Resilience is about our ability to recover more than our ability to endure. Not everyone is born resilient, it is like a muscle that we can strengthen, a skill that we can develop. Should we then be training for resilience?
We live in a world where we are undeniably, regularly put under some sort of pressure. This pressure can come from at least three different sources – unpredictable natural disasters, personal challenges or living in an oppressive system.
Let’s develop our anxiety toolbox together:
Our sessions will always be practical and interactive. You will have opportunities to practice the tools during the session so that it is easier to use them when anxiety strikes.
This is one of the sessions in our new offering “Your personal stress management smorgasbord”
More details here. We would like to put the power back into your hands and give you agency to tailor-make a stress and anxiety management package that really works for you. You do not need to feel overwhelmed by anxiety – there are changes you can make in your area of influence. Every Wednesday in October from 19:30 – 20:45 we will be facilitating a different topic online. You decide what you need and when and whether you would like another session. You give yourself time to apply your learnings, implement change and control the amount of new information you are exposed to. Every month our offering will change slightly, so do check in to see what’s been added.
Email contact@tt-tt.co.za to book your place by 10:00 on 12 October.
Let’s develop our anxiety toolbox: Our sessions will always be practical, interactive and give you an opportunity to practice the tools during the session so that it is easier to use these tools in more anxious situations.
This is one of the sessions in our new offering “Your personal stress management smorgasbord”. We would like to put the power back into your hands and give you agency to tailor-make a stress management package that really works for you. Every Monday from 19:30 – 20:45 we will be facilitating a different topic online. You decide what you need and when and whether you would like another session. You give yourself time to apply your learnings, implement change and control the amount of new information you are exposed to. Every month our offering will change slightly, so do check in to see what’s been added.
Email contact@tt-tt.co.za to book your place by 10:00 on 12 September.
Anniversaries prompt us to look back at the journey to this point in history, to see where we have come from, to recall the many commemorative markers that are strung together on one long winding path. Looking back can be inspiring, nostalgic or even painful.
So many anniversaries have happened in March: our own wedding anniversary of 25 years, the one year anniversary of the begin of South African lockdown, my sister’s return from her volunteering on a Mercy Ship. And now, another Easter under lockdown. We look back and marvel at how our world has changed, and how we have changed.
The sting of death
by Khanyi Mthimunye
It is random and illogical
Even when you crave it
It can elude you
make you its accomplice
Leave you feeling guilty for the thought
A few days ago I was involved in a conversation where each person shared a phrase that has come up often in our lives, that carries a lot of our life philosophy in it. You guessed it, mine was “Live in tension. Live intentionally.”
I have come to realise that in some way or another there is always a level of tension in my life. The tension I live in has many different sources, some are easier to manage than others. (I want to just make a proviso here that I am not writing about living with chronic anxiety, PTSD and panic attacks. Please get professional help if that describes you.)
Sometimes this experience of tension can be related to choices I have to make. I have so many ideas but it is impossible to pursue them all. There are a number of people in my life with expectations of me that may conflict with my own priorities. There is only so much I can do with my time and resources.
A reason to celebrate – on Saturday 22 August we facilitated our first online Diversity Dialogue! We appreciate everyone who brought their time and energy into that space, especially those who felt some trepidation at doing something new technologically! Our topic was “Sensitizing the Church to Gender Based Violence”. We would like to share some highlights…
It was apparent during the dialogue, that there are many churches where the teaching seems to be more about rules and gender roles than about Jesus’ love for sinners. In many churches, women do not feel they are seen for who they are because they feel they have to fit into a small and rigid role and cannot be authentically themselves. There was a sense of mourning and lament for the loss of their potential skills and talents that could have contributed to life together but were not enjoyed by the community.
In both community life and Bible teaching, we need to develop an equal focus on the perpetrator and the victim. Bible teaching should be about the real people described in the Bible, with their faults and sins. The heroes of the faith should not be “sugar-coated”. In our practical lives, we can accept all broken people including those who are aggressive or alcoholics, and deal with their hurt. We can work with men who are in pain, allowing them space to heal before their pain leads to violence.
While I was doing my coaching course, we were advised to focus on finding and developing our own niche as coaches. My thought process kept bringing me back to the term “integration” – a concept that has often featured in my life, in a number of ways.
I was first introduced to “integration” when, as an Occupational Therapy student in the nineties, we learnt about how better results are achieved when the two sides of our bodies and brains work together. Much more so, than when we rely on only one side. Integration can be defined as the process of combining two or more things in an effective way so that they form a unified whole that is more than merely the sum of its parts. Disintegration then is the loss of effectiveness, cohesion, strength – a process of fragmenting or falling apart. We experience disintegration when we feel overwhelmed by external and internal stressors and challenges, when our parts are not working together smoothly.
When we experience stressful circumstances, we often struggle with strong emotions like anger, pain, anxiety and fear. It feels like they are taking over our lives, and often we try to avoid dealing with them for as long as possible. However, suppressing them often results in an uncontrolled pressure-cooker effect: the pot boils over or even explodes, often when it is most inconvenient.
After the frenzy of activity of the last few days, trying to keep up to date with rules and regulations as they were published, getting ready for lockdown and cleaning the house yesterday to start lockdown with a germ-free state, I am taking a moment (or this weekend ) to assess where we find ourselves at this moment.
During this week we have done many things for the last time for the foreseeable future – shopping at places we know will be closed, visits to family members and friends, walks/jogs around the neighbourhood. These were intentional experiences that were appreciated, greeted and gently left behind.
Then there were those things where we did not know we were doing them for the last time – because the market was cancelled the evening before, the library was closed to the public with staff still working inside, the next weekly face-to-face Sepedi conversation falls in the lock-down. There is a sense of irritation and unfairness around losing these experiences, it does not suit us that we had to unexpectedly leave these behind.
On 13 July, ten people gathered at Johannesburg Bible College in Soweto to dialogue around the topic of “Killing in schools”. Other themes included violence in home and society, rights and freedom vs. responsibility, and government’s failure – mainly in the education system, the unintended societal results of changes and laws, and the unintended results of institutions taking over responsibilities that were relational before.
