The Astrology Podcast Aug 6, 2022 Astrologers astrologers Jo O’Neill, Nick Dagan Best, and Chris Brennan do a deep dive into the meaning of the zodiac sign Leo in astrology, and discuss some of the traits and characteristics associated with people who are born with that sign prominent in their birth chart. Leo is the fifth sign of the zodiac, and it is a masculine or diurnal sign, cardinal, watery, and ruled by the Sun. This is the fifth entry in a series of episodes where we do a deep dive into each of the signs of the zodiac, one per episode, in order to develop a detailed understanding of their core meaning and significations. Jo and Nick’s credentials for this episode are that they both have stelliums in Leo, which include both the Sun and Ascendant in that sign. During the course of the episode we talk about different keywords and archetypes associated with Leo, and also look at some birth charts of celebrities who were born with different planets in that sign. Jo O’Neill’s website: https://www.jomakerofways.com Nick Dagan Best’s website: https://www.nickdaganbestastrologer.com This is episode 363 of The Astrology Podcast: https://theastrologypodcast.com/2022/… Patreon for early access to new episodes and other bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/astrologypodcast Please be sure to like and subscribe!

Entangled Minds: Extrasensory Experiences in a Quantum Reality

by Dean Radin (Goodreads Author)

Is everything connected? Can we sense what’s happening to loved ones thousands of miles away? Why are we sometimes certain of a caller’s identity the instant the phone rings? Do intuitive hunches contain information about future events? Is it possible to perceive without the use of the ordinary senses?

Many people believe that such “psychic phenomena” are rare talents or divine gifts. Others don’t believe they exist at all. But the latest scientific research shows that these phenomena are both real and widespread, and are an unavoidable consequence of the interconnected, entangled physical reality we live in.

Albert Einstein called entanglement “spooky action at a distance” — the way two objects remain connected through time and space, without communicating in any conventional way, long after their initial interaction has taken place. Could a similar entanglement of minds explain our apparent psychic abilities? Dean Radin, senior scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, believes it might.

In this illuminating book, Radin shows how we know that psychic phenomena such as telepathy, clairvoyance, and psychokinesis are real, based on scientific evidence from thousands of controlled lab tests. Radin surveys the origins of this research and explores, among many topics, the collective premonitions of 9/11. He reveals the physical reality behind our uncanny telepathic experiences and intuitive hunches, and he debunks the skeptical myths surrounding them. Entangled Minds sets the stage for a rational, scientific understanding of psychic experience. 

(Goodreads.com)

Communion: A True Story

(Communion #1)

by Whitley Strieber (Goodreads Author)

On December 26, 1985, at a secluded cabin in upstate New York, Whitley Strieber went skiing with his wife and son, ate Christmas dinner leftovers, and went to bed early.

Six hours later, he found himself suddenly awake… and forever changed.

Thus begins the most astonishing true-life odyssey ever recorded—one man’s riveting account of his extraordinary experiences with visitors from “elsewhere”… how they found him, where they took him, what they did to him and why…

Believe it. Or don’t believe it. But read it—for this gripping story will move you like no other… will fascinate you, terrify you, and alter the way you experience your world.

(Goodreads.com)

Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies

by C.G. Jung, R.F.C. Hull (Translator)

While Jung is known mainly for his theories on the nature of the unconscious mind, he did have an interest in the paranormal. In this essay, Jung applies his analytical skills to the UFO phenomenon. Rather than assuming that the modern prevalence of UFO sightings are due to extraterrestrial craft, Jung reserves judgment on their origin & connects UFOs with archetypal imagery, concluding that they have become a “living myth.” This essay is intriguing in its methodology & implications as to the nature of UFOs & their relation to the human psyche.

(Goodreads.com)

Moses and Monotheism

by Sigmund Freud,

Katherine Jones (Translator)

This volume contains Freud’s speculations on various aspects of religion, on the basis of which he explains certain characteristics of the Jewish people in their relations with the Christians. From an intensive study of the Moses legend, Freud comes to the startling conclusion that Moses himself was an Egyptian who brought from his native country the religion he gave to the Jews. He accepts the hypothesis that Moses was murdered in the wilderness, but that his memory was cherished by the people & that his religious doctrine ultimately triumphed. Freud develops his general theory of monotheism, which enables him to throw light on the development of Judaism & Christianity.

