Holiday period

I'd like to wish anyone who reads this a peaceful time over the New Year holidays.

Transitions and new beginnings, challenges and opportunities.

Nila says meow as well :)

Blog Posters Will Need to Log On Again

Hi all. As Google have taken over blogger.com, everyone on the Crafting Gentleness team will have to register with Google Mail to continue posting. It's relatively painless, just follow the instructions they give you, but it is still a bit of pain (for such a painless process!). Any problems, just let me know ... :)

an open heart and a vulnerable neck

Today I found out something I knew but had forgotten or ignored, that people I feel threatened by may simply be threatened by me, and the threat can often dissolve if I simply talk to them with an open heart and a vulnerable neck.

Dogs roll over and show their soft underbelly to signal 'I'm okay with not attacking'. Sometimes works with humans too. (Sometimes doesn't, though, I guess, but I work it out as it happens, I suppose)

I think Nila is a reincarnated dog. She has decided that playing fetch is her favourite game. Fetch is not as much fun with a cat because they come back way too fast!

Chiming in

I've been a member of this site for a while now, and my "best of intentions" syndrome has meant that I've written up numerous posts but have - for wont of a better term - found myself unable to publish because I find myself thinking more and more about a topic and as such hesitate too long with the submit button.

Instead of doing that yet again, I thought it best to talk briefly about what I do, and how I try to employ the concept of gentleness in my work, and what gentleness means to me - in the hope that I manage to hit the submit button before I become too critical of my writing.

Currently, I work as an advisor/negotiator in a Prefectural Governmental office in Japan. We employ just over one hundred foreigners throughout the prefecture and my job is to be an intermediary between the local government and the workers. This means it is basically a conflict/resolution role, as I do my best to have both sides understand not only the issues that face the other side, but also to make sure that all issues are seen in a cultural context.

My most important role is that of a confidential counselor to these foreign residents. Living in Japan can at times be no easy task. In the mid 1950's the term "Culture Shock" was created in an attempt to bring together the multiple symptoms that manifest in a person when they are removed from their normal surroundings and placed in a situation that is unfamiliar to them - which is a situation all foreigners face while living here. Almost everybody will have culture shock during their time in Japan, and a few of them may have or begin to show signs of developing serious mental health issues during their stay here.

To me, one of the biggest triggers I see that can lead to so many problems in life - as manifested here and elsewhere - is frustration and denial. If you are in a situation that you do not fully understand, and with little option available to you to change your situation, you rail against it. Alternatively, if you are in a situation that you deep down have issues with you can also choose to convince yourself that you are okay with it, and that you will soldier on because you are stronger than that. In the first situation you reject your surroundings, and in the second situation you replace your need to express/exert yourself with a need to conform, in the belief that conformity is the solution to surviving.

Both of these paths can lead to a fracture of the individual - either through emotion or through mental health. To me, crafting gentleness is about finding the balance, the path between the needs of the individual and the needs of the society around them. To strive toward gentleness is for people be aware of the background to a situation or a people, to be aware of the context of the actions that are available, and to be able to accept the rights of expression of self, even if that expression of self in others is something you have issue with.

With that, I seek to help the people around me understand gentleness as best as I can, and in turn I do what I can to learn more about gentleness myself. I hope that my continued reading of this site will help me in the path to further understanding.

Shell to Sea Campaign

"Shell to Sea is an international non violent campaign, rooted in the Erris community. We seek to ensure the proposed Corrib gas terminal and pipeline are constructed offshore, as is best practice. In doing so we seek to highlight the negligent environmental, health, safety, planning and economic consequences of this government backed plan. We are not the property of any party or movement and we disassociate ourselves from negative campaigning and tactics that many media outlets have attempted to associate us with. We have been campaigning for several years and continue to face intimidation, slander and significant hardship as a result. However, we are growing in strength, numbers and confidence. We will remain peaceful, committed and determined in the coming days, weeks months - and years if necessary!" (more)

Countering Misinformation

The cat that shares a residence with me, Nila, would like it to be known that the cat in my profile photo was Courtney, not Nila. This is a picture of Nila (a.k.a. Snuggle McZippy).

