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Global Multimedia and Multidisciplinary Cultural Organization Empowering and Inspiring Minds to Promote Social Change and Raise Consciousness

LOVING YOURSELF AGAIN In 2016 I was diagnosed wit

LOVING YOURSELF AGAIN

In 2016 I was diagnosed with a rare facial bone cancer in my upper right jaw, as an 18 year old girl who was an aspiring actress and on her way to University, this was devastating and resulted in me becoming very depressed.

How could a small abscess- like bump turn into something so big and monstrous that would leave me feeling constant pain, people staring at me, not approaching me and not being able to smile anymore? It was a horrible, and dark time. .

Thankfully, after six rounds of chemotherapy (and many infections later) the tumour went down in my face and I WAS able to smile and talk again… but not so fortunate when I had the operation to take out the tumour which left me with loads of challenges and harsh life lessons that I’m still trying to overcome today. .

My life had been a constant blur of appointments, treatments and operation meetings since I was 18 years old, and I had started to hate how I looked, hate who I was. I was in a constant limbo of having an identity crisis – because I didn’t recognise who I was in the mirror anymore. .

It has taken me two years to love myself again, and it lights me up with happiness to see how much more of a positive person I have become. I love my back scar that helped close the wound the tumour left behind. I love my neck scar that helped me breath after the operation, and helped to create my new cheek. And, finally – I love my cheek because it’s a reminder that I’ve been given another chance at life!
Yes, I do still get discouraged when people stare at me in public, or don’t approach me because I look different – but by talking about my story online, doing interviews, magazines, and even speeches on stage – I’ve realised just how many people I have inspired whilst talking about my story. .

Self care, affirmations, meditation, telling myself I am beautiful every day and taking God for being alive – THAT is what gets me up every morning, and it really makes a difference. (That, and also listening to loooaads of Lizzo and Miley Cyrus!) - @faceinosteosarcomax @nileyfan1998 📸 @sophiemayanne

THE WOMAN WHO SPEAKS THE TRUTH Lizzo has become,

THE WOMAN WHO SPEAKS THE TRUTH

Lizzo has become, at 31, a new kind of superstar: a plus-size black singer and rapper dominating the largely white and skinny pop space, all while being relentlessly uplifting and openly sexual on her own terms. Her story is just as remarkable and radical as her stardom: years of self-doubt and struggle, followed by an unorthodox but swift ascent jump-started by “Truth Hurts,” a two-year-old song that wasn’t even on her new album. .

Last April, she released Cuz I Love You, her major-label debut. She started writing the album a year earlier, around the time her first real romance was ending; the mysterious Gemini she’d been seeing would inspire practically every song. .

Faced with an increasingly demanding schedule and feeling disconnected from friends and loved ones, she had an emotional breakdown while on tour in the spring of 2018, a move that led her to start therapy. “That was really scary,” she told me just prior to the album’s release. “But being vulnerable with someone I didn’t know, then learning how to be vulnerable with people that I do know, gave me the courage to be vulnerable as a vocalist.” .

Her late teens and early twenties were marred by low self-esteem worsened by a toxic lover’s desire for a thin girlfriend. “My Skin” reflects years of work she had done to unlearn the ways society had told her to hate herself. “I’ve come to terms with body dysmorphia and evolved,” she says. “The body-positive movement is doing the same thing. We’re growing together, and it’s growing pains, but I’m just glad that I’m attached to something so organic and alive.” - BRITTANY SPANOS 📸 @david_lachapelle 👩🏾 @lizzobeeating for @rollingstone

A NEW RENAISSANCE Let us chant for a new renaissa

A NEW RENAISSANCE

Let us chant for a new renaissance. A world full of light, knowledge and glory. A world where kindness and understanding prevail. You can be black, Indian, white, Korean or whatever you want to call yourself. No matter your race or age or status in society or skin colour. .

