LACCC presents: Innovations in Recovery Conference, Monday, June 23rd, 8am – 4pm

The LOS ANGELES COUNTY CLIENT COALITION is putting on the 3rd Annual Innovations in Recovery Conference. The conference will ill take place on Monday, June 23, 2014 at the California Endowment Center (Directions & Innovations Conf 2014.flyer)  located at 1000 N. Alameda Street Los Angeles, CA 90012, from 8:00am to 4:00 pm. 

Please join us!!! The Wildflowers’ Movement will be exhibiting and presenting SHINE ON YOU CRAZY DIAMOND, an innovative workshop with music, singing and art! Our group is about giving & receiving mindful support while practicing self-awareness, cultivating radical wellness, and celebrating diversity. We meet every 1st and 3rd Sunday at SHARE! in Culver City and out at various events, and in nature, our natural habitat.

 

 

Found Voices: Art Exhibit, Poetry, Music

Join us where ART and SCIENCE collide with Art, Poetry & Music at the California NanoSystems Institute, UCLA Art/ Sci + Lab, Gallery, at UCLA CNSI, this coming Tuesday, May 20th, at 6.30-9.00 p.m.

The CNSI UCLA Art | Sci Center + Lab is dedicated to pursuing and promoting the evolving “Third Culture” by facilitating the infinite potential of collaborations between (media) arts and (bio/nano) sciences.

 The center’s affiliation with the California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI) offers access to cutting edge researchers and their laboratories and a dedicated gallery for exhibitions. The California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI) is a research center at UCLA whose mission is to encourage university collaboration with industry and to enable the rapid commercialization of discoveries in nanosystems. CNSI members who are on the faculty at UCLA represent a multi-disciplinary team of some of the world’s preeminent scientists. The work conducted at the CNSI represents world-class expertise in four targeted areas of nanosystems-related research including Energy, Environment, Health-Medicine, and Information Technology.

                                                                                                                                                            CNSI NEW DIRECTIONS  are attached… Parking is $12, $5 w “disability” pass. There is meter parking on La Conte Ave. and parking at Ralphs on La Conte – if you decide to shop and/or risk it 🙂

Can Our Suffering End?

Sadhguru tells us where the source of our suffering lays. He explains that there are methods to go beyond it, to become a “buddha” (one who is above her/his intellect). We just have to understand that we can change our internal software and become buddhas. It’s a process and it doesn’t happen overnight. But it IS possible.

We are the chemists… we can change our chemistry. We just need a different kind of laboratory.  It is not objective…it is subjective and it takes a step-by-step process with a completely different dimension of perception and experience.

Yogi, mystic and visionary, Sadhguru is a spiritual master with a difference. An arresting blend of profundity and pragmatism, his life and work serves as a reminder that yoga is a contemporary science, vitally relevant to our times.

 

 

 

 

Sex, Lies & Trauma

Straight Talk about Sexual Compulsivity, from Psychology Today, Feb. 1.2013

by Alexandra Katehakis, MFT

At Center for Healthy Sex, we find inspiration from many sources to treat sex addiction, love addiction, sexual anorexia, and sexual dysfunction. Meditation and affirmations are helpful tools that build esteem, create procedural memories, reduce anxiety, slow the heart rate, and increase blood flow to the brain.

Attachment theory is a component of our philosophy — behavioral patterns imparted in infancy affect the way we grow up to live our lives. Because this early programming becomes so ingrained, it takes consistent and sustained effort to rewire the neural pathways.

Meditation for Week 1 — AWKWARDNESS

“Anyone who realizes what Love is, the dedication of the heart, so profound, so absorbing, so mysterious, so imperative, and always just in the noblest natures so strong, cannot fail to see how difficult, how tragic even, must often be the fate of those whose deepest feelings are destined from the earliest days to be a riddle and a stumbling-block, unexplained to themselves, passed over in silence by others.”               ~ Edward Carpenter

Not having grace or skill is often a result of a socially clumsy childhood. People who feel awkward in life, and especially in sex, were typically not seen, heard, understood, or cherished as a child. Moreover, many others were sexually shamed or, worse yet, sexually abused. Shame creates sexual awkwardness so overcoming sexual trauma is the first order of business.

Once you’ve done the major work of reclaiming your sexuality and pulled it out of the grips of shame, feeling awkward in sex can be overcome. Like a beginning dancer or musician with no skill, you may feel that any attempt to a make a sexual move feels impossible to you. With practice and patience (with yourself and by your lover,) the impossible will become difficult as your nervous system recalibrates to read sexual contact as something good instead of a set up for danger or rejection. Eventually the difficult becomes easy and, with time, you will experience your sexual ease as a thing of beauty.

