The course, Introduction to the Social Work Profession opened with a module, not about the glories of the profession, but rather the demands and the emphatic need for self-care. Symptoms of “compassion fatigue” as one of the embedded TED talks warned was to be monitored on a daily basis. Compassion fatigue unlike burn-out characterized by…
Counseling / Philosophy / Yoga
Living forces honesty. Answers are seasonal, losing their sense precisely as they become scripture. You will die: this is the first meaning. The world around you seems to bear helpless witness to your wandering. Other people suffer in the same way, and yet this seems to increase loneliness. But you can welcome despair like gravity,…
It is a bit unusual for someone with a Ph.D. to go back to school, right? Yet, here I am. This is my first-week attending IUPUI’s Masters of Social Work program online. I don’t find my status odd or contradictory. Given my graduate work at the New School School for Social Research, a pursuit of…
This was week 2 of Yoga for Grief at the IU-Arnett Hospice in Lafayette, IN. Thank you to new and returning yoga friends. Yoga for grief can accompany each of Dr. William Worden’s four tasks of mourning: acceptance, processing, adjusting and finding a place for loss in new life. I am particularly interested in the…
To those who participated in our first session of yoga for grief (serving Lafayette IU Health Hospice Groups), THANK YOU. We explored basic breath, body and mind awareness as a way to notice and return to ourselves especially after loss. We started with a few easy standing stretches, seated breath awareness, guided meditation and guided…
Last weekend I had the joy of attending a certification training for the Grief Recovery Method. What a gift! I have to admit that I stepped into the training with trepidation and a healthy dose of skepticism. As a philosopher, I worried that the training would be a trite appeal to non-discursive subjective feelings. As…
The first response to the disapperance of the partner consists in the anxious attempt to find him again. The goose moves about restlessly by day and night, flying great distances and visiting places where the partner might be found, uttering all the time the pentratrating trisyllable long-distance call…..the searching expeditions are extended farther and farther…
My friend, Linda gave me a dozen fresh eggs this morning. My obessive love of eggs is no secret. What a happy gift! At the end of the morning yoga session while everyone was enjoying a peaceful savasana, I was planning lunch. My leftover rice from last night already had quiet ambitions of becoming a…
“Emotional content needs a welcoming attitude; otherwise it will remain undigested, waiting to jump out at inopportune times.” As a hungry philosopher, you can see why the above quote would resonate with me. I’ve thought about digesting yummy tastes, good-for-you food and empowering nutrition. I hadn’t thought about a range “undigested emotions” from…
Dear Readers, A confession. No. A lamentation. Recently my beloved Community Yoga, (West Lafayette, Indiana) was sued for copyright infringement based on a re-posted Hungryphil blog post. I am mortified and confused. In all my work, I aim to always attribute images and honor the work of writers, artists, and designers. I quickly learned that…
Eating meditatively takes us beyond focused sensations of the tongue. Eating becomes an expansive experience of smells, textures, coordinated movements mediated by the body and received by the mind. What would it be like to “taste” everything for the first time? Here is an excerpt from Full Catastrophe Living that explains the practice of mindful…
Yoga Rising is a collection of yoga stories about authentic practice beyond superficial projections of perfect yoga poses and bodies in media. The stories are compiled by Sociologist and Women’s Studies Professor, Melanie Klein and return us to shared struggles toward authenticity and self-study (svadyaya). I was particularly drawn to Indian-American yoga teacher Lakshmi Nair’s…
I thought back to med school, when a patient had told me that she always wore her most expensive socks to the doctor’s office, so that when she was in a patient’s gown and shoeless, the doctor would see the socks and know she was a person of substance, to be treated with respect. Kalanithi,…
According to the Happy Planet Index, Bangladesh ranks 8th among 140 countries. Just for comparison, the USA, where I live, ranks 108. How is this possible that a place plagued by a high density of population, poverty, halting traffic, uncertainty and low life expectancy be so….happy? There seems to be no reason to be happy…
My very wise for her years niece, Farah recommended I read this book by Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air, an account of his last days as a neurosurgeon, cancer patient, husband, son, father, writer and more. The urgent search for meaning is palpable in his words and reminds us that an awareness of death…