A world where you can kiss whoever you want without being labelled. You can make love with whoever you want provided they are a consenting adult without being judged or without any fear for your life. A world where you can dream of anything you want and then make it possible because others will root for you. .

A world where politicians won’t abuse you, lie every minute of the day and play with your life. You can be gay, non-binary, transgender or queer without being derided or ridiculed. A world where you simply won’t feel the need to explain yourself and just be. .

You can be tall or short. Large or small. Face full of scars or body full of wrinkles. It won’t matter. Because the delusional and disturbing false construct of beauty or gender of society will not function anymore. The only thing that will be significant are equality and fairness. The importance of being just and kind. .

People are slowly and finally seeing the truth. And they like it because it is real. Wake up with them. Join us. - LIBERATUM 📸 @charlinhus @joaomaciel 👦🏾 @retintofercar

THE V WORD MEN LAUGH ABOUT The heart is capable o

THE V WORD MEN LAUGH ABOUT

The heart is capable of sacrifice. So is the vagina. The heart is able to forgive and repair. It can change it's shape to let us in. It can expand to let us out. So can the vagina. It can ache for us and stretch for us, die for us and bleed and bleed us into this difficult, wondrous world. So can the vagina. I was there in the room. I remember. .

The clitoris is pure in purpose. It is the only organ in the body designed purely for pleasure.

I was worried about my own vagina. It needed a context of other vaginas-- a community, a culture of vaginas. There's so much darkness and secrecy surrounding them-- like the Bermunda Triangle.

It's a totally ridiculous, completely unsexy word. If you use it during sex, trying to be politically correct-- "Darling, could you stroke my vagina?"-- you kill the act right there. I'm worried about vaginas, what we call them and don't call them. - Eve Ensler .

Photo 📸 @ewphotos1 👩🏾 @alldei_nikki “Shock” from photo series Size Of a Grapefruit, which captures the emotional stages before, during and after the photographer Eva Woolridge’s emergency ovarian cyst surgery. She discusses the trauma experienced, and addresses the micro-aggressions and medical negligence black women face during and medical emergency.

THE DISCOVERY OF DAILY PLEASURES Every day we sla

THE DISCOVERY OF DAILY PLEASURES

Every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heartache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots which we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty. .

Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths. We all derive from the same source. There is no mystery about the origin of things. We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up, only to discover what is already there. - Henry Miller 📸 @lou__escobar 👩🏾 @madam_ntobe

LIVING GRACEFULLY AND TO THE FULLEST I am still e

LIVING GRACEFULLY AND TO THE FULLEST

I am still every age that I have been. Because I was once a child, I am always a child. Because I was once a searching adolescent, given to moods and ecstasies, these are still part of me, and always will be … Far too many people misunderstand what ‘putting away childish things’ means, and think that forgetting what it is like to think and feel and touch and smell and taste and see and hear like a three-year-old or a thirteen-year-old or a twenty-three-year-old means being grownup. .

When I’m with these people I, like the kids, feel that if this is what it means to be a grown-up, then I don’t ever want to be one. Instead of which, if I can retain a child’s awareness and joy, and *be* fifty-one, then I will really learn what it means to be grownup. - Madeleine L’Engle 📸 Pierre Gonnord

THE CYCLE OF LIFE It all comes back. Perhaps it i

THE CYCLE OF LIFE

It all comes back. Perhaps it is difficult to see the value in having one's self back in that kind of mood, but I do see it; I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. .

Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind's door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were. .

I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be; one of them, a seventeen-year-old, presents little threat, although it would be of some interest to me to know again what it feels like to sit on a river levee drinking vodka-and-orange-juice and listening to Les Paul and Mary Ford and their echoes sing "How High the Moon" on the car radio. (You see I still have the scenes, but I no longer perceive myself among those present, no longer could ever improvise the dialogue.) .

