The Hearing Voices Network is about affirming neurodiversity–voices, visions, and other “extreme” or “unusual” states–and empowering people who experience those states to define them and decide what is truly empowering. We welcome people who don’t want involvement with mainstream psychiatry, many of whom have been traumatized by pathologizing labels, psych meds, and/or institutionalization, and those who feel that psychiatry has been lifesaving in their experience.

Thank you, Brian and Phoenix!

“The Treasure of You” seeks to introduce the reader to the exquisite and profound notion that every child of life has a unique song to sing, and every adult has a unique life story, path, and calling to pursue.

Purpose gifts us with a feeling of mattering, significance, belonging and self-esteem.

Once we begin to experience and explore our identity beyond our formative years, we can embark upon a journey of discovery that never ends, providing us reward, enjoyment, and fulfillment.

Our existence is connected to a greater web of existence that is interwoven, and extends in all directions from our own center of existence into the vastness of the Unknown that remains a profound yet sacred mystery to us all, of which we all have our being in, and participate from and within.

This, to me, is a holographic mosaic of beauty, radiance and wonder, that we also belong to this Mystery, the very fabric of our being, known and unknown.

We want to value this life, to Treasure this existence, and to support our own essential goodness and that of others in this eternal Dance we are a part of.

Our inherent unity calls each and all of us to courageously forge futures of faith together, faith in the inner goodness that is present in our hearts, and the goodness of life, even amidst decay, ruin and incoherence, making way for renewal in our hearts, lives and communities. Viewed from a context of renewal and a call for co-creation, our vision invites and invokes a spirit of possibility, a commitment to serve from our highest capacities, a recognition we are collaborators in creation together.

The more beautiful life does exist, and we can have faith in our own story that it does not stop where we are today, and we can truly learn to lean in with wisdom, intention, faith, and the wholeness of all things, even as we allow the life-force guiding all existence to nourish our vision as we embody seeks of kindness, hope and empowered possibility emerge from a a profound conviction that we are all connected, that all things matter, and we have never been alone.

Far too many people throughout the history of the Earth have shown us a more considered way, to stretch our imagination, our courage, and our very inner souls towards this great becoming that is life, including our own lives in the great becoming, the Mystery of our Being, even as ourselves, and yet so vastly greater, a calling to know, that our hearts know, that we can let go, and learn to soar from a far greater awareness than the broken tools we’ve inherited, yet participating in a renewal that Nature knows, even when we fail to see the the future unfolding, even as we are becoming what we do not yet apprehend.

May we find hope, faith and beauty, in ourselves and in life, as we seek with a pure heart the love that life has and holds, even though challenging and difficult much of the time.

As we learn to live from an intentional heart space of faith in our own deeper capacities developing through intuitive participation and from our whole selves in emergence, we can know that our purpose is revealing Her humble majesty, one breath at a time, through our very existence, in this greater story binding all things together, even as we sometimes fight our own shadows, forgetting to turn towards the light of day dawning in our hearts forevermore, if only we allow it so.

I invite us to see ourselves as seeds of hope in the landscapes of time, with gifts to share — gifts of our own unique way of seeing in the world, being in the world, and participating uniquely as only the Song in our hearts reveals to each and all of us, the story of Creation, the Never-Ending Story of We, in humble Majesty, even here, even now, and so it is.

Until next time, my friend,

Be amazingly YOU with great passion, and pass it on!!”

Written by Major Tom the Massive Encourager!

Here is an encouraging message for every young person, and young at heart too, by Earl Nightingale.

What Every Young Person Should Know Earl Nightingale

Connect with Tom on Facebook

By Tom Clute, Written in 2014 
“You and I are not a statistic, judged, labeled, discarded;
We are Children of Earth, Strong, Courageous, Capable…
Will we allow our Brilliance, Beauty and Boldness Out??
Can we practice helping, healing, hugging instead of hurting, hating, hushing??
Just like piano lessons with a child, we need structure, support, stick-to-it-ness to build muscles of caring, compassion, collaboration.
It’s possible .
We make it so.
May it be so:)
Starting with Ourselves

…Triumphant Hearts …

Email: MatterinGgreatly@gmail.com

Back in July, John McDonald and I attended the training for facilitating a Hearing Voices Network Group, or HVN. It was facilitated by John Harold and Reggie Lee, two amazing men who offer an immense amount of value and camaraderie to the training. They went over the philosophy and ran the training as if we were in a full HVN group. Most of the facilitators-in-training are peers who relate to the umbrella term of hearing and seeing things that aren’t in line with consensus reality, having unusual beliefs, or extreme and altered states.

