The universe is a magnificent tapestry of galaxies, stars, and cosmic phenomena that stretches beyond the boundaries of human imagination. Throughout history, humanity has been captivated by the vastness of the cosmos, tirelessly seeking to comprehend, explore, and venture to different celestial bodies in pursuit of knowledge and future possibilities.

Yet, the exploration of the cosmos extends beyond the mere physical realm; it holds profound spiritual significance as well. While the human body can only sustain life on Earth, advancements in science and the training of our physical capacities have made it feasible for humans to inhabit space and potentially other celestial bodies. Despite these strides, we still encounter limitations in our ability to reside and travel across all celestial entities.

In parallel to our physical endeavours, it is crucial to recognise the spiritual dimension of journeying through the cosmos. Similar to how we prepare ourselves for travel on Earth by enhancing our capabilities, earning resources, and seeking better environments, spiritual journeying necessitates continuous growth and evolution of the self. We aspire to transcend towards places of higher energy, away from suffering and pain, akin to striving for a better lifestyle on Earth.

Consider a hypothetical journey through the cosmos at the speed of light: it would take approximately 8 minutes to reach The Sun, about 43 minutes to reach Jupiter, and roughly 4.3 years to arrive at Neptune. Venturing beyond The Heliosphere, the region influenced by the Sun, would take 37 years. Traveling to nearer celestial objects like The Orion Nebula would necessitate 1,344 years, while reaching Sagittarius A* would demand 26,000 years. Further still, voyaging to our closest galaxy, Andromeda, would entail approximately 2.537 million years, and to the Sombrero Galaxy, 28 million years.

Even in our theoretical endeavours, the prospect of reaching the edge of the Observable universe appears daunting, even when contemplating travel at the speed of light. Beyond this threshold lies the enigmatic realm of the Non-Observable universe, a vast expanse where light, the herald of knowledge, has yet to breach since the dawn of time itself. In this mysterious realm, our comprehension fades into the endless depths of cosmic marvel.

However, Quantum science challenges this notion, revealing that particles behave uniquely at the smallest scales. Through the phenomenon of Entanglement, the state of one particle instantaneously influences another, irrespective of distance, defying conventional notions of space and time. This revelation mirrors the boundless potential inherent within our spirits. Like quantum beings, our spirits possess the capacity to transcend the constraints of time and space.

Embarking on the spiritual journey through the cosmos requires a deliberate and conscious effort to enhance our inner selves. We begin by augmenting our overall capacity, which entails developing our mental, emotional, and spiritual faculties. This process involves introspection, self-reflection, and the cultivation of virtues such as compassion, empathy, and resilience.

As we embark on this journey, we must also elevate our standards, setting higher aspirations for ourselves and striving for excellence in all aspects of our being. Furthermore, expanding our knowledge is essential to our spiritual evolution. By continuously learning and expanding our understanding of the universe and our place within it, we gain insight into the interconnectedness of all things and thereby understanding our essence as quantum beings.

Through this process of growth and self-discovery, our spirits become attuned to the concept of a better life and higher existence. We develop a deeper understanding of ourselves and our relationship to the cosmos, recognising that we are part of something greater than ourselves. This awareness enables us to navigate towards realms of elevated consciousness and harmony, where we experience a profound sense of peace, fulfillment, and interconnectedness with all life.

Ultimately, by embracing the spiritual journey through the cosmos, we transcend the limitations of time and space, breaking physical constraints, expanding our consciousness and evolving towards our highest potential.

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Journeying Through the Cosmos - The Hans India

Megan Rapinoe is aware of the elephant in the room.

She turns 37 soon and she has started only one game for OL Reign this season in the National Women's Soccer League season due to injuries. Still, U.S. women's national team head coach Vlatko Andonovski selected her for the 23-player roster for the upcoming World Cup qualifying tournament, which starts July 4, one day before her birthday.

Rapinoe -- both she and Andonovski say -- will play a very different role from the one that the world is accustomed to seeing her in.

"We have a really young squad," Rapinoe told ESPN, "and I feel like what I can bring to them in a mentor role, at training, being in their ear, the level of professionalism and understanding the style that Vlatko wants to play, and [being] that conduit to what the coaching staff wants and what the players are going to ultimately do on the field, was part of the roster selection.

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"If people don't like that, that's fine. They're not the coach of the national team. Vlatko's the coach, and ultimately it falls on him and what he wants and what he's willing to put his reputation on and the team's reputation on. Ultimately, if he's unsuccessful, he'll be fired, and he knows that, and I think he's OK with that. If we're unsuccessful -- if I'm unsuccessful -- I'll be cut from the team, and that's fine, too."

Most of the world knows Rapinoe for her role as the leader of the United States' triumph at the 2019 Women's World Cup. With her unmistakable pink hair, Rapinoe won the Golden Ball and Golden Boot as the top player and scorer while the U.S. clinched a second straight World Cup title, all while fighting the U.S. Soccer Federation for equal pay and protesting against the Trump administration.

After that magical month in France, Rapinoe says now, she felt stuck in a "hamster wheel." Her life changed completely as her celebrity increased, and she found herself struggling to balance the emotional, mental and spiritual aspects with the usual physical demands made harder as she aged. The Olympics were delayed a year until 2021, and the U.S. eventually slogged through some poor stretches of play at that tournament to win a bronze medal. Rapinoe scored twice in the 4-3 win over Australia in that third-place game.

Then came the break. Beginning in November, Andonovski purposely left out longtime veteran national team players -- including Rapinoe -- from training camps. His plan was to get a better look at young, less experienced players in order to determine whether they could contribute to more important moments like qualifying and, ultimately, the World Cup. Andonovski revealed earlier this month that he and Rapinoe had a discussion in late 2021 about her eventual return to the team.

"With that conversation, she understood that we are going to bring in a lot of players, we are going to test a lot of players," Andonovski said. "We want to give the young players lots of minutes and opportunities to play and give us a chance to evaluate as much as possible. But after everything is said and done, if she is healthy and if she is fit to get minutes, that she will be on the roster. We know what Megan is capable of doing."

At some point during qualifying, Andonovski says, younger U.S. players will need Rapinoe's experience to navigate a difficult situation. Rapinoe was around for qualifying in 2010 -- the previous time Mexico hosted the tournament -- when the U.S. lost to Mexico in the semifinals and had to eke through a playoff with Italy to become the final team to qualify for the 2011 World Cup. It was the closest the U.S. women's national team had ever gotten to not qualifying for a World Cup.

Several veterans from that near disaster remain active. Rapinoe said that no two players' situations are the same, and that people very generally grouped veterans together over the past nine months of this roster overhaul process. (Alex Morgan also returns to the squad for qualifying. She leads the NWSL with 11 goals in 10 games.) Everyone who got called up deserves to be, Rapinoe said, and even players who did not get the call deserved inclusion, too.

"Rosters are not a compilation just of, go pick the best players and hope for the best," Rapinoe said. "It's about constructing an organism that works together on and off the field, that works not necessarily harmoniously all the time, but that the right pieces fit for certain reasons and for reasons most people don't understand."

Injuries played a role in the public skepticism of Rapinoe's return to the national team. A day after feeling like she completely recovered from a nagging ankle injury this spring, she pulled her calf muscle. Her return to the field for OL Reign, something she needed to do to show she was fit for national team selection, was then delayed.

Personal frustrations mounted for Rapinoe during that time, she says, so much so that sometimes retirement became a thought of hers -- not because it was what she wanted to do, but because it felt like the only way to break the cycle. Rapinoe credits her fiance, Sue Bird -- who announced last week that she would retire at the end of this WNBA season, her 21st -- with helping her manage those feelings as someone going through a similar process. Those are thoughts of the past, Rapinoe says.

"I think being able to have someone who intimately knows what it means when I say, 'I want to retire right now I'm so frustrated,' it may not actually mean that," Rapinoe said. "It actually means a lot of different things. So, being able to be there for her, and her be there for me, is the greatest gift ever."

As U.S. national team training camp convenes in Colorado this week ahead of World Cup qualifying, Rapinoe said she's in a much better place now. The outside world saw some of her physical struggles as she tried to get back on the field this spring, but they did not see her daily, internal battles with herself.

"I feel like I'm just now on the other side of healing, physically and emotionally, and getting to a place where this feels new," Rapinoe said. "Because I couldn't have done what I was just kind of continuing to do after 2019. That felt like a hamster wheel, and it didn't feel like a choice, and now I feel like I'm actually making a choice. My role is different, and I think I understand what my role is and I'm comfortable with it -- I'm really excited about that. It's kind of a combination of those things where I feel like in the last couple of weeks, I feel like a weight has been lifted. But also, I'm like, 'Oh my God, I'm excited again.' "

Beyond leadership, Rapinoe still has an uncanny ability to change results on a dime by being unpredictable from both open play and set pieces. She is also just reliable, and that matters to coaches in pressure-filled situations. As Reign head coach Laura Harvey said in May, "I would put my mortgage on Megan Rapinoe to score a penalty."

Harvey and Andonovski played significant roles in Rapinoe's career arc. The affable winger is best known for her triumphs at the world stage, but Rapinoe credits the evolution of her game -- one that helped the Americans win both the 2015 and 2019 World Cups -- to her time with the Seattle-based club, and specifically Harvey and Andonovski, who have both served as her coaches at the Reign.

"I feel like I owe so much of my national team career to the Reign," Rapinoe said. "I've had two of the best, if not the best coaches in the world, coach here and to be able to play under them. Some of the best players in the world [were here]... I feel like it's where my game grew up. I think up until I got here it was like, 'Yeah, I'm talented, I'm on the national team, we're doing stuff, we're successful.' But I feel like when I got here, my game changed completely, and I really took it to the next level. I just owe so much to this club."

Andonovski coached the Reign prior to taking over the national team job and in that role he insisted that Rapinoe could still be better by improving her crossing accuracy and influencing the game in small moments, like a quick throw-in to catch an opponent off guard. He said that one year before Rapinoe dominated the 2019 World Cup.

"I didn't want her to be known as Pinoe who can serve the ball," Andonovski said in 2018, as coach of the Reign. "I wanted her to be known as Pinoe who can change the game. How? Who cares? One time she'll serve, one time she'll slice a through ball, one time she'll shoot. One time she'll get a restart -- it doesn't matter. Be unpredictable."

Harvey was the original coach of the team -- then called the Seattle Reign prior to being bought by the owners of Olympique Lyonnais -- and she oversaw arguably the most dominant team in NWSL history in 2014 and 2015. The Reign went 16 games unbeaten in 2014 on their way to the first of two consecutive NWSL Shields, but they lost the NWSL championship each year to Andonovski-coached FC Kansas City sides.

Ten years into the NWSL and many great Reign teams later, a playoff championship trophy still eludes the franchise. Rapinoe is one of three original Reign players to have been with the team from the inaugural season in 2013 (among 21 who remain active leaguewide from that first season). Jess Fishlock is one of the others, and while she was the league MVP in 2021, she will turn 36 before next season. Add that context to the short-term loan acquisition of Kim Little -- who was the engine of those Reign glory teams and the 2014 league MVP -- and the arrivals of Tobin Heath and striker Jordyn Huitema, and it suggests the Reign are all-in on finally ending the drought this year.

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"I'm really motivated and focused to bring a title to a club that I feel like really deserves it and has done things the right way," Rapinoe said. "I feel like [we play] a style of soccer that has been inspirational not only here but around the world."

Before she returns to the Reign for the stretch run of the NWSL season, Rapinoe will help guide a very different-looking U.S. team at World Cup qualifying in Mexico. Four automatic qualification berths from the region lower the stakes a bit, but only the winner of the CONCACAF W Championship tournament will earn an automatic berth to the 2024 Olympics. (Second and third place go to a playoff.)