The other one, a twenty-three-year-old, bothers me more. She was always a good deal of trouble, and I suspect she will reappear when I least want to see her, skirts too long, shy to the point of aggravation, always the injured party, full of recriminations and little hurts and stories I do not want to hear again, at once saddening me and angering me with her vulnerability and ignorance, an apparition all the more insistent for being so long banished. .

It is a good idea, then, to keep in touch, and I suppose that keeping in touch is what notebooks are all about. And we are all on our own when it comes to keeping those lines open to ourselves: your notebook will never help me, nor mine you.
- Joan Didion 📸 @maximushka 👩🏾👩🏻 @mamasolaris @divinedierra

THE FLOWERING OF LOVE If you both agree that the

THE FLOWERING OF LOVE

If you both agree that the relationship will be your spiritual practice, so much the better. You can then express your thoughts and feelings to each other as soon as they occur, or as soon as a reaction comes up, so that you do not create a time gap in which an unexpressed or unacknowledged emotion or grievance can fester and grow.

Learn to give expression to what you feel without blaming. Learn to listen to your partner in an open, non-defensive way. Give your partner space for expressing himself or herself. Be present. Accusing, defending, attacking — all those patterns that are designed to strengthen or protect the ego or to get its needs met will then become redundant. Giving space to others — and to yourself — is vital. Love cannot flourish without it.

When you have removed the two factors that are destructive to relationships — when the pain-body has been transmuted and you are no longer identified with mind and mental positions — and if your partner has done the same, you will experience the bliss of the flowering of relationship. Instead of mirroring to each other your pain and your unconsciousness, instead of satisfying your mutual addictive ego needs, you will reflect back to each other the love that you feel deep within, the love that comes with the realization of your oneness with all that is. This is the love that has no opposite. - Eckhart Tolle 📸 @annebarlinckhoff 👩🏾👩🏻 @devyn_abdullah @nappyese

LOVING-KINDNESS MEDITATION . Please put the atten

LOVING-KINDNESS MEDITATION .

Please put the attention on the breath for just a moment to become centered. Take a look into your heart and see whether there is any worry, fear, grief, dislike, resentment, rejection, uneasiness, anxiety. If you find any of those, let them float away like the black clouds that they are… Then let warmth and friendship arise in your heart for yourself, realizing that you have to be your own best friend. .

Surround yourself with loving thoughts for yourself and a feeling of contentment within you… Now surround the person nearest to you in the room with loving thoughts and fill that person with peace and wish for that person’s happiness… Now surround everyone here with loving thoughts… Let the feeling of peacefulness extend to everyone here, and think of yourself as everyone’s good friend… Think of your parents, whether they are still alive or not. .

Surround them with love. Fill them with peace and gratitude for what they have done for you, be their good friend… Think of those people who are nearest and dearest to you. Embrace them with love, fill them with peace as a gift from you, without expecting them to return it to you… Think of your friends. Open up your heart to them, to show them your friendship, your concern, your love, giving it to them without expecting anything in return… Think of your neighbors who live near you, the people you meet at work, on the street, in the shops, make them all your friends; let them enter into your heart without any reservation. Show them love… .

Think of anyone for whom you have dislike or with whom you may have had an argument, who has made difficulties for you, whom you do not consider your friend. Think of that person with gratitude, as your teacher, teaching you about your own reactions. Let your heart go out to that person because he or she too has difficulties. Forgive and forget. Make him or her your friend…
- Ayya Khema 📸 @kevinoux 👩🏾 @munik_lemos1 🧖🏿‍♀️ @uli.__ 👗 @jeannegubert

THE POWER OF THE MIND Many of us are slaves to ou

THE POWER OF THE MIND

Many of us are slaves to our minds. Our own mind is our worst enemy. We try to focus, and our mind wanders off. We try to keep stress at bay, but anxiety keeps us awake at night. .

We try to be good to the people we love, but then we forget them and put ourselves first. And when we want to change our life, we dive into spiritual practice and expect quick results, only to lose focus after the honeymoon has worn off. .

