February 5, 2012

Taking Care of the Whole of You

Female embodiment has evolved grossly from the turn of the twentieth century and yet some facets of female personality and potential have remained the same. Women are silly, inspired, paranoid, lovable, insecure, ambitious, romantic, fascinating, we boring; the circumference of what it means to be human. In acknowledging the various components of our physical, emotional, and spiritual existence, we are equipping ourselves with the tools to take care of our whole selves.

It’s important to keep a journal. Go ahead and spit out advice even if unsolicited if you deem it appropriate or constructive, and utilize your gift of language to achieve and share freedom. Each of us manifest these entities in different ways based on our unique circumstances, resources, goals, and agendas and this variety is truly the spice of life. We eat, we move, we cry, and we seek guidance from friends and family and even from strangers in order to reveal the truth about our lives and how we should and can live them.

From doctors to therapists and cousins to life-long girlfriends, there are people who care to find out not only what is going on in your life but how it makes you feel. Our physical, emotional, and spiritual beings are encompassed by overlapping realities that all need nurture, attention, and treatment. The truth is, we need to care about ourselves enough to remain loyal to the non-toxic people and environments in our lives in order to truly take care of our hearts, bodies, and minds.

Seeking outside help has often been stigmatized to equate with weakness, but on the contrary, only the wise accept that we cannot always be everything we or others need and reaching out a hand is a sign of courage. Whether it’s a book on the shelf or an appointment with a trusted professional, there are resources available to help you see yourself clearly in order to take care of yourself even better than you thought you could.

Enhanced by Zemanta

Learning from and with Others

Collaborative learning is not a manipulative process for which teachers seek a uniformed resolution, devoid of contrasting ideas or individual contributions. On the contrary, internalized thought, molded into a beautiful hybrid of inner meanderings and sentiments from our external communities, finds itself translated into conversations with parallel beings (fellow learners and collaborative learning participants, specifically) which breeds inventive, innovative, and curious thought. Learners, such as ESL students, bring to their individual experience and the collective language learning experience, both a personal and global view of the world in which we coexist.
Teaching learners from different scholastic, cultural, religious, and psychological backgrounds and experiences has enriched the lives of instructors as well as fellow humans who continually delve into questions about how humans think and communicate. Whether you are teaching a class on speech and debate, or composition, or pronunciation, etc., the foundational pre-texts that guide instruction are those that lead this influential fixtures to approach each student as an individual as they partake in a collaborative learning process.
Each idea, whether it is voiced or written, or perhaps silenced by anxiety or apprehension within the mind of the learner (or instructor), is a valuable instrument in the learning process that takes place around us. Each thought, whether shared or locked away, in some shape or form, affected the disposition of its participants, may find its place among the entanglement that is social interaction, even in an academic setting.
As structuralists believe, deducing what something is NOT says something about what it is. In a similar way, conversations that take place both in and outside of our minds have reactionary qualities that never cease to argue for and against new ideas. These ideas may have been directly stated in interrogative or declarative forms or they may have been created out of a strong reaction to another set of ideas that we didn’t know we had ourselves. Drawing from experience and past resolutions on how to organize, file, and make sense of our cognitive processes is always occurring in both internal and external conversation.

Enhanced by Zemanta