(Goodreads.com)

TOMORROW AT 10 AM – 12:30 PM

Empathy Training Cohort 12.E Saturdays Now Forming

Details

24 people responded

Event by Building a Culture of Empathy and Edwin Rutsch

http://bit.ly/SignUp-Cohort12E

Duration: 2 hr 30 min

Public  · Anyone on or off Facebook

BUILDING THE EMPATHY MOVEMENT: COHORT 12.E: Module 1: Introduction to Empathy Circle Facilitation Training.

Join us in this 5 week introductory training on how to facilitate an Empathy Circle. The Empathy Circle is the most effective foundation and gateway practice for learning, practicing and deepening listening and empathy skills, as well as, nurturing an empathic way of being.

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1. ( ) COHORT 12.E: Saturdays Signup http://bit.ly/SignUp-Cohort12E
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3. ( ) By Donation $0-$300 – More at http://BestEmpathyTraining.com

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10am PT/1pm ET (2.5 Hours)

Session 1: Saturday, August 06 – World Times: https://bit.ly/39dn246
Session 2: Saturday, August 13 – World Times: https://bit.ly/39hrWgF
Session 3: Saturday, August 20 – World Times: https://bit.ly/3zwYptS
Session 4: Saturday, August 27 – World Times: https://bit.ly/3xfS8Qs
Session 5: Saturday, September 03 – World Times: https://bit.ly/3NJk3zz

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Must have taken part in at least 2 Empathy Circles.
See here for upcoming Empathy Circles: https://bit.ly/3nHBpBv

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https://www.bestempathytraining.com/testimonials

Amazing training today! I’m grateful and will be Committed to getting Certified. Being with people from different countries, cultures, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and spiritual beliefs Was Priceless. Empathy Circle reflects the world as a whole. Thanks
― Brenda B.J. Guiden

Building a culture of empathy starts with understanding how we can inject this practice in our daily lives. Being a part of this training is helping me become more aware of how I can develop empathy. Take a look at this training and join us as we promote and build a culture of empathy.
― Shawnna Hunter

I am currently a part of this empathy circle training cohort (13.C) and it’s been a wonderful experience thus far. I highly recommend it for everyone. I look forward to hosting many empathy circles and truly connecting and listening to people and sharing this skill with others. Back to basics. Thank you Edwin Rutsch!
― Dominica Rae Barber

My basic thought is that I’ve been offered a gift and that’s participating in this little learning environment. And the kind of thing that I’m discovering is that there are lots of threads where I’m building up, or inching up, my skills, my competence, my confidence as well; and this will naturally evolve into me doing something similar.
― Graham Berends

#Empathy
#EmpathyCircle
#EmpathyTraining

Scientists used painstaking research, genomics, and clever statistics to definitively track two distinct strains of the virus back to a wet market in Wuhan.

AUG 4, 2022 7:00 AM (wired.com)

IN OCTOBER 2014, virologist Edward Holmes took a tour of the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, a once relatively overlooked city of about 11 million people in the central Chinese province of Hubei. The market would have presented a bewildering environment for the uninitiated: rows of stalls selling unfamiliar creatures for food, both dead and alive; cages holding hog badgers and Siberian weasels, Malayan porcupines and masked palm civets. In the southwest corner of the market, Holmes found a stall selling raccoon dogs, stacked in a cage on top of another housing a species of bird he didn’t recognize. He paused to take a photo.

Eight years on, that photo is a key piece of evidence in the painstaking effort to trace the coronavirus pandemic back to its origins. Of course, it’s been suspected since the early days of the pandemic—since before it was even a pandemic—that the Wuhan wet market played a role, but it’s been difficult to prove it definitively. In the meantime, other origin theories have flowered centered on the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a biological research lab which, it’s argued, accidentally or deliberately unleashed the virus on the city and the world.

