Rather than train your mind to forget, you need to remember, but in a way that is healthy. And to do this, you need these 10 pillars of social support.
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1. Reading or listening to history. The value which historians add to our lives is that they make us feel less alone by explaining the world in which events took place.
2. Education: (not simply schooling) Education is supposed to help us read the world. Any educator who polices knowledge, who uses fear, rather than discussion, is toxic for you.
3. Therapy: counselling helps you to remember in a way that doesn't make you destroy yourself
4. Sports, exercise, dance and recreation: they give your body something else to spend your energy, so that you don't destroy your body with the toxins of worry.
5. Natural wonders: Mother Nature is the environmental equivalent of history. She hugs us with her beautiful green hands, she caresses us with the wind, and hums to us with flowing water and crushing waves, to remind us that we are part of the universe and that we matter.
6. The performing arts: watching and listening to theater and music helps you suspend your mind. Fiction helps our minds suspend reality. The Greeks called the therapeutic function of art "catharsis."
7. Spending time with others and participating in rituals to celebrate milestones - what we are taught is called "rites of passage"
8. Seeking medical attention. Sometimes your pain needs to be medically mediated
9. Spirituality - remembering that God and ancestors are still part of this world
9. Spirituality - remembering that God and ancestors are still part of this world
10. JUSTICE - justice is more than simply taking people to court. Justice is society saying that all of us, together, acknowledge your pain, and we will replace the institutions, and practices that facilitated the people who caused that pain, and
hold people responsible for their actions, so that the injustice never happens again. This a recurring promise to fulfill, not a once and for all one.
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Now you can see why we keep saying that resources for health, recreation and education are what a proper government is supposed to provide.
Now you can see why we keep saying that resources for health, recreation and education are what a proper government is supposed to provide.
Stay healthy. And fight those who deny us the resources to stay healthy, and use force to break our efforts to be healthy. Amnesia is not healthy.
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