about

Inspired by The Icarus Project, MindFreedom, and other human/civil rights & alternative health groups, The Wildflowers’ Movement envisions a new culture and language by seeing ourselves in a new light. Self-acceptance is the key to recognizing who we truly are. Self-awareness and self-consciousness are to be cultivated daily in order to maintain our self-acceptance.

This group is for people to come together, embrace mental diversity and learn from each others’ different views and experiences. Rather than seeing ourselves with a “disorder” needing to be “cured” or “overcome”, we accept ourselves as WE ARE. It is this idea that resonates with our actual experiences rather than trying to fit our lives into a conventional framework.

The Wildflowers’ Movement also hopes to advocate mental health rights for all people who have been and are being affected daily by the outdated mental health care system which does not provide them with the alternatives necessary to seek therapeutic recovery.

You are welcome to the group for whichever reason you feel you should be, whether you take drugs or not, whether you define yourself with a “disorder” or not. No matter how alienated you are by the world around you, no matter how out of step or depressed and disconnected you might feel, you are not alone.    

We believe that true community which embraces diversity is the solution.

Self-awareness is having a clear perception of your personality, including strengths, weaknesses, thoughts, beliefs, motivation, and emotions. Self-awareness allows you to understand other people, how they perceive you, your attitude and your responses to them in the moment.

Self-consciousness is the mental activity through which you feel a sense of being or existing as a unique and total individual. Although it does not rule out the idea of the unconscious, this notion comes out of reflexive philosophy and its derivatives that hold that the human faculty of consciousness, apparent to itself and having itself as its object, marks the primacy of consciousness in the definition of the human psyche. This sense of identity, this initial subjective stance, is established gradually, being linked with the general development of the human mind in its relationship to itself and the outside world.

Underground Roots by The Icarus Project

You can see it all from the highway: enormous monocrops of identical corn plants that reach for miles bordered by an endless sea of strip malls, parking lots, and tract housing. You can see it on our kitchen counters and in our classrooms: the same can of soda on the table in Cairo and Kentucky, the same definitions of ‘progress’ and ‘freedom’ in textbooks around the world. Monoculture — the practice of replicating a single plant, product or idea over a huge area — is about the most unstable, unsustainable, unimaginative form of organization that exists, but in the short-term it keeps the system running smoothly and keeps the power in the hands of a small number of people.

In the logic of our modern world, whether it’s in the farmer’s field or in the high school classroom, diversity is inefficient and hard to manage. Powerful people figured out awhile time ago that it’s a lot easier to control things if everyone’s eating the same foods, listening to the same music, reading the same books, watching the same TV shows, and speaking the same language. This is what we call the monocult, and while everyone is supposedly more and more connected by this new “global culture,” we’re more and more isolated from each other. Things feel more and more empty, and so many of us end up lonely and rootless, wondering why everything feels so wrong.

Out in the wild, things are very different. In old forests everything is connected, from the moss and lichens to the ferns and brambles to the birds and beetles. In our human minds we separate all the parts of the forest into separate pieces when a lot of the time it can be more helpful to view the forest as one giant organism with separate parts all working together. The trees of a forest intertwine their roots and actually communicate with each other underground. You see it most visibly along ravines and creek beds where a cut-away hillside reveals totally asymmetrical tangle of roots that no scientist could ever have imagined or planned out with all his laws of physics. Something in that tangle explains how those trees can lean out at all kinds of gravity-defying angles and hang their necks into the strongest winds and still survive, bending but not breaking, adapting with unpredictable curves and angles to the way the world breathes and shines and rains and burns. Concrete can’t do that. There are a lot of lessons to be learned from the way life evolves and gets stronger in the wild. Something about the living architecture of chaos and time, multi-tiered forests and microscopic algae, outlasts any of the straight lines and square institutions we’re told to believe in.

We believe that people do not belong in grids and boxes of rootless lonely monocultures.