April 2012
8 posts
“But when it comes to the way we relate to each other, I wonder if we could commit more to giving people with mental health issues the respect they deserve – recognize the bravery it takes for some people to make it to class at all, rather than assume laziness or a hangover when they’re not there. There are larger structural and administrative issues at play, but I think we underestimate the importance of the way we have this conversation with each other and with ourselves. In an environment where the expectation is of constant perfection, the drive to do better, be better, try harder has immense potential to wreak havoc on our mental health. Telling a classmate or a friend who is struggling that they should’ve known better or tried harder is perhaps the least helpful thing we can do to address this culture. Perhaps, instead, we could refuse to normalize anxiety and depression as the price of admission to this school, and insist on creating an environment where feeling like hell is not a given.”
—http://www.thestrand.ca/editorial/don-t-tell-me-to-try-harder
http://www.scribd.com/doc/17126789/Buddha-Karen-Armstrong#download
he was convinced that it was his attachment to things and people which bound himto an existence that seemed mired in pain and sorrow
From the very earliest times, men and women devisedreligions to help them cultivate a sense that our existence has some ultimate meaning and value,despite the dispiriting evidence to the contrary. But sometimes the myths and practices of faithseem incredible. People then turn to other methods of transcending the sufferings and frustrationsof daily life: to art, music, sex, drugs, sport or philosophy. We are beings who fall very easilyinto despair, and we have to work very hard to create within ourselves a conviction that life isgood, even though all around us we see pain, cruelty, sickness and injustice.
The new religious systems that emerged during this period—Taoism and Confucianism in China, Buddhism and Hinduism in India, monotheism inIran and the Middle East, and Greek rationalism in Europe— all shared fundamentalcharacteristics beneath their obvious differences
but in almost every culture, themyth of this primal concord showed that human beings continued to yearn for a peace andwholeness that they felt to be the proper state of humanity. They experienced the dawning of self-consciousness as a painful fall from grace.
It is only when people becomeaware of the inescapable reality of pain that they can begin to become fully human. The story intheNidana Kathais symbolic and has universal impact, because unawakened men and womenall try to deny the suffering of life and pretend that it has nothing to do with them. Such denial isnot only futile (because nobody is immune to pain and these facts of life will always break in), but also dangerous, because it imprisons people in a delusion that precludes spiritual development
Even if the familiar is unsatisfactory, we tend to cling to it because we areafraid of the unknown
“
Loss of inhibition is crucial to your success tonight, okay?
Alcohol has been a social lubricant for thousands of years.
You think you’re gonna sit here tonight and reinvent the wheel? Please.
” —roger dodger
“
The old have always complained about the young, of course. But this new explanation based on developmental timing elegantly accounts for the paradoxes of our particular crop of adolescents.
There do seem to be many young adults who are enormously smart and knowledgeable but directionless, who are enthusiastic and exuberant but unable to commit to a particular kind of work or a particular love until well into their 20s or 30s. And there is the graver case of children who are faced with the uncompromising reality of the drive for sex, power and respect, without the expertise and impulse control it takes to ward off unwanted pregnancy or violence.
” —http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203806504577181351486558984.html
what’s wrong with the teenage mind