Rapinoe's inclusion in World Cup qualifying both reinvigorated her and provided clarity for her path ahead. If Rapinoe is to play in a fourth World Cup next year, it will have to be in a much different capacity than the previous cycles. She is at peace with that, so long as it is the best path for the team.

"Now, I can imagine myself in qualifiers," Rapinoe said. "Now, I can imagine, potentially, what a run to a World Cup would look like and what's going to be required of me, where I feel comfortable and where I can push myself, where I can be of the utmost help to the team. Ultimately, that's what it's about. It's about winning, period. It's about getting another championship and going for a three-peat, which is f---ing ridiculous and amazing. If I can be a part of that, that excites me."

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Megan Rapinoe's USWNT role has changed and she's at peace: 'A weight has been lifted' - ESPN

The Troike program helps students prepare for the TACHs test by emphasizing religion, math, science, and language arts, but they also experience other subjects, such as theater arts. This year, journalism and creative writing are joining the mix. (Photo: Courtesy of Cathedral Prep)

ELMHURST Social and political chaos dominated 1968, with the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Sen. Robert Kennedy, as well as violent protests over U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War.

The faculty of Cathedral Preparatory School and Seminary saw the need to divert young men from the turmoil. So they developed a summertime program that fed their spiritual development, basic academics, and teamwork via organized sports.

The annual month-long Troike program returns this year, July 5-29, at the Cathedral Prep campus in Elmhurst, Queens.

Just as much has changed in the U.S. since 1968, the program has also evolved. This year brings a new slate of activities for boys participating from grades 6, 7, and 8.

The morning academics portion helps them prepare for high school and the Test for Admission into Catholic High Schools (TACHS) by building knowledge in religion, science, English/Language Arts, and math. But theater arts were added in recent years. And this summer, for the first time, is journalism and creative writing.

Were always evaluating and always trying to grow to make things better, said Father James Kuroly, rector and president of the school.

The afternoon athletics continues to foster teamwork and camaraderie, but new this year is a soccer clinic.

We try our best to keep things updated and exciting for the kids, said Deacon Phil Franco, assistant principal and director of the program. In our organized games, there will be soccer this year, which weve never had before to my knowledge. But there was a little more of a call for soccer than ever before.

And last year, the program added video games.

There are those young people who dont like playing sports, Father Kuroly said. And we respect that. So theres opportunities for them in the cafeteria where they can play chess, ping pong, other board games, and video games.

Also new this year will be on-site lunches. In years past, students brought their own food, but now they can buy meals in the cafeteria.

It usually shuts down for the summer, but this year, we will have it open, Father Kuroly said. Thats one of the things that the parents consistently asked for the last couple of years.

The programs evolution included a name change in the early years, from Summer Program.

Leading its development was popular math teacher Father Ed Troike, who died five years later of cancer at age 44. The school honored his memory by renaming it the Father Troike Leadership Program.

That leadership part was training our students to be counselors, and to really take upon a leadership role of service and of a servant leader, Father Kuroly said. Over the years, obviously, it has been a great recruitment tool.

A lot of those who go to Troike ended up coming to the school, such as myself.

The lead counselor this year is Daniel Schilling, who will be in the 11th grade this fall.

The summer program speaks to the message of Cathedral Prep, which is forming men for greatness, Schilling said.

His brother, John (Class of 2018) is still involved as the associate director and the schools new admissions and enrollment coordinator.

Its a full-circle moment for me, John Schilling said. I was a student here at Cathedral, and I worked as a (Troike) counselor for three summers. I used to sit in on classes when I was a counselor, and now I teach a class, which is really cool. I couldnt have imagined that I would be doing that many years ago.

The cost is $500 for the entire month. Lunch costs extra, but on a per meal basis.

Because it is summer and some people may go away on vacation, we encourage students who are only able to come for one, two, or three weeks to still come anyway, John Schilling said. We adjust the price accordingly. Each week costs $125, essentially, but we prefer if students come for the full program so that they can get the most out of it.

Parents can fill out a registration form and pay the $500 fee by logging on to cathedralprep.org or calling the admissions office at 718-592-6800 Ext.150. For more information email John Schilling at jschilling@cathedralprep.org.

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'Troike' Summer Program Returns to Cathedral Prep with New Classes and Sports - The Tablet Catholic Newspaper

The Army has adopted an all-around health program that targets a range of areas, including mental, spiritual and physical health. The Holistic Health and Fitness, or H2F, program aims to take the best of current mental and physical health science to improve the condition of soldiers across the force.

But this isnt the first time, by far, that the service has looked for ways to better mold soldiers for the rigors of modern battle.

Army Maj. Garrett Gatzemeyer, 37, has now documented this long and fascinating history in his recent book, Bodies for Battle: U.S. Army Physical Culture and Systematic Training, 1885-1957.

Gatzemeyer was commissioned out of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 2007, and later taught history there as an assistant professor from 2016 to 2019. Like soldiers everywhere, Gatzemeyer did his dose of calisthenics without fail when he hit the regular Army.

And, like many in uniform over the past century, he had a limited understanding of how the Army produced those bodyweight physical routines, its run distance and other measures of fitness.

As the service began revamping its protocols with combat fitness tests and other ways to keep soldiers in fighting shape, the Fruitland, Idaho, native was leafing through old Army manuals as he sought a dissertation topic while working on his doctoral degree at the University of Kansas.

Army Maj. Garrett Gatzemeyer, author of "Bodies for Battle," analyzes Army physical training between 1885 and 1957. (Garrett Gatzemeyer and University Press of Kansas)

The old physical training manuals from the 1920s and 1940s drew his attention.

The language was really rich and interesting, Gatzemeyer told Army Times. And in many ways, the PT manuals felt really, really familiar to me as an Army officer.

The pages, which dated to the pre-World War II era, had instructions on how to do burpees and a series of drills that soldiers had performed for generations.

That finding and a few more years of research led Gatzemeyer to draft his dissertation, obtain his doctoral degree and publish Bodies for Battle.

The first lesson for todays soldiers: What you do now has an origin story, and PT wasnt always the way it is now.

Gatzemeyer talked to Army Times recently about his findings. The interview was edited for length and clarity.

Q: Young students can ignore history. But there are cultural aspects in the military on how leaders and troops view physical fitness. What did you notice while you were researching that stood out?

A: That was about the time, mid-2015 to 2016, that the Army was working itself away from the Army Physical Fitness Test and moving toward what became the Army Combat Fitness Test. The study for what comes next had just concluded and one of the findings in the study was that the Army should reduce its run to 1.5 miles down from the 2-mile run, because science indicated that was the optimal distance to test cardiovascular fitness. I remember reading that the sergeant major of the Army wanted that overruled because, he said, that last half mile tested your spirit and your heart.

I was reading these old manuals at the time, and I said, theres clearly more to fitness than just measures of physiological performance, given the sergeant majors comments and then kind of reflecting on my own experience with how we associate good leaders or good soldiers with high PT scores.

A U.S. Army recruiting poster circa 1919, left, boasts that it will build men. A recruiting poster from 2019, conceived in response to the perceived shrinking of qualified recruits, targets Generation Z young adults with a focus that goes beyond traditional combat roles. (Army)

Q: On the civilian side, fitness goes through various trends and fads. From the jogging-centric 1970s to the bodybuilding craze of the 1980s and 90s and even CrossFit in recent decades. Has the Army seen such shifts?

A: Early in the period of my research I saw a tug-of-war in Army leadership, mostly at West Point, between cavalry, drill, organized sport and later systematic group exercise. And the science was just emerging. It was not just exercise for exercises sake. People are starting to learn that if you repeatedly work a muscle, for instance, that muscle can become larger or stronger and capable of carrying more weight. But theyre also trying to apply that concept more broadly and in an educative sense. So, they make connections between physical and bodily health and things like mental health, social well-being and morality.

The beginning of my research, the late 1800s to the early 1900s is also the Progressive Era. Thats when many people were looking to scientific methods to improve society, hygiene and community planning to make better citizens. The question they were asking was what the physical training was supposed to produce. Some saw it as simply a matter of becoming better horsemen, better at drill and other soldier tasks. That fit the tactics of the time, which required discipline and obedience. But some saw athletics to both improve fitness and create teamwork. But sport often meant injuries and often a focus on the talented star athletes on one team, instead of total force fitness development.

U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York, cadets drill in group exercise circa 1903. (West Point archives)

Q: Itd be easy to see how some thought that combat-focused physical training was the priority, especially in the more physically demanding era of early 1900s soldiering. Was that always the case?

A: The Armys physical culture didnt start with training for specific skills or tasks. It was a little bit more abstract. It was about training the soldier and cultivating some characteristics that would be useful on the battlefield but not translate directly. So, theyre not, for instance, teaching grappling or combatives in this early period of the 1880s-1890s. But they are doing things to instill discipline and making a unit work well together.

Q: Much of physical fitness and physical culture came from a variety of other sources. How did the Army bring that knowledge into the force?

A: A lot of it was up to the individual unit commander to create. Then, with the rapid increase in the size of the Army for World War I and World War II, the force needed a more uniform way to bring all soldiers up to a standard. The Army just didnt have the depth and breadth of expertise among its physical trainers at that time. So, they had to turn to civilians and bring in experts from the outside. The institute was forced, in a way, to accept this outside advice and cede some of that territory. But, when the demands were gone, after the two world wars, military leadership took back more control and you see more of the traditional culture reemerge.

Q: You covered a lot of events in your book, from 1885 through 1957. Why did you pick those as the starting and ending points?

A: Within the Army, physical training began gaining traction after 1885 and physical educators took a major step forward, more broadly, with the founding of the American Association for the Advancement of Physical Education at that time. There are three evolutionary periods for the Armys physical culture between 1885 and 1957; the disciplinary era led by Herman Koehler, Master of the Sword at West Point; the combat-readiness interregnum of 1917-1919; and the rise of the scientific measurement school of thought after 1942. In 1957, the debate between drill and sport and systematic training had essentially ended, and Army leaders in a conference that year brought together all the leading physical fitness experts, establishing a doctrine and culture that is like what the Army has today. At that conference, for the first time since 1885, you dont see any question anymore that systematic training is valuable. A lot of it feels like consensus when you read the conference report about what the Army should be doing in terms of exercise and a daily routine for soldiers.

A U.S. Army training circular, published circa 1944, shows different body movements during exercises. (Army)

Q: What did you draw from your historical work thats applicable in thinking about soldier fitness today?

The total fitness model outline of the U.S. Army, circa 1957. (Army)

And it absolutely continues today. There is good evidence that Americans bodies are changing. I know it concerns a lot of people who are thinking on its national security implications. But one thing I can derive from looking at the past century of physical fitness in the Army is that generations tend to rise to the occasions; and the standards by which we measure people in peacetime, when we can afford to be very selective, change in wartime. Physical standards by which we measure the quality of a soldier, are all malleable, those standards are not set precisely down in stone. So, as military service changes, the character of combat evolves, and perhaps our definitions of physical fitness can also evolve alongside that. There is a lot to think about. For instance, when Space Force is standing up and thinking about what it wants its physical culture to look like, there are some big questions to ask.

Spc. Ryan Schultzman, an aircraft power plant repairer with the 404th Aviation Support Battalion, 4th Combat Aviation Brigade, 4th Infantry Division, completes the final lap of a two-mile run during the Best Army Combat Fitness Test Competition May 24 at Fort Carson, Colo. (Sgt. Clara Harty/Army)

Todd South has written about crime, courts, government and the military for multiple publications since 2004 and was named a 2014 Pulitzer finalist for a co-written project on witness intimidation. Todd is a Marine veteran of the Iraq War.

Original post:
As the Army pushes holistic health, an officer examines the history of soldier fitness - ArmyTimes.com

Riley Cotes journey to enlightenment began in earnest when a hulking man punched him in the face. Cote, now 40 and retired from professional hockey, remembers the moment with a dark laugh. Hed gotten into this particular bust-up one night during the 2009 season with one of the NHLs most vicious fighters, and took the worst of it, waking the next day with his left eye blackened shut.

