Kemper Wellness

12/27/2024

❤️

12/24/2024

Sending love to all. ❤️

Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Happy Kwanza, Happy Holidays. 🕯️✨

01/05/2023

Let’s hear it for tragic optimism and post-traumatic GROWTH. ❤️
Daniellekemper.com 🪷

“Tragic optimism” is the search for meaning during the inevitable tragedies of human existence, and is better for us than avoiding darkness and trying to “stay positive.”

12/29/2022

Powerful.
Be that person. ❤️

12/24/2022

Wishing you all peace, community, and health this holiday season. And, just so we’re clear, well, I think you’re wonderful.
❤️
Daniellekemper.com

10/10/2022

Mental health is health. ❤️
Happy World Mental Health Day!


Daniellekemper.com

06/25/2022

Lately the word hope has been rolling around in my brain.
I am a social worker, psychotherapist, professional coach, and activist. I live on a farm in the drought-stricken, fire-prone West. I read about heartbreak in the news every day. And the wind hasn’t stopped blowing for months. So hope, as you can imagine, is a very big deal to me. It is my currency. It is my “why.”

It is also the thing in my life that has been the most challenged lately.

It’s a tricky little thing, hope. Most of the definitions out there make it seem like a synonym for optimism and positivity. Social media is rife with memes telling us to have hope, be positive, and if we somehow can’t manage that, if what we feel is closer to anger, sadness, confusion, there’s likely a product, offer, or yoga outfit on our feed that will make us feel better.

But what if hope needs us to feel those feelings we try to push away? The sadness we feel when we hear about tragedy or experience hardship or loss? What if those feelings are the springboard for hope itself?

Psychologist Charles Snyder believed the difference between hope and optimism was this: hope contains “practical pathways to an improved future.” Optimism is positive thinking, but is passive. In other words, hope is active-goals, action, movement. The antidote to overwhelm. The foundation of hope.

While it is true that just five minutes consuming news or doom scrolling online can make us believe that there is little reason to hope, I don’t believe we have the luxury of giving up. We need hope in order to raise our kids well and set them loose in the world. We need hope in order to change our health for the better, to make our communities safer and more livable. Hope is necessary to start that new business, finish that novel, change our family’s financial future, and positively impact the health of our planet for generations to come.

But like I said, hope is a tricky little thing.

It is an active endeavor and requires skill. It is the belief that something better IS possible. It is the desire and search for a future good. It is the acknowledgement that what is happening right now must change. It is possessing the agency and willingness to roll up our sleeves, become visible, and commit. It is being present, letting ourselves feel, and then being moved to act. Indeed, it is one of the ways our species has survived.

Whatever the change you seek, whether personal, national or global, whatever “why” you identify, the key is that you must show up. Christopher Reeve said, “Once you choose hope, anything is possible.”

What are you going to choose today?
In solidarity,
❤️
Daniellekemper.com

05/10/2022

New rule:
Who’s in?
❤️
Daniellekemper.com

04/22/2022

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.
—Carl Sagan
Happy Earth Day. Please love our mother. 🌎
Danielle kemper.com