For John and I, it was comfortable, exciting, and liberating to be surrounded by people who understand what it’s like to experience things not experienced by others. Having experienced altered and extreme states and seeing things on occasion, it felt new and fresh to be around people who are open, honest, and unashamed of their experiences. John Harold has a sweet and gentle way of presenting the information, of getting us excited about what it means to be part of the HVN philosophy and community and running a group. His energy and demeanor put me at ease right away.

John and I had a great time meeting people in the community like us; making deep connections that I feel are life-long and bringing this information and energy to our organization with the intention of leading a full group independent of the NAMI support model and instead honoring fully what the HVN philosophy is about.

So far, we’ve had fun building our group and connecting with its members. Our group tends to be small with just a handful of people attending. We would like to see it grow and to be able to put participants at ease, present a comfortable environment where you can share and connect and not be afraid to talk about what these experiences mean to you.

This level of validation, respect, and community are so important. HVN has shown John and I, and many others, that we belong in the world as is and deserve to without the assumption of illness or defect. We are great how we are and that includes all of our differences. We like to celebrate that in our group and are eager to get to know and build our own micro-community honoring the HVN model to the best of our ability.

HVN at NAMI SW WA meets at 2500 Main Street, Suite 120 from 2:30-4:00 pm every Wednesday excluding holidays. For more about NAMI SW WA, visit namiswwa.org. You can contact Chiara or John at 360-695-2823 and via emails at chiara.c@namiswwa.org and john.m@namiswwa.org.

https://www.columbian.com/news/2019/dec/30/hearing-voices-network-changing-the-way-mental-health-is-viewed/

“Written by Thomas CluteForthcoming author of “The Treasure of You” email: matteringgreatly@gmail.com

By Tom Clute

Today I reflected on a shift on a movement level from recovery to RESILIENCE.

Resilience to me is an embodied state of wellness transcending models of coping or improving, or overcoming. Resilience connotes celebration, thriving, flourishing, fulfillment and realization of possibility unfolding in an atmosphere, a context, a framework of beauty, wholeness, artisanry, community and connectivity ever expanding.

Resilience is a freedom song.

By Tom Clute

 Thomas Michael Clute, MSW

“Towards an Ecology of We” tomcluteconsulting@gmail.com

Essay

“The Currency of Love”

I believe it is possible to partner with money.

What do I mean by that?

What I mean is that intention makes the difference. Intention is the life-blood, or currency of money, or anything in terms of exchanges and in terms of relationships.

My premise is that “It all Rests on Relatedness,” and from this context, the currency, energy, consciousness, intention, frequency, valence, or similar metaphors we hold in the social construction of our shared concept of money and the agreements we hold together, are the basis of our experience of being in a relationship with money, whether we are consciously aware of it or not.

The more aware we become, the more choice we have in partnering with others in mutually beneficial ways in which money is very often the medium of value we exchange between participants, parties, people, and so on.

When we elevate our awareness of the role money plays in our lives, we can begin to examine the assumptions and beliefs as well as the experiences associated and attached to these assumptions and beliefs that give us our unique mode of being in relationship on a feeling level, as well as a transactional level, with money.

Our experiences color our feelings and associations about money. Not just on a personal level either. On every level. We all share in the soup of sadness of the conditions of most of our citizens on the planet who struggle with so much poverty, and not just the poverty of money, and yet often includes money.

Poverty takes many forms.

One of the most striking examples of how our mass beliefs about money betray us is the belief in pop culture on fashion, materialism, status, wealth, position, power, beauty, sex, intellectualism, or anything else we compare ourselves to or judge ourselves or others on what it means to be rich, wealthy or to somehow have made it, and it is very easy to associate money being the basis of all of these popular or desirable conditions, status, and so on.

But at the same time, for example in America, despite our wealth, status, power, position, military strength and many other outer measures of wealth many ascribe are status symbols, we struggle with so much violence, violence on every side from self-inflicted violence that sometimes tragically ends in suicide, to mass shootings in public, in schools and more.

These, I submit, are forms of poverty. Poverty of humility, poverty of wisdom, poverty of core humane philanthropic values shared by the United Nations, poverty of a literacy of peaceful language, poverty of emotional intelligence or emotional fluency, poverty of an ethos of empathy in child rearing, family relations, and poverty in education, the workplace, politics, and every aspect of our shared lives, we swim in poverty, while surrounded by the wealth of the currency of money available if we only knew how to begin to partner with the wisdom of money.

Let us invoke and invite love to begin to bring us to a transformation infused, not just a transaction informed partnership with money, where we cherish ourselves, each other, and the ecology of relatedness money serves in our lives.

