Managing The Chaos Of A World Run Amuck

New Horizons Poster People discuss the #MeToo chaos in their personal lives.

There is so much upheaval going on in the world around us that the chaos generated out of it can't help but to also challenge the world we live in within ourselves. 

The atmosphere is so unsettled and charged, it gets to be way too much: pipe bomb threats, eleven murders on a Shabbat morning at a Jewish congregation in Pittsburgh over the weekend, combined with our daily fare of political bashing and turmoil, racial tensions and, of course, here at New Horizons, as well as many other places around the world, a preoccupation with #MeToo-related issues. 

For this reason alone, if no other, I was pleased with the radio show Steve, my co-host, and I did this past Thursday, highlighting how very personal turmoil can be. 

In our broadcast discussion I found brief comfort, as if sheltering from a thunderstorm, as Steve and I each took a step back from the disorderliness of a single day, to reflect on it in terms of how we, each, have been dealing with upheaval in our own lives.

In that show broadcast, titled Managing The Chaos Of Lives Run Amuck, now on podcast, which I have just now listened to for a second time, I heard both Steve and I recounting some of the turbulent times he and I have experienced this past year.  And how we’ve been managing them.

On the surface, as merely a listener, I was told by one of our New Horizons Board Members that what we were sharing sounded almost “ordinary.” OMG!! Has living in chaos now become ordinary?

Yet for the two of us, independent of one another, our separate crazy-making events were far from normal. 

It was particularly striking to me, in my discussion with that board member, that I was able to put into words that even my briefly sharing as much as I had on the show had re-traumatized me, just pulling the words out of my inner storage chest and telling some about it. Read more on this on my Anastasia The Storyteller post “…How…Anastasia Revealed Surprising…” details.

Having accomplished getting ourselves on the air that day, up against obstacles, I was just about to relax into the easy flow of the topic Steve and I had planned for the day when the heartfelt words he was sharing prompted me to open up some of the wounding experiences I am harboring, sharing some of what I've been managing with the horrible ordeal I've been experiencing in making a long-overdue sexual harassment and power abuse Ethics Complaint.

Hear all Steve and I cover in that show, now on podcast. 

Managing The Chaos Of Lives Run Amuck:

Moving Beyond Gender Tyranny

And, plan to join us for our upcoming broadcasts with a #MeToo story, reflection or comments of your own.

Look for details.

Anastasia's Gender Tyranny Declaration Of Independence

Are you committed to moving beyond the chaos of gender tyranny?

Here are two blog articles that may interest you from Anastasia Rosen-Jones, New Horizons Executive Director.

Ethics Complaint Update: Anastasia Was Not O.K.! And, Then She Was Awesome!

Anastasia Proudly Announces-

Super Sleuth’d Systems Coaching And Consulting

Specializing in transforming the darkness in individuals, relationships, communities, businesses and organizations, including #MeToo-related issues.

All fees from Anastasia's new coaching and consulting services are donated, in full at this time, to advancing the efforts of New Horizons Small "Zones of Peace" Project -- and -- its latest initiative Beyond Gender Tyranny!

Find out how you can contribute to New Horizons Beyond Gender Tyranny Movement!

Look for details on this site or -- 

Contact Anastasia at: Cell: 240.409.5347, email: mountainwomanrj@aol.com

#MeToo And The Issue Of Chaos: The Podcast

Be sure to check out links in the article below to find out more of the back story of New Horizons Beyond Gender Tyranny Initiative and the personal back stories of Anastasia and Steve as #MweToo Poster People for New Horizons.

Steve and Anastasia, New Horizons #MeToo Poster People, are back! 

Hear Anastasia and New Horizons Board Member, Steve, back today, with a new online podcast on The Anastasia The Storyteller Radio Show.

And back, on the air with an awesome array of #MeToo-oriented program ahead, including today ....

#MeToo And The Issue Of Chaos

Listen in to our newest show, where Steve and I, gently and with intent lead into a rich conversation, taking up the following points:

1. What is chaos and how does it relate to the #MeToo movement;
2. When and how does the #MeToo movement incorporate the problems of gender power abuse with sexual harassment and sexual assault;
3. How do the objectives of the #MeToo movement connect with "gender tyranny" and Moving Beyond Gender Tyranny – the latest initiative of New Horizons Small “Zones of Peace” Project;
4. How does a man become an identified #MeToo victim?

And, lots more interesting perspectives on the issue of chaos and the #MeToo movement!

Steve and Anastasia are soooo happy to be back!

Hear about the chaos that kept us off the air most of the time since the May flood disaster that severely affected the New Horizons Harpers Ferry Retreat Center here on Anastasia’s "Chaos Test" podcast.

Also hear Steve and Anastasia gearing up for today’s vibrant show on "Anastasia And Steve Testing."

