In Bloom: Growing slowly, gently and steadily
We work towards our goals with compassion, gentleness, and boundaries
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Hello to our wonderful community,
Welcome to the Bloom newsletter. This is Beatriz saying ‘hi’ to all of you from tropical Colombia. It is now March, the beginning of Spring in the northern hemisphere, and a month with holidays and carnivals in some countries like mine. I’m wishing you a month of awe for nature and festivities.
In this newsletter, we’ll update you about what the Chayn community has been up to during this month. Then we’ll ground ourselves with a pain management exercise before going to our deep-dive on the myth of productivity. You are receiving this email because you subscribed to the Bloom newsletter.
But before we get into all that, we have some special announcements to make!
Firstly, we need your help to win an award. Bloom has already had a spectacular start to the year, winning a CogX award in the Good Health and Wellbeing category, and an inaugural Anthem Award for Responsible Technology Innovation in their Product, Innovation, or Service (Not-For-Profit) category.
Now, we’re nominated for a 2022 award from the World Summit on the Information Society, and it’s only your votes that will help us win. If you appreciate the work we’ve been doing with Bloom, create an account here to vote for Bloom in Category AL C3 (Access to Information and Knowledge).
Bloom is also expanding our team, and have some really exciting roles. Read more below.
Survivor Service Manager - We’re looking for a passionate, ambitious Service Manager with plenty of operational experience to co-lead Bloom.
Survivor Service Facilitator - Calling all multilingual activists, psychologists, and mental health professionals! We need someone to facilitate our Bloom courses, record videos, write content, and work our chat service.
Trauma-informed therapist - Are you a therapist based in the USA or Canada? We need trauma-informed therapists to provide individual support to survivors of gender-based violence from around the world. (We are also running a drive for therapists not based in the USA or Canada; details here)
Video presenter [Hindi & English] - To support the development of Bloom into Hindi, we need camera-confident professionals passionate about mental health and trauma-informed care to record and edit Bloom videos in Hindi for us.
Ground: Settling into our bodies and the present
Let’s create awareness of our environment. You can do this exercise wherever you are and in any position you’d like, seating or laying down.
You might want to start by closing your eyes, or just keep them open with a soft focus.
Then notice the sensations of your body in contact with the seat, if you’re seated, or the weight of your body in contact with the surface where you're laying.
Start to notice the space around you, becoming more aware of the sounds. Some of the sounds might be familiar, if you’re in a familiar place. Or they can be totally different sounds to the ones you hear every day. Just allow all these different sounds to come and go.
Now start noticing your breath, feeling the movement of your body as you fill your lungs with air and then letting it go. Feel your lungs expanding and then releasing the air. Do this 5 times.
Finally bring your attention back to the environment around you and gently open your eyes.
Root: Connecting with the Chayn community
We’ve been very busy getting our Bloom courses ready for the launch in April! You can now be notified about sign up and launch dates, please head to our website, and/or sign up with your email address here.
During International Women’s Day we showed our support to our allies from around the world. And we were very eager to retweet from the Gender Pay Gap Bot - @PayGapApp that revealed the pay gap of companies that tweeted about IWD.
We were also active during Mozfest 2022 in early March, running two interactive sessions:
Mapping the feminist web - When it comes to fighting gender-based violence, the patriarchal web blocks women from breaking out of oppressive systems. Patriarchy manifests itself online with many women still not having equal & affordable access to the internet. Women, non-binary, and people of colour still largely remain underrepresented on the web as makers but are enthusiastic consumers. In this session facilitated by Hera, Zoë, Nooreen and Beatriz, we started creating an open, collaborative map, where we linked together ideas and spotted gaps in our feminist web ecosystem.
Orbits: survivor-centric, trauma-informed and intersectional interventions to tech abuse - Orbits is a field guide to intersectional, survivor-centric and trauma-informed interventions to technology-facilitated gender-based violence. In 2020 we ran a workshop to generate ideas for the guide and in this session, Hera shared the final guide and led a discussion on how we can implement its suggestions to end tech-facilitated gender-based violence.