Daily Healthy Sex Acts:

• Set sail on a course of sexual healing by committing to address one thing you need in order to move out of awkwardness. Does this mean going to therapy for the first time to address sexual abuse you experienced as a child or does it mean that you’re awkward around a certain sexual act you need to talk to your partner about? Today’s the day to take action.

Meditation for Week 2:  TESTING

“Perhaps all the questions we ask of love, to measure, test, probe, and save it, have the additional effect of cutting it short.” ~ Milan Kundera

Trust is often tested instinctively in relationships. This is different than taking conscious measures to test a partner’s trustworthiness, because the very act of testing trust is a contradiction. Testing reveals that you don’t trust. Whenever you set up obstacles as a form of test for a partner, really what you’re doing is setting up obstacles. For lovers to successfully get past your obstacles to pass the test, this just means that you’ve trained them to allow obstacles in the relationship.

We test ourselves when we test others — do we operate from the greater good, or from a place of ego and preconception? They say you teach what you most have to learn, and it’s also possible you test what you most have to comprehend. Any test we consciously set for others is going to be steeped with subjectivity. In scientific methodology, this is called ‘confirmation bias.’ Perhaps life delivers enough tests so that we don’t have to add any trick questions. A healthy way to evaluate trust with a partner might be to observe how they respond to life’s challenges. It can also be a great test to allow simplicity …to tolerate intimacy, security and safety with another person, and to build trust.

Daily Healthy Sex Acts:

• Your deepest innermost self always knows just what you need to do. Trust yourself to act accordingly.

Meditation for Week 3:  DISCLOSURE

“I have said to you to speak the truth is a painful thing. To be forced to tell lies is much worse.” ~ Oscar Wilde

Keeping secrets from, or telling lies to, your partner can be an enormous burden that will ultimately get in the way of your sexual intimacy. A guilty conscience is not sexy, but making yourself vulnerable is.

Exposing your true self means facing your shortcomings and any accompanying shame you feel about your actions. Speaking the truth about things that make you feel bad about yourself can be scary or painful, but is essential if you want to build your relationship on honesty. Living a life of secrets and lies doesn’t allow love and sexuality to flourish but, instead, suffocates them.

Take time today to think about what an act of courage it would be for you to disclose any secrets and lies you’re holding that separate you from your partner. Are you ready to face yourself and stand up as an adult? Keep current with your partner by banishing secrets and lies from your relationship, and experience what it’s like to live in honesty every day.

Daily Healthy Sex Acts:

• Today, disclose just one secret you’ve been keeping from, or one lie you’ve been telling to your partner. Let honesty be your goal, and don’t expect reciprocity. Do it from your heart because you want to be truly known, and want the other to know you.
• Drop your defenses.
• Stay present.

Meditation for Week 4:  OPEN-HEARTEDNESS

“Open your heart and take us in, Love – love and me.” ~  William Ernest Henley

Every person possesses the quality of open-heartedness. The real test is to stretch into open-heartedness right when you feel most like isolating and shutting down. It’s so easy to close a heart, especially against a partner (if not all humankind, at times). Withholding love is called being “cold” while open-heartedness is called being “warm,” and it’s possible there is actual vital energy being shared when you open your heart to another.

But first, open your heart to yourself. Show yourself love even when–especially when–you fall short, because your shame, disappointment, or regret can never open that heart.

There’s a saying that anger is like picking up a burning ember to throw at someone–you get burned in the process. It’s the same with close-heartedness. You might close your heart to protect yourself from intimidating or hostile forces, and yet closing your heart is one of the most hurtful acts you can do to yourself. Closing your heart as a form of protection is a contradiction. The only protection in any challenging situation is to open your heart so you can keep the vital energy flowing inside you.

Daily Healthy Sex Acts:

• Share with a partner or friend: What opens your heart? What closes your heart?
• Feel the vibration of your own opening heart. Imagine that vibration expanding and basking everyone you encounter today with its warmth.
• Practice synchronized heart-opening with your beloved. Explore together what it feels like to close and open the vital energies of loving hearts.

Drowned in a Stream of Prescriptions

New York Times, By ALAN SCHWARZ, Published: February 2, 2013

VIRGINIA BEACH — Every morning on her way to work, Kathy Fee holds her breath as she drives past the squat brick building that houses Dominion Psychiatric Associates.