What, he asked himself, am I doing?

He drove to the Philadelphia Flyers training facility and got into the shower. Feeling congested, he reached for a tissue. He didnt realize hed suffered a cracked sinus, so what happened next was physics. When he blew his nose, the air rather than coming out of his nostrils inflated his face. The pressure surged instantly behind his good eye and closed it tight.

Team trainer Derek Settlemyre heard Cote scream. His whole face had swollen up, Settlemyre recalls. We tell them, if they think they have a fracture, Dont blow your nose and he did.

After eight years in pro hockey (four in the NHL, four hopping around its minor-league teams), Cote felt his retirement bearing down. As an NHL enforcer a player whose main role is to get into fights hed taken countless hits on the ice. Off it, he self-medicated with booze and drugs. Hed brutalized his body inside and out by the tender age of 28. I damaged my brain, Cote says. Punching it and dehydrating it and partying my ass off.

Today, Cote is a new man, with a mane of long brown hair, a yoga-trimmed physique, and an aura of ease in his own skin. It is a transformation he credits largely to psychedelic drugs. Since retiring, Cote has emerged as one of the sports worlds most vocal advocates for what he calls plant medicines from cannabis, itself a light psychedelic, to weightier hallucinogens including DMT and magic mushrooms to treat post-concussion symptoms (think headaches, insomnia, depression, and possibly, the degenerative brain condition known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE). In 2017, Cote co-founded Athletes for Care, a group that promotes research into the physical and emotional health issues athletes face and novel paths for treatment. He regularly speaks at conferences on the benefits of psychedelics. And, perhaps most important, he reaches out to players who are known to be struggling post-career, even arranging magic-mushroom ceremonies where they can safely experiment with the drug.

Cote understands the hesitation surrounding these substances. While psychedelics fill him with love, gratitude, and a connection to a higher energy source, they are technically illegal throughout most of the U.S. Beyond that, the experience, whether good or bad, can be intense. Certain users experience not just so-called bad trips, but also psychotic breaks from reality. Cote says talking to a first-timer about using psychedelics is basically like asking them: Do you want to see God? Are you sure? The ask is so big, the answer is often no.

Cote was worried when he walked into the lunch area at the Good Hope House Retreat Center in Jamaica one day in April, got a green smoothie, and waited for one of the biggest weekends of his life to unfold.An ESPN crew was coming to film a magic-mushroom ceremony hed helped organize for a group of retired athletes, including former players from the NHL and NFL. All had pledged to eat breakthrough doses enough, that is, to induce a mystical state of mushrooms containing psilocybin, which is legal in Jamaica.

The opportunity to showcase mushrooms as medicine to a mainstream television audience was a precious thing, but as Cote sat with some early arrivals, he couldnt enjoy it. He kept mulling a more practical concern: Would everyone actually show up?Two people in particular Steve Downie, an ex-Flyers teammate, and Justin Renfrow, a former NFL lineman were due any minute. Or not.In the past 11 years, Cote has invited a lot of people to venture down the magic-mushroom path, and most who say yes subsequently run into excuses not to follow through. In fact, second-thought declinations are so common in Cotes experience that he doesnt judge anyone for them.

Its scary, right? Cote says. Theres a fear associated with it. Theres a lot of unknowns, like, Where am I going? What am I getting myself into? It all sounds grand when youre sitting on your couch, you know, and talking about it via text or phone. But when youve actually got to be committed to something and actually do it, its another story.

There is some irony here. Since Cote began proselytizing, scientific research bolstering the case for psychedelics has accumulated.Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore established a center for psychedelic and consciousness research in 2019, and has published 50 peer-reviewed papers that indicate psychedelics help treat depression, promote psychological insight, alleviate anxiety in cancer patients, break smoking addiction, and improve overall life satisfaction.In 2018, the Food and Drug Administration, which had for decades held the line against psychedelics, granted breakthrough therapy status to psilocybin use for severe depression, an act designed to accelerate the drug development and review process. MDMA, better known as the club drug Ecstasy, also won breakthrough status, and could receive full approval to treat post-traumatic stress disorder next year.

At the same time, the discovery of CTE has created a crisis across all contact sports, linked to myriad symptoms, including memory loss, confusion, impaired judgment, impulse-control problems, aggression, depression, anxiety, suicidality, and progressive dementia. The condition can only be confirmed after death, but the list of the dead with CTE is long, including four soccer players, more than 300 NFL players, and at least a dozen high-profile hockey players: Stan Mikita, Bob Probert, Derek Boogaard, Jeff Parker, Wade Belak, Larry Zeidel, Reggie Fleming, Rick Martin, Steve Montador, Zarley Zalapski, Todd Ewen, and Dan Maloney.

Dr. Julie Holland, a practicing New York psychiatrist and psychedelics expert, says the application of psychedelics to sports medicine is new, but makes sense based on the current scientific literature.We know that many psychedelics have really potent anti-inflammatory effects, says Holland, who is also a longtime medical adviser for the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, or MAPS. The other thing is, theyre being explored for treating neurodegenerative disorders, including chronic traumatic encephalopathy. These athletes that get multiple blows to the head [represent] a case where you really need not only anti-inflammatory effects, but this purported neuroplasticity that comes with psychedelics.

Cote during his playing days with the Flyers, in December 2008.

Jeff Vinnick/Getty Images

Studies largely involving rodents suggest that psychedelics reduce neuroinflammation, a key component of both Alzheimers disease and CTE; produce healing from brain injury; and possibly even prompt neurogenesis, or the birth of new neurons. They have also been shown to increase the density of dendritic spines small protrusions found on nerve cells in turn spurring the growth of neuronal connections that can be lost in cases of chronic stress or depression. Some human experiments suggest that psychedelics reduce activity in the default mode network (DMN), a web of connected brain regions responsible for self-awareness, social thinking, and thoughts about the past and future. The mystic feelings that users like Cote report such as the loss of a sense of self, and the ability to set aside the past or think afresh about the future are thought to arise from this reset of the DMN.

Cote started Athletes for Care with such edgier therapies in mind initially just cannabis, and then psychedelics as the encouraging science grew. And while he might not be the groups most famous retiree (members include former NFL star running backs Tiki Barber and Chris Johnson, and former UFC champ Bas Rutten), he looms as perhaps its most pivotal figure.He is a partner in a hemp-derived CBD recovery product line called BodyChek Wellness and an adviser to Wake, a multipronged company that is collaborating with Baltimores Lieber Institute for Brain Medicine to use genetics research for the development of psilocybin-based treatments tailored to individual patients a potentially dramatic step toward eliminating bad or ineffective trips. At AFCs most recent board meeting, in March, Cote led a deep discussion around psychedelics, presenting the current body of research and urging the group to strengthen its commitment to incorporate psychedelics into its work.

Riley has been a leader in this space for a long, long time, says Marvin Washington, a former NFL defensive lineman, who won a Super Bowl with the Denver Broncos in the late Nineties and became a pro-cannabis activist in retirement. He was the first athlete I ever heard talking about psychedelics.

The pair were at a cannabis-related conference several years ago when Cote waxed on about the mental-health benefits associated with taking both small and reality-shifting doses of psilocybin. Washington was surprised and started checking out Cotes claims. He was right, he says. He deserves a lot of credit for being in early on all plant medicines.

In his early days playing hockey, as a teenager, Cote discovered that a bong hit in the morning helped him maintain his focus through a long workout. Later, after his skill set proved unequal to becoming a scorer, he remodeled himself as an enforcer, or goon, a hockey player whose main job is to punish opponents for any penalties the referee missed. Undersized for the role at six feet one and a playing weight of 220 pounds, Cote brawled his way into the league, racking up more than 200 professional hockey fights. He increased his cannabis use then, smoking weed on a regular basis and finding that it helped him sleep, recover, and manage the anxiety and trauma of bare-knuckle fighting. Magic mushrooms, when he took them, were more of a party drug, a way to enhance the lights and music at a concert.

Cotes delivery while retelling his own journey is understated. But his presence speaks loudly. His face is rugged, with a nose that moves this way and that, like a switchback trail, to suggest his past. His hands are gnarled. By the time he retired, he had accumulated a litany of injuries: torn ligaments in both knees, a dislocated finger, broken ankle, separated shoulder, three broken noses, and at least four diagnosed concussions. Cote knew back then that he needed to heal up, and intuitively wanted to build on his past experiences with cannabis and psychedelics. So he began reading deeply, discovering that cannabis and psychedelics bore rich histories as natural medicines.

Cote also did as he learned, securing five grams of mushrooms, or whats known as a heroic dose, for his first ceremonial trip. He set an intention to treat the experience as important, even sacred, and arranged his house for the occasion, putting on some ambient music, turning off the electric lights, and setting out a couple of candles. Still, nothing hed read or done truly prepared him.

Acknowledging the experience was ineffable, indescribable, Cote reaches for language, doing his best. It was bliss, he says, and delivered an incredible sense of knowing. Eventually, he lands on something particularly hard to explain to potential initiates: I felt my ego dissolve.

This specific result suggests an additional, perhaps unexpected use for psychedelics that might be uniquely valuable to athletes: For a lot of athletes, and these could be amateurs or professionals, says Cote, everything you do from a very young age is geared toward achieving success in that sport. It becomes your identity.

In Cotes case, the identity hed spent so long forging for himself with blood and terror, jacking up his emotions to punch people he didnt hate and often admired, lifted off his shoulders during that first trip like he was shedding his skin with no more importance or difficulty than he would remove a coat. I felt free, he says.

What Cote experienced was actually a typical effect reported by users, and left him feeling like he could set hockey aside to do whatever I wanted. He spent the next several years banging away at his new cause, eventually finding a high-profile supporter in Lindy Snider, former vice president for sales with the Flyers and daughter of the teams beloved late owner, Ed Snider. Cote called her and asked for a meeting, Snider says, and came in quoting the science as it stood at the time. She was impressed.

Hes by far one of the leading voices in sports around these issues, Snider says. And the athletes hes brought into Athletes for Care are all very similar. Theyve run the gauntlet in the physical realm like nobody else. And, you know, theres associated deeper meaning with looking at all of these alternative ways to ameliorate your health, your mental wellness, your state of being, and Riley is always looking at a higher state of being. Whatever those tools look like that help us get there is what his mission is.

Snider was open to cannabis. She ran a skin-care company that made products for cancer patients and knew of the drugs potential as medicine. She also helped get her father some cannabis for relief as he lay dying in 2016. But the evolution of Cotes story has educated her, helping her see that psychedelics, too, bear importance not just in the treatment of brain injury and CTE, but also to help former athletes lead productive, enjoyable post-career lives.

Within the Flyers family, Snider says, she had too often witnessed players suffer a failure to launch after retirement. She sadly recalls one player she declines to name who felt so lost after hockey he succumbed to alcoholism and died of liver failure. I felt we failed him, Snider says. And it was this notion that there were things that could have helped him, and he didnt have access to this stuff.

It is easy to imagine that athletes would prove particularly challenging to invite on this kind of a trip, the hippie-dippy side of the experience too off-putting for people so deeply task-oriented and rooted in their physical bodies. But Cote says they are no more resistant on that front than anyone else. The spiritual side of this is always more difficult to address, in general, he explains. Thats the world were living in. Still, he routinely pitches the physical benefits as his way in, and finds retired sports stars uniquely receptive. Elite athletes are always looking for the next best thing and how to optimize their performance, he says. The average Joe in the Western world doesnt give a shit about optimization. They dont even know what that word means. They dont understand theres higher levels of performance. So they just think that wherever theyre at, thats just the hand that God dealt them.