Just being

by Ronald M Epstein

There are many ways for health professionals to enhance well-being, to reflect, and to be mindful. A recent study indicates that mindfulness meditation training for medical students improved their psychological and spiritual well-being and also improved their capacity for empathy ... (more)

http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1071240

Quiet Is Freedom

By Kenneth Maue

All things I love dwell in quiet. I don't mean total lack of sound, which is rare, and never perfect anyhow since we hear our own heartbeat, breathing, and nerves when other noises fade, but the soft, sparse body of sound we hear in nature, empty rooms, and the deep of night. ... (more)

http://interact.uoregon.edu/MediaLit/WFAE/readings/Quiet.html

Cleaning House

I’ve been cleaning around the house. To be honest, the place was a bit of a mess, boxes everywhere, books strewn all over the place, empty food wrappers where I’d left them, last night’s dinner plates unwashed by the sink along with a few others that I’d prefer not to carbon-date. A large basket of unwashed clothes. It’s amazing to me sometimes how I can be perceived by others as being a high-functioning academic when some of the simplest things baffle me. Swamped by procrastination again and again. The deferrals, the sometime-soons, the I’ll-get-around-to-its. No point fighting the procrasto demons. I find it's sometimes good to let them march by, wait till they disappear over the hill. Don't want to engage the swordplay - it just means more time before they pass on.

It was good to feel methodical again. 5 loads of washing. A decent meal last night, decent breakfast this morning. Walking slower. Breathing slower. Purposefully spending time on my own. Feeling productive in a non-productive sort of way. More grounded, at least. Seems I’ve been more or less absent without official leave for a while. Makes sense, given the year that I’ve had. I can feel glad that I’m not in worse shape than I might be, all told. Still here, still hopeful.

I have been feeling a bit buffeted by various forces and distractions and other people’s agendas and demands for grievings of various sorts, and I think I’ve finally decided to step out of the hassle and into a quieter place, until next time, so that I can listen a little more carefully to myself and to what’s going on. Eyes forward, gentle heart. At least that’s the intention. We’ll see how that goes.

It has been an interesting process at the end of an interesting month. I was beginning to feel like I had lost my mojo, and I think it’s back, for the moment. Once again I have been reminded that there seems to be nothing more important for me than feeling a little more at peace. Everything else stems from that in the way my relationships operate. The more anxious I get the more blind I get to the unhelpful situations I am contributing to. The more crap I eat the more anxious I get. The less exercise I get the more anxious I get. The more anxious I get the worse my judgment calls become. And I tend to make more of them when I’m revved up, which is a bit of a pain. I tend to talk more, think more, too. Words can generate so much unnecessary unhelpul energy a lot of the time. Listening does not mean waiting to speak. Works for conversations, works for life as well, I guess.

Settling back down again. Hoping that I can feel less busy and more active. Starting to play guitar again. Starting to write again. Starting to read again. Starting again in many, many ways.

Time to rethink, regroup, recalibrate.

The gaze as the limbs of the soul

"Traditionally the gaze was conceived as a way of fingering, of touching. The old Greeks spoke about looking as a way of sending out my psychopodia, my soul's limbs, to touch your face and establish a relationship between the two of us which is this relationship, and this relationship was called vision. Then, after Galileo at the time of Kepler, the idea developed that the eyes are receptors into which light brings something from the outside, keeping you separate from me even when I look at you. Even if I gaze at you. Even if I enjoy your face. People began to conceive of their eyes as some kind of camera obscura. In our age people conceive of their eyes and actually use them as if they were part of a machinery. They speak about interface. Anybody who says to me, I want to have an interface with you, I say please go somewhere else, to a toilet or wherever you want, to a mirror. Anybody who says, I want to communicate with you, I say can't you talk? Can't you speak? Can't you recognize that there's a deep otherness between me and you, so deep that it would be offensive for me to be programmed in the same way you are."

Ivan Illich, interviewed by Jerry Brown

Political Violence and Mental Health

"The idea that trauma is created by conflict, but more likely to be manifested in a period of peace implicitly presents war as bad and peace as good. The assumption is that war creates trauma and peace provides the conditions in which trauma can be worked through and psychological health restored. This view of the conflict and peace process is too simplistic. It fails to acknowledge the ambiguities of the findings on the relationship between political violence and mental health, glosses over the positive aspects to the conflict that have helped people to deal with the realities of war, misses those aspects of the peace process that have negatively impacted on people and fails to capture the open-ended and politically contested nature of the peace process."

Chris Gilligan, "Traumatised by peace? A critique of five assumptions in the theory and practice of conflict-related trauma policy in Northern Ireland." Policy and Politics 34(2)