Self Care Shakedown: Sacred Cows
Self Care Shakedowns are not about getting all kumbaya. We are learning to ride our dragons.
Life
The Self Care Shakedown
This past Sunday Minds On Fire hosted its first Self Care Shakedown for youth development professionals. By all measures, the event was a success! We were at capacity, and all attendees brought their best selves to an afternoon of challenging internal work. The premise behind the Shakedown is that getting further along in our self care is not a matter of “doing more.” We won’t really be taking better care of ourselves if all we aspire to is to be able to go to the gym more often, meditate for longer, or get more massages. No: The self care journey is about transformation. It’s about figuring out and committing to a new way of being in the world. That’s why it’s a shakedown: We aren’t messing around here! (more…)
Youth Development
How does love inform your work?
I’ve been staring a lot of sacred cows in the eye lately, and it’s been a very productive exercise. In my last post I wrote about empowerment; today I feel like taking on the subject of love. No matter how tough our actual job situations get, youth service professionals firmly maintain our love for the work and the people we serve: “I love working with youth!” “I love my young people.” What do we actually mean by the word ‘love’? More precisely, I should ask, what do you mean when you say the word ‘love’?
There’s been a lot written around the languages of love, but that’s not what I’m referring to here. While it’s interesting to figure out whether you express love through words, action, etc., I’m trying to get at something deeper still: your very definition of ‘Iove.’ In other words, when you tell someone “I love you,” or you prepare a meal for your loved one, or you give someone a hug, what is your intention? (And please don’t say, “To show love,” because that would be circular reasoning.)
If you can’t answer this question, I suggest you take some time to put together your own personal definition of love because this is too important a term to throw around lightly. My interest in love is not born of intellectual curiosity. This has to do with practice. Knowing what you actually mean when you claim to bring love to your work has several very concrete advantages. (more…)
Youth Development
Youth “empowerment” & other sacred cows
What youth program these days does not claim to be in the business of youth empowerment? But if you pay attention to what’s actually baked into the DNA of a program, you will get a firmer grasp of an organization’s particular definition of youth empowerment, and you’ll come to understand Read more…