Washington, the retired NFL player and cannabis activist, tried psilocybin after listening to Cote talk about it. He now describes it as the next moonshot beyond cannabis legalization. He also credits the drug with helping him find a sense of himself far greater than football.

From left: Justin Renfrow; Daniel Carcillo.

Brett Carlsen/Getty Images; Dale MacMillan/Getty Images

One of Cotes biggest success stories might be retired NHL star and two-time Stanley Cup champion Daniel Carcillo. Nine years of pro hockey had left Carcillo suffering from light sensitivity, headaches, insomnia, anxiety, depression, slurred speech, suicidal ideation, and more. He was public about it, speaking out toward the end of his career, in 2015, about his concussion history, hockeys disregard for players health, and his own failed attempts to find some solution in modern medicine.

After Carcillo retired, Cote says he reached out to him for more than a year about trying cannabis and psilocybin. No luck. It was only when Carcillo reached his darkest point, and started thinking about how he might get a rope around the big wood beams in his ceiling, that desperation, as he describes it, drove him to meet with Cote and learn more.

Cote made arrangements for Carcillo to attend a mushroom ceremony in Colorado, a decriminalized state. That first experience, says Carcillo, included the spiritual sensations that psilocybin is known to induce and something more. A few days later, Carcillo realized that he could start crossing off symptoms: light sensitivity, slurred speech, his suicidal feelings giving way to hope.

Carcillo came home from Colorado and started taking microdoses of psilocybin and occasional breakthrough amounts. He began to enjoy that sense of rebirth that Cote, Washington, and so many others describe. Soon, he was in the news, crediting Cote with saving my life.

In May 2020, Carcillo founded Wesana, a startup trying to develop its own psilocybin treatment and earn FDA approval. He is, perhaps out of necessity, more buttoned up than Cote. In the space that Rileys in, Carcillo says, you can talk more freely about what this does for the spirit. For me, when you go down the FDA path, they dont care about that. Like, they dont want to hear that. In fact, Carcillo says, he no longer uses words like psychedelic at all in his work. I say its a compound found in nature. Most all of our medicines are a single extract from a plant found in nature, or fungi. Thats the reality.

The effects of that compound on his psyche have been profound: This medicine, the biggest stuff that it does there is always that feeling that you are enough. And one of the things that Im really interested in is showing people not only can we recover and be a beacon of hope, but you can break out of what you think you need to stay in and do new things.

In science, a story like Carcillos might be dismissed as only an anecdote. But his recovery is seemingly validated through brain scans. The images Carcillo received from neurologists before he tried psilocybin showed a brain suffering from decreased connectivity. Big pockets of red signified areas of the brain that werent communicating. His slurred speech was a byproduct the signals from one part of his brain having to travel around these red areas, a slowdown that affected his enunciation. According to Mark Wingertzahn, Wesanas chief scientific officer, those initial scans qualified Carcillo for a diagnosis of moderate traumatic brain injury.

After hed come home, however, and continued his own ad hoc psilocybin therapy for about six months, Carcillo got another set of scans. What [doctors] were able to see is, those areas of red may have gone down to blue, or in some cases white, which is consistent with that normal brain pattern, says Wingertzahn, meaning Carcillos brain was suddenly showing greater connectivity and function. What interested Wingertzahn most, though, was what happened to Carcillos symptoms, which the former hockey player says have been reduced, on a scale from one to 10, to a number not even on the menu: Zero.

The reduction of symptoms is what the FDA does care about, says Wingertzahn, who spent 25 years at pharma companies, including Pfizer, getting new drugs to market. He thinks psilocybin-based medicines will be approved in three to five years.

Human trials have shown significant success in the areas of depression, death anxiety, smoking cessation, positive personality changes, and more. Not only that, a pair of studies have suggested that psilocybin treats depression at rates at least equal to, and by some measures much better than, todays available meds along with a whole different class of side effects.

Listed side effects for drugs like Lexapro include nausea, sleepiness, weakness, dizziness, anxiety, trouble sleeping, delayed ejaculation, painful erections, difficulty with orgasms, sweating, shaking, reduced appetite, and dry mouth. Noted side effects of psychedelics, aside from that small number who experience a psychotic break, and the occasional bout of nausea or insomnia, include joy, calm, increased awareness, self-confidence, and a sometimes obnoxious desire to tell everybody you meet about your awesome fucking experience.

Carcillo, during a Zoom call, smiles and asks: Are you interested in something like that? Its the same question, essentially, that Cote has been asking for years the seemingly obvious answer left hanging in the air.

In the days before Cote left for Jamaica, a few of the people scheduled to come canceled, including the former offensive lineman Justin Renfrow.

I was trying to make a lot of excuses, says Renfrow, who has a lot in common with Cote, having made it to the pros as an undrafted free agent and carved out a difficult career bouncing between NFL squads and the Canadian Football League. I played football injured since my sophomore year of high school, he says, explaining that the grind slowly took its toll.

The journeyman tackle told Cote he wasnt going to make it to the retreat, then secretly asked the universe for a sign. The night before the scheduled trip, he got one: a text message from Wake, the psilocybin research company, delivered at 11:11, a time his family had always invested with mystical meaning. He felt it was his deceased grandmother encouraging him to go.

Cotes old teammate Downie, meanwhile, said yes to Jamaica, and then complained that he did not have a valid passport, so he would not be able to travel. Cote talked him through that episode. Still, he couldnt be sure either man would actually get on the plane.

Cote, left, with his former teammate Steve Downie at a magic-mushroom retreat in Jamaica.

Courtesy of Riley Cote

Khara Cartagena, vice president of business development with the Spore Group, one of many startups across the country prepping for the Wild West of psychedelic legalization, was sitting with Cote as he waited to see if Downie and Renfrow would arrive.

I could see he was distracted, says Cartagena. He was clear that it meant a lot to him to help these people.

But eventually, after an anxious several minutes, Cote lit up at the appearance of Renfrow. And again when he saw a figure he thought he could recognize at a distance the height just about right, the shape in silhouette familiar, until finally the man got close enough that Cote could see the trademark missing tooth in his smile: Steve Downie, Cotes old teammate.

It was all just really beautiful, says Cote. I shouldnt be surprised. Plant medicine delivers, you know. But it was really maybe even better than I expected.

Both men were moved by their magic-mushroom experiences. Downie teared up after his first dose, and spoke during a subsequent integration session held to help people process the intense experience about how his father had died in a car accident while taking him to hockey practice. The ceremony had given Downie an incredible sense of relief.

Perhaps the most powerful moment, though, came when Cote looked at Renfrow deep into the ceremony. Renfrow had spoken to Cote beforehand about his personal uncertainty: Should he continue playing in the CFL, or pursue his passion for the YouTube food show hes created, Whats Cooking, and try to grow it? A hulking man at six feet five and 320 pounds, Renfrow was wearing a T-shirt with his initials on it in a circle. Then, methodically, he took it off. Cote felt he was watching a peace settle over the big man as it had once settled over him: a shedding of the skin and the birth of someone new.

Renfrow, in a tearful interview after the trip, confirms Cotes observation: It felt like my grandma was taking that weight, the pain and stress of playing through all those injuries, he says. I didnt need to keep going through that. He emerged knowing that he could leave football behind.

Cote, for his part, says that bringing people like Renfrow this kind of existential healing is his calling now, and he marvels at the dichotomy between the old Riley and the new. In Flyers-related photos, his eyes are often filled with terror, bestial anger, and sadness. Now, he says, here I am talking about a flower.

He laughs.

Its been an incredible journey, he says, and really, I just want to take as many people with me as possible.

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How an NHL Enforcer Broke His Body and Turned to Psychedelics to Heal His Brain - Rolling Stone

Yoga, an Indian tradition that we have gifted the world, is a powerful tool for inner engineering through which one can explore the metaphysical and achieve spiritual oneness.

Yoga enables one to truly connect with oneself. It enables an expansion of physical and mental abilities and helps us become the best version of ourselves. Afterall, inner tranquility is the recipe for greatness. This is the reason Yoga has gained unprecedented popularity across the globe with people in the United States of America, Canada, countries in Europe, Japan and South Korea adopting and practicing yoga in large numbers. The beginning and peak of the global pandemic were definite inflection points. Today, the popularity of Yoga has soared from Los Angeles to Okinawa and from London and Paris to Sydney and Auckland.

Yoga is a drugless Indian system that emphasizes stress management, lifestyle, and diet correction to reduce the increasing prevalence of non-communicable diseases like diabetes, heart disease, hypertension, obesity and even cancer. The Ministry of Ayush has, since its inception, gone the extra mile in promoting Indian traditional medicine systems of Ayurveda, Yoga, Unani, Siddha, Homeopathy and Sowa Rigpa. It has made these endeavors in a bid to establish India as the holistic health capital of the world.

The Indian Prime Minister had proposed at the United Nations, in 2014, the idea of celebrating June 21 as the International Day of Yoga. The proposal was passed by the general assembly with a record 175 countries supporting India. On June 21, 2022, the Prime Minister of India will, once again, be leading the celebrations of the Eighth International Day of Yoga 2022, in Mysuru, performing yoga with 15,000 people. Additionally, the celebrations will feature a whole host of attractions. There will be a two-day physical and digital exhibition. The physical exhibition will have around 148 stalls exhibiting the latest innovation in the field of yoga and in other Indian traditional medicine systems.

The digital exhibition will allow for unique features like Yoga with the Prime Minister, a display where users can do an instructed yoga session (with a three-dimensional projection of the Prime Minister) and their movement is detected and shown on a giant display. This has been made into a challenge with posture recognition Kinect technology where users will have to complete five yoga asanas in a limited time frame and score maximum points. The user will have to do each asana correctly to move onto the next one.

The Digital Yoga Exhibition will showcase the evolution of Yoga from the pre-historic to the modern period. It will feature a Heal in India and Heal by India wall which will showcase career opportunities in yoga, training, institutions, and research in Yoga and its efficacy in disease mitigation and prevention. The digital exhibition will also highlight COVID success stories, Yogas impact on peoples lives, and practical demonstrations.

The theme of International Day of Yoga 2022, Yoga for Humanity, is indeed yoga for health for all. Yoga alone is inner engineering in the truest sense. Yoga is Indias gift to the world. Yoga is Indian tradition, embraced by the world. In a divided world, Yoga is a uniting force bringing people together through compassion and kindness. It is all-inclusive, and respects diversity. Practicing Yoga brings joy, health, and inner peace. It deepens the connection between an individuals inner consciousness and the external world. For these intrinsic values embedded in Yoga this years International Day of Yoga has been given the theme Yoga for Humanity.

Apart from its obvious health and spiritual benefits aside, yoga has become an important avenue for professional growth.

As per some industry estimates, the size of the global yoga market analyzed by enrolment in online and offline yoga courses, and yoga accreditation training programs was valued at USD 38 billion in 2019 and is projected to reach USD 66 billion by 2027, growing at a compounded annual growth rate of 9.6% from 2021 to 2027. North America leads by the sheer size of its yoga market, but the Indo-Pacific region is expected to grow at the highest compounded annual growth rate at least until 2027. Yoga has emerged as an important area of commerce, employment generation and entrepreneurship development.

It is with this in mind that the International Day of Yoga, 2022, being observed on June 21, has instituted the Startup Yoga Challenge Contest, to invigorate the youth to innovate for India and for the world. Thanks to its global popularity, yoga institutes in India and across the world will require several qualified and certified trainers. India can supply well-qualified, and accredited yoga teachers and practitioners to the world.

Yoga truly is one of the many ways India contributes to making the world a better place, a place with healthy, content people who step up for the collective good of humanity, eliminating war and strife. As Indians, it is our duty to not just embrace this great Indian tradition but also to promote it globally as a tool for harmony and universal brotherhood.

Views expressed above are the author's own.

