Well Being: Complementary Healing Alternatives

07/01/2022

Here's one good thing to celebrate this July. Festive fireworks not required.

06/05/2022

Apropos a segment of our Spiritual Potluck this afternoon this intriguing discussion just popped up.

A rat in a cage with a bottle of water and another laced with either he**in or co***ne will almost always prefer the drugged water and almost always kill itself very quickly within a couple of weeks. So there you go.

Bruce Alexander: “Well, hang on a minute. We’re putting the rat in an empty cage. It’s got nothing to do. Let’s try this a little bit differently.”

So Bruce built Rat Park that is like heaven for rats. Everything your rat about town could want. Lovely food, got loads of other rats to be friends and have s*x with, loads of colored balls. Everything your rat could want. And the same normal and drugged water bottles.

The fascinating thing is that now they don’t like the drugged water. They hardly use any of it. None ever overdose. None ever use in a way that looks like compulsion or addiction.

Bruce showed that both the right-wing and left-wing theories of addiction are wrong.

The right-wing theory is that drugs are a moral failing, you’re a hedonist, you party too hard.

The left-wing theory is that drugs take you over, your brain is hijacked.

Bruce says it’s not your morality, it’s not your brain; it’s your cage. Addiction is largely an adaptation to your environment.

We have created a society where significant numbers of our fellow citizens cannot bear to be present in their lives without being drugged, right?

We have created a hyperconsumerist, hyperindividualist, isolated world that is, for a lot of people, much more like that first cage than it is like the bonded, connected cages that we need.

The opposite of addiction is not sobriety. The opposite of addiction is connection. And our whole society, the engine of our society, is geared towards making us connect with things not people. If you are not a good consumer capitalist citizen, if you’re spending your time bonding with the people around you and not buying stuff—in fact, we are trained from a very young age to focus our hopes and our dreams and our ambitions on things we can buy and consume. And drug addiction is really a subset of that.

https://www.ted.com/talks/johann_hari_everything_you_think_you_know_about_addiction_is_wrong
** About the work of Bruce K. Alexander

05/10/2022

ITHACA, NY -- On May 11, 2017, Tenzin Taklha — secretary to His Holiness the Dalai Lama — wrote to the Namgyal Monastery Institute of Buddhist Studies in Ithaca, approving

04/19/2022

04/09/2022

Life isn't a contest. No one wins first place. Pace yourself.

03/05/2022

🖤💙💚

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A background with a blend of blue and green with a Tweet in the middle by Ursula Wolfe-Rocca that says, “It can be overwhelming to witness/experience/take in all the injustices of the moment; the good news is that they’re all connected. So if your little corner of work involves pulling at one of the threads, you’re helping to unravel the whole damn cloth.”]

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Via .Hill on IG

02/19/2022

01/27/2022

— Ernest Hemingway

01/23/2022

01/11/2022

"We say, 'Oh, I know.' But we don't know. We don't know anything." - Pema Chödron

Man says owl led him through blizzard to campsite