May you always have enough for rent.
and enough left over for food and transportation
And your bills.
Amen.
And some just for yourself and personal needs
And some for unexpected emergencies and paid drills
And some to help those who deserve it
And enough to build your savings
The boy sits there, his head down. He feels stink; he knows all the adults are there to talk about him, about what’s wrong with him.
He’s always been told off for being so fidgety, for not paying attention. He knows it’s a bad thing.
But when the talking begins, it’s not about how to fix him. They’re telling a story about atua, the gods, and one of them sounds exactly like him! He’s called Uepoto, and he’s always curious. He’s full a mischief, a tutū.
The boy looks up.
“That’s where the healing starts, with an exchange of words,” says Poutu Puketapu, 25, a mental health worker at Gisborne service Te Kūwatawata. Only, that’s not his title here - in this space he’s a Mataora, or change-maker.
And the boy isn’t a patient, or client, or even a consumer. He is simply whānau.
“Instead of labelling them and making them feel like they are part of the mental health system, we reach them with these narratives. When they hear the pūrākau (stories) you see a little spark in them.”
Mahi a Atua is a form of narrative therapy that focuses on recovery from the trauma of colonisation. Māori creation stories are used as a form of healing, connecting alienated Māori to their whakapapa.
The pilot programme began in August last year as a response to the disproportionate mental health issues among Māori, and is backed by the Ministry of Health’s innovation fund and Hauora Tairāwhiti District Health Board.
Māori youth are two-and-a-half times more likely than non-Māori to commit suicide. Māori in general are more often underdiagnosed, and once in the mental health system are more likely to be secluded and imprisoned.
Mahi a Atua is driven by Dr Diana Kopua, an Otago University Māori health academic and clinician who is Head of Psychiatry at the DHB, and her husband Mark Kopua, a tohunga and Tā Moko practitioner.
We, as colonizers, have spent generations engaging in a project of destruction and suppression of indigenous languages and stories. We have dismissed them as mere superstition, instead of highly conserved forms of identity and epistemology. Indigenous knowledge of identity, local flora, fauna, and the Deep Time of the landscape, narratives of self-and-Other providing insight into complex ecological relationships - all these are beginning to be (grudgingly) acknowledged as not only useful, but in some sense ‘necessary’ for wellbeing.
The mythopoetic arises from gnosis - the point of contact between living environment and humanity. For indigenous peoples, I suspect the gnostic interplay stretches for hundreds if not thousands of years - or at least would have, had we not, as colonizers, attempted to break and shatter those links which ran throughout Deep Time in an effort to reduce those peoples in service to capital and authoritarianism.
Ironically, we have even had these weapons turned back upon ourselves - the colonizing peoples having their own localised and highly specific forms of knowledge destroyed or dismissed unless their narrative power could be made to serve State or Corporate Imperialism.
To quote Ursula K. Le Guin: “A writer is a person who cares what words mean, what they say, how they say it. Writers know words are their way towards truth and freedom, and so they use them with care, with thought, with fear, with delight. By using words well they strengthen their souls. Story-tellers and poets spend their lives learning that skill and art of using words well. And their words make the souls of their readers stronger, brighter, deeper.”
Long live the tales of the Maori - and their tellers!
when u scratch a cat’s chin and they lift their head up reblog if u agree
when u scratch a cat’s cheek and they lean their head into ur hand reblog if u agree
when u put your hand in front of your cat’s face and they gently headbut u reblog if u agree
when ur cat runs just a lil bit faster to get to u reblog if u agree
cats reblog if u agree
I pray that everyone who likes/reblogs this gets the job they’re looking for. 🙏🙏🙏🙏Good vibes sent 💸💸💸💸💸
social media and i have decided we're on a break. but things are heating up between me and texting - inbox me if you wanna stay in touch!! i love y'all ✌🏼
CITRINE
☀️ Known as the “Stone of Success” as it promotes directed energy and enthusiasm to overwhelming or difficult tasks.
☀️ Clears any aura of unwanted negativity, for example would be best worn when interacting around someone you have had a disagreement with or in times if tense family interactions within a home.
☀️ Citrine does not actually absorb negative energies, but merely disperses them, thus the stone is so strong and self reliant that it doesn’t actually need to be cleansed. With this, it is a wonderful stone for promoting ongoing happiness and optimism.
☀️ On the other end of the spectrum, it can be worn short-term for a quick boost in times of sadness or turmoil as a fast way to release tension and cleanse negativity, helping prevent the situation from worsening.
☀️ Enhances self acceptance, happiness and courage in social situations, while bringing a sunny, open disposition to the wearer. A powerful confidence booster that blocks thoughts of self doubt of fear.
Brown Beauty
Growing up, I was raised to always stay indoors to keep my skin from getting dark. My relatives who traveled all the way from the Philippines bring pasalubong, and I have gotten the infamous papaya whitening soap as a gift.
When I visited the Philippines, the people portrayed in media look nothing like me, and instead are replaced with the mestizos/mestizas who are pale or light skinned, and are the beauty standard. Colorism is unfortunately still a big problem, and it’s so ingrained in our culture that I’ve struggled to even be proud of being Filipino. How can I when society tries to erase my brown skin?
I dealt with a lot of self-hatred, (still kinda do) but I recently decided to change that by drawing these girls. I wanted to draw badass and confident women that I could look up to, but most of all I wanted them to look like me: Brown, Proud, and Beautiful.
So yeah, fuck whitening soap.
