1 ::Take deadly seriously that there is living inside your mind a world of smaller islands of consciousness – sub-minds: inner children, inner villains, inner heroes, frozen-off men and women. They are listening all the time. They await from you a message of compassion and reconciliation. This transformed me. ::
2 :: “I need a man who…”; “I need a woman who…”.
These statements are simply false. I may desire to have a certain man or woman in my life – but this is really because they help me find parts of myself I have not yet found by a direct turn inwards. In turn, I may reveal aspects of them to themselves too. A neat exchange – but we never needed each other – we just chose to find ourselves through each other. ::
3 :: When we criticise ourselves for our shortcomings, our foibles, our people-pleasing, attention-seeking, cowardice, disorderliness, we are shaming a child inside of us who is confused and acting out. ::
4 :: The scientist is on some level aware that there is treasure to be found by digging deeper into the present moment. This is the experience we would call, depending on the context, love, beauty, flow, awe, wonder, or total immersion in one’s work. But the scientist remains convinced that this treasure is the exclusive product of the fleshy ball of grey and white matter between his ears inside his skull, and can thus be discounted and demystified as evidence of the magic of the brain, rather than of the magic of the direct and uncorrupted experience of the present moment. ::
5 :: Real strength is not the absence of any feelings of weakness. Real strength is the flexibility to allow and contain feelings of both strength and weakness, power and powerlessness, joy and grief, fear and longing, shame and love. This is part of the deep meaning of self-acceptance. ::
6 :: All religions began with types of mystical experience that are available as much to you as they were to them. We might consider that the extent to which a religion obscures this fact is the extent to which it is interested primarily in controlling its followers. ::
7 :: If in doubt on the spiritual path: feel. Feeling is healing, and healing is breaking character. ::
8 :: If we could trace the current crises in mental health back to its origins, I am confident we would find implicated the establishment of reductionist materialist science as the mainstream philosophical lens of the West. In that transition, the world became founded on a lie that we are cogs in a blind and meaningless mechanism. It was only a matter of time before we all lost the plot. ::
9 :: All the world’s problems have a psychological basis. Why don’t the rich share? Why does one nation see an enemy where another sees a friend? Why are more people than ever obese, addicted, depressed, anxious, isolated, disconnected, dissociated, alienated? All stem from a distorted psyche. The clarifying of the psyche of distortion is the only panacea. ::
10 :: How much vitality would be freed up, how much sanity restored, and how much stress and pressure and pain and delusion dissolved, if trauma processing were made a top priority of our collective efforts at civilisation? :
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