Category: Solutions

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Barefoot Gift Cards

This is the story of  how we came up with the best local present you can give or receive this year.

 

Two years ago the owners of Witch Haven Farms decided to give back to their community by helping  struggling families grow food. The hope was to help with rising food costs, and increase nutritious food availability, variety, and security in their community.   They helped people start their own home lots, offering everything from seeds to support. The families had success in their new gardens, so much success that they had excess.

 

Witch Haven began buying the excess and offered the veggies at cost to seniors they know in neighbouring communities.  The income created even more household security and made a real difference for the families growing food.

 

People began eagerly joining the program, and success has brought the challenge of organizing and delivering all of the food.  This issue brought Witch Haven to the Ecology Action Centre’s Community Food Leadership Certificate Program.  

We fell in love with the idea and formed the Barefoot Farmers Association and work beside our community partners Shelter Nova Scotia, the Mulgrave Park Family Centre, and Sipekne’katik Food Pantry.

We all put our heads together and came up with the perfect local gift idea:

 

Barefoot Gift Cards

 

Each gift card provides twenty dollars worth of local, organic produce and eggs to a local shelter or community pantry.  This would be a great gift in itself, however this twenty dollars also provides economic growth to our Barefoot Farmers Collective, and increases food security in Nova Scotia.  

 

You see it is the perfect local gift.

 

Get yours in person at the Brewery Market on Saturday December 22, 2018

 

Order Online @

 

Facebook@BarefootFarmersAssociation

https://osberghealth.com/barefoot-farmers/

 

E-transfer @

 

barefootfa@gmail.com

 

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Writing to meditate and heal

I read a beautiful book I once named “The Artist’s Way” by Julia Cameron.  She introduced me to the practice of morning pages.  Writing three pages each morning started as just something new to try.  It began so long ago now that I have forgotten my motivation.  It would take me hours, struggling to make the words flow out of my fingers onto the page.  Most of the time it was pages of the silliest mundane drivel, anything to reach my goal.

That drivel was probably the most important stuff that I ever wrote.  Having a learning disability that makes it difficult to spell, I have always felt a lot of shame around my writing.   These morning pages were the first time I made myself use my voice in a way that was  allowed to be, and meant to be imperfect.  The goal was not to write anything in particular, what mattered was writing three pages.  What ended up happening was my first experience of listening to myself and the inner dialogue that was creating the world I lived in.

There are lies that we tell ourselves all the time: I can’t cook, I am not prepared enough, there is not enough time.  In the background noise of my pages I write down my lies.  They usually come out as blame, creating problems and self doubt.  When I see the lies on the page in front of me a different part of my brain takes over and solves, works around or flat out dismisses them.

My journey of recovery started with those first pages.  I have learned to use meditation as my daily tool for connecting my internal chorus to my awareness, but I would not have known that was possible without those pages.  If you are looking for a place to start, and especially if you have no access to professional help, try morning pages.  Three pages written everyday (within reason, some is better than none) for at least a month, looseleaf size, single spaced.  It is tough and time consuming, and so is everything else that is worth doing.  You deserve to listen to your own story. You are worth it.

 

 

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Finding peace and love in anger

I don’t have a choice but to be angry.  I have tried to quell, shove down, just flat-out deny feelings of rage and disappointment for as long as I can remember.  I was raised by angry people who believe our strength and protection comes from the armour of anger that we wear. I build my terracotta warriors, to hide the pink fleshy bits that are so vulnerable and imperfect.  Ashamed and unaccepting of my true self, I hide it away. I am afraid to see my true reflection, see others reactions to my true hideous nature. My anger is a reaction to powerlessness and the crippling reality of our flawed human nature and the limited experience of a short life.  

 

I have spent years searching for tools to rid myself of all of the excess pain that I created not loving myself.  At first I felt it would go away, if I put it on someone else. I blamed people for their roles in my pain. Even if they wanted to, they would have been unable to take the pain.  It was mine, I had to own it, feel it, learn to love it, care for it, and most importantly honour it. No one controls the times and moods of the universe, my journey has taught me to be a good navigator of all types of storms.  My pain has made me a better person.

 

So how do I learn to love and care for my anger?  I do not know how to pity anger, the way I do pain.  I keep asking the universe this question, this is what I have gotten back so far.  I need to listen to my anger because it tells me when something is wrong. It is my alert system.  It also gives me passion to fight. I was taught long ago that our actions are fueled by one of two energies, love or fear.  We can be angry from a place of love, we just can not act from fear, and expect love in return.

 

When we are angry at the world, when we are looking for a place to put our blame, we are sitting here howling at the moon.  Our actions are our experience, howling feels really good, spewing more negative into the universe does not, however, appear to be helping.  It just divides us further.

 

How can we move away from being powered by fear, and move into love?  That is the question of our time, and there is no one answer, and no right answer.  I focus on activism. I have a dream of a place where anyone can come to find and build community.  I live in a area that excels in community building, and they are teaching me how to build my dream. I am no longer waiting for someone to tell me it is okay to change my world.  For me it is not about the end result, it is about the trying.

