All posts tagged: Healing

Philip Reed-Butler, Black AI and the future of healing

Philip Reed-Butler, Black AI and the future of healing

Published by Sam Flores

(RNS) — What if AI’s deepest promise is not better answers, but better questions — the kind that help us become whole? For the last few weeks, we’ve been talking about artificial intelligence. We’ve talked Vatican positioning, Silicon Valley philosophers, Catholic ethics, corporate power, doomsday language, all circling the question of who gets to shape the future these machines are confining us in. But most of those conversations begin from the same assumption: AI is a tool built somewhere else, by someone else, to give us answers. Productivity. Efficiency. Surveillance. Profit.  Today’s conversation starts somewhere else. Philip Reed-Butler is a scholar, theologian and technologist at Iliff School of Theology, where he directs the AI Institute and teaches Theology and Black Posthuman Artificial Intelligence Systems. He is also the founder of the Seekr Project, a distinctly Black conversational AI project designed around introspection, healing and mental-health capacities. Source link

Radical Healing: From the Clinic to the Classroom

Radical Healing: From the Clinic to the Classroom

Published by Jenni Sidey

Post by Janet Gu, Saleha Mian, Soe Young Lee, and Michael A. Medina (Boston University). For youth of color, psychological well-being is often a community effort. Whether they live in an ethnic enclave or attend a racially diverse school, a young person’s emotional health may depend largely on their engagement with the communities around them. Yet supporting this process may require educators to deviate from traditional teaching methods that focus primarily on avoiding discrimination or reducing harm. While necessary, these approaches rarely envision schools as sites of empowerment, agency, and joy. A potentially more positive alternative for educators may already exist in the counseling practice of radical healing. What Is Radical Healing? The radical healing framework defines psychological well-being and community advocacy as complementary (French et al., 2020). Initially applied in counseling psychology, this practice encourages clinical practitioners to guide youth in drawing strength, support, and well-being from their social connections during times of cultural trauma. For youth of color, this trauma can take many forms: experiences of discrimination, exposure to negative stereotypes, erasure or …

Engineered cells deliver healing signals directly into wounds

Engineered cells deliver healing signals directly into wounds

Published by Jenni Sidey

A stubborn wound can change nearly every part of daily life. Simple movements become painful. Routine tasks take longer. The risk of infection never feels far away. For millions of people living with chronic wounds, healing can stall for months or even years, despite repeated treatments and frequent medical visits. Now, researchers at Rice University have developed a new approach that aims to help wounds heal by restoring the body’s own repair signals. Their work describes a removable “cytokine factory” patch that continuously produces therapeutic proteins directly inside a wound. In animal studies, the technology accelerated healing and activated key biological pathways involved in tissue repair. The innovation tackles one of the biggest challenges in wound medicine. While scientists have long known that cytokines play a crucial role in healing, delivering these signaling proteins effectively has proven difficult. They break down quickly, often fail to remain at the injury site and can cause unwanted side effects when delivered throughout the body. The new patch seeks to solve those problems by turning the wound itself into …

Hypnosis, Healing, and Consciousness | Psychology Today

Hypnosis, Healing, and Consciousness | Psychology Today

Published by Jenni Sidey

In India during the 1840s, a Scottish doctor named James Esdaile was frequently visited by men suffering from enormous tumours in the scrotum, caused by mosquito bites. The operation to remove the tumours was so painful that men would often postpone it for years. Esdaile had learned about hypnotism (or mesmerism, as it was usually referred to then) and decided to try the technique as a way of relaxing patients in collaboration with local Hindu and Muslim mesmerisers. To his surprise, he found that not only did the patients feel relaxed, but they also felt no pain during operations. Esdaile also noted that patients didn’t seem to display physiological signs of pain, such as changes to pulse rate and pupil size. Since then, evidence has accumulated showing that hypnosis can have an analgesic effect. A 2020 meta-analysis of 45 trials of the use of hypnosis for clinical pain found that 73 percent of hypnotised people experienced less pain than control groups (who didn’t have any pain interventions). Research over the past 20 years at the …

The Healing Power of Poetry

The Healing Power of Poetry

Published by Jenni Sidey

Poetry therapy is often used nowadays in mental health settings for healing and growth. Patients read and write poetry to find new ways of being mindful or relaxed. Poetry can point to the work they can do on themselves. Poetry can open them to new ways of coping. A poem can lead safely into realms of the unconscious that might be frightening ordinarily. Poems open the imagination to see alternatives to the status quo or to chronic suffering. In fact, every poem takes us into a parallel universe. The realization that poetry has healing power is ancient in the human psyche. Shamans intoned poems as prayers that could bring help to the tribe or to individuals. In Egypt, as early as the fourth millennium B.C., poetry was inscribed on papyrus, dissolved in a solution, and ingested by patients so that their illness might subside. We recall in the Hebrew Bible that David soothed the depression of King Saul with his singing of poems in the form of psalms. A Roman physician, Soranus, in the first …

