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Wellness Wednesday for September 18, 2024

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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Her: Ooo which church I would love to go if that’s okay?

Me: Sure, I was looking at [nearby church] — it's a bit nontraditional (rather, they say they follow a non-mainstream tradition, Theosophy) of course, as I said, I haven't actually been there yet so don't judge me if they turn out to be 100% crazy 🙈

Saturday morning

Her: I’ll look into! It might be interesting

To be specific, this is probably where you lost her. It went from her inviting herself to, looking into it as a soft exit. You tricked her with the church thing.

Looking up Theosophy, is that it looks odd, and makes you look out there. Likely - She's a Christian and thought you were going to Christian church, then pointed her to an odd pagan church with Nazi-esque logos, and she got spooked out by that. Culturally Christian people don't mind going to a nondenomination christian church to meet a stranger. It would code as a safe place. Rightly or wrongly, going to a non-christian esoteric religious meeting would code as dangerous and weird.

The wikipedia page has a logo at the top with a snake and a swastika thing.

"any of a number of philosophies maintaining that a knowledge of God may be achieved through spiritual ecstasy, direct intuition, or special individual relations, especially the movement founded in 1875 as the Theosophical Society by Helena Blavatsky and Henry Steel Olcott (1832–1907)."

This is a good take. I never even thought to look that up and now that I have yeah, it doesn't scan well.