
Go toward it.

Anchor yourself in that breaking-open feeling. Your heart won’t shatter. Your soul is not fragile. The deepest part of you is indestructible. Nothing essential is breaking. What’s happening is that your heart is asking to be felt - fully, honestly, and without any filters.

This is the heart frequency coming online.Let it.

We are not going to get through what comes next by living only in our minds, as we have for so long. Analysis alone won’t carry us. Arguments won’t either. What’s required now is heart-led clarity. This is quite literally the frequency of the new world coming online as the old one rages violently on its way out.

You don’t have to feel good about anything right now. Feel sorrow, because it’s sacred. Feel rage, because there is truth there too. But take it all to your heart, not away from it.

Let the anger, the grief, the fury move through the center of your being so it can be refined into something that knows what to do next.

This is not a time for spiritual bypassing. Not a time for “everything happens for a reason.” Not a time for forced optimism.

This is a time to take the despair, the injustice, the heartbreak - all of it - straight into the core of your soul and let it move.

Your heart can take it.
Your soul can take it.
They are eternal.

And when these feelings are allowed to flow instead of being suppressed or displaced, that’s when the heart can begin to inform the mind. Clarity follows feeling, not the other way around.

This is how the new world begins to rise, not out there first, but within us. Through hearts that are awake, alive, and unafraid to feel what this moment actually asks of us.

Stay with your heart. It knows the next step, even if your mind doesn’t yet.

This is not the breaking of the world; it is the remembering of the heart.
And only a heart that feels deeply is fit to shape what comes next.

01/13/2026

Facing it,
always facing it,
that's the way to get through it.
Face it.
~Joesph Conrad

01/12/2026

For 28 years, every milk-dependent infant elephant died.
Daphne Sheldrick refused to accept this. From 1954 onward, she and her husband David — the founding warden of Kenya's Tsavo East National Park — raised orphaned elephants at their home. Older calves could be weaned onto solid food. But newborns needed their mother's milk, and no substitute worked. Cow's milk killed them. Every formula failed.
In 1974, a tiny calf named Aisha arrived. She had fallen down a disused well in Northern Kenya. She was just days old, her trunk still tinged with pink, covered in the soft fuzz of elephant infancy.
Daphne tried every combination she could find. Finally, she discovered that a European baby formula containing coconut oil was the nearest substitute for the fat in elephant milk. Aisha survived.
But weeks later, when Daphne left for her daughter's wedding, Aisha stopped eating. She died of grief — she had bonded too closely to one person and couldn't survive the separation.
Daphne learned the hardest lesson: orphaned elephants need not just milk, but family. They need multiple caregivers who stay with them day and night, mimicking the matriarchal herds they lost.
In 1977, David Sheldrick died of a heart attack at age 57. Daphne founded the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust in his memory.
In 1979, she wrote: "One last triumph I longed for, was to be able to look with pride on an animal like an elephant, born of a mother I had nurtured from the start, and think, deep inside my heart, 'But for me......'"
That triumph came. Again and again.
To date, the Trust has rescued over 262 orphaned elephants and reintegrated more than 160 back into the wild herds of Tsavo. Seventy-eight calves have been born to orphans the Trust raised — wild elephants who return to the stockades where they grew up to introduce their babies to the human family that saved them.
In 2006, Queen Elizabeth II made Daphne a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire — the first damehood awarded in Kenya since independence in 1963.
Dame Daphne Sheldrick died on April 12, 2018, at age 83. Her daughter Angela now runs the Trust, continuing work that began with a coconut-oil formula and a refusal to give up.
The elephants born to Daphne's orphans will have calves of their own. Those calves will have calves. Entire dynasties of elephants now exist because one woman spent 28 years failing until she succeeded — and then spent 44 more years turning that success into a system that could outlive her.
But for her, none of them would be here.

~Weird Wonders and Facts

01/12/2026

It is easy to say what others want to hear, but rare to face the consequences of truth. Those who choose integrity risk conflict, judgment, and criticism. Yet their courage inspires respect and trust. Surround yourself with people who speak truth, even when it hurts. They shape a world where honesty leads, not flattery or lies.

Truth is rare. Some people speak it even when it costs them comfort or approval. They know honesty is stronger than smiles or nods. Seeing the world clearly means accepting what is real, even when it stings. Life rewards those who choose truth over convenience, and the path they walk may not be easy.

01/12/2026

The Indian parable of the Blind Men and the Elephant addresses the limitations of subjective views, where the blind men are arguing over the true nature of an elephant, each believing it to be something different (e.g., a wall, a snake, a spear).

The story teaches that human perspectives are often incomplete, highlighting the importance of combining viewpoints for a deeper understanding, and warning against dogmatic declarations of absolute truth.

"The ability to observe without evaluating is the highest form of intelligence." ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.." ~F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Crack Up,” 1936

These observations by Krishnamurti and Fitzgerald highlight the insight that deep wisdom and intelligence involves embracing complexity and paradox, rather than seeking simple, one-sided answers.

This is sometimes called Paradoxical Thinking, recognizing that seemingly contradictory truths can coexist and actually provide deeper wisdom when unified.

Also referred to as Dialectical Thinking, moving beyond "either/or" to "both/and" thinking, acknowledging the value of multiple perspectives.

Divergent Thinking and Creative Intelligence are also rooted in this way of seeing situations from many angles simultaneously. In modern cultures, young children are often much better at Creative Thinking than adults.

As we grow older, most of us were indoctrinated by systems of standardized education and testing, that train us to believe that difficult questions always have only one right answer.

Creative Systems Thinking involves a unity of different views, being aware of how multiple perspectives form greater wholes when we connect them together, rather than rejecting the divergent ideas and observations of others.

Niels Bohr noted that while superficial truths have false opposites, "deep truths" often have opposites that are also true.

An example of this would be the spherical nature of our planet, and how time is experienced subjectively. Right now half of the world is experiencing night, half are experiencing day. And all of us are experiencing different times of day.

Arguing about what time it is on our planet would be an exercise in futility, as it is simultaneously many different times at once, and paradoxically always the same time, NOW.

~Christopher Chase
Fukuoka, Japan

01/12/2026

01/12/2026

"To truly know the world, look deeply within your own being;
to truly know yourself, take real interest in the world." ~ Rudolf Steiner

01/08/2026

🖋️ Rebecca Dupas