u/Spiritual-Willow2778

I'm starting a reading group where we can read together Martin Buber's book 'I and Thou'.

Moderators - if this post is against group rules please do remove or let me know if I can make any changes to it. I do not earn from this group.

Here is a description of the group -

Martin Buber’s book ‘I and Thou’ is a book about relationship.

It speaks of relationships of deep presence, and relationships of use.

Relationships of use are those where we seek something from the other – support, care, pleasure, money.

Relationships of presence are those which form when we fully experience what is between ourselves and the other, as it emerges and changes, every moment. The emotion I feel as I meet you, the thoughts that run through your mind as you meet me, the ache in the back that might lie underneath these thoughts and emotions in our stream of experience, the sound of the bird chirping in the background.

Relationships of use help us construct a world around us – a world of goodwill and care, or a world of indifference and mechanisation of life.

Relationships of presence are the ground on which our experience of this world emerges – they are how we first experience life, every day, every moment, before we choose to sustain or move away from what we experience into building our world.

Relationships of presence are what allow care to remain care and not become mere performance of care, what allow deep listening to remain deep listening rather than a hearing and reacting from our set patterns.

Buber never ceases to emphasise that the relationships he speaks of are between us and other human beings, but also between us and nature, as between us and the industrial, internetted civilisation we live in.

This reading group is a place for a small group of 4 or 5 people to read a few passages from Buber and pause, and speak about our own personal experience of the world – our emotions, bodily experiences – in ways that they are illuminated by what the book expresses.

It is a place to form a community rooted in relationships of presence, anchored in these words as a stirring point but not entangled with them.

It is not a place for scholarly conversations, for debates, for difficult language or abstract philosophisations, even though at times the nature of the book and the nature of reading itself might lean us in those directions.

It is open to anyone willing to read a paragraph or two together, and spend the next hour and a half or so sharing their experience in that light.

We need not read full pages, we need not finish the book, but we try to breathe in its essential spirit.

One doesn’t need to have read this book or any book beforehand.

We meet once a fortnight for 1.5 hours.

If interested please send me a DM.

I've used my laptop to do therapy sessions always, and I am considering buying a 27 or 32 inch monitor, or near that size.

Has anyone used ~30 inch monitors, and do you find any of these to be difficult?

- The distance between the centre of the screen and the top of the screen where the webcam will be is more, so I wonder if the client sees you looking at an angle down rather than straight?

- I've read about some people having this problem and then having to use a 'center webcam', one that can hang by a thin wire to the centre of your screen so that you look straight into it. Has anyone tried this? Does this interfere with having a natural and clear view of your client?

- I make very brief notes on my laptop sometimes during the session. Such as just a date or a name that I need to remember. I hardly need to look down to do this. I wonder how this will be if a big monitor in front of me is plugged into my laptop, and my laptop is on my side diagonally. I will obviously have to look away from the client as I type those notes.

I had an ORIF surgery for my right radius and ulna bones 1 year ago. The ulna fused, but the radius still has a 1 to 1.5 mm gap. The surgeon said he would need to take that amount of bone from my iliac crest to graft it on the radius.

I asked him when I can return to my work - which means sitting at a stretch for 2 hours with clients. He said about 2 weeks.

He also said that most of the pain will be because of the surgical incision and not because of the actual bone loss, because that area of the hip bone is not very significant for sitting or standing.

Is 2 weeks realistic?

I realise that other people may have longer recovery timelines because of more amount of bone being harvested, so I wonder if it is correct that given they will only take about a millimeter of bone, I may be able to work in 2 weeks.