The overwhelming scientific consensus is that Covid originated in a similar way to related diseases such as SARS, which jumped from bats to humans via an intermediate animal. Figuring out exactly what happened with Covid-19 could prove immensely valuable both in terms of finally disproving the lab leak theory and by providing a source of information on how to stop the next pandemic. “This is not about placing blame,” says Kristian Andersen, a professor of immunology and microbiology at the Scripps Research Institute in California. “This is about understanding in as much detail as we can the origins of the Covid-19 pandemic.”

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For the last two years, an international team of scientists including Andersen and Holmes has been trying to pinpoint the epicenter of the pandemic, using methods ranging from genetic analysis to social media scraping. Their research, which attracted widespread coverage in preprint before being published in its final form last week, reads as much like a detective report as an academic study.

First: the scene of the crime. Where exactly in this city of 11 million people did the virus first jump from animals to humans? To find out, the team—led by University of Arizona biologist Michael Worobey—scoured a report published by the World Health Organization in the summer of 2021, which was based on a joint investigation the public health body conducted with Chinese scientists. By cross-referencing the different maps and tables within the report, the researchers obtained coordinates for 155 of the earliest Covid cases in Wuhan, people who were hospitalized from the disease in December 2019.

Most of those cases were clustered around central Wuhan, particularly on the west bank of the Yangtze river—the same area as the Huanan market. “There was this extraordinary pattern where the highest density of cases was both extremely near to and very centered on the market,” says Worobey, lead author on the paper, which was published in Science. Statistical analysis confirmed that it was “extremely unlikely” that the pattern of cases seen in the early days of the pandemic would have been so clustered on the market if Covid had originated anywhere else: A random selection of similar people from around Wuhan were very unlikely to have lived so close to the market.

Even early patients who didn’t work or shop at the market were more likely to live close to it. “This is an indication that the virus started spreading in people who worked at the market, but then started to spread into the local community, as vendors went to local shops, infected people who worked in those shops, and then local community members not linked to the market started getting infected,” says Worobey.

But a high level of transmission centered on the market doesn’t, in and of itself, imply that the entire outbreak started there. Snapshots from later in the pandemic might have found similar patterns centered on superspreader events in Italy or Seattle, for instance. To strengthen their case beyond the WHO data, the researchers turned to the Chinese microblogging service Weibo.

People who posted asking for help on a Covid-19 app within Weibo in January and February 2020 were clustered not around the market, but to the west, in more densely populated areas of the city, and in areas with more older people—hinting at how the pandemic began to shift from an isolated outbreak linked to the market to one with the potential to explode around the world. A few months in, it had started to mirror the population density of the city. Historical location-based “check-ins” on Weibo also show that the Huanan market was a relatively unlikely destination for most people in the city—in other words, it was unlikely to be the location of a superspreader event unless the virus originated from there.

To trace the pandemic in the other direction, toward its source, the researchers turned to swab samples collected by Chinese scientists from around the Huanan market just before it was shut down by the authorities in January 2020. Those swabs returned a cluster of positives in the south-western corner of the market—on a glove found on one of the stalls, from a grate under one of the cages. Five of the positive samples came from a single stall—a stall that was known to be selling live animals in late 2019, and the same stall where Holmes had taken his photograph of the raccoon dogs five years earlier.

This layering of indirect evidence has helped to settle the question of where Covid jumped into humans, but the question of timing has also been a subject of fierce debate. A companion paper explores this using Covid’s molecular clock—what Joel Wertheim, a virologist at the University of California, San Diego and coauthor on the paper, calls “that steady drumbeat of mutations accumulating in SARS-CoV-2,” or how the virus shifts over time.

It had been assumed that a virus jumping from animals into humans was a piece of cosmic bad luck—a one-off amplified by bad decisionmaking in the days and months that followed. But the genetic data tells a different story. There were actually two strains of Covid circulating in Wuhan in late 2019: Lineage A and Lineage B, which are just two letters apart in their genetic code, according to Jonathan Pekar, a researcher at UC San Diego and another of the study’s coauthors.

As Pekar delved deeper into what scientists call the “phylogeny” of SARS-CoV-2—its family tree—it became clear that their understanding of how the disease had crossed over might be wrong. “We eventually figured out that it was better explained by multiple introductions than a single one,” he says. The researchers now think Lineage A—which is more genetically similar to bat coronaviruses, and so appears earlier in the virus’s family tree—was actually introduced into humans after Lineage B. Lineage B ended up becoming the dominant global variant: both persisted for a while, but Delta, Omicron, and the rest of the variants that swept the globe are descended from B, not A.

