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 🙂

Finding a Voice, UCLA Broad Art Center, May 6th

Finding a Voice to Silence the Crowd:

Health Through the Arts

Photo Art by Sandra Cheng

Tuesday, May 6^th, 7-8.30 pm at the UCLA 2100A Broad Art Center

Dave Leon, LCSW, Foundation Director of “The Painted Brain” and Jim McGrath, Director of the Imagination Workshop at UCLA Semel Institute, will discuss the work of Imagination Workshop & Painted Brain, both peer-driven creative arts programs for adults with mental health issues.

A 15-minute performance and a Q & A between a psychiatrist and program participant will follow.

Celebration Festival

We look forward to seeing you on Saturday, April 26th at SHARE!  (we will attend this Festival instead of our regular 3rd Sunday meeting on April 20th, since many members will be celebrating Easter)

Please come by our booth and/or call 951.638.WELL or email us at:  wildflowersmovement@gmail.com for more information!!! We will also have a group meeting on this day and lunch will be served.

We look forward to seeing you there!!!

 

 

When Johnny and Jane Come Marching Home

This is an incredible project started by Dr. Paula J. Caplan, a clinical and research psychologist, and an Associate at Harvard University’s DuBois Institute and a past Fellow at the Women and Public Policy Program in Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. She is the author of:  The Myth of Women’s Masochism, They Say You’re Crazy: How the World’s Most Powerful Psychiatrists Decide Who’s Normal, and ten other books. Her articles, essays, and op-eds have appeared in both scholarly and popular publications. 

Thank you for your interest in this work!

Listening is “the art and practice of putting someone else’s speaking, thinking, feeling needs ahead of our own,” wrote Marc Wong in Thank You For Listening.
The Welcome Johnny and Jane Home Project helps veterans heal – and reduces the too-common chasms between veterans and nonveterans – by having one nonveteran at a time simply listen to a veteran from any war. You can become involved by doing one or more sessions, by helping organize others to get involved, or both. Listeners are not therapists, and – except for speaking two sentences – they truly do nothing but listen. However, they do so with 100% of their attention and their whole hearts. Harvard University research has shown that veterans describe this as helpful, and the listeners say it is wonderfully transformative for them.

This is about human connection through the often overlooked but astonishing power of listening. Regardless of the veteran’s politics and the listener’s politics, the sessions are healing.

The three main steps you need to take are becoming familiar with the purpose and guidelines, finding a place to do the session, and finding a veteran who wants to do a session. For more information about how to get involved with the project, click here.

When Johnny and Jane Come Marching Home

“He who sees a need and waits to be asked for help is as unkind as if he had refused it.”
                                                                                                                                                   – Dante Alighieri (1265-1321)

Martin Luther King Jr., Jan. 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968

from MindFreedom International, MLK on the International Association for the Advancement of the Creative Maladjustment (IAACM)

In one of his earliest references to creative maladjustment, MLK addressed the 27 June 1956 annual convention of the NAACP in San Francisco to describe the historic victory of the ”Montgomery Story” bus boycott in 1955.

Excerpt:

“There are certain words in the technical vocabulary of every academic discipline that tend after a while to become stereotype and cliches, there is a word in modern psychology which is now probably more familiar than any other words in psychology. It is the word the maladjusted; it is the ringing cry of the new child, psychology — maladjusted.

And as a minister seeing and counseling with people very day concerning their problems and their maladjustment’s, I’m certainly concerned with those who are maladjusted, concerned to see everybody as adjusted as possible.

But I want to leave this evening saying to you that there are some things in our social system that I’m proud to be maladjusted to, and I call upon you to be maladjusted to. I never intend to adjust myself to the viciousness of lynch mobs; I never intend to become adjusted to the evils of segregation and discrimination; I never intend to become adjusted to the tragic inequalities of the economic system which will take necessity from the masses to give luxury to the classes; I never intend to become adjusted to the insanity’s of militarism, the self-defeating method of physical violence.

There are some things that I never intend to become adjusted to, and I call upon you to continue to be maladjusted. History still has a choice place for the maladjusted. There is still a call for individuals to be maladjusted. The salvation of our world lies in the hands of the maladjusted.

I call upon you to be maladjusted, maladjusted as the prophet Amos who in the midst of the tragic inequalities of injustice in his day cried out in words that echoes across the generations: ”Let judgment run down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

As maladjusted as Lincoln who confronted a nation divided against itself and had the vision to see that the nation could not exist half free, and half slave.

Maladjusted as the — hundreds and thousands — of Negroes, North and South who are determined now to stand up for freedom, willing to face possible violence and possible death, who are willing to stand up and sacrifice and struggle until segregation is a dead reality and until integration is a fact.

Maladjusted as Jefferson who in the midst of an age amazingly adjusted to slavery cried out in words of cosmic proportions: ”All men are created equal; they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights. Among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

I call upon you to follow this maladjustment. It is through such a maladjustment that we will be able to emerge from the bleak and desolate midnight of man’s inhumanity to man to the bright and glittering daybreak of freedom, equality and justice.”

Shocking Failure in U.S. To Prohibit Sex-Based Discrimination

by Paula J. Caplan, Ph.D., Published on October 12, 2013 by Paula J. Caplan, Ph.D. in Science Isn’t Golden, Matters of the Heart and Mind

People in the United States talk a lot about rights. Nothing wrong with caring about rights, but it doesn’t have to be at the expense of caring about fairness.

I was born and raised in the U.S. but lived and worked in Canada for 19 years, and I have both U.S. and Canadian citizenship. Since my return to the U.S., people have often asked me how Canada has long had the equivalent of what in the U.S. is called the Equal Rights Amendment, prohibiting discrimination  on the basis of one’s sex, when the U.S. has never managed to adopt the ERA. My explanation is that Canadians have a long tradition of caring about fairness as well as about rights and do not see the two as mutually exclusive.

Last month, I had the privilege of attending the educational and inspiring event about women and media that Veteran Feminists of America held in Los Angeles, and I want to tell you what I saw onscreen there. I urge you to have a look at this one-minute video right now, before reading the rest of this essay, because no attempt to describe it could match the powerful impact of watching it. It is at

It is shocking but sadly unsurprising, given the rollbacks in race-based civil rights and the upsurge in racism in recent years in the U.S., that we are also far behind many other countries, even some that Americans regard as less civilized than our own, in eradicating bias against and mistreatment of girls and women. Our Voices of Diversity project — funded by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation revealed a tendency for sexism, including violence against women, to be taken less seriously than racism. As long as we have no federal Equal Rights Amendment, it will continue to be harder to eradicate the significant and appalling discrimination in hiring and wages, in the prosecution of sex-and-gender-based crimes, in the military, and in education, as well as in many other arenas.

It is unconscionable that the country that touts itself as the exemplar of freedom has not managed to pass legislation prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sex. Happily, there is organizing aimed to revive the ERA and get enough states to vote their approval to make it finally the law of the land. To learn more about why it is so sorely needed, I urge you to have a look at

ERA EDUCATION PROJECT

to learn about the film-in-progress called “Equal Means Equal.” I heard the smart and impassioned filmmaker, Kamala Lopez, speak at the women and media conference, and as you will see in the above link to her 1 1/2-minute video, she is driven partly by the fact that between 75 and 90% of Americans mistakenly believe that our Constitution already prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex. As she says in the video, “235 years is a long time to wait for equal rights.” Her website is full of detailed information about the scope and manifestations of sexism.

After you watch these videos, please post the links, and urge everyone you know to watch them.