END OF ARTICLE

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Yoga, one of the many ways India contributes to making the world a better place - Times of India

Building a culture of adaptability among leadership and staff starts with clarity and transparency about the companys objectives if you want to get everyone on board from the top down.

As you train and encourage your team to be fearless about facing challenges, they will become much more resilient and willing to go the distance, implementing a new direction at the company that is positive and beneficial for all.

Below, 15 members of Fast Company Executive Board present their best practices for introducing a new approach to the business process that makes employees feel confident about embracing a flexible mindset and becoming more involved as valuable company stakeholders in their role to move the organization forward.

1. BE THE CHANGE YOU WANT TO SEE.

Use a decision-making log and publish it for the whole company to see. Help your people see the tangible results of senior leaders trying to adapt the company to change while staying true to a core set of values or principles. This provides a clear example of the right behavior and a tangible tool anyone can use to adapt to change. Brian McCann, Intergalactic

2. STAY TRANSPARENT.

Leadership must be honest with employees. Keep them informed of risks and potential opportunities. Make it a collaborative exercise to discuss tasks and execute towards mitigating risks or capturing opportunities. This creates a sense of ownership and excitement to navigate and overcome any challenge. Together, everyone learns to become a nimble and important element in future endeavors. Alice Hayden, H2 IT Solutions

3. ARM YOUR TEAMS WITH CLARITY.

There exist opportunities to identify influential teams in an organization. Therefore, arm them with clear objectives and outside resources with the aim to work through an iterative process that is set up to test hypotheses, learn, regroup, make a new version, and repeat. This experience is at the heart of design thinking and will flip fear of failure into learning adaptability. Michelle Hayward, Bluedog

4. DEVELOP A CONFIDENT AND RESILIENT STAFF.

Train employees as if they need to vertically and horizontally integrate their skill sets. We found that when we do this in acquisition scenarios, employees gain confidence to be resilient to new ideas and new, challenging processes. It also creates a greater spirit of resiliency within the organization when staff can say, I can do hard things because Ive done them in the past. Tyrone Foster, InvestNet, LLC

5. ENGAGE IN CONSTANT COMMUNICATION.

Transparency ensures companies build adaptability within their organization because it shows trust and understanding from the top down. Adaptability is usually tough for companies because theres a lack of communication and employees are typically thrown into predicaments without any previous knowledge of a situation. A level of transparency removes that barrier and makes the process easier. Josh Perlstein, Response Media

6. EXPLAIN WHY A CHANGE IS NEEDED.

Role model it. Dont react negatively to change without understanding the rationale, and be transparent when you make a change and explain it as well. Sunil Rajasekar, Mindbody

7. ENSURE YOUR GOALS AND METRICS ARE ALIGNED.

A practical way to foster change is through organization metrics. What and how you measure communicates what is important. Your cultural organizational goals and metrics must be aligned to make sure that people have the proper guidance and incentive. Capture creative and strategic thinking, teamwork, and problem-solving metrics in order to avoid over-indexing execution and individual performance. Bruno Guicardi, CI&T

8. INVITE ONGOING FEEDBACK FROM STAFF MEMBERS.

You must first be aware of what needs to be changed and why. A practical tip for this is to consistently invite feedback from team members on your organizations processes. Regularly providing open, safe spaces for honest dialogue is a great way to understand whats working and whats not and cultivate a team thats comfortable with a consistent cycle of assessment, adaptation, and reevaluation. Bilal Aijazi, Polly

9. HIRE PEOPLE WHO ARE PASSIONATE ABOUT WHAT THEY DO.

A culture of adaptability starts with a transparent hiring process. At sunday, we look for team members who are not only talented but also passionate about the restaurant industry and ready to challenge the status quo. This means adding team members who will ask the tough questions. Working in both the United States and France throughout my career has taught me to value diverse opinions. Christine de Wendel, sunday

10. ENCOURAGE A NEW BUSINESS MINDSET.

A great way to build a culture of adaptability is by implementing disruptive thinking. Practice new ways of looking at situations before your team faces an external challenge. This will develop their capacity for change, so they are ready to adapt. When a team is adaptable, they are clear on their capabilities and understand the landscape enough to react calmly in the face of a challenge. Tony Martignetti, Inspired Purpose Coaching

11. FOSTER TRUST AND CREATIVITY.

Cross-functional teams are a great way to build adaptability into the culture. By exposing different perspectives, different ways of working, and different work structures, you build trust into the system and foster creative thinking in every situation. Candice Georgiadis, Digital Agency, Inc

12. PROMOTE FLEXIBILITY TO KEEP THINGS FRESH.

Be constantly evolving. Introduce new training, new ideas, new methods, and processes on a regular basis. You dont want to focus on the same old day-to-day forever, make small edits to keep things fresh and introduce new methods to mix up normal operations. This will enable your team to be more flexible, especially if it is urgently needed. Christopher Tompkins, The Go! Agency

13. HELP EMPLOYEES UNDERSTAND AND OVERCOME FEARS.

Build resilience and fearlessness across your organization. Educate employees on how to navigate stressful situations effectively, how to understand their fears, and overcome them, since these skills will allow them to embrace evolution and be more adaptable, not only at work but in their personal lives as well. With these skills, they will become more agile, proactive, motivated, and productive. Andreea Vanacker, SPARKX5

14. USE MULTIPLE CHANNELS TO SHARE YOUR MESSAGE.

Organizations can build a culture of adaptability by starting with systemic transparency in communication. It will help employees understand the why, which builds trust and increases the likelihood of a positive reaction. Your means of communication should also be omnichannel so it is repeated and can be accessed through multiple sites. Mark Bryan, M+A Architects

15. USE MISTAKES AS A LEARNING TOOL.

Encourage employees to take risks and learn from mistakes. This is not only a good way for employees to get the opportunity to try new things and make mistakes, but it also creates a more innovative company culture. Kristin Marquet, Marquet Media, LLC

Originally posted here:
15 ideas to cultivate an open mindset for change in the workplace - Fast Company

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Twenty months after he developed a crush, 18 months after hed fallen in love, Diego, who is enormously appealing but also very canceled, boarded the bus with Jenni and Dave. They were going to the beach, and it wasnt a big deal except for the fact that pretty much all of Diegos friends had dropped him, so, yeah, it was. The three, all 17, sat in a row of orange seats that ran the length of the bus, Diegos eyes dark, goofy, and sad; his body freshly stretched to almost six feet; his oversize Carhartts ripped on skateboard ramps. This could have been in any American city this past January, on any bus. (First names in this article are pseudonyms.) Jenni kept her face tilted down toward her lap, hidden by a scrim of shoulder-length hair.

Then, a stop away from school, another high-school student boarded the bus. Just one more kid with a backpack in a hoodie, and at first Diego waved and Jenni smiled. Diego because he wanted to show he wasnt scared, as this kid had thrown accelerant on a stupid mistake Diego had made, thus blown up Diegos life. Jenni because shes pragmatic enough to play along with social rules, plus this kid sat right in front of her in AP Statistics. But instead of waving and smiling back, this boy just stared, his eyes flat and certain. Jenni began to hyperventilate.

When, the month prior, Jenni first befriended Diego, he tried to warn her: You really dont want to be canceled. It sucks. No one looked at him during the day at school. His teachers marked him present, then sent him to study by himself in the library because kids changed seats if he sat next to them in class. Diego no longer wanted to get out of bed. But he had talked to Jenni at the climbing gym, where hed started going after the skate parks filled up with opps kids who hated him. She noticed that Diego was surprisingly sweet and funny given how much his life had turned to shit.

She also asked him what had happened, which almost nobody did. She decided hanging out with Diego was okay.

This okay did involve putting a jacket over her head when she rode in Diegos car near school. But it was too late to hide now. After the kid got off at his stop, he took a picture of Jenni through the bus window. Jenni started crying.

on the cover

Artwork by KAWS for New York Magazine. Illustration: KAWS

Later that night, Jenni, whom Diego described as a solid, solid woman, tried to do some damage control because, as she explained, if you get an Instagram post about you, your life is over. I know what this looks like , she texted the boy. For months now, he had played the role of self-appointed enforcer. In Statistics class, hed announced, There are not many people that I would bash in the head with a hammer. Diego is one of them.

I was on the way to the beach, Jenni wrote. And I saw Dave, who I know.

Dave attended a different school, but he was such a good wingman his earnestness was so disarming, his golden curls fell so adorably into his eyes that everyone, boys and girls alike, was at least a little smitten with him. Dave was the one friend of Diegos who had never disappeared. It never even crossed my mind, like, Am I able to handle this? Dave said. Diego is like my brother. Still, he kept their friendship quiet which is to say he didnt post pictures with Diego on Instagram. That seemed to appease his peers.

The boy from the bus left Jennis message on read overnight, meaning hed seen it and not responded, a very bad sign. In the morning, he wrote back, Yeah, I know Dave, too, but I dont go sit with him and Diego.

Jenni wrote again: Im friends with Dave and I cant help it. She wasnt involved in the situation, she explained, and she didnt plan to be. Still, the day after the bus ride, the enforcer turned around in Statistics and said as a threat, Fuck Diego. I love cancel culture. If you were to cancel anyone, who would you cancel?

This nightmare began sweetly. Diego fan of Nivea deodorant, Air Jordans, and Taylor Swift; dragged on annual camping trips by his parents; his father white, his mother Filipina; 8.5-by-11-inch prints of every school photo of him and his sister hanging in his familys upstairs hall started high school and met a girl. They dated for a month. (According to Diego, this doesnt really count.) They broke up. He spent a lot of the next year hanging out in skate parks, learning to do frontside 360s. Summer after their sophomore year, the two started going out again. Fiona was Diegos first real girlfriend, and she was almost psychedelically beautiful: pale, celestial skin, a whole galaxy of freckles, a supernova of red hair. This made everything, even the pandemic, okay. Diego would do online school and skate and hang out with Fiona. Sometimes she broke plans with Diego to go on hikes with her parents, which Diegos mother loved. He said, I know, Mom! when his mother, who taught college courses on parenting and child development, reminded him to ask for consent.

Then, in the middle of last summer, Diego went to a party. He got drunk and Diego really fucked up here: Everybody, including Diego, agrees on that, so please consider setting aside judgment for a moment showed a nude of his beautiful girlfriend to a few kids there.

Three weeks later, school started senior year, finally back in person after 18 months at home, woo-hoo. Within days, teachers and administrators started noticing that the ninth- and tenth-graders were acting like middle schoolers wrestling, invading one anothers personal space. It was really clear a lot of them hadnt been in school since seventh grade, said the principal, who had held her job for only seven months before the pandemic closed in-person classrooms. Juniors and seniors, she noticed, also had big gaps in the skills theyd need to navigate complexity and a very low tolerance for relational discomfort.

Everyone seemed scared of each others bodies and breathing and out of touch with each others boundaries. Soon students started streaming into the glass-fronted administrative offices asking school staff to intervene in their relationships with one another, saying they felt unsafe. Students also wanted their administrators the principal and the two vice-principals, all young women who led with a big-sister, let-me-make-you-a-cup-of-tea vibe to investigate interpersonal incidents from years prior, stuff that no longer felt right after 18 months stuck at home.

Yaretzi, a young woman in Diegos grade with walnut skin and a gentle voice that masked her intense focus, started attending school-board meetings on Zoom and speaking up during public comment about how disregarded students felt by the way the district handled sexual harassment and assault. We were given the space and a lot of time, she said, half-joking, to reflect on why that kind of behavior was tolerated at school. No way was she just slipping back.

This was a common pattern: the isolation of the pandemic producing both pain and insight, followed by a need to assert new power dynamics as people gathered up the shards of their social lives and tried to reassemble them. Diegos school began working up a curriculum on harassment, a tier-one intervention, as one of the vice-principals called it, meaning the whole community needed help.

Two and a half weeks into the school year, a friend of Diegos approached him between classes. He was like, Yo, I heard this kid was walking around bragging that he was gonna tell your girlfriend that you showed some random dude her nude.

