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

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

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/