It was there that her son, Richard, visited a doctor and received prescriptions for Adderall, an amphetamine-based medication for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. It was in the parking lot that she insisted to Richard that he did not have A.D.H.D., not as a child and not now as a 24-year-old college graduate, and that he was getting dangerously addicted to the medication. It was inside the building that her husband, Rick, implored Richard’s doctor to stop prescribing him Adderall, warning, “You’re going to kill him.” It was where, after becoming violently delusional and spending a week in a psychiatric hospital in 2011, Richard met with his doctor and received prescriptions for 90 more days of Adderall. He hanged himself in his bedroom closet two weeks after they expired.

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Stigma of Suicide & Substance Abuse… Winehouse, Joplin, Hendrix, etc.

The fact that people are incarcerated in the US for thinking & talking about suicide implies that Americans do not really believe in freedom of thought & speech- in addition to rejecting an individual’s right to commit suicide. In contrast, the assertion that people have a right to not only think about but to commit suicide has been made by many people who believe in individual freedom.

June 25, 2011  AlterNet / By Kristen Gwynne

In Death, Amy Winehouse Becomes Most Recent Member of 27 Club

When Winehouse died this Saturday at age 27, she joined the ranks of Joplin, Hendrix and Cobain in the mysterious “Twenty-Seven club.”

Amy Winehouse’s sad, and yet not unexpected, death this Saturday makes her the latest inductee to the mysterious “Twenty-Sevens,” an eerie post-mortem “club” of some of the most influential rock artists of all time, all of whom died, perhaps not coincidentally, at the ripe of age 27 — just before adulthood.

Alongside Kurt Cobain, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, beehive-rocking, door-knocker-earring-wearing Winehouse joins a shocking three dozen great rock-and-rollers to die at 27, the curious age at whichThe 27s: The Greatest Myth of Rock and Roll author Eric Segalstad claims more rockers have died than any other.

Like many other Twenty-Sevens, including Joplin and Jim Morrison, Winehouse is suspected to have died from a drug overdose. Despite her hit “Rehab,” in which Winehouse famously sang, “They tried to make me go to rehab, I said NO, NO, NO,” Winehouse had undergone several stints in rehab for an admitted heroin addiction.

While Amy Winehouse is the newest member of this most simultaneously revered and abhorred club, her induction into the peculiar group has rock fans like myself wondering once again if the Twenty-Sevens are, in fact, no coincidence. Thirty, the stepping-stone to adulthood, where creativity and good music often go to die, is, after all, just around the corner. Perhaps early death saved our greatest musicians from the mediocrity (or at least minimized rebellion) that for rock stars often accompanies aging.

Basic numerology (the most complicated of which is often applied to the Twenty-Sevens) suggests this may be the case. To start, numerologists attribute the number 27 to persons of the highest wisdom and enlightenment – an argument few die-hard fans may disagree with. According to author Alfred Weysen, the number 27 symbolizes light in darkness. What’s more, biblical numerology relates the number 27 to the expectancy of divine approval or redemption. Did talent, wisdom and divine redemption lead these stars to die at their peaks? We do, after all, like our rock stars gritty, druggy, edgy, and young. And their dangerous lifestyles and rebellious music offers so much to their fans that, as strange as it may sound, it seems they may have died for us – like the Jesuses of rock and roll.

For rebellious teens and fans to whom rock stars offer a sense of belonging and righteousness denied by our parents — and adults in general — the Twenty-Sevens never grew old enough to move away from the edge. Instead, they hurled themselves over it, and their permanent youth is (perhaps creepily) comforting, especially to those for whom rock and roll is a lone sign of hope that we are not all doomed to be dull, that the mainstream fueling our angst is not the only future.

Fascinated by the Twenty-Sevens from a young age, I remember being 14 and poring over Kurt Cobain’s diary like it was my own; being 17 and visiting the hotel where Joplin died; and now 21, I remember my own encounter with Winehouse while studying in London. Two years ago, 19 and enjoying the freedom of drinking legally in London, I was out with some friends in Camden, the punk London neighborhood where Winehouse lived, partied and was found dead this weekend, when a lucky encounter landed me at a bar where Winehouse was DJing. In another twist of fate, the bartender invited us to stay for the after-party.

by Andrew Colunga

As Winehouse stood behind the bar mixing drinks andstruggling with her balance, my friends and I excitedly introduced ourselves to the troubled star and took a few shots with her before walking home in the daylight. She was so tiny – emasculated by her huge beehive and door-knocker earrings – it was obvious she was sick. The next day, she made the cover of London tabloids for, once again, stumbling down the street intoxicated.