It becomes a love story of the heart with money as the currency we share together in exchanges of caring, sharing, giving and receiving of all things necessary in our lives, both personal and collective, in a greater appreciation of how money is here to serve us, to love us, to nourish us, even as the love of water, sunlight and gentle rain on our fields to flourish harvests of goodness together, far beyond what we have ever known possible of war torn eras ravaging our planet. We are capable of sowing seeds of kindness, and these will yield in kind, generations to come.

We develop an ethos of money love.

Love becomes the basis for our relatedness, and heals,nourishes, transforms and empowers our lives in a relatedness context.

“When the power of love surpasses the love of power, we will know peace,” – unknown.

We learn to care, honor, respect and to treasure the moments of our lives together, and money can happily supply the invisible yet very real fuel needed to power us on our way, as a way of being.

Written by Thomas M. Clute

See Kate Northrup, author of “Money, a Love Story”
Kate Northrup: Money A Love Story

Comments welcomed.

People are more than willing to accept you as you are, imperfections and all, if you can allow them to. 
Test it out. 
If they don’t, they don’t accept themselves either. 
Self-acceptance eases and heals the burden of self-loathing and self-criticism. 
These are programs and viruses that have no place in your amazing, beautiful and awesome self. 
Accept that you truly are wonderful. 

Now look for it. 
Research on exquisite you. 
Learn about yourself!!
Get out of your comfort zone by extending a genuine interest in others. 
Let others love you. 
Allow others to listen to you, truly care, and help you blossom even more.  Reciprocate the favor!
Laugh, love, and give yourself away through acts of  generosity and you will find yourself in the process. 
Be strong in your own skin. Be firm in your  no so your yes is amazingly strong and awesome. 
Study Brene Brown on this. https://brenebrown.com/
Vulnerability is real strength.   
Let life in. Be a big giver. Give to YOU most of all, all the love Life has for you. 
You can do this! 
Breathe! 
Major Tom The Courage CoachThe Massive Encourager!tomcluteconsulting@gmail.com

Major Tom The Courage Coach

The Massive Encourager!

tomcluteconsulting@gmail.com

I still feel this terror, sometimes. It’s like an old character in my mind, that mostly takes the form of a deep, low, rumbling ache in my stomach. She’s like a woman, who has me by the throat, forbidding me to speak. It’s for my own safety, you see.

So I didn’t speak.

But I watched and listened to others speak about their experiences hearing voices, seeing visions and the like. And for a long time, I attended groups this way. Never saying a word. I think there’s a lot to be understood about things we’re not supposed to experience, not supposed to talk about and certainly not supposed to have in common with others. For me, it seem that these things that go unexpressed remain partially un-experienced. But if something is not fully experienced, how can it be adequately expressed?

The wonderful thing about this group, Portland Hearing Voices, was all of the space.

I’m not sure why it seems that so many people have such strong feelings and opinions about other peoples experiences. It also seems that there are certain topics that folks feel very strongly about, and often these opinions are not coming from personal experience. They also frequently conflict with each other. Feels like a war.  All of these strong feelings and conflict that didn’t belong to me, but were about me, pushed their way into my mind, filling the space that was meant to be mine, to process, to make meaning and to become a thriving part of myself.

At the heart of the Hearing Voices Movement is the respect for the diversity of views regarding our experiences and the humble wish to support, and empower others in theirs. This simplicity has always felt very good to me, like the shedding of unnecessary things. Like the silencing of warring characters.

But the war wasn’t in this group. There was space and even a little silence in this group.

Without all of the noise of the outside world I could finally start to express and process what I had experienced. As I expressed myself over time, I began to remember things. Things from my childhood and adolescence. These were very important memories. They were memories that I needed.

I also began to realize things and to identify with positive feelings, with strengths, with notions and with characters that balanced out the terror in my mind. This group gave me the space to experience what really was mine. My spirituality. My inner parts. My voice.

Thank you to everyone who works so hard to keep it going!

In response to the resent rise in violent attacks against LGBTQ* community members, the Q-Center is hosting a Town Hall meeting. Here are the details:

Sunday, February 24th at the Q-Center, 4115 N. Mississippi, Portland, Oregon, 97217, at 6pm

There are many members of the voice-hearing community that are also members of the LGBTQ* community. The population within this intersection needs and deserves our support. This is a wonderful opportunity to get involved!

Here is a link to the Facebook event: https://www.facebook.com/events/384459849048376/

Tickets are on sale now! Anyone who’d like to attend the evening performances/presentation of the artwork created that day can purchase their tickets here: https://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/3628249

Artistic participants can sign up at www.art-a-thon.org

Creative Mentors (age 26 and up) can apply at: https://goo.gl/forms/kMe20WXQIcBgFhLf1