As an anthropologist, I am trained to listen to people and understand their point of view. In Liberia, I and my team of local researchers went into communities and said, “We are from WHO (the World Health Organization) and we need to know what you […]

COMMUNITY WELLNESS – building resiliency through mutual support At FII, our team meetings begin with a pause during which we check inside to sense what is going on for us at that moment, and then share what comes. In the first meeting after Pat returned […]

FII’s newly published Reaching Resilience is rich with fresh, living stories and activities, such as ‘dry stick green stick’, ‘inner guests’, and ‘the story listener’.  As people have used these activities, they have adapted them to different cultures and situations around the world. Here is […]

THE POWER OF METAPHORS FOR WRITING, FOR LIFE, FOR COMMUNITY You probably think you learned about metaphors in your freshman literature class, but, really, you’ve been using them from the time you began to talk.  If your mother kept a ‘baby book’, you will find […]

Building a community wellness program reminds me of my recent experience knitting my grandson’s sweater. Here I was happily knitting away and I was almost finished with the body of the sweater when I realized the front was completely wrong. 

A while back, my Wholebody Focusing partner Elizabeth and I decided to spend a weekend together.  We live far apart and I needed to fly to where she lives.  We called it our Focusing Spa Weekend because we intended to spend our time in Grounded […]