Give Us Your Good Advice

Back in Middle School, someone on the yearbook committee wrote that my future profession was going to be 'Peace Activist.' At the time it seemed pretty weak considering one of my best buddies was written in to be a much cooler sounding 'Tattoo Artist.'

These both seemed highly unlikely at the time, albeit interesting. The facts remain however. I am a social work student and case manager for a housing program for homeless folks and that friend of mine turned out to be an acupuncturist. Ha. I realize they are not the same things but along the same lines, perhaps. 

The point is, what is it that propels any of us through our barriers to make use of opportunities that come our way?

Rollins has a good story about a choice he made and what happened because of it.

 

Baz has lots of advice on what to do, how and why. It's set to pretty music and have nice imagery.

 

This Oriah poem is one I have posted printed before. Here is a new version of it. I don't need to really know if you will get up in the middle of the night to help the children, but I think it's a good thing for all of us to ask ourselves. 

What are we willing to do? How committed to ourselves, our goals are we? If you are reading this, these are questions for you. What makes you stick with what you are working on?

It's time for a National Intervention

Have you ever wondered what you could to help take action against corporate greed?

National Intervention is a campaign for this purpose. These are some of the basic understandings of this campaign:

 

- Understanding that corporations are not people

- Money is not speech

- Only publically funded elections are not corrupted by moneyed    interests 

 

The focus is to view corporate greed through the lens of an addictive lens and treat it as one would treat someone suffering from an addiction.

This morning I had the good fortune to be tuned in to KBOO, a Community Radio station out of Portland, OR. This morning,  Executive Director, Scott Silber of National Intervention was giving an interview with the radio staff. Mr. Silber sums up the campaign:

"Understanding each of our roles in the addiction system, choosing what our own relationship to those addicted to corporate power will be, that any of this no-brainer amendment work is a sobriety checkpoint and that an intervention is our best chance at banding together for recovery before it's too late."

I am also adding a video that is also on the  National Intervention website because it's important and videos bring it home in a way words might not.

Please friend the Intervention on facebook and follow them on twitter and give support in any other way you are able because the cause is worthy and talk is cheap but campaigns are not.

Self Care: Not Just a Platitude

It was a simple training day today at work. We were going over company policies, programs, protocol while also doing some indirect team-building.

I was asked to give a short "something" about self care and when I told my partner (boyfriend) of nearly two years this, he laughed out loud. Humpf. He was laughing at the irony of me teaching a class on Self Care. The nerve. However, he has a point. I am not great at it. Self care is a moving target and sometimes I can't seem to catch up with it. Maybe next week I will get to that stuff. Meanwhile, there are important things to take care of. Or are there?

Case in point, last week when I came down with a cold and instead of cancelling THIS, I went anyway and then pranced around SF for a couple days, turning in my first paper for the semester from my hotel room while coughing and taking both Albuterol and Alka Seltzer Plus cold to function properly.

Needless to say, right after our training day today, I hopped over to the clinic where my practitioner told me, "You have another sinus infection." I knew I needed an antibiotic because the medicine I had been taking wasn't doing anything anymore. I was still weak, shaky and cloudy-brained.

I asked him what I could do to stop showing up in his office with this same story. He works in a clinic and he sees all kinds so I figure by default he must be some kind of Allopathic ninja. Surely he has some secret he can tell me, something revolutionary that will change how I operate. He shrugs and says, "Some people are more prone to these things but eating right and exercising and taking good care of yourself can't hurt." 

So self care. It is the image of the flight attendant telling you to put the oxygen mask on oneself before putting it on your kid. It is knowing you can't transmit something you haven't got. The irony of my teaching this self care section of the staff training today was to highlight my own weak spots and in so doing, letting me revisit how they can be strengthened. 

Self care seems like it might be selfish but it is the selfish one who runs themselves ragged because they are of no use to others. Hopefully with this public announcement (humiliation) I will begin to change my ways. I will keep you posted.