Posted: June 9th, 2009
What’s Happening at Dasi-Ziyad Family Institute?
- Order a copy of The Booklet of 8s in our Lulu.com store. This concise guide to spiritual living is full of nuggets and seeds to prompt your personal growth. It offers simple yet powerful ways to access and develop your strengths.
- We are at the halfway mark (5th class) of presenting our S.E.L.F. (Singles Evaluating Life and Family) Healthy Relationship Course. This is a comprehensive, interactive course that delves into many aspects of the S.E.L.F from past to present. Feedback of our participants, indicates that this course is timely, practical, fun and much needed! We will be presenting the S.E.L.F. course again in the fall. Registration will open in July. Get ready for an experience that will enliven, elevate and empower you as you invest in the ten classes of DZFI’s S.E.LF course.
- Co-Directors travel to North Carolina for family conference at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, June 16-18, 2009.
June ‘09 DZFI Monthly Newsletter: Family is a way of feeling
Family is a way of feeling; a myriad of emotions are evoked by the activities, sacrifices and memories that occur in a family: love, joy, sadness, hope, pride and more. Family is a way of loving; we love our children who love their children; we love our parents and cousins and aunts and uncles and grandparents and grandchildren. Most of the time, this love causes us to share, to give, to believe, to work for, and to model good behavior. When things go wrong family can evoke fear, sadness and hurt.
Family is this very important thing that binds people together in a network of relationships that span generations and over time and space. Is it, as the dictionary tells us — just a group of people living together and functioning as a single household, or, a group of people who are closely related by birth, marriage, or adoption? Or does your family fit this definition: a group whose members are related in origin, characteristics or occupation? Whatever the family you identify with, at Dasi-Ziyad Family Institute we provide tools and techniques for healthy family development and skills for successful, productive relationships. Remember, families are the springboards from which we all dive into life. Healthy families are the barometers for healthy communities.
Today there is an urgent necessity to support and create marriages and families that are wholesome. Without such urgency, we will continue to see juvenile delinquency, unwed teen mothers, truancy and mental illness proliferate in society at higher and higher rates.
There are things we can do. We can teach young people healthy relationship skills. We can insist that those who marry first get premarital relationship skill-building or counseling. We can support marriages by setting good examples, offering good advice and providing whatever other support is required. We can unashamedly declare that good marriages are important and necessary — and that they are crucial to raising healthy children. And while there are many valiant single parents whom we applaud and honor, a strong, healthy marriage is best for children, with both parents — mother and father cooperating together.
For those already married, we can encourage them to go to marriage retreats, workshops and other activities to enhance and enrich their relationships. There are skills such as communication, conflict resolution, goal setting and values clarification, and financial management, that can be learned and commitments that can be made that will increase the number of healthy families. We can discourage divorce. Because while divorce does not guarantee happiness or improved circumstances, it almost always leaves abandoned, neglected or confused children and women struggling to maintain families.
Here is what La Grande Mason, a psychoanalyst and psychotherapist, says in a recent LA Watts Times article, “children raised in two-parent families are less likely to get involved with gangs or drugs and are more likely to go to college and have successful marriages themselves. His wife, Sonja, a school Administrator, adds that “life expectancy is longer for married people and financial situations are better. She saw firsthand how divorce damages children. “We¹ve seen some students that were really well behaved and self-motivated,” she said. “All of a sudden mom and dad split up, and they kind of get lost in the shuffle.” Mrs. Mason said she¹s “not advocating for parents to stay together only because of their children. It¹s important, however, for parents to try to save their marriages by learning how to effectively communicate and remembering what attracted them to their mates in the first place.”
At Dasi-Ziyad Family Institute, we want to push the idea that healthy families, two parent families, should be one of the greatest priorities of our time. As an ancient proverb tells us: “the ruins of a nation begins in the homes of its people.” Similarly, the well being of a society begins in its families. Together, we can work to make such well-being a reality.
