Allison Bailey was one of my best friends. She died very suddenly on December 29, 2018 only 6 months ago. Recently I realized just how important our shared idea was, that she called Resource Community. Today I’m bringing the pieces together, in the name of her legacy and creating something that would have met a profound need for both of us.
Continue reading “Mapping Allison’s Wonderland”
Here is the original design of the interactive community map tool that would later evolve into Resource Community, a collaborative map website co-founded by myself and my close friend Allison Bailey. Find the full Color & Icon Key below.
Everything starts with the first of many.
Below is my comment response to the video – Interview on Meaning, Masculinity and Responsibility with Neil Smedley & Iman Amrani of The Guardian.
The greatest flaw in focus on “success” is that it distracts us from a proper focus on character. A person of great character who lives through tragedy and failure, especially outside of his own control, is an important story. Too many people get attached to the success story and don’t bother to consider the character of the person they follow. And if some of those people get far enough down that path to discover it has no rooted meaning, that can be a real existential crisis.
One of the best people I met aimed to get as much of his resources as possible from within his own being. And after all the ways my life has been dragged through the mud due to others being unstable and unreliable, I really have no interest in the success story, especially from people who don’t understand sorrow, anger, grief- the reactions to tragedy and evil. With yin and yang, if you blind yourself to the dark parts of the world and life, you’re missing an integral half of the recipe for meaning and purpose.
After losing everything, all I have left is the proof of my character, the fact that I survived, and the chance to start over again.
SUMMARY
Intrinsic Abundance is the belief that wealth and poverty are best defined by the needs of Self-Determination. Current definitions of wealth and poverty are extrinsic based on physical resources. The Materialist Fallacy is the belief that attaining more money or resources automatically or intrinsically equates to greater quality of life, wealth, abundance, or personal liberation. Intrinsic Abundance, by contrast, puts Self-Determination as the foundation of abundance, and shows that ego-death is a natural companion path to Self-Determination.
Continue reading “Intrinsic Abundance: Defining Wealth & Poverty by Self-Determination”
I see many people with trauma respond to that pent up energy by funneling it into an ideology that makes them feel safe and comfortable. There is politicization of trauma today, and in the words of Marshall Rosenberg (nonviolent communication), this is a “tragic expression of unmet needs, tragic because it is said in the way that makes it unlikely others will want to or be able to meet those needs.”
Continue reading “When Trauma Becomes Political”
When you discover how difficult some things can be, how crippling and how Deep Dark, that’s when you believe what you thought was powerful is all a sham. But sometimes it’s just showing you why something is really powerful. Get used to the dark. What’s powerful is not always light, the light could be a crutch. What’s powerful is allowing you to live in the dark, and transmute it on your own.
That is the path to self-determination.
Art: “Learning to live with the noises” by Hoopoe Aftonmåne
What happens when doctors ignore trauma? A minor tendon strain can deteriorate into a severe broken arm in a matter of 5 days if doctors ignore the red flags. And this doesn’t even count for the severity of trauma that occurs during this time, and is even emboldened by the negligence.
Recently I’ve been awoken to the depth of profound medical ignorance. This is an urgent call to take trauma seriously in medical care and beyond. Here’s the nutshell; I’m turning this disaster into a case study. Let the story begin.
Continue reading “How Traditional Medicine Fails to Address Emergency Trauma”
Polyvagal Theory has popped up as the unifying theory of the nervous system and trauma after about 60 years of discovery and treatments such as Somatic Experiencing. The best thing he says in this whole speech is at 19:05 –
