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- You need to follow your own pathways in a way that makes sense to you. Practising another persons connection isn’t life promotion, its appropriation.
- Organizations need to recognize there’s always a way to help people, and they should not be afraid to bring Spirit into the work.
- In an ideal world, life promotion and feasting our Spirit should be intentional. Every person needs to know their own intentions, so that people aren’t “accidently” feeding Spirit without awareness. When we learn to feed our Spirit early on in life, then people have a tendency to grow…
- Living in isolation - no friends, no community, always on-line, blame everyone else and everything - reflects what happens when people are not given the opportunity to know their own Spirit. Without guidance, individuals may try to feed their Spirit with drugs, alcohol, and abusive relationships because they don’t know another way. They may look at life and say “there’s nothing here for me."
- For Anishinaabeg, we have been told “the voice of the land is in our language.” When we seek our language we feed our Spirit.
- Outward bound can be a life promotion approach, like sleeping on the ground, that relationship to the earth. The land is a powerful feast for our Spirit - ie. clean water is a powerful feast for the Spirit, when depressed people stop bathing, helping them to have a shower could be life promotion.
- With youth they feel a lot of stress and anxiety and ‘don’t know how to deal with it’ because they haven’t been taught. In other countries, children learn to do yoga/taichi and mindful breathing these are life promotion pathways that give them skills they carry into youth and adulthood. Movement, connection, and presence contrast with rigid practices like being taught to “sit still” on hard chairs or floors in school.
We need to be able to move beyond the rigidity of western, eurocentric and capitalist relationality to the Spirit -
because the human being did not start out that way.
Elder Gertie Beaucage on Promoting Life
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