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:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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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.
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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.
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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).
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I have a very similar set of views / experience to this I'd like to share.
I became an atheist when I was 11. Like most of my fellow gen Z's who converted to atheism, I snuck my nose up at all things religion. Beautiful churches started to feel like their was deception seeping through the walls. Thankfully I've always kept my child-like curiosity, so I was never hit with the overt cynicism a lot of kids my age had, but that's a different story. My overall cynicism has begun to wane over the last few years. But I had an absolutely striking experience while in Japan this last year that really made me start seeing the wonder again.
I was at Fushimi Inari shrine in Kyoto at around 8 at night by myself, and I wanted to see the full shrine before the bullet trains closed at 11 because my hostel was in Osaka. So to be able to satisfy both conditions of:
I decided to run the shrine rather than walk it. But as I started to run, I noticed these beautiful sub shrines with saisen-bakos. There was something about just running bast these beautiful pieces of architecture like it was just a background really bothered me. Like I was missing the real point of the shrines, and possibly a very fundamental human experience. So instead of running by each of these shrines, I decided to to stop at each and every one of them (I think there were about 30 of them) to do a Shinto prayer that a local friend of mine taught me.
At first, doing this felt extremely awkward, like I was trying to fake religion or something. But then as I decided to do what every self-help Youtube video has told me to do, say something I'm grateful for. So each shrine became a combination of a Shinto prayer and a gratefulness prayer. And at some point, this process of running and praying became extremely meditative. And I started to feel a connection to what my pre-11 year old self would of called God. I still don't believe in a Christian god per say, I'm more of an Agnostic at this point, but I do think I felt what people across all religions feel when they go to their religious place of worship to pray. That moment had a pretty profound effect on me, and my appreciation for religious spaces is tremendously higher than it used to be.
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