Holistic Healing — Embracing the Practical and the Radical

“Holistic healing” typically refers mind, body, and spirit, an approach that focuses on mastering what is going on within the four walls of our body. Operating in a world in which compete and win, dominate and control are so dominant, the author offers a broader definition that includes “the practical” – effectively negotiating your place in the world, as it is – and “the radical” – being an active agent in molding the environments within which you exist.

PTSD Relief in Israel Through MDMA and Cannabis Research

Doctors come up with many reasons to avoid prescribing cannabis to their patients, including but not limited to lack of education, fear, or lack of funds. But Mimi Peleg gives examples that would have doctors giving it a second thought, mostly through her work with PTSD patients in Israel.

Cut Off from Nature: Air-Conditioned Synagogues on Rosh Hashanah

Jewish law requires that all synagogues have windows. We’re not supposed to pray in separation from the world; we’re supposed to pray with the world, conscious of its cycles, in a space that invites connection with them. Unfortunately, most authorities interpret this rule as permitting synagogues to have windows that never open.

The Color of Care in Aging America

While race, culture and religion shouldn’t affect the care provided to older adults, the reality is simple: It does. The country’s heralded melting pot is quickly becoming a complex racial stew at both ends of the nation’s caregiving spectrum: for those needing care–and for the family members and hired workers providing it.

How Solitary Confinement in Pelican Bay Prison Almost Drove Me Mad

At the age of eighteen years, four months, and six days, I was cast into the SHU where I stayed for two and half years, alone, without a window, a television, or a radio. How can I make anyone understand what it’s like to cling desperately to the hope of someday being heard because that’s the only hope left? That’s one reason why the hunger strike going on across California’s prisons matters.

The Next Time You See The Red Sea Part…

Without safe water and sanitation, we cannot curtail malnutrition, a multitude of diseases, or poverty.We cannot support sustainable farming and food security, promote girls’ education or gender equality.Not even peace can be achieved when some have and others don’t have something as basic to life as water.

Materialism and the Logic of Capitalism

Resistance to capitalism must articulate a vision, not just call for the creation of opposition institutions. A world that has no sacred aspect, a world of mere heaps of matter, is a world devoid of ethics a priori. In such a world, the word oppression is meaningless, and justice is a legal term only. If we are going to challenge oppression and injustice, we have to believe that these are real categories of action, and this demands what is today a radical assertion: people are not just collections of cells, they are real relational entities, and ethics is the ontologically valid study of how such entities can exist and thrive in harmony. Hence, the materialist determinism of Marxism, though not flat-out denied, must be balanced-Hegel wasn’t standing on his head after all. And the desperate post-Romanticism of anarchism must be reconciled with itself-the dualism inherent in it must be transcended and a unity achieved.

Gimme Shelter: (un)affordable housing

The cost of mere shelter is destroying the present of deserving people and the future of our youth, preventing our area from reaping the full benefit of motivated, educated people.
I just came back from a superb meeting on affordable housing at Sacred Heart Community Services, an agency known for practical, street-level work. Then I started talking about the issue with friends. Here are a few jolts that stuck with me:
In Silicon Valley, the greater San Jose area, the list for subsidized housing is around 40,000 names long; it would be longer, but they aren’t taking names any more, so we can’t know the true extent of need.