Smells and Bells

In Sacred Pain and the Phenomenal Self by Ariel Glucklich many different reasons for intentionally inflicting pain are discussed. The one that stood out to me the most was pain as medicine.  When pain is medicine, it is the solution to a problem. Many neurodivergent individuals, especially those with autism, use pain as a way to self regulate. This is often called “pain stimming” and is common enough that many people see it as a stereotype of autism. For example, many people think all autistic people hit themselves. While this does happen, this is not how it always presents. As an autistic person I find pain stims very useful for self regulation because they are usually a lot more subtle than vocal stims, for example, and therefore can be utilized for self regulation in public more often. I personally have a little plastic turtle that has some spikes in it that I use to stim. I think there is a lot of misunderstanding about pain stimming that paints it as inherently dangerous self-...

  Pain and Suffering;  Why We Celebrate the Hurt and the Martyred One thing I find incredibly interesting about religion is the pain we so heavily associate with it. So many religious figures seem to have to have encountered some sort of pain to “deserve” their position as an “important” figure. I think one significant, particularly universal example is Christ, especially with Easter occurring so recently. For some reason pain appears to be a necessary, however, I don’t understand this. Why must one suffer to deserve something and would we feel these figures less deserving if they hadn’t suffered?  “A successful explanation of sacred pain needs to account for this phenomenon,  that is, the experiential contours of pain and how these contribute to the pervasiveness of voluntary pain in the religions of the world,” - Glucklich, 391 We celebrate and romanticize the pain that our figures experience and we look at how they experience pain for us. I guess for me it is a qu...

 Narcissus & His Lack of Touch By Ava Barry Last year I was offered the opportunity to study abroad in Athens Greece for a semester. And you know us study abroad kids will take any chance to tell talk about it, so here is me doing just that! During this experience, I was able to learn about stories I never would have known being a sociology major. Greek mythology rings true in our everyday lives, and we can heed many lessons from them if we listen close enough.  When learning the unit on touch, my mind was drawn back to those days sitting in the warm Athen's air listening to my professor tell us of the story of Narcissus. I will spare you the details if the story and give just the important points. Narcissus was a beautiful young man, yet throughout his life he was never allowed to look at himself, and therefore did not know his true reflection. One day he stumbled upon a puddle and was completely enthralled with the reflection in it. He fell madly in love. He was driven c...