From Horror to Healing: The Neuroscience of Liminal Spaces

From Horror to Healing: The Neuroscience of Liminal Spaces

Published by Jenni Sidey

With growing anticipation for the A24 film debut of Backrooms, liminal spaces have become a viral symbol of psychological horror. These spaces unsettle us because they highlight our brain’s sensitivity to processing ambiguity and transition. Images of the film’s main characters, the backrooms themselves, evoke similarly disconcerting places we’ve all experienced: a narrow, dim hotel hallway, a long underground hospital corridor, or an empty airport terminal. By examining the neuroscience behind these spaces, we can better understand their impact and what they reveal about navigating transitions. Trapped in Liminality Recently, it has become more cost-effective to abandon malls, big-box buildings, and entire neighborhoods and construct new ones, rather than reuse or repurpose existing structures. This practice has resulted in a new typology of liminal spaces. These are liminal in time: spaces sitting empty, awaiting reuse or demolition, much like ghosts lingering before crossing over. These are not merely liminal spaces, but rather spaces trapped in liminality. This architecture of ambiguity, across both space and time, may resonate with many youth experiences about our world, as …

Miraculous Cancer Healing in Northern Ireland – OpentheWord.org

Miraculous Cancer Healing in Northern Ireland – OpentheWord.org

Published by Sam Flores

Newcastle, County Down, Northern Ireland Credit: Eric Jones, Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 2.0 162 | Miraculous Cancer Healing in Northern Ireland FOLLOW OUR PODCAST ON (search opentheword): PODCAST NOTES: An article in the Belfast Telegraph discussed the miraculous healing of Sharyn Mackay who lived in Newcastle County Down in Northern Ireland along with her husband who pastored several Methodist churches. In 2004, doctors diagnosed Sharyn with a cancerous tumour on her kidney. After taking a biopsy, the staff at Craigavon Area Hospital sent a sample to Harvard University because her form of cancer was very rare. Sharyn told the Telegraph: “They said it was spindle cell sarcoma which is normally bone cancer. I was one of only 10 known cases where it had become a kidney tumour.” Though people in the four churches her husband pastored were praying for her, in a YouTube interview with Stuart Chalmers, Sharyn said her trust was in the doctors treating her. However, that changed when further tests showed the cancer had spread to her lungs. The doctors stopped any further treatment …

Radiohead’s Ed O’Brien on depression, healing and the band’s 2027 world tour – arts24

Radiohead’s Ed O’Brien on depression, healing and the band’s 2027 world tour – arts24

Published by Sam Flores

To display this content from YouTube, you must enable advertisement tracking and audience measurement. Accept Manage my choices One of your browser extensions seems to be blocking the video player from loading. To watch this content, you may need to disable it on this site. Try again arts24 © FRANCE 24 Issued on: 07/05/2026 – 16:46Modified: 07/05/2026 – 16:47 11:40 min From the show Reading time 1 min After nearly four decades at the heart of Radiohead, Ed O’Brien is entering a new creative era. In a candid interview with arts24’s Eve Jackson, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame guitarist discusses depression, healing in the Welsh countryside, the making of his deeply personal new solo album “Blue Morpho” and why Radiohead’s carefully planned 2027 global tour marks a new beginning for the band. By: Source link

Why You Can’t Rush Healing

Why You Can’t Rush Healing

Published by Jenni Sidey

I still remember the computer lab in undergrad, rows of bulky monitors, the hum of machines, and the quiet intensity that filled the room whenever we opened Adobe Illustrator. It was the late ’90s and early 2000s. We were using clunky mice and overly sensitive trackpads, trying to master Bézier curves with hands that cramped from the effort. What stands out most is not the software itself, but the people. Emerging adults, my peers, and even a few older adults would become visibly overwhelmed. I watched frustration turn into tears as they struggled to make a simple curve behave the way they intended. Illustrator demanded precision, patience, and a kind of embodied coordination that many of us had not yet developed. It was not just about learning a program. It was about tolerating the discomfort of not being good at something right away. At the time, I did not recognize this as anything more than a difficult class. I did not imagine myself becoming a therapist. But looking back, those moments, watching people hit their …

7 Gentle Phrases People With Difficult Childhoods Say To Themselves Every Day To Start Healing

7 Gentle Phrases People With Difficult Childhoods Say To Themselves Every Day To Start Healing

Published by Jenni Sidey

It’s easy to assume that your inner child is just a cute concept, some vague idea about the younger version of yourself. Yet understanding our inner child helps us face the wounds that we may have received while growing up.  Helping our inner child heal means offering ourselves the empathy we may not have gotten when we were actual children. That work is more significant than it might sound. Psychotherapist Joan E. Childs explains about inner child healing, “Every child must feel they matter, otherwise they grow up believing they have no worth.” Doing this work is how we start to rewrite that story. Helping our inner child heal means offering ourselves the empathy we may not have gotten when we were actual children. The mental health Instagram account, I Go to Therapy, shared various ways to approach your inner child and work to overcome the difficulties you experienced in childhood by repeating a few gentle phrases to yourself to start the process of healing. Here are 7 phrases people with difficult childhoods say to themselves every day …