Diego was like, Broooo, what?

Then the kid did.

Fiona dumped him, which, frankly, good for her. She felt humiliated, betrayed, and startled that someone she trusted so much respected her privacy so little. I had put so much care into our relationship, she told me. Then I got screwed over.

Diego offered Fiona a raft of apologies Im so sorry, Ill never do that again, that kind of thing, Fiona said. He then holed up in his bedroom, ashamed, heartbroken, and furious with himself. He started writing songs with bald lyrics: Its all my fault/I hate me for that/And Ill do anything to get you back /Youre beautiful and perfect/Im sorry.

Over the course of the next three days, everyone in Diegos old friend group stopped talking to him, which he didnt really notice at first because he was too disgusted with himself to pay much attention. But by the following week, most of the other students in his grade had stopped talking to him as well. Diegos parents reached out to the principal for the first time on October 4, 2021, to alert her that students were broadcasting their sons errors and telling kids throughout the school that Diego was an abuser and if they remained friends with him, theyd be condoning rape culture. The principal, who was still planning the anti-harassment summit for November, did not respond.

A vice-principal walked Fiona through how to file a Title IX complaint. Title IX established a quasi-legal protocol meant to protect students right to access public education without discrimination or harassment. Every public school is required to have a Title IX coordinator. The principal and a vice-principal both held this job at Diegos school. (There was so much to share this year! the vice-principal said.) In terms of securing equal access to school sports, Title IX works well. But with regard to preventing harassment in high schools? The regulation is a sieve, a piece of ed code, the vice-principal admitted, that is not really written to protect students but instead revolves around protecting district and school from liability. The result is a law that both does a poor job of stopping harassment and leaves students feeling ignored and enraged. Students come in saying, I feel harmed and uncomfortable and sometimes unsafe, the vice-principal told me. What Title IX mandates from there is that the students fill out a form. That form is sent to lawyers at the school districts Office of Equity. A verdict comes back in legalese. The lack of shared vocabulary between students and the adults meant to protect them created an added layer of hurt. Assault has a very specific meaning in the ed code, the vice-principal said. So sometimes difficult conversations arise when we say, I acknowledge you feel uncomfortable and unsafe, and we should attend to that. This wasnt assault.

Through the end of October, Diego remained heartbroken and depressed. While half his school canceling him seemed a bit much, he hated himself too. He spent a lot of time alone with his pet rat, Toe (named because he didnt like the rat at first, but she grew on him), sitting under his lofted bunk bed, composing music on his mini Korg synth-vocoder, staring at the haute-adolescent mash-up on his walls: family water-park photos, concert-ticket stubs, Junior Ranger pins earned at national parks.

He also wrote Fiona a letter, but it was too much pleading love letter for her taste, too little straightforward apology. Besides, she thought, hed brought this extended exile upon himself. Hed acted like a jerk that past summer, partying a lot, even breaking up with her for a bit. That had left Fiona feeling, she said, like this person patiently waiting for him to come back, when he seemed he couldnt care less about how I felt.

Diegos father, a high-school teacher in a different town, took the day off work on November 1 to try to dig his son out of his dark hole.

That same morning, posters with blood-red lettering that read GET ABUSERS OFF CAMPUS started appearing around school. I just got really fed up, Yaretzi, who made them, said. My friend had called me to tell me about how her abuser wasnt being held accountable after multiple reports were made about him. Shed heard this from other friends too. I printed like 60 posters in an hour and ran around the school and slapped them on the walls. She herself had suffered through the fear and humiliation of sexual abuse, but her abuser did not go to the school a privilege, she said, in that this made her worry less about retaliation. Yet she saw how girls on her campus felt more unsafe than ever. So she taped the posters up in the long, locker-lined hallways, in the bright stairwells, in the girls bathrooms, in front of the fishbowl of an office where the administrative staff worked.

That afternoon, around five, administrators learned students were planning a walkout the next day over the schools handling of sexual misconduct. They also found a list on the girls-bathroom wall labeled PEOPLE TO LOOK OUT FOR. Scrawled on the off-white tile in black Sharpie were seven names. DIEGO was one.

The list caught Yaretzi by surprise. On my way home from school, I started getting calls, she told me. Im like, What the hell list are you talking about? Her intent was to lay blame at the feet of the school district, not specific young men.

Administrators phoned the parents of all the students named to tell them about the list and the walkout, which immediately got paired in everybodys mind. School staff also locked the girls bathroom and repainted the wall, but it hardly mattered. Photos were already bouncing around social media, accompanied by tags like stay safe please look out for these people and I wanna add [names] to this list.

November 1 was also Diegos mothers birthday. When a vice-principal reached her, she was heading to meet her husband and Diego, along with a friend, for dinner. She pulled her husband aside to alert him, then they limped through the meal for the friends sake. Afterward, Diegos parents sat him down.

This is serious. I dont want any surprises, his father said. Diego laid out the facts: drunk at a party, showed the nude. His mother was relieved he hadnt done something worse. His father was pissed.

It was not good, actually really terrible, he told me. Its embarrassing as a parent. You thought you raised your kid differently. You wish you had done things better. Diegos father was upset with himself, upset with Diego. He wanted his son held accountable, though he wasnt sure what that looked like yet.

At 11:39 p.m., Diegos mother wrote an email to the school:

Subject: My Son Is Not a Rapist.

This situation with my son has gotten out of control and needs to be stopped. Ill be heading to campus tomorrow with my son to help him file a Title IX Violation for those Spreading a series of sexual rumors about a peer.

Early the next morning the morning of the walkout a classmate texted Diego and said, Bro, you shouldnt come to school today.

On campus, from the moment students arrived, administrators tried to stay on top of the situation, but even the simple task of keeping the bathroom walls clean felt exhausting and futile. Lists went up; administrators scrubbed them down. Lists went up again, not always with the same names. Nearly 20 students (not even the principal knows the full count for sure) were named in all. People would put names on the wall and then other people would cross off names. And then people would write on the wall, like, How dare you take that name off and You dont know the story, the principal told me. Fiona herself did not write Diegos name. The principals whole focus became How do we stop the bleeding? As she saw it, students are acting as judge, jury, and executioner for other students.

At 10:30 a.m., 500 kids walked out of class, many dressed in red, as the organizers, most of whom were girls and queer people of color, had urged. Some had red-inked NO ABUSERS ON CAMPUS signs taped to their bodies. Others had written in pen on their skin: MAKE SCHOOL SAFE on an arm, I AM A SURVIVOR along collarbones. In the quad, Yaretzi led the crowd in ten minutes of silence to honor survivors. Then everybody walked up to the parking lot for speeches. Students punctuated these by banging on drums and rattling keys. They chanted No abusers on campus! and Fuck admin!

I have been here for four years, one of the organizers told a local newspaper reporter. Ive walked people, hand in hand, up to the office to go report their assault, and a lot of times, they were turned away or they said, Okay, heres a piece of paper, fill out this report, and talk about what happened to you.

There are known abusers in that crowd right now, Yaretzi added in that same interview. Theres so much protection for the abusers rather than the victims. Were just sick and tired of it.

It was a wild day, a wild day, the principal told me in her office, choking up, her back to the treadmill desk she had started using to ease her stress. Im having a hard time talking about it even now. She had students screaming, the calls for systemic change wrapped up in very public accusations against specific young men, a disturbingly high percentage of whom were boys of color, almost none of whom she knew anything about. She had a whole student body aching, telling her to fuck off. Just two weeks before, the American Academy of Pediatrics, American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, and Childrens Hospital Association had jointly declared a state of emergency in child and adolescent mental health.

In the popular imagination, the evolution of the crimes of the boys on the wall was rapid and steep. Youre an abuser quickly morphed into Youre an assaulter, which soon turned into Youre a rapist. The truth, according to Jenni, was most people didnt actually care what theyd done. Someone goes, Oh my God, I heard hes a bad person dont talk to him. And then people are scared to be on the wrong side. So they just do it. They dont think about it. Theyre just like, Oh, I dont know him, so I guess I wont talk to him.

The unifying rally cry on campus was Were not safe here. Even for students whod never felt that way themselves, suddenly there was a very compelling narrative to buy into, the principal said. There was a lot of social capital and relational capital to be found suddenly I dont wanna say it was a lie in understanding your own experience within the context of this narrative. That story line rested on the idea that the administration failed to do its most basic job. Parents started emailing the principal, asking if students were getting raped on campus.

A letter Diego wrote to himself. Photo: Courtesy of Subject

This was not just Diegos school. This was all over the country. A boy touched a girls waist without consent at a Spirit Week rally shunned by his community and called a sexual abuser. A student accused a boy of touching her at a school dance major investigation, lawyers on all sides. A student outed by the friend of a girl he tried to feel up after she reciprocated his affections while cuddling and holding hands threats on social media, thoughts of taking his own life.

The case of Kathleen Kurtz and Robert Straub v. Lewisburg School District, in the Middle District of Pennsylvania, reads like a horror story in the form of a civil-action complaint. The plaintiffs were parents of a 14-year-old boy, Minor JX. In November 2020, classmates at school started calling JX a rapist, pedophile, and child molester, according to the complaint, and encouraged other students to do the same. Then, on March 19, 2021, a girl at his school made an anonymous report to ChildLine, the State of Pennsylvanias child-abuse hotline, accusing JX of being a rapist. When a classmate was asked what JX had done, another girl said, You know what you did, JX, and refused to elaborate. JX started begging his parents to let him skip school. His parents sent a letter to the school principal:

JX is a sensitive soul and we fear this is damaging to his confidence at a very crucial time in his life where he is building his own Self-worth.

These horrific verbal attacks he is undergoing can make or break what kind of human he becomes.

The local police investigated the ChildLine call. As the complaint reads, the allegations were entirely fabricated. Still, the bullying continued. JXs Mother reported that, given the ongoing bullying and name-calling from November 2020 to the present, the School was no longer an emotionally safe place for JX to be educated, the complaint reads. He told his parents his life was so bad right now that he cant see how it can get better anytime soon. JXs parents sued under Title IX. The judge tossed the case, explaining the facts failed to prove JXs harassment was based on his sex.

At Oakland School for the Arts, vigilantism drew the attention of the NAACP. Before the pandemic, a group of students had been swapping nude images of female classmates. The administration disciplined the ringleader, but many felt his punishment was light. Then, while stuck at home for remote learning, some students formed a group chat to share experiences of sexual abuse and harassment and frustrations with reporting them to the school. They requested a Zoom meeting with the dean about how to make the campus feel safer. But the meeting was a disaster, two of the students told me. The dean wanted to talk about vaping, not sexual misconduct, and the students were incensed. Its hard to have somebody not necessarily believe you, but its even harder when its like somebody should be really concerned about you, one of the students said. The group chat organized itself into the Student Safety Committee and in late September planned a walkout and rally in a park across the street from the school. The event devolved. While students, primarily women of color, shared their personal stories of sexual violence up front, students in the crowd screamed at specific boys, most of whom were Black: Rapist! You need to go die in the ditch.

The rally ended early, one of the organizers told me, after a school administrator approached her. He was crying and was like, Youve got to shut this down, she said. We dont have the mental-health support for this.

The organizers spent the next day in the school administrators office. It was just, like, a horrible experience, one said. It was like talking in circles or like talking to a wall. Parents of accused boys showed up as well.

How are you going to put that genie back in the bottle? a Black woman whose sons were called rapists asked the dean. She had no doubt that the girls who had singled out her sons had experienced real pain. Im not saying that theyre not harmed, she said. What Im saying is that hurt people hurt. No individual had accused either of her sons of any specific abuse or crime.

