Your Pain Is The Breaking Of The Shell

[julie gosling]

'... your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding ... '. Khalil Gibran

Negative Emotions Are Key to Well-Being
Feeling sad, mad, critical or otherwise awful? Surprise: negative emotions are essential for mental health

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=negative-emotions-...

By Tori Rodriguez

' ... the deeper sorrow carves a well in your heart, the more joy you can contain ... ' Khalil Gibran

This is a great article and links into a lot of my current thinking around how we learn and teach about 'well-being' - and how misery is medicated and pathologised instead of being heard and honoured. Any thoughts?

Ps the quotes from The Prophet are my addition not part of the article!!

[Jill Anderson]

Thanks for posting this Julie. I agree that it raises some very interesting questions in relation to learning and teaching.  Some stray thoughts: 

- How, as educators, to we facilitate expression of negative emotions (particularly when our own performance is being judged via student satisfaction surveys!).  I think - from my own experience - this can be a particular issue for beginning teachers, where it can tap in to fears about one's own competence and about floodgates opening. . . . I wonder what other people think?

- How are social media approaches (eg twitter) playing in to this focus on positivity (and, perhaps, closing down discussion of more difficult emotions)?

- How can we acknowledge the negative/unsettling/troubling impacts of learning itself? This is much discussed in relation to PhD study, but an issue with resonance at all levels.  

I was interested in the discussion of mindfulness approaches.  I've been collecting links with a focus on mindfulness and higher education here: http://bundlr.com/b/mindfulness-and-higher-education  Would be interested in any others people come across. 

[Jill Anderson]

And this all, of course,takes us back to Terry's recent mhhehub blog posting:

http://mhhehub.ning.com/page/september-2013-1