For those of us who struggle with thoughts about our size and shape, sometimes we don’t like our bodies and our behaviour very much. It seems like an impossible task to transform our self loathing into self-love, but it is possible with these five simple steps. I started to write some examples of the self loathing dialogue I occasionally have in my head and I found I couldn’t do it. It felt as wrong as criticising my closest friend. I guess it goes to prove that the shift from loathing to love is not always huge and momentous, but subtle and gradual. When I look in the mirror and see a part of my body I don’t like, I run through these five steps in my head. This following example is the kind of internal conversation I might have about my belly. 1. POSITIVE INTENT (THE GIFT) Recognise the gift your body is giving you. My belly fat is protecting and cushioning my intestines and reproductive system. By having a higher body fat percentage my hormones are functioning as they should, enabling me to have a normal transition through perimenopause. I fit my skin and the wrinkly empty skin folds are gone. 2. FORGIVENESS Acknowledge the way you have treated your body in the past. I am sorry that I have been either starving you or stuffing you with toxic food and that I have accused you of betraying me. I now realise that my body is a reflection of my thoughts and beliefs so I was hating myself. Please forgive me for treating you so badly. 3. GRATITUDE Notice the miracles your body performs even though you have abused it. I am so thankful that even though I have treated you so badly you are still healthy and functioning. I am amazed at your ability to heal a lifetime of digestive and hormonal issues within a short amount of time. Thank you for your forgiveness and that’s it’s not too late to take great care of you. Why does the narrator have self loathing behavior? Pick the correct answer from the following options: - she eats too much - she was abused as a child - not enough information - she drinks too much
not enough information
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Greg said goodbye to his last student at 8:15 PM, locked up the studio, and got into his car. He always looked forward to his evening rendezvous with Bonnie--his nickname for the Bonneville. He liked to put her top down, and drive her around town in the moonlight. Their route varied from night to night, but the ultimate destination was never in question. "May I help you?" The worn-out speaker was crackly, but he still recognized the particularly twangy East Texas voice of Fontana Fry. Over his six years of vocal training, he had become acutely aware of accents. This is true of all classically trained singers. Great emphasis is placed on precise pronunciation and enunciation. It is mandatory that the singer's repertoire include works written in English, Latin, Italian, German, and French. So, by the time Greg finished his graduate degree, his accent had been all but eliminated. He sounded somewhat like a network news anchor instead of an East Texan. "I would like a large--" "--a large dipped cone, the usual. Right?" The Dairy Queen drive-thru ordering station was located out in front of the restaurant, on the right side. He looked up, and saw the 19 year-old waving at him. She looked so cute in her little Dairy Queen outfit. Fontana was in her first year at Kilgore College. She planned to be an elementary teacher. He knew she would be a good one. Greg had met Fontana a few months earlier when she brought her 13-year-old brother to the studio to enroll for guitar lessons. The boy was holding a U.S. made, 1968 Harmony acoustic guitar his uncle gave him. The body and the frets were badly worn, but the instrument still played beautifully. It looked somewhat like a large violin, with arched top and f-holes. That shape produces a more mellow sound than flattops. And the guitar's age contributed additional warmth to the tone. Greg liked to drive around town: Pick the correct answer from the following options: - At 8:15 - Six years ago - In the moonlight - not enough information
In the moonlight
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Recently the subject of discrimination has been something I have been thinking a lot about. It was the subject of some meetings with ubuntu-women, something I have discussed with my friend Sulamita in a Brazilian bar at 4.30am and the subject of various ad-hoc discussions at the Ubuntu Developer Summit. As the wider Open Source community grows, it becomes more of an issue every day, and something we all need to be aware of. While in Brazil I made a promise to Sulamita that I would be blogging about the issue of discrimination against women, and I have been holding off writing an entry until I had some real, practical, implementable steps that I can advise people to take to help make the situation better. Although I will never fully understand how some women are made to feel at the hands of such discrimination, I have been hoping my contribution could be to help contribute to an awareness of the issue, and for that to happen I felt I needed to construct some doable steps that people can execute. Solving social problems is hard though, which ain’t all that surprising, so I had held off on a blog post until I had some such action points. I have since discovered that there is really one key step that we all need take – don’t accept or allow discrimination in your community. In my mind all discrimination is bad. Every day people get up and are discriminated due to gender, age, race, mobility, technical knowledge and more. The issues of discrimination, while different in the specifics (e.g. women are discriminated in different ways to age discrimination), the underlying issue is very similar – mistreating people because of a grouping they are part of. We have all suffered this in different ways, from serious racial hatred to someone not taking you seriously because you have long hair and an Iron Maiden t-shirt. How has the speaker been discriminated against? Pick the correct answer from the following options: - Casual profiling - Judged for a t-shirt - Serious racial hatred - not enough information
Casual profiling
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I end this small run of blog posts with the question posed by Professor Brian Boyd at the beginning of our evening: Do we want to close the achievement gap? We know we can close the gap. It’s been done or almost been done before in Scottish education, but the answers have been ignored as they pass us by. The simple clue is this: poverty is single biggest predictor of achievement, and according to research (Hammonds sic, reference required), aged 10, a child living in poverty is 60% less likely to get to university. Boyd borrowed from his own mother’s report card to ask us what kind of education we desire. Is it the academic success at all costs route, or is there another option we need to value as much, if not more? His mother’s report card, one that prevented her from becoming a secondary school pupil in Glasgow, is filled with G and FG, until the last point: Character and conduct - excellent. What kind of pupils do we want to develop in Scotland? What do we value in our assessment system? Opening up opportunity for all is a tough game to play when the examination system rewards only certain types of behaviour, few of them related to what the Curriculum for Excellence says we stand for. In his own small community in East Kilbride, three secondary schools enter a period of meltdown as the local rag sets about creating its own local league table of performance, with those three ‘teams’ in competition for the top spot (or at least not the bottom one). Therefore, we must stop basing “the gap” largely on attainment. First of all, Boyd would like us to remove the traditional, and non-sensical academic/vocational divide. Is the law or medicine degree we value not vocational? (Are all General Practitioners not Plumbers, as Dr Murray on the panel suggests?) Who borrowed for his own mother's report card? Pick the correct answer from the following options: - The narrator - not enough information - A Scottish Student - Boyd