 

Painting may work better for you, or writing.  Find something creative for that energy. We can use our anger to express ourselves creatively, to build, to solve, to try, to love.  We may never be able to fix what as angered us, we can heal by moving forward with compassion and intent.

  

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Insecurity is a lack of ethical education

I heard that quote this week, and found it incredibly powerful.

We are taught our morals and values  Families and cultures create and rely on its members being socialized, have a degree of “common knowledge” on how to respectfully and reverently act in the world.  When we act in the world, these actions fall in or out the rule sets we are given. Rule breaking is required in life and it always has consequences, some good, some bad, some meh, but if risk is not involved we are not breaking any rules.  We need this risk, without it there is little change, growth, and adaptation. Cultures would stagnate and not adapt to the world at large without making constant adjustments, tweaking norms and values.

I have taken many of my culture’s, religious, and familial values and created personal ones: joy, kindness, vitality, clarity, structure, dependability, emotional presence, accountability, understanding of personal bias and perspective, plus many many more.  When my actions are not aligned with my values I begin to damage my relationship with myself. I judge myself for letting myself down. The less my actions are connected to my values, the harder it is to recover my relationship with myself. This creates the internal insecurity that cause my anxiety and depression.

To relieve the pressures of insecurity we need to slow down and focus our attention on the behaviour at hand.  We need to educate ourselves to the constant micro ethical choices we make. This is how mindfulness works to relieve mood dysregulation.  Regardless if the behavior is writing, cleaning or thinking, the more we can align it to our values (I do the laundry because it needs to be done, I do it with love because it helps me be emotionally present) the more it has purpose.  The greater the purpose we have in our lives the more resilience we have.

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Building Our Scaffolding

We have relied on billions of people over time to create the technology and compile the information for us to be in this place and this time.  

The tools that we have to sculpt our lives and share our experiences are profoundly powerful. Still, we need the support of people and institutions as scaffolding, to build breathtaking works of life.  

We are interlaced, our future depends on supporting each other.

Support is being accepted for who you are, by people who believe that you are the most qualified person to make decisions about your life.  

Support does not create change, it can only allow room for it.

We need those people.

We need to be those people.

We must understand that we are our foundation for everything. We can not find ourselves in others’ eyes or in far away places.  

We must accept ourselves as and where we are.

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What Yin Yoga taught me about goal setting.

There’s a practice in yoga called yin,  for those unfamiliar with it, it is what I remember as  yoga from my childhood in the 70s. We get in poses that stretch our body and we stay there from three to five minutes.  The point of the exercise is to let our joints, tendons and fascia tissue relax and stretch creating flexibility.   We who have had the experience of sitting uncomfortably for any length of time will be able to attest to the human’s ability to  not notice discomfort initially. As time wears on, our foot may become numb or our knee strained, it becomes harder and harder to sit still.   So when we practice Yin, we keep that in mind and we seek our edge. Our edge is not the farthest we can go,  it is enough that we feel sensation and still maintain the pose for an extended period of time.   Through the practice our edge may change, we might be able to go a little deeper into the pose we may need to pull back.

Creating wellness requires us to look at the changes we need to make as Yin poses, rather than s.m.a.r.t. (specific, attainable, measurable, realistic, timely) goals.  It is tempting to get fixated on numbers whether they be zeros in a bank account, or numbers on a scale. Living is a process that does not end when we reach our savings goal or ideal weight.  The goal is to make maintainable changes; those changes create wellness. It is effective to use minimums as achievement  standards. Now my minimum for yoga is three times a week, when I began it was one.   

The reality is that changing habits and building mental wellness requires a number of different tactics motivations and work styles.   I loved taking summer courses in university.  The fast pace in the immersion in to the material was ideal for the way that I  learn.   I like feeling I am swimming in  the subject when I’m learning about something new. If it is a subject that I am not interested in however,  I  need to learn in small chunks and then take time to process.

In our endeavor to find best practices is important to keep in mind that any best practice won’t be best for every situation.    

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The Beginning

Why are you here?   What questions do you have in your life that you came here searching for answers?  Are you here for yourself? Are you here for somebody else? If you are here for somebody else, you cannot answer the question for them.   Mental Wellness is not a gift that can be given, it is something that must be earned. Perhaps you do not know what the questions are yet.  Perhaps that is why you are here, you are looking for your questions. No matter where we come from this is where we all start.

You may want to exercise, make more money, and be healthier for your family.  You may want to enhance performance and control anxiety. You may be looking for ways to adapt to a mental health diagnosis, or recover from trauma.  That question, why are you here, that is your seed. That seed contains your experiences, resources, your support networks, but more importantly it contains all of your potential.   I quite like using seed as a metaphor, it makes a great acronym too, success explored exposes development. New endeavors are all so diverse and have unique needs. They each require a great deal of different things in order to grow.   

Now we have our seed, to stay with our analogy, and we need to look and see where we are going to plant it.  If you work, commute, have children, a spouse, maybe some, maybe none, and then have to manage to consistently keep everybody alive, you will have to be creative about how you find time.  I like to set minimum goals, we will talk more about why in next week’s post. A minimum goal is the absolute minimum time you know you will be able to devote. It is how much you have to do in order to know that you are making consistent progress, and challenging yourself.  We can always do more. I give myself virtual achievement points for each yoga class over three I take a week, when I started it was one class a week.

