Below is an evergrowing list of thoughts, links, and contacts for everyday activism–as you post more, I will add them to my own list and share them with my audiences, students, colleagues, and friends.

Resources for Everyday Activism

NEVER SURRENDER, by Working Assets Long Distance
Never surrender to corporate greed, never surrender the fight to build a better democracy that can provide life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for all. Buy their bracelets for $1 each and pass them out! www.neversurrender.org

HUMAN RIGHTS CAMPAIGN, working for equal rights for LGBT people
www.hrc.org

MOVEON.ORG POLITICAL ACTION, a progressive political action organization with opportunities to take quick action on line. www.moveon.org

You can go to any of the following sites every day and, by clicking a button, you can provide help at no cost to yourself (sponsors donate to these causes every time you click the button). Some also have pins, bracelets, and other products you can order and give to your friends and family:

The Hunger Site: www.thehungersite.com
The Breast Cancer Site: www.thebreastcancersite.com
The Child Health Site: www.thechildhealthsite.com
The Literacy Site: www.theliteracysite.com
The Rain Forest Site: www.therainforestsite.com
The Animal Rescue Site: www.theanimalrescuesite.com

ANNUAL CONFERENCE ON WHITE PRIVILEGE: www.whiteprivilegeconference.com

CO-OP AMERICA: ECONOMIC ACTION FOR A JUST PLANET
Co-op America is a not-for-profit membership organization founded in 1982.
Their mission is to harness economic power—the strength of consumers, investors, businesses, and the marketplace—to create a socially just and environmentally sustainable society. www.coopamerica.org

NATIONAL ORGANIZATION FOR WOMEN (NOW): Has e-mail signup to be informed of current issues www.now.org

EMILY’S LIST: EMILY’s List, the nation’s largest grassroots political network, is dedicated to taking back our country from the radical right wing by electing pro-choice Democratic women to federal, state, and local office. We are a network of more than 100,000 Americans — from all across the country — committed to recruiting and funding viable women candidates; helping them build and run effective campaign organizations; training the next generation of activists; and mobilizing women voters to help elect progressive candidates across the nation. www.emilyslist.org

Shop at 10,000 Villages – one of the oldest and largest fair trade organizations in the world, and voted Co-op American’s Peoples Choice Award for Green Businesses.
http://www.tenthousandvillages.com/

Buy Green (environmentally friendly, fairly traded)

Add to the list: Send your ideas and links to
Sue Morrow – morrow@ed.utah.edu

“Activism is the rent I pay for living on this planet” – Alice Walker
“If women loved their bodies, the economy would collapse.” – Unknown

Pain: Given the huge separation of body, mind, and spirit that are part of our intellectual heritage, I think we have a distorted view of pain. I know that when I am in pain, I tend to think of it purely as physical. When I look more deeply, though, there are so many aspects to pain. Last blog I commented about the place of fear in the cycle of chronic pain. I think the emotional aspects of pain are really huge. In Louise Hay’s book, You Can Heal Your Life, she talks about the relationship between our emotional selves and illness and pain. Is there a relationship between “carrying the world on your shoulders” and having chronic neck and shoulder pain? Between having a job that “eats you up inside” and developing ulcers? When we bottle up our emotions, something’s got to give.

Remedies: I am so thankful to live in a time where remedies abound for pain. Although I believe in my heart that if I could only gather my resources and those of the universe to heal myself without surgery, pain interventions, and drugs, I am glad I have them to fall back on or to intervene in pain that I can’t control myself. I also think that I fall in that midrange way of thinking that values some kinds of “alternative” interventions (such as chiropractic or acupuncture) simply because they are physical. When I move into the areas of psychic healing, stress management, meditation, and mindfulness, I am so conditioned to think of them as unscientific (gasp!!) that I forget to trust them.

Fear: I’ve been thinking a lot more since my last blog about fear and its relationship to chronic pain. I’m thinking that being alone with my pain, being isolated from others, is one of the greatest contributors to pain. Pain separates us from others. “Nobody can understand” (They really can’t; nobody who doesn’t have it can understand it, and we can’t truly understand another person’s pain, even if we have some of our own). “I won’t be able to backpack in the Grand Canyon with my lover” (It’s a real possibility). Sometimes the pain is so bad it makes us cranky, causes us to withdraw, makes us depressed and not fun to be around. The future: what will this do to my ability to do the work I love? Will I become disabled? How will I stay physically fit if I can’t move? I think recognizing the fear is crucial. I have a deeply ingrained ability to not know how scared I am (of everything). And as I get more “in touch” with myself, I’m starting to know, and it is terrifying. Getting out of denial is a bitch. But necessary for healing.

Mindfulness: I don’t claim to be a mindfulness expert, just a novice who is experiencing some wonderful success. I hope those of you who practice mindfulness in a more consistent way will add to this conversation. To me, mindfulness means being in the present moment, quietly and peacefully (and with a sense of humor), nonjudgmentally, observing myself, my thoughts, my emotions, my processes. When I go to that place, I notice some interesting things. First, I notice the rushing of my fearful thoughts. When I observe them without judgment, they calm. They may still be there, but they lose their chaotic nature. When I notice pain, I learn that it fluctuates and that sometimes I have a lot of it and sometimes there is very little. Just that fluctuation sometimes gives me the hope I need to let go of the fear.