In the weeks and months that followed, parents and grandparents began showing up at Oakland School for the Arts board meetings, saying they were scared to send their children to school because of all the sexual violence. Families of the accused boys reached out to the local NAACP chapter to talk about consolidating a case. Parents told Black children about the Central Park Five. This can ruin your life simply because she says so The school empowered a group of teenage young ladies, little mini-Karens, one of the mothers said. Another mother told me her son struggled with returning to a place where everyone thought he was a rapist. To survive every day, going to school like that, she said, having to prove hes worthy, a good person, when he feels like hes going to a school of hundreds of kids who think otherwise?

Oakland School for the Arts eventually sent a letter to the school community acknowledging that most of the allegations of sexual assault against a number of predominantly African American boys were either not backed by evidence, unfounded, or in some instances a result of mistaken identity or assumed guilt by association and that the community had real healing and soul-searching to do.

On November 4, Diego lost his job with a youth organization in town. You suspended my son due to graffiti on the wall that you saw on Social Media? Diegos mother wrote to his bosses. NOT ONE person has accused my son of sexual assault.

One of the bosses wrote back that she was not in a position to say that Diego has sexually harassed or assaulted anyone, but the truth was not the issue. Other kids in the program, which was entirely online, now said they felt unsafe with Diego. The program had to distance itself from him based on the fact that this has gone very public and has compromised the way participants feel and/or interact.

The Title IX claim about Diego ended up with the incident being declared outside the schools purview. The vice-principal told Fiona she could file a police report. She didnt want to do that. In communication with her family, however, the school made a plan to help Diego and Fiona repair. Fionas family, the vice-principal wrote in an email to Diegos, made two requests:

1. That all pictures are deleted from every possible device, cloud, storage/media platform, etc.

2. That it be made clear to Diego and his family that this was a serious violation that is having an impact on the students overall well-being.

Done and done. As individuals, at the beginning, the two had managed this incident okay. Fiona had no interest in getting back together. But a couple of weeks after their breakup, when Diego was still eating only a handful of peanut-butter pretzels a day, theyd met at the beach and talked. I was like, I dont appreciate getting treated like an abuser, Diego said. And shes like, I dont think youre an abuser at all. I know that. But this had grown way beyond them.

The public conversation recast Fionas view of Diegos actions in a worse light. She was mortified knowing that every time people thought about Diego now, they thought about her nude photo. Still, she felt validated and supported by the list. After the clinical and pointless Title IX claim, it was refreshing to know that, like, Wow, someone else is standing up for me, she said. Someone does care about my story.

Everyone hoped that after Thanksgiving break Diego would feel comfortable returning to school. That didnt happen. Other boys whose names had been on the list were doing horribly too. One had hitchhiked away from home earlier in the year after his ex-girlfriend called his mother one morning to tell her she was going to cancel her son that day. Then she did. He returned a day later at the ex-girlfriends urging. (They couldnt stay away from each other, his mother said. She didnt want him to leave.) But being in a town where everybody shunned him, except for the person primarily responsible for that shunning, was just too painful. His mother stayed up all night with him so that he didnt slip into the bathtub with a kitchen knife. Then he ran away again.

Yaretzi tried to keep the focus on systemic change. One simple ask, which Fiona would have appreciated, too: more counseling support to complement the reporting process. Yaretzi spoke with the superintendent and the Office of Equity, pleading with them to, at a minimum, connect students with outside mental-health resources. Theyre like, Well, what would you propose? she told me they said right after she made her pitch. And then I just started laughing. I was like, I just told you what I proposed! I mentioned the possibility of a Linktree. Have you ever seen a Linktree? It would take ten minutes and cost zero dollars.

A scarcity mind-set not just in terms of money but in terms of care, morality, and protection set in. Students kept coming into the principals and vice-principals offices upset over the fact that in the days after the protests, the school helped create safety-and-support plans for some of our male-identifying students who have been named, the principal said. And our female students saw that as Who are you protecting? Whose narrative is more important to you? Who do you believe?

For instance, the school put Diego on independent study for the month of November. The guy who caused a lot of pain to me now gets kind of like a GET OUT OF JAIL FREE card? Fiona asked. Shouldnt there be something offered in the other direction? (The school did offer her a safety-and-support plan, but she declined because she didnt share any classes with Diego.) Meanwhile, some of the families of accused students had started deploying what has become the standard legal tactic in the Me Too backlash, displayed most publicly at the Depp-Heard trial: going on the offensive. The families demanded disciplinary action against the students shunning their sons. But I cant make your kids be friends, the vice-principal told those parents. I cant stop kids whispering and laughing when your kid walks into the classroom.

In the worldview that set in, being kind to a canceled kid is all downside. If youre kind, youre an apologist, then you too will be shunned. As another canceled kid told me, hed really tried to press his ex-friends on why they ostracized him, but there was no point. They were like, You know why. And I was like, I dont know why. And theyre like, You know why. And then I just ended up leaving because how can you argue with that?

The schools official protocol on how to deal with ruptured relationships was to use restorative practices. This usually meant a facilitated conversation among the people directly involved, with the goal of creating empathy and coaxing kids out of angel/devil, black-and-white thinking. But Diegos school had a countervailing policy: You couldnt use restorative practices in cases of sexual misconduct. You also couldnt make anyone participate in restorative practices. Given that the students existed in a universe where just talking with an alleged abuser made you an apologist where you could lose all your social capital simply for suggesting that someone might deserve compassion who would agree to restore?

It was an impossible situation, a whole world supersaturated with emotion, starved for common ground and facts. The school tried to get the stalled anti-harassment training back on course, but the advocacy group it had hired to run the workshop declined. This is not the time for us to come, its representatives said. People need an open mind to learn.

Diego barely ate for weeks. He slept 12 hours a night. He wrote bad poems. He stared at the pink Post-it note he had put in his phone case on November 1:

Reminders

Compliment people always

be kind and respectful to everyone regardless of previous encounters

be generous

Not wish for more or better

Think before acting

He who is not satisfied with what he has will not be satisfied with what he would like to have

dont talk shit ever

What else did he do? Cry? I dont know, he said. Eventually, he agreed to go with Dave to Daves familys cabin for the weekend. On the way there, they stopped at a taco truck. Diego said, Bro, Im not hungry. But Dave made him order three tacos anyway and stood there while he ate.

Diegos parents kept pressing the school to do something, to at least use restorative practices with Diego and the students threatening their peers with social ostracization if they talked to him. Yet on December 2, 2021, the vice-principal sent an email explaining to Diegos parents that a restorative circle was not going to happen. Those students canceling him, she wrote, have no personal ill-will toward Diego but that the social pressures on them are so great that to be associated with Diego would cause too much harm for them. She also said shed reached out to their peer groups, teachers, or classes but they believe these interventions would cause more conflict (at least at this point). So that was that.

The bullying and harassment complaint that Diegos parents had filed in November was closed on December 17. The outcome letter acknowledged that the situation which in this case referred to Diegos cancellation was indeed both severe and pervasive and, as such, violated the districts bullying-and-harassment policy. To remediate this, the letter continued, school officials had counseled the offending students to stop that behavior. Yet in a tacit admission that this made no difference, Diego now would be excused to eat lunch early and leave campus early so he could avoid interacting with other students. His teachers would also excuse him from class because they couldnt stop the bullying.

Over Christmas break, Diegos sister, two years older, came home from college. The whole family got in the car, as they did every year, to chop down a Christmas tree.

Diegos sister had made the best of shelter-in-place, which shed spent in her apartment near school she pulled through all her STEM courses. She even earned a commercial drivers license and now worked as a public-bus driver. Diegos friends used to tell him they were jealous of how close he was to her. Now her politics, according to Diego, involved spending a lot of time on Twitter and, according to her dad, thinking he was a privileged white guy with a beard. Hed taken to saying to her, Key word: Nuance!

Diego drove the family car to the Christmas-tree farm. On the way, his sister called him a bad driver. He told her to shut up. She then said, Abusers deserve to be canceled. Like virtually all young people in their town, shed seen the image of her brothers name on the school-bathroom wall, posted and reposted many times.

Diego: Bruh, that was a little out of pocket. Get the fuck out.

Sister: Oh my God, I dont want you in my life anymore. Everyone started crying. Their parents kicked her out of the car and told her to find her way home.

New Years came. Then February. The experience kept rooting in the dark rut of its own logic. A kid spat on Diego in a stairwell. (It wasnt clearly caught on security video, so no one took disciplinary action.) Diegos mother started losing her own friends. (There are levels of abuse, you know, theyd tell her. You dont know what your son did.) She started making Diego drive her to work to get him out the door to school. But he often drove to school and just sat in the car. His whole day was working by himself in the library anyway. Why enter the building at all? On occasion, hed see other boys in the library whose names had been on the wall, and theyd sit together. But mostly he felt invisible.

Race remained a topic almost too toxic for the school to touch. You are telling us that most of the boys that were accused were Black and brown students, and all of the kids who are canceled are brown or Black, and the white boys were able to walk back on the campus, no problem, Diegos mother said to the principal. And yet youre not telling these white kids this? Thats called white fragility and being afraid of these girls.

A reprieve finally came in February, when Diego and Dave traveled to the South on a trip organized through Sojourn Project, a social-justice nonprofit that takes groups of students to places like Selma, Montgomery, and Birmingham to learn about the modern civil-rights movement. It felt so good to be in a different place with different kids, tune in to the arc of history, focus on justice with a capital J. They talked a lot about how people use and respond to negative power. Diego described the trip as one big therapy session.

The universe snapped back into perspective for a moment. Diego had fucked up and hurt someone; people had ostracized him. That wasnt the whole world. But the good feelings did not last long. Emboldened from their travels, Dave and Diego posted trip pictures together on Instagram: the two of them goofing off on buses; Dave, smiling, his body held up parallel to the ground by Diego and a pack of kids. This got Dave fully canceled. Within two weeks, he, too, was eating lunch out of his car, thinking about an MLK quote he had learned in the South and half-remembered now: It was something like, Its not about what will happen to me if I help this someone, he said. Its about what happens if I dont help them.

When were home, Dave said, I feel like were in a bubble of hate.

By this point, the guardians of the social order had changed. Boys are worse, Im not going to lie, Diego said. Guys just want to feel powerful, and they feel entitled to be mean to other people. And they really didnt want the girls to think they stood with abusers.

My friend Ethan I mean, my previous friend, Dave said. I have three classes with him. And he made it clear. Like, I miss you. Its just, like, this situation is so dumb, I just cant hang out with you.

Dave tried to get his school to help. He approached the counselor, dean person, I forget what she is, really, he told me. She said, Canceling is very new to me, and its a very hard thing to deal with. He asked if she could set up a restorative conversation. And she said, Well, I can ask, but I cant force them to do it. And so she asked and they said no.

Reason and control felt like distant concepts. Diego and his sister pretended the fight had never happened the next time she came home, but Jenni was still putting a jacket over her head when she rode in Diegos car. I feel bad for putting my reputation before my friend, she said. But, ummm A boy threatened to beat up Diego while he was visiting Dave at school. Diegos father thought about going over to this boys familys house because the school district, obviously, was not going to intervene. Everybody was exhausted. Diegos principal had decided to quit.

The absurdity of the situation caused something in Diego to crack, and that release allowed for new clarity: Youre only canceled if youre trying to hang out with the people refusing to associate with you. The rest of the world doesnt know and probably doesnt care. Diego and Dave started taking the bus to the beach on Friday nights and talking to anybody who looked their age. Everyone I met, I was like, By the way, this is what is happening at my school right now, Diego said. Its better to hear it from me than from some kid: Hes a certified abuser. Oh my God. But almost no one met his disclosure with much besides sympathy. They were all like, Dont worry, bro. Youll get through it. Or: Your school is wack as hell.

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Story of a Canceled Teen - The Cut

Western Universitys Own Your Future program reflects a partnership between units across the institution.

