My son asked me this morning “What comes to your mind when you hear the word addiction?”
Well… disconnection, I said, and my heart sunk a bit deeper.
We have been talking A LOT about gaming and screen time in the last year. Like a lot! It has taken us so much energy to even find the rational non-anger driven or fuming state to sit together and dissect what is happening in our life, and how gaming has become such a hotspot in our family.
I paused this morning. Something felt different.
“So glad you asked” I said. “Let’s watch Johhan Hari’s Ted talk about it. You know daddy and I got to meet him and we even spoke about research with him”
He perked up.
It has been increasingly challenging to engage him and pull him in so that he can actually hear us. It’s been so hard to try as see myself not as a preacher, a lecturer…
As Clarissa Pinkola Estès wisely advised us “there comes the time when we as parents have got to stop lecturing ans start encouraging”. This has kept my hope for connection alive. Especially during those moments when I felt like gosh am I losing my child to gaming?!
Hari makes such a well rounded compelling case about addiction and how it’s a response to disconnection.
Lots to learn. Lots of work to do to reconnect. And to always bring him back to our world. Which is worth it.
His comment after we watched this: “I am not an addict. I have my rat park!”
With love
Aleks
Published by aleksandrastaneva
Aleksandra
She, who remembers.
I work at the threshold, where psyche speaks in symbols, and the soul remembers. Rooted in Jungian depth psychology and Internal Family Systems, my work invites women and seekers into the quiet, often forgotten places within: the underworlds of grief, the wild terrain of desire, the sacred chambers of the inner child, inner mother, the Shadowlands, and Self.
With a background in women’s heath research, in ritual, and in lived experience spaces, I do not offer diagnosis or treatment, I offer devotion to the unfolding Self. On the threshold of becoming- where we always are.
Through dreams, parts work, myth, and the body, I walk beside those ready to meet themselves fully, fiercely, and tenderly.
This is not fast work. It is sacred work.
It is not about fixing, it is about remembering.
I do not promise certainty.
I promise presence, and a deep trust in the wisdom already within you.
My work is rooted in the wild: in the seasons and the body, in the wisdom of the land, and in the deep ecology of the soul. I honour the personal as political, and the psychological as inseparable from the cultural. Feminism, ecopsychology, and embodied awareness are not add-ons here, they are the soil this work grows from.
I offer one-on-one soulwork sessions, women’s circles, and immersive psychoeducational experiences that weave together depth psychology, parts work, and embodiment. Some of this work unfolds indoors, some in wild places—always with reverence for the wisdom of nature, the nervous system, and the feminine psyche.
Welcome to the HORÓ nest.
I think you might just be ready to re-member your Self.
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