668: Rebecca Ruda on Mental Health and Urban Farming.
Understanding the Importance of Keeping Grounded While Trying to Make a Difference.
In This Podcast:
We talk a lot about agricultural practices, climate change, and the global food supply, and the news is not always great. Rebecca Ruda reflects on the anxiety this can cause and reminds us that just as the problems of the world deserve our attention, so does our mental health. She provides tips for recognizing anxiety symptoms and openly shares her own experience. Then Rebecca offers simple but useful strategies for continuing the work of advocating for nature without doing harm to ourselves.
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Our Guest:
Rebecca Ruda is a wife, mother, mental health therapist and urban farmer. When not endlessly pulling bindweed from her strawberry patch, she enjoys hiking in the nearby mountains with her family. She is currently at work on her first novel. As an Urban Farm podcast listener, we have invited her to share her story.
Listen in and learn about:
-
- Gardening with small children
- Getting to know Rebecca’s property
- Growing in the front yard to encourage others
- Planting strawberries on the berm
- Naming the farm
- Managing climate grief
- Engaging in changing our global food supply
- Feeling fragile and scared
- Starting to become more at peace
- Minding our own business (and letting go of the other 2 types of business)
- Reducing our suffering by paying attention to and questioning our thoughts
- Enjoying the gardening ride
As well as:
Her failure – Doing too much too quickly
Her success – Marrying her husband
Her drive – The possibilities for regeneration
Her advice – “Let us mind our own business.”
Rebecca’s Book recommendations:
The Overstory: A Novel by Richard Powers
Loving What Is: 4 Questions That Can Change Your Life by Byron Katie
The Good Germ Hotel: Meet Your Body’s Marvelous Microbes by Kim Sung-hwa and Kwon Soo-jin
How to reach Rebecca:
Send an email through us at podcast@urbanfarm.org and we will forward your messages to her.
UrbanFarm.org/RebeccaR
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