Pekar now thinks there were actually up to a dozen separate crossover events, because in order for a disease like Covid to “take”—to go beyond its initial human host and start an epidemic—it needs to infect someone who’s going to spread it widely, and not everyone does. “Roughly 70 percent of introductions go extinct, so you need eight introductions to have two that persist,” Pekar says.

It might seem unlikely that a once-in-a-generation event happened twice within the space of a couple of weeks, but actually, says Wertheim, once all the conditions were in place—a zoonotic virus capable of human infection in close proximity to humans—it would have been surprising if it had only happened once. The barriers to spillover had been lowered. “We failed to climb Mount Everest for thousands of years, and then in one day two people did,” says Andersen.

The fact that the virus likely crossed over twice in quick succession is significant for two reasons: first, because multiple introductions damage the lab leak hypothesis—although like all conspiracy theories, it will likely contort itself into some new variant that hand-waves this away; and secondly, because it rules out Covid being introduced into the market from a human who caught it elsewhere. “This is so concordant with what we’ve seen with other epidemics that it makes any other scenario implausible, because you’d have to have an introduction of one virus and then we’d have to wait a week or two and have an introduction of another virus that is kind of similar but not the same,” Pekar says.

There’s been a narrative throughout the pandemic of Chinese obfuscation making matters worse—fueled by the same political tensions and mistrust that have made the lab leak theory so compelling to some. And while Chinese authorities undoubtedly made mistakes and obstructed access to information at times, it’s only the data collected by Chinese scientists that has made such detailed analysis of the origins of Covid possible at all. If, as these papers indicate, SARS-CoV-2 first crossed over in late November 2019, it took just a matter of weeks for doctors to figure out there was an epidemic, compared to several months for the 2014 Ebola outbreak and a year and a half for Zika. “The fact is we have an unprecedented view of the early picture of this pandemic compared to any pandemic in human history,” says Worobey. “There’s nothing like it.”

It means we have environmental sampling data that can place the spillover event precisely in the southwestern corner of the Huanan market, and genetic testing of virus samples from the first patients to give us a date: around November 18, 2019, for the introduction of Lineage B, with Lineage A following a week or so later. After that, though, the trail runs cold.

The researchers know which animals were being sold in the market in late 2019, and which ones were susceptible to coronaviruses, but they don’t have the smoking gun. “They don’t have samples from animals that had the virus. That’s what they’d like to have, and they’d like to be able to trace those animals back to the farms from which they came and see whether people in those farms had been exposed to the virus or viruses,” says Jonathan Stoye, a virologist at the Francis Crick Institute in the UK, who was not involved in the research.

That’s unlikely to be possible. There are theories on how infected animals may have reached the market: Wuhan is in Hubei province, and to the west of the region there are caves that are home to horseshoe bats, close to farms that once housed millions of raccoon dogs and civets. The most likely course of events is something like: A bat infected with a novel coronavirus flies over a farm where animals are being reared for meat. It poops, and viral particles infect one of the animals below, sparking an unseen wave of infections at the farm. Maybe the virus crosses over to the farmworkers but fizzles out because there’s not enough population density to sustain a human epidemic. Days or weeks later, in November 2019, some of the infected animals are shipped to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, where they’re sold at stalls in the southwestern corner. The virus crosses over to humans at least eight times, maybe more. The majority of those infections fizzle out without spreading to anyone else, but two take hold, start to spread. Not long after that, dozens of people in the area start to come down with a mysterious viral pneumonia.

But the animal or animals that carried coronavirus are almost certainly long dead: shipped off and sold for meat, or killed in one of the mass culls that took place in early 2020 as the Chinese authorities clamped down on the live animal trade. “It is very possible that we will never have that sample, that we may have missed our opportunity,” says Worobey.