Then check back here for further details on our next radio show broadcast, as we get back into doing Beyond Gender Tyranny: The Online Course, with our upcoming shows on The Possible Society In Motion Radio Show –

Managing The Chaos Of Lives Run Amuck

Thursday, October 25      11:30 a.m.

Gender Tyranny Is About…. ?
(Rescheduled topic 4x+)

New, upcoming date to be announced.

Also read blog article title, Gender Tyranny Is About....?
written in preparation for our first attempt to do this show.

Chaos Testing

Links to be added shortly.

If you’ve been following my blog articles for the past few months you can probably intuit, even if I did not come right out and say it, there has been so much chaos going on at and around New Horizons, that it’s hard to stay settled for long.

For example, take a look at my Beyond Gender Tyranny collection of articles on Anastasia The Storyteller. 

There you will read about the upheaval going on in my life, personally, due to an Ethics Complaint for sexual harassment and power abuse against one of my former clinical trainers.

Also, note that that circumstance, alone, has brought me to cut back my regular hours, by half, as Executive Director of New Horizons. If you can’t imagine it, let me tell you, a ship without a captain, or one who works only half-time, is not a great deal. The dearth of blog articles posted to this site for months, if you have noticed, will drive the point home of the upheaval with which we have been dealing.

Add to that, the general chaos in the world around us, political and #MeToo-oriented, for starters. Then count in, OMG, what else????

In the midst of this turmoil, yesterday, order followed disorder, if only for a short time, when, after months of struggling to get back on the air with New Horizons online radio shows: Anastasia The Storyteller and The Possible Society In Motion Radio, I had a breakthrough! 

To accomplish this, I had to practically slither into my Anastasia The Storyteller show studio to do the broadcast. 

However, all in all, the show didn’t come off too poorly, especially as the sound quality was fine most of the time, in spite of the fact that I had to manage losing my wireless connection, one time, to carry it off.

I’d like all of you to hear this show titled “Chaos Test” that I went through so much to present.

Maybe you could rate me, as to how I sounded on the air, doing almost every imaginable, behind-the-scenes gyration to come off, even mildly, with a few decent comments shared for the duration. 

We were certainly testing the chaos, doing this show, seeing if we could best and surmount it.

If you do listen, you will save me the toil and trouble of further explaining about the tech end of the chaos we’ve been encountering, at New Horizons, for months, trying to do what used to be simple; the broadcasting of a once a week online radio show.

Without doubt, we’ve had a hard time connecting with you, our radio show listeners, due to the CHAOS we’ve been experiencing on multiple levels. That’s why we titled this show “Chaos Test.”

Bottom Line: Yesterday, we were testing to see if we could go beyond the chaos of our radio show that we couldn’t actually air -- and -- defeat the obstacles our wireless service had placed in our way. 

And, we succeeded! 

On ground level, again and again, for going on five months, we have been attempting to transcend obstacles, brought about by a flood disaster in our locale. The flood catastrophe brought much upheaval to our generally serene mountain living, bringing us down in several MAJOR ways:

1. Our only direct connection to a main highway has been closed – and – may not yet re-open for months to come. OMG!! This will depend on how soon engineers and contractors of the Harpers Ferry National Historical Park Service can clear and make safe again an area that suffered a rock slide on to a connecting roadway; 
2. A T and T, our former cell provider had one of its towers downed in our area due to extremely heavy rains and flood conditions; and 
3. Finding us undeserving of improved cell service when they righted it, they redirected the repaired tower signal so far from our very sparsely populated expanse we had almost no signal at all.

So we’ve been challenged!

Nonetheless, pressing forward, I did accomplish a full broadcast show, yesterday, if only for a brief fifteen minutes!

Therefore ---- Steve and I hope to be back with you next week, anticipating a full run on both of our radio show programs, to help you, our listeners, find better and better ways to move Beyond Gender Tyranny.

Our next scheduled broadcast will be on Anastasia The Storyteller Radio with a program titled –

#MeToo and The Issue Of Chaos

Scheduled for Tuesday, October … at 11:30 a.m.

Be sure to check here for updates and program changes.

#MeToo Poster People At New Horizons

Who would’ve thought it?

Not I!

That New Horizons very own Executive Director, that be ME, would have found herself, like countless others, embroiled in a #MeToo controversy!

And, then, lo and behold, not many months later, New Horizons Board Member, Steve, became entangled in one too!

Of course, now we know that #MeToo controversies have reached epidemic proportions. 

Few can escape!

However, allow me to come back, later, to Steve and myself, now becoming New Horizons’ #MeToo Poster People, by taking a look back at how we’ve moved from where we were last year at this time to where we are now. 

There we were, innocently, at New Horizons, around this time last year, trying our best to find a way through the chaos Donald Trump and Company had brought into our lives, getting himself elected to the highest office in the land.

For months we tried, again and again, to find new directions. 

What could we do that would align with our objectives of being agents of change to help keep our country, safe, secure and unified, within reason?