If you want just one (of many) valid reasons to hate how the Disney company handled the story of Pocahontas, know this:
When Pocahontas was kidnapped, she fell into a deep depression after enduring mental, physical and sexual abuse at the hands of her captors.
She was in such poor condition that her captors thought she was going to die, so they allowed her sister Mattachanna and brother-in-law Uttamattamakin to come to Jamestown to take care of her and nurse her back to health. This is when she confided to her sister that she had been raped several times (by more than one person) and believed she was pregnant. Mattachanna and Uttamattamakin were also with her when they sailed to London and were the ones who had to tell her father of her death (possible murder).
Pocahontas and Pocahontas II: Journey to a New World leave out Mattachanna entirely, but this is how they chose to depict Uttamattamakin:
Disney knew enough about this man to actually add him in a film and call him by his name (which also becomes a running joke because everybody fucks it up throughout the film), and THIS is how they portray him.
If that doesn’t make you sick to your stomach I really don’t know what will.
this. this is why I’m pissed, this shit right here. It makes me so unbelievably angry and makes me cry. I’m so sorry matoaka, so sorry they romanticized your abuse and your captors. I’m so sorry all the white girls dress up as you and defend there reasoning by saying “she’s just a disney Princess” you weren’t just a disney princess and I won’t let you be. you were a scared twelve year old child who went through things no child should ever have to go through. I will not let you be reduced to a bastardized fairytale. your real story will be heard and will not be ignored.
THIS IS MONEY CAT!! REBLOG FOR BLESSINGS AND MONEY AND SHE WILL COME THRU!!
1. Accept where you are and what you are feeling. Wherever you are and whatever you are feeling right now is okay.
2. Move your attention to something that makes you feel better. Even if you feel slightly better, it’s an improvement and it’s working.
3. Simply be aware. Become aware of your senses—feel the water when you wash your hands, enjoy the taste of the food you are eating, etc. Try meditation.
4. Appreciate what you have. Think of all the great things and people you are grateful for.
5. Acts of Kindness. Do big or tiny acts of kindness for anyone you wish, including yourself. You can write someone a poem, draw something, or just tell someone how much you appreciate them. “Remember there’s no such thing as a small act of kindness. Every act creates a ripple effect with no logical end.” —Scott Adams
You can choose to do all five of these, a few of these, or even just one of these, and it will work.
when they jonas brothers were like “i came from the year 3000..not much has changed but they live underwater..” that was a politically charged remark about climate change and we all ignored it
Can i get a step by step on how to do this?
So far for me it’s been something like:
1. Become aware of how and when you tearing yourself down.
2. Now that you can catch yourself doing it. Offer counters to the negative self talk. A really useful thing I read was to talk to yourself almost the way you would child. Gentle and patient. Even when they fuck up.
3. Take time to celebrate your small accomplishments. You’ve been attacking yourself for every little mistake. Apply that same fervor to the positive things in your life. Did the dishes even though you didn’t want to? Fuck yeah! Got up and took shower? YES!!! You are taking positive steps to feeling better. Celebrate it.
4. Make lists of things you’re good at/ like about yourself. The first time I did this the only two things in my list we’re that I liked my hair and I had good friends. It was start.
5. Don’t beat yourself up if you screw up steps 1-4. It’s counter productive. When I catch myself calling my self stupid for some mistake or other my response now is,“We don’t talk to ourselves like that anymore. What’s something constructive that could actually help solve the problem.”
Most of the time that seems to work. Not always. But more and more Everytime.
I hope any of that made sense.
oh my goodness there are instructions!!
‘“To be modern and to respect my Māori identity are one and the same thing,” Hansell tells the Guardian. “I don’t see them at the expense of one another, I don’t put them in a competitive binary: that’s a colonial mindset they sell you … indigenous people have always evolved because no one knows about being forced to adapt like we do.”’
The problem with the idea of 8 hours of work, 8 hours of sleep and 8 hours of recreation as a structure for a day is that it simply can’t work that way. If I’m expected to be at work at 9, then my work day must begin at 7. Allowing myself a rushed experience to wake up and get to work. And I live close to work. So either my recreation or my sleep needs to take a hit, but for some people it could be more. 8 hours a day, 5 days a week as a basis for full time work is honestly unreasonable at that point. Because it isn’t actually 40 hours a week, it’s 50 hours a week lost to a job, of which 10 is unpaid.
some of my coworkers have 2h of transit to get to work, which takes 4-5h off their free time. working full time is a bad idea and shouldve never been a thing
This is, it’s worth noting, by design.
It’s perfectly well known that people can only really “work” (in that they can only consistently and effectively perform tasks and create products) 3-6 hours a day, for 1 hour to 2 hours at a time. Generally speaking, the broad consensus among actual researchers is to aim for about 4 hours a day.
The rest of these work hours, and the associated sunken time necessary to get to and from these work hours, serves one purpose:
It exhausts people.
People who don’t have leisure time are stressed. People who are stressed need conveniences. People who need conveniences will pay for them.
People who are stressed also don’t have the energy to fight for their rights, having expended all that energy in just staying alive.
And let’s not forget that maintaining a clean home and providing food for yourself takes over 20 hours a week (appx 20 hours in-house, and varying hours spent running outside errands) if you are completely abled.
compassion is harder than pity, it takes more work. You can remain separate when you pity- look down from up above, you have to let something down to feel compassion. You have to accept the world is varied and different and deserves our love anyway. Pity is a poor substitute for compassion and yet something we often settle for.
To feel for someone else’s pain is not weakness, it’s the strongest damn thing we can do.
