Becoming Human

From funerals to the grieving process, we can move through death more healthily. This episode explores the grieving process including:

• Grief as any form of loss and an unending process
• Four grieving principles (Distress, Trauma, Affliction, & Meaning-Making)
• Instrumental versus instinctive grief.
• Reactive versus proactive responses to grief.
• Memorial services versus ancient death rituals.

Finally, we explore how we might re-approach grieving with a reflection experience.

Music includes:

Valdeldur (Sigur Ros)

Day is Gone (Noah Gundersen)

Your memory is a means of grieving your inevitable death. Which then offers an honest approach to the time that you have left. This episode explores mortality, phenomenology, and an exploration of Augustine's three tenses of time: Memory, Attention, and Expectation.

May you grieve your own death with every passing moment; for then there is a possibility that you can contribute to making a better world within the limited constraints of our bodies and minds.

We tell stories, relay information, and discuss details, but they only capture the limited perspective that we've experienced. Our memories are malleable, splintered, and easily influenced selections and interpretations.

Memory is not about history, memory is about meaning. Why is this the case? And how should it impact how we tell stories and memories? This episode is a conversation on epistemology. We need to stop pretending our memories are more than they really are.

We need to let stories be stories. Only then will our stories be able to come together to bring all of us closer to reality than we are unable to discover on our own.

A lot of people think they don't have a good memory. That's not true. Memory is not a personality trait. Often poor memory is a result of leaving the process to chance. If you don't know the seven methods of encoding or how sensory, short-term, and long-term memory works, you probably won't have a good memory.

How, then, do we remember stuff? And why do we forget things?

Do you want to learn more effectively? Do you want to get better at storing information and retaining details and remembering names?

This episode explores the memory game:

1. Memory, storytelling, and meaning-making
2. Sensory memory
3. Short-term memory
4. Long-term memory
5. Explicit and implicit memory
6. Encoding failure (storage decay and interference)
7. Encoding methods

Why do we fail to enact the good ideas we have and the changes we desire? We have to confront our natural resistance to change and the complicated process of memory.

A different approach to changing and transforming your health - from diets, nutrition, exercise, and helpful processes for meaningful health and wellness development.

1. How to approach holistic health transformation
2. Exploring the fitness industry (especially this time of year)
3. The goals of integrative health: Functionality, quality of life, life expectancy, and societal value
4. Intrinsic mental vision
5. Executing action
6. Intuitive eating
7. Intuitive exercise
8. Why you should drink more water
9. Challenging our culture's body image perspective
10. The role of accountability

For more on Vanessa's health and wellness coaching: vkhealthcoaching.live

To support the show: Becoming Human Ko-Fi

What is justice?

Guest contributor Bryce Webster explores a third form of justice: Eucharistic Justice.

If you acknowledge justice, you have to consider the source of that justice. Justice, therefore, is a metaphysical question and Eucharistic Justice is a way to give a source for justice and a practice of justice deeply inspired by Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

What is justice? Guest contributor Bryce Webster explores justice and begins unpacking the first two options - retributive justice and restorative justice.

Although retributive justice (revenge) is the most common form, there are other options.

What is capitalism all about? Why do we often hate our day jobs and work? We look at our economy and alienation; and why the alternative might not be as romantic as it seems. There are problems with every type of economy. Here's why we probably won't change our modern one and why we probably wouldn't want to even if we could.

What is work and why do we say no one wants to do it?

Labor is an action or exertion to develop the world through the deployment of human abilities, time, and energy and there are multiple ways to approach it. This episode explores the history of hard work, extrinsic labor, intrinsic labor, and the two overarching types of economy that result: "Production for Use" and "Production for Exchange."

We need to reconsider the essence of work, work-life balance, and what work means in light of human limitations.