Branch: Exploring together
It’s just three months into 2022, and yet some of us might feel that we’ve been working for a whole year. Maybe we already feel like we need a break, and that’s totally fine. But sometimes, ‘productivity culture’ gets the best of us and we start feeling a bit of guilt for needing a break after only 3 months.
In previous newsletters we have explored the importance of rest .Today, I would like to explore other ways in which our lives can be negatively impacted by productivity culture, which is the idea that our worth as human beings is determined by our ability to sacrifice our lives for our jobs.
I love my job and it fills me with joy, but because I have Lupus, I feel tired most of the time. Therefore, I tend to take breaks and postpone some tasks when I’m not feeling well; I have my energy limits. Postponing tasks can be anxiety-inducing for some people. We might start feeling we’re lagging behind in our jobs, our brains might start focusing on the negative: ‘Oh, I should have done this’, or ‘I could have done that’, or ‘why did I not do this?’ Well, you were resting, which is a productive thing to do, because that’s the way that our bodies recover the energy that we need to live.
This toxic, capitalist work culture, has taught us to criticise ourselves for not doing the things we decided we must, should, or ought to do, and that if we don’t, we are less successful or less worthy. We might also internalise negative feelings such as shame, as if something is wrong with us, for not being able to keep functioning in spite of our illness. I’ve had many close ones telling me: ‘I know other people who have what you have, and they are fine and working’. Likewise, we might feel shame because other people have it harder than us - they cannot afford taking a break because they have to pay their bills, or have families to support; we’ve had it so easy. At the same time, it might also be that our sense of independence comes from being able to provide for ourselves. And that finding a job is one of the biggest goals we’ve had in a while. So what to do with all these mixed feelings?
Another aspect of my career that used to fill me with self-criticism was my career gaps. Have you ever been to a job interview where you’re feeling everything is going smoothly until that dreaded question about those 6 months you took off for whatever reason, that don’t appear in your otherwise perfect job timeline? I have. Because of my lupus, I have not one but several gaps in my CV. I don’t think we owe our interviewers an explanation of our health’s ups and downs in every single job interview we attend; it can be exhausting. I’ve felt like lying to my interviewers - telling them I’ve spent 2 years as a volunteer saving wildlife in Costa Rica, because that sounds cooler than saying that I was sick and didn’t feel like working.
Another group that I’ve noticed that is affected greatly by career gaps are mothers. Going back to the job market after spending some years taking care of their children can be tough for some people. There is a lot of stigma around this. It’s a double-standard - society expects mothers to work as if they didn’t have children, and have children as if they didn’t have jobs.
It reminds me of the premise of a show I really enjoyed called Younger, in which a 40-something woman has to pretend to be a millennial in order to get a job after spending 18 years being a full-time mom. She was in her right to spend all her time caring for her child. And when she wanted to rejoin the job market, even though she is a smart, experienced woman, she was being denied opportunities due to her age and her career gap.
This is why I was so happy to see Linkedin’s new feature for career gaps. It now gives us 13 options for career breaks. You can read more about this in Linkedin’s story ‘Let’s normalize career breaks’. It makes me happy to see that at least this is being normalised.
I cannot say that I have figured out my work-life balance, but I can say that I’m working on it. I am happy and lucky to be working in an organisation that has flexible hours (that give me time to rest) and understands my limits. All I have is compassion for my body, listening to it when it needs to slow down, and not beating myself up with guilt and shame.
And the static workplace, with fixed hours, is not the only option anymore. During COVID-19, many people took gaps or started working remotely and would now prefer to keep the benefits of their flexible lives. More companies should give opportunities to people who don’t have perfect timelines in their CVs. They’re missing out on the richness that a more diverse group of employees can bring.
I hope you have a rewarding rest of the month and keep following your goals and dreams whilst being gentle with your bodies and yourselves.
For anything urgent, you can always reach us at team@chayn.co. We’ll see you very soon.
With love,
Beatriz and the Bloom team