We return to our state of bewilderment. We're left feeling helpless and discouraged. It seems we all agree that training the body through exercise, diet, and relaxation is a good idea, but why don't we think about training our minds?
- Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche 📸 @denisseaps

THE WHITE SAVIOR COMPLEX I imagine that you’re

THE WHITE SAVIOR COMPLEX

I imagine that you’re familiar with the white savior complex in many of its manifestations, whether as the overdone trope in Hollywood films like The Help and The Blind Side, or maybe you’ve seen it in a missionary friend, or perhaps you are a recovering white savior like me.

Here are some of the harmful consequences of the white savior complex:

1) It leads to approaches and methodologies rooted in patronizing charity rather than biblical justice.

2) It prevents mission, aid, and development work from being dialogical and participatory; the so-called experts swoop in with their answers and expertise and fail to include the voices of local leaders, organizations, and stakeholders.

3) It leads to paternalism: doing things to or for others rather than seeking to empower and build local capacity. It makes us into heroes rather than empowering others to become the heroes of their own stories.

4) It robs agency from the economically poor and contributes to a shame-based identity and sense of helplessness.

5) It leads to doing things in other contexts that we’d never even imagine doing in the U.S. or Europe. Imagine if twelve of us got on a plane and flew to Stockholm or Dublin and when we arrived, we found all the cutest little children — other people’s children — and we began picking them up and taking selfies and posting them on Facebook. Sounds strange, right?

6) It perpetuates poverty porn, the ubiquitous images of the poor seen in many fundraising campaigns, which objectify human beings for the sake of eliciting an emotional response in order to garner a donation. It labels them as powerless victims who can’t help themselves, implicitly naming God’s image bearers as inept, incapable objects who are passively awaiting rescue. - Ryan Kika 📸 Vanessa Beecroft. White Madonna with Twins (2006)

THE WEALTHIEST OWN TOO MUCH World's 26 richest pe

THE WEALTHIEST OWN TOO MUCH

World's 26 richest people own as much as poorest 50%, says Oxfam

The growing concentration of the world’s wealth has been highlighted by a report showing that the 26 richest billionaires own as many assets as the 3.8 billion people who make up the poorest half of the planet’s population.

In an annual wealth check released to mark the start of the World Economic Forum in Davos last year, the development charity Oxfam said 2018 had been a year in which the rich had grown richer and the poor poorer.

It said the widening gap was hindering the fight against poverty, adding that a wealth tax on the 1% would raise an estimated $418bn (£325bn) a year – enough to educate every child not in school and provide healthcare that would prevent 3 million deaths.

Oxfam said the wealth of more than 2,200 billionaires across the globe had increased by $900bn in 2018 – or $2.5bn a day. The 12% increase in the wealth of the very richest contrasted with a fall of 11% in the wealth of the poorest half of the world’s population.

As a result, the report concluded, the number of billionaires owning as much wealth as half the world’s population fell from 43 in 2017 to 26 in 2018. In 2016 the number was 61.

Among the findings of the report were:

In the 10 years since the financial crisis, the number of billionaires has nearly doubled.

Between 2017 and 2018 a new billionaire was created every two days. .

The world’s richest man, Jeff Bezos, the owner of Amazon, saw his fortune increase to $112bn. Just 1% of his fortune is equivalent to the whole health budget for Ethiopia, a country of 105 million people.

The poorest 10% of Britons are paying a higher effective tax rate than the richest 10% (49% compared with 34%) once taxes on consumption such as VAT are taken into account. - Larry Elliott, The Guardian 📸 Claudio Allia

WOMEN UNFORTUNATELY STILL DON’T HAVE A SEAT AT T

WOMEN UNFORTUNATELY STILL DON’T HAVE A SEAT AT THE TABLE

Women only have three-quarters of the employment rights of men worldwide.

In Middle East and North African women still have half the rights of men.