Many doctoral students end up in careers outside tenure-stream academia. Consequently, universities are placing more and more emphasis on broad skills development for their PhD students to equip them for a variety of careers. But it can be challenging and resource-intensive to construct doctoral-level programming that is both effective and works across all disciplines.

Western Universitys Own Your Future program seeks to help change that with a doctoral professional development program that is in-depth, comprehensive and can be replicated and shared beyond the institution.

The program has two main components: skills identification and skills building.

With the former, students complete the programs Power Skills Assessment tool, in which they self-assess their skills in six competency areas: communication and relationship building; leadership; thriving; teaching and learning; intercultural and social fluency; and career engagement. Based on this self-assessment, students receive a report that identifies their current strengths, growth areas, and areas requiring experience. The student report also directs students to workshop opportunities to build their strengths.

When it comes to skills building, PhD students have access to approximately 80 workshops, each tied to at least one skill. For example, students can use understanding of comic design to increase their skill in communicating ideas broadly, or complete anti-oppression training to strengthen their ability to work and engage with others effectively. Many of the skills training workshops provide students with training that will benefit their immediate research needs as well as their future career skills needs, such as time management and project management.

Lorraine Davies, associate vice-provost in the school of graduate and postdoctoral studies at Western, is the Own Your Future academic lead. She is also the primary investigator for an assessment of the program funded by the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO). As part of the HEQCO Skills Consortium, Dr. Davies and her team will consider three key questions:

In the evaluation project, which is still ongoing, Dr. Davies and her team had students complete mock job interviews with a team of career evaluators, including an employer, and the Power Skills Assessment at the start of the study. After completing three workshops, the students again completed mock job interviews and the Power Skills Assessment. Dr. Davies and her team will compare the pre- and post-training data, among other data, to assess the program. (See the project description on page 18 of the HEQCO Skills Consortium Interim Report for fuller details.)

The goal of this evaluation project is not simply program improvement, but also the creation of evidence-informed resources that can be adopted and adapted by other institutions. As Dr. Davies told me, We are committed to sharing our work with others, and to learning from best practices at other universities. To this end, Own Your Future has a creative commons license, and Dr. Davies team intends to share the results nationally.

There are a number of things about the Own Your Future program that catch my attention. The first is that the program reflects a partnership between units across the university, including (but not limited to) the careers and experience department and the school of graduate and postdoctoral studies. My own research on best practices in graduate professional development suggests that these collaborative models are more effective than other approaches.

Second, I am pleased to see the explicit ties between the student self-assessments and the workshop offerings (through the student report), and the explicit identification of career skills in the workshops. As I have discussed, explicit instruction is an evidence-based teaching practice that can advance skills training effectiveness.

And finally, I am impressed by the desire of Westerns school of graduate and postdoctoral studies to share resources to benefit doctoral students across Canada. While universities can be highly competitive, there is a more collaborative spirit in the graduate professional development space, as demonstrated by the work of the Graduate and Postdoctoral Development Network. Given the importance of doctoral professional development, Westerns school of graduate and postdoctoral studies willingness to share its work is admirable.

I will watch the evolution of Westerns Own Your Future program with interest and encourage you to check it out for yourself.

Is your university doing innovative things regarding student skills training and professional development? If so, I would love to hear about it. I also welcome opportunities to speak with universities about skills training. Please connect with me at loleen.berdahl@usask.ca using the subject line The Skills Agenda.

I look forward to hearing from you. Until next time, stay well, my colleagues.

Read more from the original source:
Empowering doctoral students and other universities University Affairs - University Affairs

Sleep is a mystery we dont definitively know what it is, why we do it, and why we need so much of it.

To spend 8 hours a day incapacitated, for every day of our lives, there has to be something important going on! But there isnt exactly consensus scientists still debate whether it cleans the brain; although they can agree that if you dont get enough, youll go insane.

The potential size of the sleep market is as big as it can get we all need sleep on a daily basis. The sleep economy is made up of the products, services, devices, and applications that help you fall asleep, stay asleep, and manage your sleep. The industry has seen a flood of investment activity in recent years and as wearables proliferate and enable our desire to monitor and optimise our bodily functions interest and investment will intensify.

We can all attest that lack of sleep makes it harder to concentrate, increases grumpiness and stress, impairs memory and judgement, and lowers motivation to do things that are good for us, like exercise. It can also lead to poor decision making and increase desire for sugary foods.

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On top of that, sleep is essential for cell repair, memory formation, emotional regulation, and hormonal balance. A good nights sleep ensures the right amounts of hormones are released at the right times. Every organ in our body needs sleep, and accidents increase when were sleep deprived.

Theres more to sleep than rest and recovery. During the day, we only access 10% of our brains. In dreams, we get to explore tangential connections, identify unconsidered patterns, regulate emotions, and shape memories. As we sift through the days events and decide which memories to keep and which to discord, sleep has the power to shape the stories we tell ourselves and hence, who we are. This critical, autobiographical process happens by incorporating new data into our memory bank and identifying patterns and connections between them.

Despite its importance, our society has a large problem with sleep. Our permanent connection to our digital devices has disrupted our circadian rhythms and sleep patterns, with debilitating consequences. In Australia, 50% of adults suffer from at least one chronic problem with sleep be that trouble falling or staying asleep, or waking up before you want to. 10% of Australian adults have insomnia. This costs us dearly. People who receive less than 6 hours of sleep per night have a 13% higher mortality rate.

In healthy sleep, we oscillate between REM and non-REM phases of sleep.

In healthy sleep, we yo-yo between REM and non-REM stages of sleep. This cycle repeats every 90 minutes and consists of about 5-6 cycles. Sometimes we skip a stage, or it gets disrupted. For sleep to work its magic, all stages need to happen.

As venture capital investors, we always ask why now?

Since sleep has been a constant for the entire history of humanity, why do we believe we are on the precipice of an inflection point, thatll unleash a wave of innovation in this industry?Here are some macro trends that we think will play a role in driving an evolution in the way we sleep.

Where running on three hours of sleep may have once been glamorous in certain circles, as a society we are waking up to the importance of sleep as an input into health and wellbeing. Our chronic lack of sleep is being recognised as a global health crisis the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention has even classified it as endemic. More people are recognising that a bad nights sleep is just as damaging if not more as a night of heavy drinking or guzzling down an unhealthy meal.

Moreover, not only are sleep deficits unhealthy, theyre downright dangerous. As proof, each year at daylight savings (an event which disrupts peoples sleep), the number of car crashes goes up by 6% in the following week.

Companies are are taking notice: Calm, Headspace, and Insight Timer have invested heavily in their Sleep Series, recognising how much the world needs to be lulled to sleep by the sonorous voices of Stephen Fry or Matthew McConaughey.

Theres a range of products to optimise sleep, from lower tech smart mattresses and pillows, weighted blankets, temperature controlled bedrooms, blackout blinds to higher tech dreamscape music, light projectors, and noise modulation. Quite remarkably, theres no leading consumer brand for sleep owning and bundling this tech!

Edible products that can help people fall asleep are gaining in popularity. Active ingredients can be found in gummies, cookies, teas, or even ice-cream. Some popular edibles include melatonin a naturally occurring hormone that induces a feeling of sleepiness. As it turns out, blue-light exposure reduces the natural production of melatonin one of the reasons that looking at screens right before bed can make it harder to fall asleep.

Another popular active ingredient is CBD a cannabinoid. In some parts of the world, its gaining popularity as a natural sleep remedy, as it curtails the production of cortisol the stress hormone.

Sleep trackers capture data, providing insights about sleep and suggestions on how to improve your sleep. They come in all shapes and sizes, like WHOOP around your wrist, the Oura ring, the Beddr forehead wearable, the Dreem headband, and the 10 Minds Motion Pillow.

The Dreem headband uses a technique called polysomnography (PSG) to track sleep stages.

Sleep tracking devices are about 95% accurate in measuring whether youre asleep, but only 60% accurate in measuring sleep quality or stage. It primarily relies on lagging indicators such as heart rate, movement, and noise. A more accurate method would be to measure leading indicators, such as eye movement and ESG, however most people are reluctant to wear headbands to bed simply to get more accurate measurements of their sleep. As Apple and Googles Fitbit accelerate innovation in wearables, were watching with interest the innovations rolled out for tracking sleep.

So youve gotten a baseline picture of your sleep, and you want to improve it. Its time to find a sleep coach! Human and AI-powered sleep coaches can help you determine how much sleep you actually need, optimise your bedtime routine, and serve as your accountability buddy to cement a healthy sleep routine.

Not only is poor sleep a lagging indicator of poor health or illness, poor sleep can also increase the risk of disease or even death. Sleep deficiency is correlated with chronic conditions such as heart disease, kidney disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, obesity, and depression. Furthermore illness often disrupts sleep, fuelling a vicious cycle of degeneration. For example, getting less than seven hours of sleep makes diabetes harder to manage as both insulin resistance and hunger increases the next day.

Sleep monitoring is increasingly being used as a diagnostic tool. For example, disruption to sleep cycles can indicate early stages of Alzheimers disease. Monitoring sleep not only enables early diagnosis, it can track the progression of degenerative conditions. In addition, diagnosing and treating mild to moderate cases of obstructive sleep apnea can help prevent the development of cancers, while detecting changes to respiratory rates can catch COVID-19 early.

Dreams offer a glimpse into the subconscious mind a place of wisdom and power. Human civilisations have been interested in programming dreams for thousands of years. In ancient Egypt, people slept in sacred beds at the Serapeum of Saqqara in hope of receiving divine messages. In ancient Greece, the sick would go to sleep temples or spiritual hospitals to channel the gods healing powers. Today, dream incubation is a part of spiritual practices like dream yoga.

The Serapeum of Saqqara.

Artists knew that dreams can enhance creativity. The connections that are formed while we dream can offer a new perspective when we wake up. The artist Salvador Dali had a creative process called slumber with a key. He would sit in a chair holding a heavy key over a plate and meditate on a problem as he dozed off. When he fell asleep, his hand with relax, and drop the key on the plate, waking him up, often with a fresh perspective.

Slumbering with a key.

Recently, practices called dream intelligence have sprung up to harness dreams to promote learning and growth. These techniques use dreams to embed positive habits or bolster the learning of new skills, like languages. Content we review right before bedtime affect our hypnagogic dreams visceral dreams that occur just after we fall asleep. This means what we see, hear, or smell right before we sleep can be programmed to influence our dreams, and in doing so, our thoughts and behaviours.

In one experiment, researchers exposed participants to certain kinds of content right before they fell asleep, and documented how it impacted their dreams:

Perhaps unsurprisingly, there are people trying to monetise the power of hacking dreams, with marketers experimenting with how to reach people through their dreams.

Early experiments present participants with stimulus right before they fall asleep. In small study, 18 people watched a video that showed Coors Light beer cans interspersed with with nature images, set to synth beats. The participants then fell asleep to the same soundtrack. A whopping 30% of participants claimed to have dreamt about Coors beers. In our dreams, we are defenseless prey for marketeers. The daytime savvy weve built to tune out the relentless bombardment of advertising material goes out the window, as were unable to scrutinise whats marketing and whats our subconscious telling us something important.

Marketers seem determined to break down the last bastion of our privacy. The American Marketing Association (NY) found that 77% of marketers surveyed would. like to experiment with DreamTech.

Theres some brands that have already staked tall claims to their ability to influence our dreams. Burger Kings nightmare burger, which was rolled out for Halloween, is said to be clinically proven to induce nightmares, making it 3.5x more likely that someone has a nightmare after eating one.

Someone in my dream turned into the burger, said one study participant. The burger then transformed into the figure of a snake.

Definitely doesnt look like it would go down a dream

We believe the convergence of these trends will drive the creation of companies that reimagine how we approach sleep.

This article was first published by AfterWork Reading.

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Wearables, edibles and monetising dreams: What is the future of sleep? - SmartCompany