STRESS, OVERWHELM, and …SKYDIVING?

By Coach Kat, Mar. 3, 2023, copyright Bronwyn Katdaré 2023

Imagine this: you’re tossing and turning for most of the night, your mind racing about all of the things you have to do tomorrow and all of the things you completed today. You’re doing this while your partner snoozes away. That’s irritating – how dare your partner sleep while you’re wired and tired, staring at the ceiling!

A Truce for Christmas 

November 2018 marked the 100^th anniversary of the end of World War One. Within two months of its beginning, it had devolved into the stalemate we know as trench warfare. The opposing forces established a line along the Western Front extending from the English Channel to the Swiss border that would not fundamentally change for the next four years. The armies settled into a perpetual clash under the most barbaric and miserable conditions: soggy, frozen trenches, constant bomb

Best-selling fiction, theater, and film often employ plotlines that introduce us to archetypal patterns that address problems we and other people are facing. For example, many people worldwide today suffer from isolation, loneliness, alienation, and society is changing so quickly that many have difficulty thriving within cultural contexts they feel unprepared for or even resist. So it is no surprise that groups feud with one another.

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Perhaps that is why people still flock to performances of Sha

John F. Kennedy and America’s Obsession with Innocence 

If anyone's going to kill me, it should happen now. – John F. Kennedy, 1962

Assassinations, murder – and war, to – begin this way. This revolution is not just outside us in the streets and jails and detention homes and clinics, or in Texas, but is the Shadow in each of us that is trying to             come out. – James Hillman, 11/22/1963

Part One: Myths

At book talks I used to ask: When did you lose your innocence?  Common answers include 9

Part One

Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. – It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country. – Quintus Horatius Flaccus (Horace)

If any question why we died, tell them, because our fathers lied.  – Rudyard Kipling

So if you love your Uncle Sam
Bring them home, bring them home
Support our boys in Vietnam
Bring them home, bring them home – Pete Seeger

My good sir, what are you doing? Don’t you know the armistice goes into effect at 11:00 o’clock? – German officer under a white flag, to American off

Since being vulnerable does not always come easily to many of us, it is important to have empathy for anyone who struggles with it. The internet is flooded with writings and talks on encouraging people to show vulnerability. Having trouble expressing it often gets associated with a lack of authenticity. Such judgmental interpretations can frequently trigger shame in people who don’t feel safe enough to be vulnerable due to certain socio-demographic factors. There is a misconception that expressi

Part Five

He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past. – George Orwell

I will never apologize for the United States of America. I don’t care what the facts are.  – George H.W. Bush

Universities commonly mirror what students have already endured. Public education reverses the age-old tradition of identifying a child’s innate and unique gifts. Indigenous cultures emphasized what the Romans called educare – to identify, encourage and welcome that which t

Part One

What went before, as told by those who think they know it. – Gary Snyder

Everything comes to the reader as interpreted by the historian. Everything is seen through the medium of his personality. The facts of history when they are used to teach a moral lesson do not reach us in their entirety…but selected and arranged according to the overmastering ideal in the mind of the historian. The reader is at the historian’s mercy. – Peter Novick

History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.

‍I love to track what is going on in the inner life of people around me by reading best-selling fiction with an attention to archetypal patterns. When a colleague told me to check out the All Souls Trilogy by a notable historian, Deborah Harkness, I was intrigued. The heroine of these books is Diana Bishop, an academic (Sage), hiding the fact that she is a witch, but just studying alchemy, not practicing it. Then she falls in love with Mathew Clairmont, a researcher (Sage) who is studying the DN

Introduction: Branding ideally is integrated into organizational development activities. A brand archetype held too rigidly can throw a social system out of balance. The solution is to reinforce a complementary archetype, one already active in the organizational culture. Compelling situations can obscure both. The enmity between our political parties has constellated a war story (the culture war). Once a war story gets constellated, our brains notice events that reinforce our passion for our s

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