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Energy and Good Health
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Mary Pipher |
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Breathing properly, meditating, and focusing on the impermanence of all things are healing activities. In fact, some of our most successful psychotherapy incorporates aspects of Buddhism.
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Mary Pipher |
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To truly recover, one must find a deep sense of purpose and meaning.
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Mary Pipher |
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It seems counterintuitive that more choice leads to more depression. However, when we increase people's opportunities for control, we increase their expectations of control and their sense of responsibility for failure. When we have more choices in every domain, we must spend more time researching choices and negotiating these decisions with family members.
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Mary Pipher |
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For our own positive mental health, we need to reconstruct some constraints. It is no accident that retreat centers are an increasingly popular vacation spot. Retreats restrict choice and thus, paradoxically, allow certain kinds of freedom.
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Mary Pipher |
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Memmi believes racism has four elements--an insistence on difference, a negative valuation of that difference, the generalization of that difference to an entire group, and finally the use of that difference to justify hostility and aggression.
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Mary Pipher |
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Ten Common Beliefs of the JPI Refugees are ignorant and have no formal education.
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Mary Pipher |
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The United States takes in most of the world's refugees.
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Mary Pipher |
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In Legacies, Portes and Rumbaut report that most immigrants move into the middle-class mainstream in one or two generations. That is the good news. The bad news is that if they don't make it quickly into the middle class, they won't make it at all. With the passage of time, drive diminishes, and by the third generation, assimilation stops.
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Mary Pipher |
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Most refugees are here illegally. This also is not true. Most have the proper papers and are desperately seeking to comply with the INS. My INS story about Sadia and her daughter going to Hastings illustrated how difficult that can be.
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Mary Pipher |
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We need to help refugees and immigrants early with job training, education, language, and business loans.
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Mary Pipher |
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Newcomers are taking American jobs. In fact, they are filling jobs that Americans won't take and thus enabling businesses to prosper in a time when minimum-wage workers are hard to find.
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Mary Pipher |
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Newcomers do not pay taxes. In fact, refugees pay taxes, including property taxes.
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Mary Pipher |
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Tax dollars go to teach refugees in their own languages. Actually, the concept of ELL is that our publicly funded schools teach newcomers English.
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Mary Pipher |
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Newcomers don't want to learn English.
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Mary Pipher |
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Most refugees end up on welfare. In feet, all of the refugees I know do 3-D work--difficult, dirty, and dangerous.
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Mary Pipher |
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Anyone who wants to can come to America. This is not true. We have strict rules and quotas on new refugee arrivals.
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Mary Pipher |
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Why don't they go back where they belong?" Refugees are here because they had no choices but to be here."
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Mary Pipher |
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We have the capacity to build happiness into our lives with humor, concern for others, and gratitude.
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Mary Pipher |
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Over the years my friends and I have discovered many empty, wild places. Invariably, when we get lost or something goes wrong, one of us reminds the others, "Remember the first rule of the wilderness: don't panic."
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Mary Pipher |
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Our ideas about how to deal with pain do not seem relevant to many newcomers.
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Mary Pipher |
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attributes of resilience.
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Mary Pipher |
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Attributes of Resilience Future Orientation
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Mary Pipher |
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The Ability to Pay Attention
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Mary Pipher |
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Ambition and Initiative
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Mary Pipher |
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Verbal Expressiveness One of the most important attributes is simply being able to express one's needs clearly and appropriately.
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Mary Pipher |
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Positive Mental Health
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Mary Pipher |
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The Ability to Calm Down
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Mary Pipher |
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Flexibility
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Mary Pipher |
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Intentionality, or Being Thoughtful about Choices
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Mary Pipher |
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Lovability
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Mary Pipher |
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Laughter, music, prayer, touch, truth telling, and forgiveness are universal methods of healing.
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Mary Pipher |
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In our strange and difficult times, one reason the American dream stays alive is that new people keep showing up who believe in it. And, because they believe that America is the land of freedom and opportunity and because they act on that belief, they sometimes make it true.
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Mary Pipher |
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realized that this cactus with its withered arms symbolized what my life would be. It would consist of thorns and fruit, pain and beauty. My body would age; my soul would expand.
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Mary Pipher |
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But even with our maturity, we must see our constraints in order to break free from them. Meridel Le Sueur wrote, "Survival is resistance."
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Mary Pipher |
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Without a certain number of these attributes, a newcomer is unlikely to make it in America. The attributes of resilience are Future orientation Energy and good health The ability to pay attention Ambition and initiative Verbal expressiveness Positive mental health The ability to calm down Flexibility Intentionality Lovability The ability to love new people Good moral character
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Mary Pipher |
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People don't need to die for us to experience loss. Holly was losing her local family to a move. It felt to her as if there would be a death. In the 1800s, the Irish had emigration wakes for their families when they moved to America, never to return. They spoke elegies for the living. Holly felt elegiac now. Everything seemed so over.
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Mary Pipher |
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culture doesn't make it easy to sort through this issue.
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Mary Pipher |
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The English language contains the words "poignant" and "bittersweet," but it is challenging to find other words to describe the complex emotional states we feel as we run out of time. Our inner experience is too complicated to label. Without language to express the nuances, we often resort to using single words to describe complicated feelings, but emotions frequently occur in combinations, such as sorrow and rage, anger and fear, or love, ..
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Mary Pipher |
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As friends or family members and caregivers, we can help a great deal by listening and empathizing with women who are in the thick of it. We can bring them small gifts...and make sure they are invited to get-togethers even if it is unlikely they will make it. When women are homebound caretakers, a daily phone call can be a lifesaver. We can acknowledge both the efforts other women are making and validate the importance of those efforts. .....
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Mary Pipher |
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Just as Sylvia rated her pain, so can we rate our own stress on a ten point scale. When we first start doing all our stressors are eleven, but over time we learn that real tens are rare occurrences. Most stresses such as ruining a meal, forgetting an appointment, or losing a library book are only ones and twos. Just being able to assign a number to our upset emotions helps us keep our lives in perspective.
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Mary Pipher |
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Freedom is the ability to make conscious choices in accord with our deepest values. It is the opposite of reactivity, which we could define as acting on every whim, impulse, and emotion that we experience. Reactivity leads us to self-destructive choices. Freedom requires self-awareness and the skill of choosing where to place our attention and how to frame the circumstances we find ourselves in. We all feel hopeless at times. Events have th..
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Mary Pipher |
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Feeling grateful is not a moral injunction, but rather, a healthy habit that we can learn to employ with greater frequency.
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Mary Pipher |
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Good stories build good lives. When we are lonely we can remember our good times with loved ones, a blazing sunset, or our sixtieth birthday dinner when everyone told us precisely what they loved about us. When we reexamine our stories with a focus on clarity, acceptance, and resilience, we grow in confidence and joy. Our stories, if carefully considered allow us to heal from the pain of the past and live vibrantly in the present. We could ..
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Mary Pipher |