Much remains to be done to deliver equality according to a World Bank report.

In every region of the world, discriminatory laws still prevent women from fulfilling their potential, undermining their economic security by limiting their ability to work and pursue a career.

The World Bank’s Women, Business and the Law index reveals wide variations in women’s rights at work. Overall, it says women have only three-quarters of the employment rights that men enjoy.

The nations with a perfect score in the Index are Belgium, Denmark, France, Iceland, Latvia, Luxembourg, Sweden and, joining the list this year, Canada, which recently improved parental leave rights. In these countries, the index shows, women who work are on an equal legal standing with men, measured on indicators including access to jobs and protections on gender discrimination and sexual harassment in the workplace.

Although there have been improvements in many areas, with 40 nations enacting reforms to improve gender equality in the past three years, in the Middle East and North Africa, women workers still have just half the legal rights of their male colleagues.

But the index shows that countries most in need of improvement are making the fastest progress. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates head the list of most improved nations, having occupied the bottom two places in the global ranking in the 2019 edition. - Douglas Broom, World Economic Forum 📸 @carlota_guerrero

GLORIOUSNESS AND WRETCHEDNESS . Life is glorious,

GLORIOUSNESS AND WRETCHEDNESS .

Life is glorious, but life is also wretched. It is both. Appreciating the gloriousness inspires us, encourages us, cheers us up, gives us a bigger perspective, energizes us. We feel connected. .

But if that's all that's happening, we get arrogant and start to look down on others, and there is a sense of making ourselves a big deal and being really serious about it, wanting it to be like that forever. The gloriousness becomes tinged by craving and addiction. On the other hand, wretchedness--life's painful aspect--softens us up considerably. .

Knowing pain is a very important ingredient of being there for another person. When you are feeling a lot of grief, you can look right into somebody's eyes because you feel you haven't got anything to lose--you're just there. The wretchedness humbles us and softens us, but if we were only wretched, we would all just go down the tubes. .

We'd be so depressed, discouraged, and hopeless that we wouldn't have enough energy to eat an apple. Gloriousness and wretchedness need each other. One inspires us, the other softens us. They go together.
- Pema Chödrön 📸 @edfreemanphoto

THE SCARRED CHILDREN Forced recruitment of child

THE SCARRED CHILDREN

Forced recruitment of child soldiers is increasing in South Sudan despite a peace deal in 2018, the head of a United Nations investigating body said in December last year, adding that a return to full-blown conflict remained a possibility.

Some of the country’s thousands of child soldiers were released after the 2018 accord, but the chair of the Commission on Human Rights in South Sudan said that investigators have recently observed a reversal as both government and rebel groups seek to swell their numbers. “Ironically, the prospect of a peace deal has accelerated the forced recruitment of children, with various groups now seeking to boost their numbers before they move into the cantonment sites,” panel chair Yasmin Sooka, who visited the country in late August, told the U.N. Human Rights Council.

Sooka later told Reuters in Geneva: “What our investigators have picked up is that in many of the hotspots you are actually seeing an increase in child soldiers.” Some of them were girls providing sexual and labor services to the fighters, she added.

South Sudan split away from Sudan in 2011 after decades of war but plunged into its own conflict at the end of 2013. - Emma Farge, Reuters 📸 Film: Johnny Mad Dog

THE COURSE OF TRUE LOVE Let me tell you about lov

THE COURSE OF TRUE LOVE

Let me tell you about love, that silly word you believe is about whether you like somebody or whether somebody likes you or whether you can put up with somebody in order to get something or someplace you want or you believe it has to do with how your body responds to another body like robins or bison or maybe you believe love is how forces or nature or luck is benign to you in particular not maiming or killing you but if so doing it for your own good. Love is none of that. .

