Rhonda O’Brien, MS, RD, CDE is a Registered, Licensed Dietitian and Certified Diabetes Educator.  She has a nutrition consultation private practice in Boise’s North End, and has over 21 years experience providing nutrition education and counseling for individuals and groups. Her specialties include: Assisting in the nutritional recovery of people with eating disorders and disordered eating. Empowering individuals to self-manage their diabetes. Nutrition for preventive health, particularly heart health, targeting cholesterol and blood pressure. Rhonda teaches Diet-Free Living, a 6 week class series for people who are ready to recover from chronic dieting  and develop a peaceful relationship with food and their body.  For more information, please visit her website at www.dietfreeidaho.com
Start Time: 19:00
Date: 2010-03-15

Recognizing the importance of values such as empathy, compassion and peaceful solutions goes a long way in helping to understand and recognize the differences in each other, cultures, religions and world views without prejudice and knee jerk judgment calls.  Parents and primary caregivers are the primary models for children. They look to them as a barometer of their own vulnerability or safety. Remaining calm and realizing the influence your reactions and words have is basic to raising secure and stable kids.

Resilience, the key word in the title of this book, is defined as the “ability to bounce back quickly from illness, change or misfortune; buoyancy.” Resilient children are created and nutured by the experiences and people they encounter in early life. Bouncing back is good, but there has to be a good place to bounce back to. “As parents, educators, and other caring professionals, we may ask how we can identify, nurture and instill the qualities of adaptability, tolerance, patience and fortitude in our children within their ever changing environment,” says Goldman.

Three important factors that can help with creating resilient children:

1. Their perception of and involvement in the world they live in.
2. Coping strategies to deal with the hits life brings them.
3. A safe and secure environment where they share ideas and are listened to.

Whether it is spiritual, religious, social, community or family, resilience is key to survival and for healthy coping. It isn’t something that can be dropped on the stove and cooked up this afternoon. It takes a determined and informed effort on a broad palette of values, virtues and visions to create Resilience in our children and to adopt it as a goal for ourselves. I suggest the above book for parents who are feeling they need some ideas on helping their children negotiate life’s rough terrain.

~ Randy Meenach

Hold Onto Yourself is a simple idea with many meanings. Self-mastery and self-control involve learning about yourself, confronting yourself and shifting to self-validated
intimacy, and taking care of yourself (self-soothing). Learning to hold onto yourself nudges your personal development and your marriage forward, and fundamentally
changes how you and your partner interact. Holding onto yourself is a shorthand way of talking about differentiation. It involves several activities and processes:

• Maintaining a clear sense of who you are as you become increasingly intimate with a partner who is increasingly more important to you; knowing what you value and believe, and not defending a false or inaccurate self-picture.
• Maintaining a sense of perspective about your anxieties, limitations, and shortcomings so that they neither drive nor immobilize you.
• The willingness to engage in self-confrontation necessary for your growth. This includes standing up to your fears – taking the hits about yourself, your family of origin, your marriage, and your life; confronting your own selfishness, hatred, manipulation of others, sadism, withholding, and self-denigrations; and resisting your attempts to avoid yourself.
• Acknowledging your projections and distortions and admitting when you are wrong – whether or not your partner does likewise.
• Tolerating the pain involved in growing; mobilizing yourself toward the growth you value and aspire to; soothing your own hurts when necessary, without excessive self-indulgence; supporting rather than berating yourself.

Holding onto yourself – maintaining a relationship with yourself – is not easy. However, the benefits to you and your marriage are incalculable. Your ability to hold onto
yourself allows you to pull out of negative interactions and conduct yourself in ways that lead to positive ones. It lets you break the “set” of your communications – habitual
topics, patterns, intensity, and tone. Instead of matching your partner’s feelings and emotional tone when you’re locked in protracted arguments, bad feelings, or flaring
tempers, holding onto yourself allows you to break free of this form of emotional gridlock called “negative affect reciprocity.”

Holding onto yourself is a key ingredient in intimacy and sex. Intimacy involves self-confrontation and self-disclosure in the presence of your partner. When you don’t hold
onto yourself, intimacy always suffers. And holding onto yourself is vital if you want more sexual passion, novelty, and desire in your marriage.

David Schnarch, Ph.D.
Passionate Marriage (1997)

An interactive day dedicated to re-learning the language of hope. When health problems, opportunity, or life itself become difficult, your attitude is the strongest predictor of your future. Through the elixir of poetry, reflection, and facilitated journal writing, Reviving Hope will help transform despair into revitalized living. Join us for a day that may, indeed, save your life. *Lunch provided. For more information about this class, send us an email: (writing@writepath.org)
Start Time: 10:00
Date: 2010-02-13