Carol Ryff on Purpose and health
Carol Ryff is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Dr. Ryff is well-known for identifying dimensions of psychological well-being. In this short video, recorded at the PRYDE “Purpose and Health across the Life Span” conference in October 2016, she talks about the links between purpose/meaning and health.
Reflection Questions
Can you identify areas of your life where you feel a strong sense of your values, purpose and strengths?
Can you identify areas in your life where you are not sure how your activities are connected with your values and strengths? How might that inform you in making decisions into the future?
Tapping into core values
In this short video Lady Gaga talks about how losing touch with her strengths and values lead her to feeling unhappy, and how reclaiming her strengths and values started by saying “no.” You can find the whole presentation this video came from here. It was part of the Emotion Revolution Summit in 2015 cohosted by Born This Way Foundation and the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence.
Reflection Questions
What is one thing you feel uncomfortable about because it does not align with your values?
What’s one small step you can take to set a boundary in this part of your life to align you more with your values?
Study: Articles on Values and Strengths
You can find a number of other articles on the HeartWorks website about core values and strengths.
The Spiritual Art of Saying No
Sometimes we need to free ourselves up, by saying “No,” so that we can do the work that really matters to us. Saying “No” often doesn’t feel good, partly because we have been afraid to do it because we don’t want to be rejected, but it’s a powerful self-compassion practice that allows us to live more authentically and with more freedom. You can read an article on saying no here.
Reflection Questions
What is one small thing you could start saying “no” to, as a way to practice setting a boundary?
What is one thing you might prune so that something else can flourish?
My Feelings Are Not My Enemies
In this On Being article, Miguel Clark Mallet talks about his struggle to become more comfortable with his emotions and to eventually understand them as important information about values, strengths, motivation and needs.
If you’d like to explore how Miguel’s writing sits in your internal landscape, you might like to reflect on the Wisdom Questions below. Feel free to share your thoughts on the discussion board.
Reflection Questions
Miguel writes, “If I don’t know myself I can’t know why I react to the world as I do; I can’t distinguish the fear that says I’m in peril from the fear that arises when faced with the need to change. What separates true threats to my well-being from simple discomfort at being wrong?” Do you have a sense of what separates “true threats” to your wellbeing from “simple discomfort at being wrong”? How do each of these feel?
Miguel quotes Antonio Damasio: ““Rather than being a luxury, emotions are a very intelligent way of driving an organism to certain outcomes,” he has said. “And we know this because if you’re deprived of those emotions then, lo and behold, rather than being a sort of coolheaded reasoner, you become a rather poor reasoner.”” How have your emotions helped you to reason? Can you think of a situation where you were much wiser because of your emotional information?
Miguel writes, “It seemed easier, behind a calm, reasonable veneer, to stay safe and project a dispassionate persona, wielding the shield of certainty that would keep anyone from seeing the trembling me beneath.” Have you had a similar experience? What did you learn from “staying safe”?
Somatic Self-Compassion Community on Facebook
You can see articles to support your study and practice on strengths and values this week on our Somatic Self-Compassion Community page on Facebook.