So these are just some thoughts to get us talking some more. Engaging in dialogue about this can help to reduce our isolation, increase our empathy and hope.

The other day, one of my wonderful grad students brought me a chapter on chronic pain from a book he was reading on Mindfulness in Psychotherapy. Lo and behold, reading this chapter has made an incredible difference in my life. Did you know that “approximately 2/3 of people who have never suffered from serious back pain have the same kinds of ‘abnormal’ back structures that are often blamed for chronic back pain,” that “many people continue to have pain after ‘successful’ surgery,” and that there is little relation between the success of the surgery and whether or not a person is still in pain? Also “psychological stress, and particularly job dissatisfaction, predicts who will develop disabling back pain more reliably than do physical measures or the physical demands of one’s job.”

Ronald Siegel, the author of the chapter, identified fear as a major factor in continuing the pain cycle when there are no structural problems. Apparently, if we are afraid, then the pain is worse than when we are not afraid. It was amazing to read this chapter and find that my sciatic pain went down several notches after reading it, when I was unafraid. I began to understand how scared I’ve been that the pain would get worse, I’d never recover, I’d never hike or run rivers again. As I keep noticing the fear and staying in the moment things get better. Also, that fear makes us not notice that pain fluctuates: sometimes it can be really bad, but other times a person with chronic pain is not in great pain and may be pain-free at times. Amazing when you pay attention to your body!

The three elements that will help people recover from chronic pain are (a) cognitive restructuring (changing how you think about the pain), (b) resuming full physical activity (after being sure that there are not structural reasons to limit activity), and (c) working with negative emotions. Underpinning it all is mindfulness practice. I would recommend work by Jon Kabat-Zin, particularly his book Full Catastrophe Living. I have ordered Ronald Siegel’s book Back Sense ($4.50 used on Amazon). And if you are a healer, you might want to get the book from which this chapter came: Germer, C. K., Siegel, R. D., & Fulton, P. R. (2005). Mindfulness and Psychotherapy. New York: Guilford. Also, last year Andrei recommended to me the book The Life we are Given by George Leonard and Michael Murphy. It was a bit too structured for me to follow the whole program, but it has some awesome ideas.

Although I am far from blowing off the allopathic medical system, having been heavily socialized in the quick fix and the drug solution (my mom was a nurse), I feel like this chapter has given me some tools that make sense. I think our dependence on the medical system undermines our power and makes us dependent on procedures and medications that can actually harm us rather than help us. I would be interested in having more dialogue on DS about health and healing. Any takers? (Sherry, where are you??)

No, I will not take that houseboat adventure on a man-made lake that drowned the Canyon I could have loved, not even to see the beauty that remains, not even to mourn what was lost.

“Remember these things lost.
The native wildlife; the chance to float quietly down a calm river,
to let the current carry you past a thousand years of history,
through a living canyon of incredible, haunting beauty.
Here the Colorado had created a display that rivaled any in the world.
The side canyons simply had no rivals.
We lost wholeness, integrity in a place, one that might always
have let [humans] experience a magnificent gesture of the natural world.
No [human], in all the generations to be born of [humans], will ever be free
to discover for [him/herself] one of the greatest places of all.
This we inherited, and have denied to all others–
the place no one knew well enough.” –Eliot Porter

Glen Canyon Dam will not be forever–either it will erode the sandstone cliffs into which it is anchored, or it will be come filled with silt. “We can pollute the air, despoil the water, denude the land. Nature won’t care, but we will. It’s our frail allotment of time that we wreck, not nature’s” — Ruth Kirk. I hope within my own frail allotment of time I will see Glen Canyon Dam brought down and that I will be able to witness the first healing moments of Glen Canyon as I row through it.

I don’t like to talk about talk about talk about talk about W, but I will read and listen because it’s the responsible thing to do. I don’t believe there is a Truth, only the individual and collective truths of our lives. I really believe that belief in an objective and universal Truth had gotten us into a lot of the trouble we are in—if you don’t adhere to my Truth then you are a heretic, infidel, traitor. That’s me, I guess, heretic, infidel, traitor. Lover of my country and, more important, of the planet to whom my primary citizenship belongs. Lover of women. Lover of humans who love and respect the planet and women. 1960s civil rights activist, 1970s feminist, peacenik, gay rights activist, all of those continuing right down thru the decades to 2005. Beauty is rafting down a river, hiking in a canyon where the night stars reach down and touch my eyes. Goodness is in the ways we try to make a difference in this troubled world, through our marching, sharing information, believing it will–IT WILL–end up all right, living by our deeply held spiritual values (I’m not talking about religion here), refusing to be domesticated, insisting on our radical loving voices being heard. In the words of Holly Near, “We are a gentle loving people, singing, singing for our lives.”