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The Ripples Pondcast

A Resilience Refresh

Season 6, Ep. 80

Enjoy this replay of our March 2025 Monthly Zoom with the Team Ripples Patreon Community (https://www.patreon.com/RipplesGuy for more info) We followed our usual format:

pebble (a resource that I've found useful in my work or life)

boulder (and activity I'm using personally or professionally)

ponder (a collection of information and ideas I've been pondering)


The notes and links from the session are pasted below.

You can also watch the video replay here: https://youtu.be/w9q6O6_HW1Y


WARM UP

Just for Now, by Danna Folds


PEBBLE

My Unsung Hero Podcast (via NPR’s Hidden Brain)

Nice News

$100k financial assistance for Olympic & Special Olympic athletes

Owls in Towels


BOULDER

Don’t like to exercise? Try this simple, science-backed trick:

“Fartleks” — meaning “speed play” in Swedish — are an effective way to add intensity to activities, which a growing body of science indicates can make your workouts more beneficial.  Fartleks are an informal version of interval training. To start fartlek training, head outside, warm up for a few minutes at whatever activity you most enjoy — whether it’s walking, running, biking, unicycling or snowshoeing — and then pick a landmark a short distance ahead. It could be a tree, a colorful mailbox or an unusual rock formation. Pick up your pace until you reach it. Then, drop back to your original pace, let your heart rate and breathing slow, and look for another landmark. Vary the distance between these goals, and aim for perhaps 30 minutes of fartleks once a week to start.


PONDER


"Everything is horrific and along side it is hope.

Everything is dark and along side it there is light.

The question becomes, “How do we cultivate a practice of noticing so that we can also speak into existence the things that are going right?”

When we have algorithms that are so tuned towards catastrophe, brains in fact that are so alarmous, such drama queens…

that we forget the practice of noticing beauty.

To rewire my brain and my heart is to speak aloud the things that I find beautiful.

And that gives me hope. There’s such a smorgasbord of beauty around us, and we often feel guilty in naming it, as if that detracts or cancels out the severity of what we’re facing. I don’t think it does. What the universe is always asking us to do is to become bilingual."

~Alok Vaid-Menon, shared by Josh in New Hampshire

lightly edited from these informal remarks


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