But there are still leads to follow: tracing the supply chains for the stalls in the southwestern corner of Huanan market and finding out which farms supplied them; poring over the paperwork from the culls to find out where the animals from that farm were buried; exhuming the animals and sequencing their DNA to look for remnants of a coronavirus that looks almost identical to SARS-CoV-2.

It will need patient work and international cooperation in a difficult environment—but it could be the only way to stop the next pandemic. “These things are not impossible,” Worobey says. “So let’s look at all the options. Let’s connect every single possible dot that we can.”

Image updated on 8/4/22 at 11:17AM PST to include the Wuhan Huanan Wholesale Seafood Market.

More From WIRED on Covid-19

• ? The latest on tech, science, and more: Get our newsletters!
• The Covid virus keeps evolving. Why haven’t vaccines?
• Can medicine recover from the pandemic’s superbug surge?
• The secrets of Covid “brain fog” are starting to lift
• Rapid at-home Covid tests—and where to find them
• Need a face mask? Here are ones we like to wear
• Read all of our coronavirus coverage here

Amit Katwala is a senior writer at WIRED with a focus on longform features, science, and culture. He graduated from the University of Oxford with a degree in experimental psychology, and is the author of two books: The Athletic Brain, about the rise of neuroscience in sport, and a WIRED… Read more

From the Arctic to the Tibetan Plateau, rain water is ‘unsafe to drink’ under current PFAS guidelines

By Harry Cockburn

August 3, 2022 (independent.co.uk)

Even in the most remote parts of the world, the level of so-called “forever chemicals” in the atmosphere has become so high that rainwater is now “unsafe to drink” according to newly released water quality guidelines.

Forever chemicals are a group of man-made hazardous products known as PFAS, which stands for perfluoroalkyl or polyfluoroalkyl substances, some of which are linked to cancer in humans.

In recent decades they have spread globally through water courses, oceans, soils and the atmosphere and as a result, they can now be found in the rainwater and snow in even the most remote locations on Earth – from Antarctica to the Tibetan Plateau, researchers have said.

Guideline values for PFAS in drinking water, surface waters and soils have been revised down dramatically due to greater understanding into their toxicity and the threats they pose to health and the natural world.

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The changes mean the levels of these chemicals in rainwater “are now ubiquitously above guideline levels”, according to researchers from Stockholm University and ETH Zurich university.

“There has been an astounding decline in guideline values for PFAS in drinking water in the last 20 years,” said Ian Cousins, the lead author of the study and professor at the Department of Environmental Science at Stockholm University.

“For example, the drinking water guideline value for one well-known substance in the PFAS class, namely the cancer-causing perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), has declined by 37.5 million times in the US.”

He added: “Based on the latest US guidelines for PFOA in drinking water, rainwater everywhere would be judged unsafe to drink.“

“Although in the industrial world we don’t often drink rainwater, many people around the world expect it to be safe to drink and it supplies many of our drinking water sources,” Professor Cousins said.

To study the prevalence of these chemicals the Stockholm University team have conducted laboratory and fieldwork on the atmospheric presence and transport of PFAS for the past decade.

They have found that the levels of some harmful PFAS in the atmosphere are not declining notably despite their phase out by the major manufacturer, 3M, already two decades ago.

PFAS are known to be highly persistent – hence being known as “forever chemicals” – but their continued presence in the atmosphere is also due to their properties and natural processes that continually cycle PFAS back to the atmosphere from the surface environment.

A key way PFAS are continually cycled into the atmosphere is through the transport from seawater to marine air by sea spray aerosols, which is another active research area for the Stockholm University team.

“The extreme persistence and continual global cycling of certain PFAS will lead to the continued exceedance of the [water quality] guidelines,” said Professor Martin Scheringer, a co-author of the study and based at ETH Zurich in Switzerland and Masaryk University in the Czech Republic.“

“So now, due to the global spread of PFAS, environmental media everywhere will exceed environmental quality guidelines designed to protect human health and we can do very little to reduce the PFAS contamination.”

“In other words, it makes sense to define a planetary boundary specifically for PFAS and, as we conclude in the paper, this boundary has now been exceeded,” he added.

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The research team noted that PFAS have been associated with a wide range of serious health harms, including cancer, learning and behavioural problems in children, infertility and pregnancy complications, increased cholesterol, and immune system problems.

