Ghost Town

The Amur Leopard and Clouded Leopard (which recently celebrated its 50th cub born at the zoo!)

The Sumatran Tiger

The Red Ruffed Lemur and Ring-Tailed Lemur

The Cotton-Top Tamarin and White-Cheeked Gibbon

The Colobus Monkey and De Brazza’s Monkey

And the Mexican Spider Monkey!

if there's a task, especially a recurring one, that you find difficult to do and that you keep avoiding, check whether you're in pain or physical discomfort.

For a long time I would avoid doing tasks like showering because they nebulously made me feel 'bad' or i just instinctively felt like avoiding them. It wasn't until I got a shower chair that I realised standing to shower was causing me pain. My bodymind knew that on some level but didn't tell the conscious me.

Similarly with sensory aversions (things you don't like). Before I got kitchen gloves, I did the dishes but it took me a long time and I never wanted to. Afterward, it got a lot easier to motivate myself.

"But how can you not know you're in pain/uncomfortabke?" Extremely easily if your brain is wired a specific way or if you were taught, intentionally or not, to downplay your own experiences or distance yourself from your body.

So from then on whenever one of us called something problematic, he would make us talk it out until we could name the “bad” thing we were hinting at. In this particular class, 7/10 it was some type of oppression, and the remainder was like, “I’m uncomfortable because this is very new/confusing/pushing boundaries that made me feel safe.”

Once we stopped calling things “problematic” and stopping at that, class got way more interesting and... we all had to say, like, “that’s racist” or “that’s misogynistic” or “ew capitalism gross” out loud, which a lot of us had never done in a classroom before. Or we had to be like, “Uhhh... I’m not sure what’s so bad?” and confront our own beliefs and that was maybe even more useful.