Womankind June - September 2021

Being positive doesn’t come easily to most people - we’re simply not built that way. Our brains naturally gravitate towards the concerns of life because that’s our survival instinct at play. We’re evolutionarily inclined to seek out obstacles so we can overcome them, while at the same time we’re forever hunting for the next reward or goal, to quell that overwhelming sensation that ‘something is missing’ in our life. But while positivity may not come naturally, it certainly can be enforced, and one technique that’s interesting to try - even if it’s just for amusement - is to make yourself list five things that are ‘positive’ as you go about your day. You could go for a walk, for instance, and make your list, however ridiculous your ideas might seem…

Womankindmag.com is our online portal for subscribers to share ideas, writing, art, and much more. Want to become a Womankind affiliate? We have generous terms - please contact us at award@womankindmag.com Facebook (womankindmag) Instagram (#womankindmag) Twitter (@womankindmag) If you like Womankind and support our advertising-free ethos, we’d be delighted if you spread the word about us.…

Antonia Case:  Antonia Case is Editor-in-Chief and Creative Director of Womankind, and Editorial Director of New Philosopher. She was awarded the 2016 AAP Media Professionals’ Award for excellence in the presentation of philosophy in the media. Her forthcoming book Flourish will be published by Bloomsbury Sigma. Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore: Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore is a British journalist who lives in New York. She writes for New Philosopher, The Guardian, The Economist, Financial Times, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, New Statesman, New Internationalist, The Huffington Post, and Time magazine. JenniferKunst: Jennifer Kunst is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst, working in private practice in California. She is a training and supervising analyst at the Psychoanalytic Center of California and an adjunct associate professor at the Fuller Graduate School of Psychology. She is the…

It’s the one question that we’d all like to know the answer to, so we could just get on with it - the living part, that is. If we knew what the ‘good life’ entailed then we could shun the rest, and just concentrate on the important bits. But society has a tendency to derail us. We’re repeatedly told that the good life is about making loads of money, having a successful career and buying as much as we can possibly shovel into our houses and garages. Some are convinced that they need to be famous and get their name up in lights for the good life to kick in. It’s worth remembering that the phase of flight for the Kunanyia stephaniae butterfly lasts a mere 14 days, long enough…

The savannahs in Southern Africa are well known for housing the last of the great mammals - zebras, elephants and cheetahs - and many a safari tourist has gone there in the hope of capturing these magnificent creatures on camera. But less well known, and lying beneath these flat grassy plains, exists a world that few know about, and no tourist has ever photographed, and that’s the immortal forests. “What is required of us is that we love the difficult and learn to deal with it. In the difficult are the friendly forces, the hands that work on us. Right in the difficult we must have our joys, our happiness, our dreams: there against the depth of this background, they stand out, there for the first time we see how…

Life can feel at times like a conveyor belt, forever compelling us forward into the future, and we aid this onward motion with our busyness. We make calls and plans, organise ourselves and others, a lurching towards some distant place where we think, “at that point, I will slow down and appreciate what I find”. But not now. Psychologist and meditation teacher Tara Brach thinks this onward motion needs a daily readjustment, what she calls the “sacred pause”. To pause is to interrupt temporarily, to suspend motion and thought. A timestamp when we are not bound by the prospect of a goal. “The pause can occur in the midst of almost any activity and can last for an instant,” she writes. In her book, Radical Acceptance, Brach describes a bull…