Things May Appear Bleak, And Yet…

by Marie Snyder Byung-Chul Han’s The Spirit of Hope is a beautiful book, the kind you want to treat with care and won’t dare dog-ear a page. Anselm Kiefer’s illustrations throughout provide a place for contemplative moments between ideas. It’s more immediately accessible than The Burnout Society, which took me weeks to wrap my head…

Everything Old is New Again

by Marie Snyder We’re being asked to believe six impossible things before breakfast. We have to reckon with several  upheavals at once: more conflicts, discrimination, poverty, illness, and natural disasters than many of us have ever seen in our comfortable lifetimes, and without a clear path forward. It’s unsettling. It feels necessary to find courage…

Stand Out: How to Prevent Obeying in Advance

by Marie Snyder Timothy Snyder’s dictum, “Do Not Obey in Advance,” seems to be everywhere these days. It’s the title of the first chapter of his book out in 2017: On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, which is worth a revisit along with conformity experiments that back up his concerns and some clarification…

Developing the Capacity for Rational Choices

by Marie Snyder “As the world falls around us, how must we brave its cruelties?” —Furiosa  Imprisoned climate activist, Roger Hallam, recently wrote about the necessity of expanding emotional well-being as we face bleak events happening around the world. While climate scientists try to “help people through the horrific information that they are being given,”…

Stoic Environmentalism

by Marie Snyder I dipped my toe into Stoic Week again this year. I’ve done it before a decade ago, and even went to StoicCon once! I was hoping to find the attitude necessary to manage all this (gestures broadly at everything). I got stuck on the first day. They start with Epictetus’s bit on…

On Burnout: ‘Can’ is the New ‘Should’

by Marie Snyder I started reading about burnout when I walked away from teaching earlier than expected. Suddenly, I couldn’t bring myself to open that door after over thirty years of bounding to work. A series of events wiped away any sense of agency, fairness, or shared values. Their wellness lunch-and-learns didn’t help me, and…

Embracing Fallibility

by Marie Snyder  Many of us live  in a punitive, carceral type of society that can make it difficult to have compassion for ourselves or others. It’s an era of the glorification of the individual over the group, leading to perfectionism and narcissism and so, so much loneliness. We can’t connect when we’re working with…

We Smashed Up the World: On Noam Chomsky

by Marie Snyder Noam Chomsky was rumoured to have left us almost a month ago, but he always told us not to trust the media!  It appears he’s still alive at time of writing, and recovering at home from a stroke. Both The New Statesman and Jacoben published obituaries. Yanis Varoufakis claims his article about…

A Future Self

by Marie Snyder Over thirty years ago I was in an on-again-off-again relationship that I just couldn’t shake. After months of different types of therapies, I lucked into a therapist who walked me through a version of the Gestalt exercise of talking to a chair,  which ended my longing for this guy on a dime. …

On Identity: Erikson, Freud, and Sartre

by Marie Snyder I recently listened to a podcast of Dr. Louis Cozolino, a neuroscientist and psychoanalyst, discussing what he would teach if he were training psychotherapists. The first year would be phenomenology:  the power of Carl Rogers’ perspective to train how to develop an alliance through reflective listening while keeping countertransference out of the…

Yalom’s Gift

by Marie Snyder I recently binge-watched all of Group, a show inspired by the Irvin Yalom novel, The Schopenhauer Cure. So I revisited Yalom’s non-fiction to see how closely the series aligns to his actual practices. The Gift of Therapy is a fascinating read from 2017 in which Yalom dives openly into his existential psychotherapy…

A Fruitful Exploration of the Core

by Marie Snyder Maybe there are seeds of potential deep within ourselves, but maybe there’s nothing there but a collection of signals. Regardless the outcome, we need to dig in to see what we can find. In several classes I took last term, the idea of a core self that’s fluid came through discussions of…

Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence

by Marie Snyder Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More than IQ, was originally published in 1995 but more recently updated in a 25th anniversary edition in 2020. Well, he added a new introduction, but no study or concept in the book was updated despite huge changes in our lives since then and…