Dr Jane Muncke, managing director of the Food Packaging Forum Foundation in Zurich, who was not involved in the research, said: “It cannot be that some few benefit economically while polluting the drinking water for millions of others, and causing serious health problems.“

The vast amounts that it will cost to reduce PFAS in drinking water to levels that are safe based on current scientific understanding need to be paid by the industry producing and using these toxic chemicals. The time to act is now.”

The research is published as a perspective article in the journal Environmental Science & Technology.

A Therapist Assembles an Emotional Toolbox to Help Us Grapple With Collective Trauma

Through his research and work in collective trauma, Jack Saul has honed four practices for engaging responsibly with large-scale suffering. “Moral Injuries 4312,” oil on paper, 2018. Painting by author.

by JACK SAUL | AUGUST 4, 2022 (zocalopublicsquare.org)

The subterranean strata of U.S. wrongdoing run deep—the genocide of Native Americans, the long history of slavery and racism, the effects of xenophobia, the illegal wars of aggression around the world. Today we are faced with the question: As a society, how will we remember and respond to these many past wrongs?

Approaches that take into consideration participants’ histories—along with their experiences of physical and mental trauma, and moral injury—seem to pay off.

For the past 25 years, I have worked as a researcher and practitioner in the field of large-scale psychosocial trauma. My current project, the Moral Injuries of War, seeks to probe the moral anguish experienced by military veterans and war correspondents deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq. It is an immersive audio installation, in which we overlay edited audio interviews and ambient sound. Veterans and journalists who are present at the installation provide comment after the 20- to 30-minute piece has ended.

By listening to their testimonies, the larger public can become more aware of the dilemmas faced by those at, and in, war. One goal of the project is to promote dialogue between witnesses of war and the rest of us, to help us work through our nation’s collective trauma—and hopefully begin to heal, as individuals and as a society.

Individual trauma may be understood as the consequences of experiencing an overwhelmingly stressful event or series of events. Collective trauma—what happens when society as a whole experiences shattering events—is, as sociologist Kai Erikson puts it, a “blow to the basic tissues of social life.” Collective trauma leads to a loss of a sense of belonging, decreased morale, social fragmentation, and conflict. Moral injury is an aspect of trauma people experience after participating in or witnessing actions which are morally reprehensible. It also manifests when we feel betrayed by persons acting in positions of authority. Moral injury has been described as a “wound to the soul.”

Addressing these devastating consequences of past societal wrongs is crucial—but it requires us first to determine how to prepare, emotionally and cognitively, for such an encounter. How do we stay grounded enough to integrate remembering into our lives in a meaningful way?

The answer is in what I call an “emotional toolbox,” stocked with four important practices that can help us heal. These include convening with care and purpose; listening with compassion; grounding, reflecting, and responding; and integrating a view or action and moving forward.

CONVENING WITH CARE AND PURPOSE

The most important thing is to create a supportive social environment with sustained respect. Who will remember with each other? Will it be just victims and their advocates; or conversation between victims and perpetrators, and their descendants?

A fruitful context for remembering has a clear aim. It helps to explicitly state the benefits. South Africa enacted the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to help rebuild after apartheid, and to bring about justice and accountability. In the U.S., the organization 400 Years of Inequality has worked to right the wrongs of slavery and the history of African American inequality while other endeavors aim to establish the truth about wrongs, as in investigations into forced adoptions and genocide of Native Americans. American remembering also seeks to prevent continued perpetration of wrongs in the future, as we are currently witnessing with the congressional investigation into the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Thoughtful convening includes processes for remembering and for forgetting; we may need to forget some aspects of the past to remain focused on what is important moving ahead. Collective remembering can be an organic process—one memory jolting another—a continuous linear narrative, or a patchwork of different perspectives. Whatever shape it takes, all in the community should have the opportunity to join in.

“Moral Injuries 3459,” oil on paper, 2018. Painting by author.

