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Newsletter The Listening Post News for January, February, March & April 2008 Listening Hears the Call for a Greener Future: Nurturing Community and Environmental Health: by Jocelyn Langer For the past eight years, Listening has been committed to increasing the well-being of the community. In the coming year we will be furthering this commitment through investing in environmentally sustainable improvements in our facilities and programs. A growing movement of healthcare institutions and environmentalists are working toward “Green Health Care”, recognizing that human health and the environment are inextricably linked. At Listening, we are bringing this movement to a local level. Green Health Care is “medicine that is good for people and the environment. Based on three aspects – working in green buildings, advocating for a healthy environment and practicing medicine sustainably – Green Health Care offers a vision of the future for a sustainable, just health care system.” (Kreisberg, bioneers.org). In order to be truly committed to promoting health, we must include environmental health in our vision. The Green Health Care movement provides practical steps for integrating this philosophy with action. The Green Guide for Healthcare (2006) includes the following practical steps toward creating greener healthcare facilities: water conservation, energy efficiency, recycled materials, low-emitting materials, alternative transportation, reduced waste, and local and organic food use. At Listening, we will be taking several of these steps in 2008. We have received a generous and exciting donation to complete our Yoga Studio bathroom, and we are working to include a composting toilet system as a sensible step toward responsible waste management. In addition, we will be replacing drafty windows in our main building and winterizing to reduce our consumption of heating fuel. The Joy of Giving: Shoppers support the local economy and global Fair Trade Robin St. Germain opened her shop, The Joy of Giving at Listening in the summer of 2007. One of her goals was to create a venue where Fair Trade goods from all over the world would be accessible to Central MA customers. Robin says, “I dislike the Mall experience. My goal was to offer a smaller, more personal shopping experience that offers an eclectic collection of goods and will satisfy a shopper who is looking for that one-of-a-kind item. Opening The Joy of Giving offered me the opportunity to interact with peoples from different cultures and bring their goods to people in my local area.” Products at The Joy of Giving come from sources around the world, including Pottery from Poland, Dhurries from India, textiles from Bali and a variety of goods from local artisans. True to her goal, Robin’s products are Fair Trade, which is a global network linking disadvantaged producers with Fair Trade Organizations. Fair Trade Organizations provide an opportunity to end poverty and hunger for families, where women and men are equally valued and paid for their work. “This is important to me because I have peace of mind knowing that the products I sell help to generate income to women and children in less advantaged countries, and provide education and healthcare that might otherwise be unavailable,” says Robin. Stop by the Joy of Giving Thursdays through Sundays, 10:00am—6:00pm, and keep an eye out for Fair Trade teas and coffees coming soon! Visit www.fairtradefederation.org to read more about Fair Trade. In the Spotlight: Listening Welcomes Barbara Weinberg Listening is happy to introduce a new acupuncturist to the community. Barbara Weinberg is a Five Element acupuncturist who will be working with Dedie, seeing her clients on Fridays at Listening. After much thought, Dedie has decided to cut back on her own work schedule at Listening. She will continue to see patients every Wednesday at Listening, and Barbara will work at Listening on Fridays. Dedie will continue to work closely with Barbara to ensure that treatments are consistent and maintain continuity. New clients will benefit from diagnosis from both practitioners. Listening is pleased that Barbara practices with the same philosophy and training that is already familiar to its acupuncture clients. Born in Switzerland, Barbara Weinberg, Lic.Ac, RN came to North America in the early 1970’s to study Healing Arts. During the 80’s and 90’s she worked in Community and Maternal & Child Health. She currently provides acupuncture to people of all ages with a range of health issues in private, hospital and community settings. Barbara is an experienced group facilitator, a practitioner of meditation and Qi Gong and enjoys playing outdoors. She divides her time between the woods of Western Massachusetts and the open sky of Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia.
Coming Home To Ourselves: Mindfulness and Psychotherapy by Laura Fasano, MA , LMHC Mindfulness is simply being aware of where your attention is from one moment to the next, with gentle acceptance. Nothing is rejected. Mindfulness is mostly experiential and nonverbal ( i.e., sensory, somatic, intuitive, emotional) and is developed through practice. Psychotherapy informed by mindfulness uses present moment awareness as the primary vehicle to investigate into the source of one’s suffering. In this therapeutic approach, a basic assumption is that we are fundamentally whole. Dis-ease is seen as a separation from this wholeness. Tensions created by this internal split may manifest as disease in one or more realms of our being: physical, mental, emotional and spiritual. People often come to my office with a simple wish to feel better. In this desire to feel better, our inclination is to push our difficult experience away. Isn’t this seen as normal? Indeed, we all want to avoid pain. Yet this very act of unwittingly cutting parts of ourselves off is what exacerbates the problem. We split off from our original wholeness because, in our innocence, we don’t know any other way. Using mindfulness as a “solution” to our perceived problems, then, is to stop running and to look directly into the heart of the matter. Through quieting the mind and feeling into the body we can begin to discover those split off places and therefore, quite naturally, begin to heal them. Psychotherapy informed by mindfulness is a process of letting go with awareness into the yet revealed truth of one’s experience. This may sound simple, but it is not necessarily easy. Letting go into the unfamiliar can be difficult. What we encounter on the journey inward is the fear, rage, grief, etc., that was too much to feel when it happened. The journey of coming home to ourselves necessitates becoming intimate with these unfelt emotions. So, why would we go here, to the places we’d rather not face? What usually happens is that the opportunity catches up with us! Life becomes unbearably difficult, painful, or simply unsatisfying. When this happens, we have two options: to either wake up or go to sleep. To take the inner journey, or numb out. If we choose to take this inner journey and explore our repressed feelings within the safety of the therapeutic connection, all the way back to the source of our pain and fear, we can heal. Our sense of who we are expands, and we feel more alive and engaged with the world. Learning from all experience, life becomes the great adventure.
Please see our Workshops, Events & Classes page for more information about special events coming up this Fall & Winter at Listening. Also, don't miss the Barre Film Series page for information about this series of documentaries about troubling issues at home and abroad. To receive convenient e-mail updates about events at Listening, join our mailing list below:
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