Winehouse was a rock star, and she did as rock stars do, living off excess and freedom in a daze of fame. What’s more, she died at her peak. Dying at 27 means dying a legend: to have never started to “suck,” to have never slowed down. It is to be forever young – to skip out onselling out and losing touch – to never become your parents.

For Twenty-Sevens like Cobain, who appear to have committed suicide, this argument holds particularly strong. Cobain, in his suicide note, said: “It’s better to burn out than fade away.” So were the Twenty-Sevens, consciously or otherwise, pushing themselves toward death to avoid the impending doom of adulthood? Perhaps they felt conformity and its comorbid acquaintance mediocrity, creeping up behind them. Or maybe it was the demands and chains of the record industry and fame, driving them toward dangerous addictions.

In the end, whether young death was in the stars or just a tragic coincidence of life as a rock star, Amy Winehouse will, like the other Twenty-Sevens, leave behind a legacy of youth, from which eager teens and other fans will continue to draw inspiration and support.

Porn addicts…do they need to be medicated?

Did you know that just recently the senior staff at the Securities & Exchange Commission watched porn for up to 8 hours on their work computers while on the job? They were supposed to be carefully watching the financial system of our country! Instead, for the past 5 years 33 employees were caught watching porn during the economy crash, out of which 31 have been doing it for past 3 years or so, ever since the financial system was on the verge of crashing! See the full report and video clip here.  

You are probably asking yourself how this relates to enforcing outpatient drug treatment? Well, perhaps these government employees need drugs for their behavior? Aren’t they ‘sex addicts’, according to conventional psychiatry, if they cannot control their sexual urges? According to New York state’s new proposal to enforce outpatient drugging, these employees would qualify!

WE THE PEOPLE view the “mental illness industry” as cruel, costly, powerful and profitable. As citizens of the United States they maintain that the human rights of ALL people must be protected and promoted. When the needs of people are met, force is not necessary. Forced drugging and unwanted “treatment” is torture.  They insist, “We will be heard.”

WE THE PEOPLE is an organization of survivors and escapees of the current treatment methods of organized psychiatry. WE THE PEOPLE maintain that too many people have been victimized by experimentation, drugging, and electro-convulsive “therapy”. They continue to state national statistics that people who have been treated as “mentally ill” die an average of 25 to 30 years younger than their contemporaries.

When comparing the two stories, it is quite obvious that all people do not have the same rights despite mental diversity. We allow government employees, in fact, we are paying them, to watch porn while they are suppose to be monitoring the financial situation of our country. At the same time, we are allowing the PORN ADDICTS to view their porn, we are drugging mentally diverse people for being sensitive or for having been abused in their past or for having a different perspective of reality!! This makes no sense!!

Everyone is MENTALLY DIVERSE! This is NO REASON to drug someone! Should we drug the ‘PORN ADDICTS’ in the gov’t who were watching porn instead of monitoring our financial system? Should we drug the ‘alcholics’? Should we drug the ‘neurotic drivers’ of NYC, perhaps diagnosing them as ‘Honker-driver disease’? Who’s next? The cross-walker?!?

Discrimination of all cultures, including:  age, gender, ethnicity, race, socioeconomic class, sexual orientation, educational level, mental diversity, etc. should NOT be and WILL NOT be tolerated! If you FORCE drugs on mentally diverse people, it is like forcing drugs on someone who is a woman or a man for her/his gender; it is like forcing drugs on a teenager; it is like forcing drugs on someone who chooses to be bisexual or someone who is poor!!!

The proposed new law includes provisions such as increasing the original court order from 6 months to one year; not requiring doctor testimony, requiring fiscal management, allowing an expired order to be renewed 60 days after it expires without needing a new hearing, and viewing “non-compliance” with drugs, urine or blood tests, or drugs and alcohol use as grounds for “dangerousness”. 

On Tuesday, April 27, 2010, WE THE PEOPLE and allies will be meeting with Assemblyman Felix Ortiz, Chair of the Mental Health Subcommittee to oppose  Involuntary Outpatient Torture being made permanent or being extended. “Kendra’s Law” which exhibits structural and institutional racism and classism was supposed to sunset in June 2010 – and the new proposed law is even more social control than its previous version.

How many drugs are we going to give the ‘porn addicts’? How many drugs should we give the ‘alcoholics’ or the people who watch ‘reality TV’? How about those who are addicted to soap operas? 

How many diversities, including mental diversity, do you have? Are you ready for the government to drug you?

SIGN HERE NOW   if you want to keep your FREEDOM and not be drugged!