LISTENING WITH COMPASSION

One must feel connected with a group to be ready to encounter heavy material. Clearly establishing intention builds trust. Creators or facilitators should explain why a difficult exploration is important for them. In the Moral Injuries of War project, we tell participants how we created the project: It came out of my clinical experiences working with war correspondents and veterans, who described their moral anguish to me during therapy. It became clear to me that witnesses and participants in conflicts could overcome their social isolation by breaking silences and sharing their stories with the public. Explaining this helps participants engage fully.

It is important to explain that participants may experience physical discomfort when they listen to witnesses. It is helpful to attend to that discomfort in their bodies, recognize where it is, take three deep breaths, and then return to listening with compassion to the person speaking.  People should have the permission to stand up and walk around, or to leave the room for some time.

GROUNDING, REFLECTING, AND RESPONDING

People confronted with disturbing material in the Moral Injuries of War project sometimes experience “shattered world assumptions,” where their previous views of the world, morality, history, and even their own identities may be disrupted.

To help mitigate this reaction, a useful exercise is to have each person engage with another person in the group to name their physical and emotional responses to the material. This helps ground the participants to one another, and enables them to respond to what they witnessed as a shared experience. Hearing a range of responses and perspectives within a bonded group helps participants engage in a conversation about what moved them or resonated with their own experiences, and what they have learned about themselves.

Once feeling grounded and having reflected on one’s personal response, witnesses and members of the public may thoughtfully engage in difficult conversation. The Vietnamese Buddhist monk and teacher Thích Nhất Hạnh knew the potential transformative power such a conversation can have. “Veterans,” he said, “are the light at the tip of the candle, illuminating the way for the whole nation. If veterans can achieve awareness, transformation, understanding, and peace, they can share with the rest of society the realities of war.”

“Moral Injuries 3354,” Oil on paper, 2018. Painting by author.

INTEGRATING A VIEW OR ACTION MOVING FORWARD

As we go through deliberate processes of bearing witness to societies’ past wrongs, it is important that people walk away feeling resourced not depleted—touched not triggered. Remembering, done right, can instill a desire to make society better. One way to bring that about is to engage participants in small group discussions. What would they like to take with them from such an experience? What would they like to leave behind?

In the Moral Injuries of War project, we ask participants how they want to respond to the testimony they heard. Some have said they would like to find new ways to engage with veterans to learn more about their experiences. Some have told us they want to reach out to family members who fought in battle. Others were inspired to help refugees, especially of recent wars.

We follow talk with action, asking each person in our small groups to describe their intended response in one word or phrase, and then demonstrate that action in a gesture to the others.

For example, somebody who wanted to reach out to veterans described their action as “dialogue,” and then motioned their hands to indicate give and take. We play music and lead the group in dance. Each person shouts their word and expresses their gesture and the group reflects the words and gestures back. Participants leave feeling an element of hope, rather than being weighed down by the difficult material. Embodying the desirable action increases the likelihood that one will carry it out in the future.

Participants of the Moral Injuries of War project convene in Woodstock, New York. Courtesy of author.

The author James Baldwin once wrote, “It is the innocence which constitutes the crime” when perpetrators view themselves as innocent. A society cannot mature if it cannot move beyond its perceived innocence—especially when there are so many sins to remember.

Engaging responsibly with the suffering of others is an important step in the process, and is deeply humanizing. It develops our capacity for empathy, strengthens our connections to others and ourselves, and ultimately makes society better. My hope is that the emotional toolbox helps facilitate this.

JACK SAUL is the founding director of the International Trauma Studies Program committed to enhancing coping capacities in individuals, families, and communities. He has served on the faculties of New York University School of Medicine, the New School for Social Research, and Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health.

The Nine of Cups

This is a lovely card, known as Lord of Happiness. It talks about a sense of inner fulfilment and bliss, which radiates outward to touch everybody with whom you come into contact.

At a spiritual level, we’re talking about inner harmony, contentment and tranquillity – an appreciation of the High Powers, feeling at one with the Universe. This feeling leads to feeling that we are blessed by life.

On an everyday level, the card will often come up to mark periods of high achievement, and the resulting sense of pleasure and satisfaction. It will also come up to acknowledge joy and happiness in an emotional relationship.

When this card appears in your reading, it’s important to make the time to simply enjoy your own feelings, to revel in your sense of calmness and joy.

(via angelpaths.com and Alan Blackman)