“Everything about us—our brains, our minds, and our bodies—is geared toward collaboration in social systems. This is our most powerful survival strategy, the key to our success as a species, and it is precisely this that breaks down in most forms of mental suffering. The neural connections in brain and body are vitally important for understanding human suffering, but it is important not to ignore the foundations of our humanity: relationships and interactions that shape our minds and brains when we are young and that give substance and meaning to our entire lives.”
Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps The Score (Page 168) | ★ Featured on this book list.
“Never lose trust in trust, whatever the cost, and you will never be a loser, because trust in itself is the ultimate end. It should not be a means to anything else, because it has its own intrinsic value. If you can trust, you remain open. People become closed as a defense, so that nobody can deceive them or take advantage or them. Let them take advantage of you! If you insist on continuing to trust, then a beautiful flowering happens, because then there is no fear. The fear is that people will deceive—but once you accept that, there is no fear, so there is no barrier to your opening. The fear is more dangerous than any harm anybody can do to you.”
Osho, Everyday Osho (Page 29)
“I gradually came to realize that the only thing that makes it possible to do the work of healing trauma is awe at the dedication to survival that enabled my patients to endure their abuse and then to endure the dark nights of the soul that inevitably occur on the road to recovery.”
Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps The Score (Page 137) | ★ Featured on this book list.
“The real question we should ask ourselves is not ‘How big can we get?’ but instead ‘What kind of life do we want to live?’ The magic happens when we shift our focus from size to significance. We might discover that ‘enough’ is a lot less than we thought. Because we’re conditioned to believe that ‘more’ is synonymous with ‘better’. But often, it’s just synonymous with more stress, more time away from family, and more sacrifices.”
Justin Welsh
“I’m a firm believer in building our lives first – designing an existence that truly reflects who we are and what we value. And from there, growing businesses to fit that intentionally designed life. Not the other way around. Life shouldn’t revolve around scaling businesses. Businesses should revolve around enriching your life.”
Justin Welsh
“The ‘night sea journey’ is the journey into the parts of ourselves that are split off, disavowed, unknown, unwanted, cast out, and exiled to the various subterranean worlds of consciousness… The goal of this journey is to reunite us with ourselves. Such a homecoming can be surprisingly painful, even brutal. In order to undertake it, we must first agree to exile nothing.”
Stephen Cope, via The Body Keeps The Score (Page 125)
“I have always wondered how parents come to abuse their kids. After all, raising healthy offspring is at the very core of our human sense of purpose and meaning. What could drive parents to deliberately hurt or neglect their children? Watching [Karlen Lyons-Ruth’s] videos provided me with one answer: I could see the children becoming more and more inconsolable, sullen, or resistant to their misattuned mothers. At the same time, the mothers became increasingly frustrated, defeated, and helpless in their interactions. Once the mother comes to see the child not as her partner in an attuned relationship but as a frustrating, enraging, disconnected stranger, the stage is set for subsequent abuse.”
Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps The Score (Page 123) | ★ Featured on this book list.
“As we grow up, we gradually learn to take care of ourselves, both physically and emotionally, but we get our first lessons in self-care from the way that we are cared for. Mastering the skill of self-regulation depends to a large degree on how harmonious our early interactions without caregivers are. Children whose parents are reliable sources of comfort and strength have a lifetime advantage—a kind of buffer against the worst that fate can hand them.”
Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps The Score (Page 112) | ★ Featured on this book list.
“The roots of resilience… are to be found in the sense of being understood by and existing in the mind and heart of a loving, attuned, and self-possessed other.”
Diana Fosha, via The Body Keeps The Score (Page 108)
“The most natural way for human beings to calm themselves when they are upset is by clinging to another person. This means that patients who have been physically or sexually violated face a dilemma: They desperately crave touch while simultaneously being terrified of body contact. The mind needs to be reeducated to feel physical sensations, and the body needs to be helped to tolerate and enjoy the comforts of touch. Individuals who lack emotional awareness are able, with practice, to connect their physical sensations to psychological events. Then they can slowly reconnect with themselves.”
Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps The Score (Page 103) | ★ Featured on this book list.
“There are no outside causes of happiness or unhappiness; these things are just excuses. By and by we come to realize that it is something inside us that goes on changing, that has nothing to do with outside circumstances.”
Osho, Everyday Osho (Page 25)
“Trauma victims cannot recover until they become familiar with and befriend the sensations in their bodies. Being frightened means that you live in a body that is always on guard. Angry people live in angry bodies. The bodies of child-abuse victims are tense and defensive until they find a way to relax and feel safe. In order to change people need to become aware of their sensations and the way that their bodies interact with the world around them. Physical self-awareness is the first step in releasing the tyranny of the past.”
Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps The Score (Page 103) | ★ Featured on this book list.
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves… Live the questions now. Perhaps you will gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”
Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps The Score (Page 89) | ★ Featured on this book list.
“Mature people are those who have watched and found for themselves what is right, what is wrong, what is good, what is bad. And by finding it for themselves, they have a tremendous authority. The whole world may say something else, and it makes no difference to them. They have their own experience to go by, and that is enough.”
Osho, Everyday Osho (Page 24)
“Social support is not the same as merely being in the presence of others. The critical issue is reciprocity: being truly heard and seen by the people around us, feeling that we are held in someone else’s mind and heart. For our physiology to calm down, heal, and grow we need a visceral feeling of safety. No doctor can write a prescription for friendship and love: These are complex and hard-earned capacities. You don’t need a history of trauma to feel self-conscious and even panicked at a party with strangers—but trauma can turn the whole world into a gathering of aliens.”
Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps The Score (Page 81) | ★ Featured on this book list.
“Being able to feel safe with other people is probably the single most important aspect of mental health; safe connections are fundamental to meaningful and satisfying lives. Numerous studies of disaster response around the globe have shown that social support is the most powerful protection against becoming overwhelmed by stress and trauma.”
Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps The Score (Page 81) | ★ Featured on this book list.