Welcome,
in this edition of our newsletter you’ll find:
🌱 Commemorating Loneliness Awareness Week with random acts of connection
💧 Preparing for our first noe experience (It’s not too late to join the waitlist!)
🪴 Wisdom from Rupi Kaur
Enjoy!
Your noe team
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🌱 Planting Seeds
In this section we share thoughts and concepts around empathy that have inspired us and made us think.
Loneliness - Random Acts of Connection
In commemoration of Loneliness Awareness Week 2024, which is taking place Monday 10th June – Sunday 16th June, we are dedicating this issue of our newsletter to the topic of loneliness and this year’s theme “Random Acts of Connection”.
Loneliness is real. It can hit you while sitting on the train during your morning commute, at a party surrounded by family and friends, or while cooking dinner at home. It might suddenly hit you or slowly creep up on you. The sense that you’re out there by yourself, removed from the world around you.
According to a Meta-Gallup survey published in October last year, nearly 1 in 4 adults across the world have reported feeling very or fairly lonely. The survey, taken across 142 countries, found 24% of people age 15 and older self-reported feeling very or fairly lonely in response to the question, “How lonely do you feel?”. Among young adults ages 19 to 29 loneliness was even more prevalent with the number going up to 27%, thereby reporting higher rates of loneliness than people aged 65 and above.
But, loneliness does not only have an effect on our mental, it also severely impacts our physical health. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, social isolation and loneliness can increase a person's risk for heart disease and stroke, type 2 diabetes, depression and anxiety, suicidality and self-harm, dementia and earlier death. In other words, loneliness is harmful and based on the reported figures it can rightly be considered an epidemic.
So what can we do to counter loneliness? It all starts with random acts of connection. Acts of kindness that aim to establish and build connection. Such as making another person feel seen, by making eye contact, greeting each other and being there to listen. Maybe it is picking up the phone and randomly calling a friend today, sharing a funny video with a friend on instagram or TikTok, or writing a letter to your grandma. If you need more inspiration, here is a whole list.
If you take us up on this invitation, we’d love to know: what is a random act of connection that you’ll do today?
💧 Watering the Mind
In this section we share updates from the noe team and concrete offers that allow you to build emotional intelligence and resilience skills.
Getting ready for our first noe experience!
We are getting ready for our first noe experience, taking place June 28-30 in Brandenburg, Germany!
It is the first time we will be testing the noe methodology that we have been developing over the past months, utilizing empathy as a tool to access inner resources in order to ensure personal wellbeing as well as to initiate sustainable social change.
If you weren’t able to sign up until now, feel free to do so now. You’ll be placed on our waitlist and if a space opens up, you’ll be the first one to be offered a spot.
Don’t hesitate to get in touch with any questions by emailing us at contact@networkofempathy.org
🪴 Vines of Community
In this space we foster connection and inspiration by sharing stories, poems, and thoughts of community members.
Like with most big feelings, Rupi Kaur has been able to capture our longing for connection in a few lines of text, published in her book “home body” (2020):
our souls
will not be soothed
by what we achieve
how we look
or all the hard work we do
even if we managed to
make all the money in the world
we’d be left feeling empty for something
our souls ache for community
our deepest being craves one another
we need to be connected
to feel alive