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Our basic philosophy
Ingrid has had very good experience with holistic philosophy: mind, spirit and body have to be trained and developed together. At the same time, this holistic philosophy has to be a diversified one since our mind, spirit and body do not live in isolation from the rest of the world. Since we live in a complex society we also have to train and develop our social competence to live in peace and harmony with our surroundings. By social competence we mean our ability to deal with our daily surroundings and with our interactions with other people, in private as well as in public. We have to understand society and its daily, practical demands.
A key word closely related to personal growth is the "level" of feeling good. If your pottery plants "feel good", then they are growing and blossoming. The same reactions can be observed among people. If we feel good, then we grow and blossom personally. Spirit, joy and a good mood are very visible "feeling good" indicators.
Different types of plants need different mixtures of growth factors, and so it is with people: we are all different, and we need tailored mixtures of individual growth factors. If we feel good, then we also get a lot of another key word -energy. Feeling good, growth and energy are closely related and dependant on each other. If life is good we blossom and get more and more energy. If life is not good, however, we lose more and more of this energy. Our personal "growth house" (our greenhouse) has many more dimensions than plant life since we also have emotional and spiritual dimensions to take care of in our lives. We feel good when we do something we are confident in. This feeling of doing something we have control of gives us a positive reward. We experience such situations in environments where we get good feedback and encouragement as well as when we get constructive criticism for improvement. Activities inside our personal comfort zone give us a feeling of well being. All behavior inside our comfort zone is safe and secure, and we have a high level of self confidence. However, our comfort zone can also be a restriction for us if we never try to stretch it. It should be an objective for all of us to stretch and enlarge our comfort zone in order to create that personal growth that we have already mentioned. In our daily lives we know that a personal community and a positive environment are effective catalysts for personal growth. It is always a good idea to have close friends to share and cooperate with us in our daily challenges. Whatever we do in life, we always make reference to "standards" to see how successful we are. When Ingrid was a track and field runner, she always had records on different levels to compare with when she wanted to evaluate her performance. We live in a very complex and competitive information age with very many players trying to make reference to what is seen today as trendy, fashionable, cool and successful (tomorrow there will be something new). Very many of these references are shown as role models in advertising and commercials and, unfortunately, much of this has a very negative effect on us. The main objective of this advertising is increased consumption and profit maximization, and not necessarily our well being. In our basic philosophy we stress the importance of having the right knowledge. We know that knowledge means power, and it is important that, at least, you have the power over your own life and your own situation. It is one of our main objectives to offer you constructive and practical knowledge in the following articles and chapters. This knowledge will give you a tool to critically filter all the media influence we are bombarded with daily. (the average American receives an average of 3,500 commercial messages daily) Most of these meaningless statements and messages of how to find ultimate happiness should be immediately thrown away as garbage. Advertising always tries to use emotions and feelings in presenting its message, and it consciously uses guilt as a tool to clearly tell us what we should buy. In our personal growth world, however, we will try to retain our own useful and constructive knowledge. If we are successful in our goal, then we will have created a consciousness and a motivation for as many as possible of you; hopefully without creating bad feelings and guilt. It is then our hope that this consciousness will create a focus on values; values that really are meaningful and important for us and for the whole society. So for all of us, whether you focus on personal development, health, exercise or elite sport, we all need a basic philosophy as the bottom line of our activity. Some key ideas:
Thank you to Alan Traister, he has helped us with the English language in this chapter! |
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At
the foundation of our work we have a basic philosophy: Our advice is that, independent
of your activity level, you should have thoughts and reflections about what you
are doing. All activities that are anchored in a philosophy and positive values
will then have much more meaning and worth for you. 
A
major goal for most people is to achieve personal growth throughout life. By
personal growth we mean that we constantly experience a maturing process of self confidence, self image, knowledge, and physical and mental well being
in order to feel safe and confident in most situations while knowing that we take
good care of our selves and our surroundings.
Therefore,
we can say we are all responsible for our own greenhouse, (our "growth
house"), for our own lives. The growth factors in a real greenhouse are climate,
temperature, humidity, light, soil quality and amount and quality of the
fertilizer.