A little while ago, I blogged about Rick Hanson’s Red Brain, Green Brain model and how it can help us to understand mental wellbeing and regulation. I suggested that this model is particularly helpful in understanding why so many people’s mental health is suffering during the pandemic. Briefly, Hanson suggests that it is helpful to …
compassion
Experiencing segregation in the 1960s When I was a child in the 1960s, I travelled with my parents and younger sister to spend summer holidays with our US family in Hampton, Virginia. My uncle and aunt worked at the Black College; one was a French teacher and the other the librarian. They were happy to …
An All Too Painful Déjà Vu and How White People Can Help Read More »
A couple of years ago, I blogged about American psychologist Rick Hanson’s Red Brain, Green Brain model and how it can help us to reflect on our mental wellbeing. I regularly use this model when coaching my institutional clients on how they can improve their workplace cultures and facilitate their employees’ mental wellbeing. But these …
All Systems Red: Mental Health Under COVID-19 (part 1) Read More »
This is the third in an ongoing series of posts exploring what might change over the course of this pandemic—not in terms of the virus, but in terms of our personal, professional, and cultural responses. In Canada and all over the world, this pandemic is showing a yawning and widening gap between those who have …
I began to think about this a few weeks ago as I left a building where I’d spent the day with my mother in palliative care—the day before she died. I’d arrived in a hurry early that morning after one of my sisters called me in. My mother had had a hard night and we needed to make some decisions about dosage for morphine and other drugs, so my other sister and I had rushed to be with our family. I’d parked hastily in the dark, snow-covered visitors’ lot, and hadn’t given another thought to my car all day. Why would I? My mother was dying.