There is nothing in nature like it. Not in robins or bison or in the banging tails of your hunting dogs and not in blossoms or suckling foal. Love is divine only and difficult always. If you think it is easy you are a fool. If you think it is natural you are blind. It is a learned application without reason or motive except that it is God. You do not deserve love regardless of the suffering you have endured. .

You do not deserve love because somebody did you wrong. You do not deserve love just because you want it. You can only earn - by practice and careful contemplations - the right to express it and you have to learn how to accept it. Which is to say you have to earn God. You have to practice God. You have to think God-carefully. And if you are a good and diligent student you may secure the right to show love. .

Love is not a gift. It is a diploma. A diploma conferring certain privileges: the privilege of expressing love and the privilege of receiving it. How do you know you have graduated? You don't. - Toni Morrison 📸 @islandboiphotography 👩🏾👦🏾 @_stevensonjean @iamtico

CONTEMPLATING THE DISTANCE . Don't go far off, no

CONTEMPLATING THE DISTANCE .

Don't go far off, not even for a day,
because I don't know how to say it - a day is long
and I will be waiting for you, as in
an empty station when the trains are
parked off somewhere else, asleep.

Don't leave me, even for an hour, because then
the little drops of anguish will all run together,
the smoke that roams looking for a home will drift
into me, choking my lost heart.

Oh, may your silhouette never dissolve
on the beach, may your eyelids never flutter
into the empty distance. Don't LEAVE me for
a second, my dearest, because in that moment you'll
have gone so far I'll wander mazily
over all the earth, asking, will you
come back? Will you leave me here, dying?
- Pablo Neruda 📸 @alexbstoddard

THE CAPACIOUS OCEAN Just as the purpose of eating

THE CAPACIOUS OCEAN

Just as the purpose of eating is to satisfy hunger, not greed, so the sex instinct is designed for the propagation of the species according to natural law, never for the kindling of insatiable longings. Destroy wrong desires now; otherwise they will follow you after the astral body is torn from its physical casing.
Even when the flesh is weak, the mind should be constantly resistant. .

If temptation assails you with cruel force, overcome it by impersonal analysis and indomitable will. Every natural passion can be mastered. Conserve your powers. Be like the capacious ocean, absorbing within all the tributary rivers of the senses. .

Small yearnings are openings in the reservoir of your inner peace, permitting healing waters to be wasted in the desert soil of materialism. The forceful activating impulse of wrong desire is the greatest enemy to the happiness of man. Roam in the world as a lion of self-control; see that the frogs of weakness don’t kick you around. - Sri Sri Swami Sri Yukteswar Giri 📸 @pablobeglez

I RISE Pumping in my living room. Just like moon

I RISE

Pumping in my living room.

Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I’ll rise.

Did you want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling down like teardrops,
Weakened by my soulful cries?

Does my haughtiness offend you?
Don’t you take it awful hard
‘Cause I laugh like I’ve got gold mines
Diggin’ in my own backyard.

You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I’ll rise.

Does my sexiness upset you?
Does it come as a surprise
That I dance like I’ve got diamonds
At the meeting of my thighs?
- Maya Angelou 📸 @neeksiebeeks

THE SOUL SEEKS PEACE Millions of people never ana

THE SOUL SEEKS PEACE

Millions of people never analyze themselves. Mentally they are mechanical products of the factory of their environment, preoccupied with breakfast, lunch, and dinner, working and sleeping, and going here and there to be entertained. .

They don’t know what or why they are seeking, nor why they never realize complete happiness and lasting satisfaction. By evading self-analysis, people go on being robots, conditioned by their environment. True self-analysis is the greatest art of progress.

If you criticize others judgmentally, rather than simply commenting on their behavior impartially, that shows that you have their faults to work on in yourself. .

By criticizing others, moreover, you increase those faults in yourself. What you condemn in others, you will have to experience, someday, yourself. That is the karmic law. In that way, people are taught compassion.
- Paramhansa Yogananda 📸 @islandboiphotography 👩🏾 @thegirlwithcaramelskin

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