Tagged With "California prisoners' rights"

Suffering is an expected part of this journey because resilience is a muscle that we strengthen over time and experiences. However, developing this muscle is most effective when encouraged by warm, loving, and responsive caregiving.

As I've discovered since leaving my career as a family doctor, retraining as a somatic trauma therapist, and scouring the research for 20 years - adversity of all kinds, in all phases of our lives, and in past generations influences our health. As does discrimination. Like ACEs, these 7 additional categories of adversity shape health. They increase opportunities for prevention, identify early indicators of risk, and offer more tools for healing chronic illness and other effects of trauma.

Far too many people are walking around with unhealed, hidden wounds from toxic childhood stress. For some the pain is obvious. Others might look outwardly strong, capable, and in control. However, unhealed inner wounds inevitably cause untold and needless suffering and can lead to a dizzying array of psychological, medical, and functional problems. In this three-part blog, we’ll discuss the road to recovery. This blog is Part I: The Principles of Healing. Part II will explain why traditional...

By Kristin Neff, Greater Good Magazine, June 14, 2021 How can we effectively bring about a more just world? Although it may not be obvious at first glance, self-compassion plays a key role in the quest to end sexism, racism, heterosexism, and other forms of oppression. By aiming compassion inward as well as outward, we can better confront the pain of injustice without being overwhelmed, and find the strength and energy to fight for what’s right. Self-compassion helps us cope by accepting our...

We are in a historic moment of trauma in the United States. How do we face these things fully, let in the devastation, and then both heal and act? Can we navigate through this toward healing? Toward racial, economic, and gender justice? Can we use this moment to alter the trajectory of climate change toward sustainability? Somatics and neuroscience reveal that we have inherent needs as humans—safety, belonging and dignity. We have essential material needs too, like healthy food and clean...

In a recent nightmare, 8-year-old Jovina dreamt that her father got COVID-19. He was getting sicker, but she and her mother weren’t able to get there in time. “There,” in her father’s case, is a cell at the California Correctional Center (CCC) in Susanville, California, nearly 300 miles from where she lives in San Jose. In Jovina’s mind are a swarm of worries about her father’s welfare, her mother Benee Vejar reports. If an earthquake shakes the Bay Area, Jovina says, “What if the building...

By Kassie McClung, Photo: The Frontier, Center for Health Journalism, December 6, 2021 Laughter filled the living room of Carmen and Daniel Gibson’s second-floor apartment in Tulsa as they practiced swaddling a baby doll, gently wrapping it in a white blanket. Their doula, Ashlee Wilson, sat nearby and offered advice and words of encouragement. “So, the first thing is, it doesn’t have to be perfect, right,” Wilson said as Daniel carefully crossed a corner of the blanket over the doll. “A...