Nothing seemed to resonate with who we are and what we could contribute.

Yet, in ourselves and all around us, in our families, with friends, in our neighborhoods and local communities, throughout our nation, we saw relationships being torn apart. 

At New Horizons we were about building small “zones of peace.” We’d been doing this for decades. So we asked ourselves, “How can we help our local communities, and even our nation, regain its footing?

We were frightened, almost despairing. Still we believed that there must be something productive we could do.

Surely with all our many years of working to analyze and reverse the dynamics of
polarization in groups and organization, there must be some way we could assist.

Intent as we are, always, on building “zones of peace,” we were struggling, as were many, to find a viable pathway, post the 2016 presidential election, to a greater unity in our country and less divisiveness, for most of 2017.  Still we believed there must be some way to improve things as they were.

Then StoryCorps came to mind! 

On that breathtaking day of the solar eclipse, August 21, rising up from the debris in and around us, the idea of New Horizons partnering with StoryCorps rose up like a beacon.

“Aha,” we exclaimed!

“We can turn to storytelling, as a vehicle!”

 “That would, for sure, be in keeping with our overarching mission!”

We knew we could do this! We had been using storytelling as a community bridge-building exercise countless times in the past.

Now we could do it again! This time we would place storytelling on center stage, not only as a part of a larger program event.

From that day forward, New Horizons began to develop an updated template for building small “zones of peace.” We would enhance one of the most impactful parts of our Coffee House Conversations approach, storytelling, offering it as a means for overcoming the polarization infecting our communities, near and far, post-Election 2016.

With this in mind, New Horizons Board Member, Steve, and I set out to introduce a new series of online storytelling-centered radio shows on Anastasia The Storyteller Radio, focusing on this single aspect, storytelling, as we might derive its usefulness from our Coffee House Conversations model that we had been successfully cultivating for the past decade or so. 

We were excited to embark on this new direction, setting off on what we thought would be a new “zones of peace-building” track.

Listen to Steve and I, a month after coming up with our StoryCorps-partnering plan, unsuspecting of what would lay ahead, as we launch that online storytelling series program on podcast from September 24, 2017 here. Listen carefully and hear our energetic, yet naively, unsuspecting enthusiasm that was soon to show itself to be short-lived.

Unfortunately, our storytelling series plan, barely landed, as a tiny pebble in a huge pond, hardly making a ripple as it soon sunk into the depths. Nonetheless, over time, listener statistics for that podcast would show us that we were on the right track with our plan. Maybe even a head of time for how storytelling might, effectively, be utilized as a healing vehicle for overcoming social polarization.

However, little did we realize, on that day of our introducing our planned for storytelling series, that a torrent of societal chaos was brewing!

Just as Steve and I were unsuspectingly moving ourselves into our second broadcast for our new series, themed as interactive storytelling, both the “New York Times” and “The New Yorker Magazine” were in the process of toppling our lives and our radio show agenda, irretrievably turning the best of our intentions, upside down.

Interactive storytelling, the weaving together of storytelling with story listening,  would have little place, at least for the moment, in this new world order up ahead!

The new name of the game would be almost exclusively about women’s stories, specifically about sexual abuse and harassment and power domination by men.

Interactive storytelling as an agenda and a program theme would quickly become a major misnomer!

Oh my! Oh my!

Life in these United States was not about to be put back together again into well-oiled working parts, that might help keep our country, so recently torn apart, even more than previously, grow and flourish.  

No sirree! Our country was not on its way to a greater unity.

Not at all!

The largest possible area of division: that between men and women, had been buried – and would now be excavated in order that it might see the light of day and, hopefully, at last, a long overdue liberation. 

This is what would be going on, almost simultaneously, with our well-intended radio show broadcasts and their idealistic agenda.

Unity among U.S. citizens, as a goal, was about to be usurped while the fifty percent or so of half the population, the female half, began to take its first steps forward into a new freedom, a liberation so monumental that its impetus would soon move around the globe!

Personally, what was about to happen, once that the sordid tales of Harvey Weinstein’s corruption, with more of the same throughout Hollywood and beyond, were about to usher in a new era of feminine respect and dignity in our work and private lives in a fashion that would never again allow civilized women and men to return to the status quo that had been.

In the midst of these happenings, New Horizons would introduce its Beyond Gender Tyranny Initiative. And both Steve and Anastasia would address the impact of #MeToo in their personal lives.

For a taste of Steve’s #MeToo story, some of our more recent podcasts, especially this one titled , Can A Man Truly Be Innocent, If Charged With Assault, can introduce you to what he has been entangled in.

And, this collection labeled Beyond Gender Tyranny on Anastasia The Storyteller will introduce you to some of Anastasia’s #MeToo adventures.

We’ll be back with more articles on stories, as we at New Horizons, offer you our best tools and talents to help you Move Beyond Gender Tyranny, if you are so inclined.