This is where we begin to build our foundation, on consistent progress.  It is from here that we can gauge how to plan for our next phase. Imagine now jumping ahead in time, your seed is grown, what does that look like, feel like, try to make it as vivid as possible, using all of your senses. Now jump ahead in time again, it is three years later, imagine how it has changed. Try to experience as much detail as your imagination will let you.  How do you feel about your imagined path now that you are back at the beginning?

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Current Event Anxiety “How do I fix all the problems of the world?”

Current events are waves crashing on the shore.  They are not being born, they are finishing their journey.   Waves are born long before they hit the shore. They also do not remain with the chaos that they brought.  They come, they make their changes, and then they vanish into the vast ocean to bring life to the next one.

While  working with a client this week about anxiety around current events,  I have tried to come up with an analogy that is uncomplicated. This has proven difficult since the issues surrounding us are incredibly complicated.  Very few of us limit media, including social, and news, leaving us consuming unfiltered amounts of global suffering. Every moment and event happening in the world today is its own little whitecap.  Creating, as it crashes, its own beautiful or not so beautiful chaos.

The things that are going on around us at this very moment are the results of all of the ripples in time.  The results of all the events through time interacting with each other, constantly creating breakers, cascades of new beginnings.   Hurtling through the universe, on a rock that can wipe us all out with one big burp we, at sometime, realize how small and fragile we are.  How we feel about this information will be complicated and different for each of us. Some of us will despair for our lack of control, some of us will feel relief for our lack of ownership.  We may choose to endeavor to find what we are responsible for, we may proclaim the futility of it all. How we choose to feel, to act, to react, to all that is outside of your control, greatly determines how we experience the chaos of the universe.  

I have chosen to try, as much as a person can, to enjoy the waves. Sometimes it is a lot easier than others, thankfully I have a tribe who lets me be myself.   We may not agree with each other in all things, but we believe in each other, offer support in both attempting new things in the world, and providing a safe place to land when things are rough.  We need it all to have a full and rich life.

This is your journey, your ship, you are the captain of your life, set your course and ride your waves.

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Why we do what we do.

“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”

― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

Why do we do what we do?  

From when we are born, until we die, we are guided by the lessons learned from our ancestors.  Most everything from birth to death has been thought about by parents and other humans  all trying to figure out the “best” way to do things. Not to put too fine a point on this, but we do an exorbitant number of things.  The people who raised us, the community, and geographic region where we were raised became our normal.  It has greatly determined what we eat, how we eat, how we dress, how we bathe, how we work, what we consider work, how we think about and bond with family members.   At that moment in time we were born our perception normal and our incredibly unique journey began.    

Our normal are the events that happen at least 80% of the time.  The behaviour and social norms of our immediate family, community, and geographic region we observe most of the time, is what our brains learn to expect from the world. This communal knowledge helps us interact within our social group, one of our most basic of human needs, and it is also where we generate our rules.  We as humans are very rule driven, they help us find security in a chaotic world, they also limit us when they are not based in necessity.  We need to learn to apply as much critical thinking to our rules, as we do judgement to people not following them.  The following is a story that I have seen many versions of,  it is a modern parable which shares great, small wisdoms.

“One day after school a young girl noticed that her mom was cutting off the ends of a pot roast before putting it in the oven to cook for dinner. She had seen her mom do this many times before but had never asked her why. So this time she asked and her mom replied, I don’t know why I cut the ends off, but it’s what my mom always did. Why don’t you ask your Grandma? The mom may have said this because she didn’t think she had the time to think about it. Which is always a mistake. We always have time to think. We just think we don’t.

So the young girl called her grandmother on the phone and said, Grandma why do you cut the ends off the pot roast before cooking it? Her grandmother replied, I don’t know. That’s just the way my mom always cooked it. Why don’t you ask her? . So, undeterred, the girl called her great grandmother, who was living in a nursing home and asked her the same question – why did you cut the ends off the pot roast before cooking it? …And her great grandmother did not reply “I cut off the ends of the pot roast because that’s what my mother did.”

And she did not say because it makes the meat juicier. She said, when I was first married we had a very small oven, and the pot roast didn’t fit in the oven unless I cut the ends off.”

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/thinking-makes-it-so/201402/the-pot-roast-principle

I love exploring the journeys that happen between the beginning of the universe and the ends of pot roast.  We can begin to take a lot of pressure off of ourselves if we decide to make our choices consciously, it takes some effort in the beginning, the payoff is a life lived authentically.   

It is not even necessarily changing what you are doing, just why you are doing it.  When next we do anything, try to drill down every reason behind the action. Having a drink? Why did you pick that drink? When were you introduced to this beverage? What memories do you have drinking this beverage?  Are you thirsty? Why are you thirsty?  You can see how this can lead you down a bit of a rabbit hole, but that is how we find those pot roast ends.  So if you are drinking something because you are thirsty, it is your favorite, and brings feelings of satisfaction *cheers.*  If not, perhaps you have some pot roast ends to find.  

Have fun out there!