Tag: mindfullness

You are sitting on a bench at your local playground. It’s sunny (despite Michigan’s temperamental weather). Your gaze begins to wander and settles on children climbing. They are climbing everywhere. It’s amazing, actually, how many things children can climb on. You further notice how they run, walk, slide down slides, play tag, squeal with delight on swings. Toddlers trundle off in a big, new-to-them world. They seem to take up space with ease; it’s their world, we’re just living in it. They are so sure that they belong wherever they go. Do you have this scene? For me, this imagined space invites lots of emotions: joy, wonder, delight, curiosity, and sadness. Yes, sadness. Because I, as an adult, have a harder time feeling so present and excited and happy and confident of belonging. I have more awareness and more to my story as to why these emotions make sense for me.

What is play, and why does it make sense for all humans of ...

Recent decades have seen an increasing interest in the healing and therapeutic potential of nature and the perspective of various nature-based interventions for the benefit of mental health. The field of nature-based therapies is expanding in line with this interest. During the formative years of modern psychotherapy, several psychotherapists had a close, loving relationship with nature and who had contributed in some ways to the formation of nature therapy. One of them was Carl Jung, a renowned Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who was one of the first people in the field of mental health to voice concerns about the separation of men and nature. C. Jung believed that a modern man was in danger of losing all contact with the world of instinct, increased by his living an urban existence and separation from nature. Jung wrote in his diaries that the loss of instinct is largely responsible for the pathological condition of contem ...

Low battery! The alert pops up on your phone after you have been scrolling Facebook, Instagram, Tik Tok, and the many different social media platforms. You may have intended to only spend 5 minutes scrolling which has turned into 15 minutes and then to an hour. You look up at the time and realize how long you have spent scrolling.

You may feel drained from scrolling and seeing all the different things that the people you follow are doing while you watched from a screen. You may feel unplugged from the world you are living in and in the world that social media is sharing with you. You might suffer from FOMO (fear of missing out) or get jealous of the things that other people are doing. It is easy to start comparing our lives to others while scrolling. Most of what we see on social media is
created and not the reality of the people on the other side of the phone. We realize that we have been staring at our screens for hours on end. When ...