Gratitude

Grateful am I for ...

Simple pleasures: morning coffee, feeding my goats, hugging my partner
Friendships: on-line and in person, amazingly in the middle of a worldwide pandemic to boot
Gravity: yep, keeps my feet on mother earth, maybe your's too?
Water, Air, Earth, Fire: and all the scientific discoveries which have led us further than the bounds of our own finite understanding of elemental causes.
Freedom: as limited as human freedom actually is, I can think of times in my life when I was less free than I am now. I can imagine things not being free. Freedom at an existential level can be overwhelming if Fromm and Sartre got anything correct in their theories of human freedom.

Maybe I should be more grateful for other things. I am. Just as I can also be grateful for the fact that I don't have to count all blessings to be blessed. It's okay to forget here and there, even important things, and I'm super grateful I don't have to demand perfection of myself any longer...even on the days that I think I can still pull off this impossible feat.

Comments

1-28 of 104 Rational Maxims to Control Anxious Thinking

Dr. Albert Ellis: 104 Rational Maxims to Control My anxiousThinking . Copied from How To Control Your Anxiety Before It Controls You (pages 190-205) Minimizing my absolutistic musts, shoulds, aughts, and demands and the irrational beliefs that go with them 1. I will watch my unconditional, absolutistic musts and change them into strong preferences, such as "I would very much like to do well and be approved by others, but I don't have to do so and my worth as a person doesn't depend on doing anything!" 2. I will watch my overgeneralizations and make them more concrete: "If I fail at something important, I won't always fail and may frequently succeed." 3. I will watch my awfulizing. "It's bad to lose out on something I really want, but it's not awful or horrible. There's a good chance I'll get it later, but if I never do, it is just very dep...

Katherine Stewart's "The Good News Club"

Put on your to-read list. I could not believe all the connections between organizations that I'm familiar with! For me, as interesting as the CEF's Good News Clubs are, most interesting are the connections of the heavy hitter "Christian Nationalists" behind the story of the Good News Clubs and especially the fall out of the US Supreme Court's ruling in Good News Clubs v. Milford Central School (2001). Page 251- 252, does not mention ACE, but it reads: "The campaign to remove children from public schools is quickly gathering steam. A substantial number of fundamentalist parents have already cast their votes silently, by bringing their children home. Between 1999 and 2007, homeschooling shot up by 74 percent, to over 1.5 million children, representing approximately 3 percent of all school-age children in the United States--a figure that is undoubtedly higher today. The largest part of that growth came from pare...

I am

A copy of a post to my fellow gay fathers who journey with me. -------------------- Hello all. I'm doing pretty well. My partner is facing a concerning cancer diagnosis, and I keep doing my own internal work. I like to do exercises that spur my internal growth. Here is one that I found challenging and perhaps even helpful after taking some defenses down. I'd put the book down for a good while, and perhaps Blackwolf & Gina Jones' ideas on internal growth are not for all, but I felt a sense of triumph this morning, as I did some re-framing. In-spite of wading through considerable non-sense, I did tap into something that is real for me. (I tend not to read in this specific spiritual pop psychology genre. Far too often, for me, it has side-tracked me from facing reality as it is, and perhaps old mis-guided attempts at self-improvement did have a net benefit of helping me figure some things out. For my own reasons, harder sciences, better researched ideas, satisfy...

Water...

Search This Blog