Community and personal development go hand in hand. While we can feel powerless to make a significant contribution to our communities, we thankfully always have the power to make a change in our personal lives. Gardening’s Powerful Effect on Personal Development Personal development can be, to say the least, pretty intense. Thankfully, it does not… Read More Taking Advantage of the Many Benefits of Gardening
The process of refining one’s character is a highly exciting one, but isn’t always easy. While there are a lot of great tools that help us along, there are also many pitfalls we can get stuck behind, such as being lenient. The Challenge with “Self-Empowerment” There seem to be a lot of self-empowering messages in… Read More The Balance of Being Kind to Yourself Without Being Lenient
I mentioned before that there are probably more good people in this world than bad ones. This is a completely unscientific statement, but I wouldn’t be surprise if a survey determined that, indeed, more people are prone to performing a kind deed rather than a bad one. How, then, can’t this majority of good people… Read More How the Selfish and the Selfless can Enter into an Unhealthy Relationship
In his attempt to rid an individual of a physical ailment, a doctor will first take stock of his symptoms, i.e. his “physical reality”. Much in the same way, those trying to rid their communities of its various ailments have to take stock of its “symptoms”, i.e. its social reality. And just like the doctor… Read More Walking a Fine Line: Understanding Negative Social Forces
Mistakes earn a bad reputation pretty early on in our lives. When we make mistakes on a test at school, it gets marked in bold red, is sometimes mentioned by the teacher as a bad thing we should not have done, and something our parents tell us not to repeat next time. This relationship with… Read More The Fear of Making Mistakes: No Such Thing as Failure
Breaking news: everyone makes mistakes. What a great thing, since mistakes are a great way to learn and to advance at all levels of our lives, be it materially, mentally, emotionally, or spiritually. The tools we need to make the most of our mistakes include the art of reflection, i.e. to analyse deeply what we… Read More Dwelling: Reflecting Without Movement
As my Instagram feed can testify, I love me a good cup of coffee. I think that there is a great culture around coffee, such as the Swedish fika or the tendency for college students to get together in coffee shops. I have made friends with not just the staff at Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue’s TWIGS café, but… Read More Coffee: From Crutch to Companion
Throughout most of my life (or at least, as far as I can remember), I have been surrounded by people who are never content with what they have achieved; they always want to do a little more, and do it a little better. I have noticed two broad sub-categories amongst such people: those who take… Read More Leggo’ Of Your Ego: The Difference between Perfectionism and Excellence
Back in 2008, I promised myself that I would live a voluntarily simple life. It’s still an on-going process, surprisingly enough; I really thought that I would be able to get a hand on it after only a year or two. The first step was really easy; there was so much in my life that… Read More Nine Years of Working Towards a Voluntarily Simple Life: Well Worth It
I have always looked at my mothers’ stretch marks with great respect. As my friends started having kids, I looked at theirs in the same way. And now that I have my own, I oftentimes stare at them in the mirror, shocked and amazed at what my body managed to do. Surprisingly enough, though, I… Read More Learning To Love Your Stretch Marks