your body. And then it became obvious that if people are in a constant state of heartbreak and gut-wrench, they do everything to shut down those feelings in their body. One way of doing it is taking drugs and alcohol, and the other thing is that you can just shut down your emotional awareness of your body. And so a very large number of traumatized people who we see — I’d say the majority of the people we treat at the trauma center and in my practice — have very cut off relationships to their bodies. They may not feel what’s happening in their bodies. They may not register what goes on with them. And so what became very clear is that we needed to help people, f... posted on Feb 10 2022 (7,302 reads)

are nontoxic and universally applicable In addition to the ever-increasing body of evidence surrounding their effectiveness, placebos offer multiple benefits. They have no side effects. They are cheap. They are not addictive. They provide hope when there might not be a specific chemically active treatment available. They mobilize a person’s own ability to heal through multiple pathways, including those studied in the field of psychoneuroimmunology. This is the study of relationships between the immune system, hormones and the nervous system. By defining a placebo as the act of setting positive expectations and providing hope through psychosocial interactions, it ... posted on Feb 12 2022 (5,113 reads)

use other languages will need to help each other to access it and contribute to it by offering translation, finding translation services, and/or helping each other learn English—again, all part of the philosophy of mutuality.) Maurice limits the supporting staff infrastructure, giving families authorship of and full responsibility for their progress—and even their own failures. FII’s staff are in fact forbidden to intervene; their role is to set up the infrastructure for relationships to form and deepen and data to be gathered and shared. They also link the grassroots effort to policy reform and broader marketing of the results. Some new areas coming up: An associa... posted on Feb 23 2022 (2,270 reads)

listening is at the heart of all relationships.  It is what we experience when we become a quiet, safe container into which the speaker is able to express his or her most genuine voice.  There is a communion of souls. The way we listen to each other sets a tone for everything that follows. We often think that our speaking, the words we use, is the most important part of our communication. Yet it is the quality of our listening that has the greatest impact in any conversation.  Quaker writer Douglas Steere says: “To listen another’s soul into a condition of disclosure and discovery may be almost the greatest service one human being ever performs for anothe... posted on Mar 9 2022 (7,292 reads)

going to be a vulnerable here, which is, I think a lot people, myself included, we feel that sense of sufficiency at certain times. Walking through a forest, being with the tree, at certain moments where we feel peaceful. But there are other times when that feeling of scarcity comes up. It’s different for different people, for different reasons. For some on people, it has to do with financial pressures that they feel on their life, or some lack of love. Someone might feel, in their relationships, something like that. My question to you is, when we notice that feeling of scarcity come up, like we’re committed to this other way of being, and we know it, but there are still t... posted on Mar 12 2022 (2,982 reads)

and bearing a burden that the rest of us are nicely avoiding in some way and often don’t even want to look at or acknowledge; and I just had such tremendous admiration for these people. They range, the people I got to be with, from domestic violence shelter workers, to hospice nurses, to international humanitarian aid workers, to parents, to people taking care of their parents, and to managers who were actually sort of caregiving their staff. Or even people who in friendships and relationships tend to take that role, the giver, the person who’s offering [and] sometimes having a hard time receiving. I just really felt close to these people. I felt, well, these particul... posted on Apr 8 2022 (2,678 reads)

a daze, shocked and miserable, and even ill. 
 “Physically, I felt like my body had been plugged into a faulty electrical socket,” she writes. “In addition to weight loss, I’d stopped sleeping. I was getting sick: My pancreas wasn’t working right. It was hard to think straight.” To help understand what was happening to her, she turned away from self-help book advice—like “learn to love yourself first” or “beware of rebound relationships”—and looked to science instead. The result is her book, Heartbreak—part memoir, part exploration into the science and practice of healing from heartbreak—whi... posted on Apr 13 2022 (7,619 reads)

our history shaped my desire to better understand causes of behavior, beliefs, and generational trauma,” she says. â€¨ She and her team of Ukrainian, Russian, and American researchers went to Ukraine in 2017, after the Russian invasion of the Ukrainian provinces of Crimea and Donbas. At that point, as Timmer points out, “people of Ukraine were suffering from war for many years.” Their goal was to understand how those years might have affected civilian relationships and their sense of right and wrong, especially when it came to embracing violence as a solution to both interpersonal and international conflicts. Going house to house in the Ukrainia... posted on Apr 23 2022 (3,133 reads)

during the pandemic that a friend named India Supera, who had started the Feathered Pipe Foundation in Montana—and I had been going there doing workshops, but we and Jenn Levitt Keen, who I’d worked with with India Supera and the Feathered Pipe on its major trips that we made to Ireland, to various parts of Europe, to various places in the world, suddenly India, who was an exceptional person and a unique person, and, unlike close friends who like to talk about their lives and relationships and things, she was her own person, and didn’t do that level of talk. But there was a hard connection with everybody that is in this circle. And suddenly there she was, a felt pres... posted on May 9 2022 (3,978 reads)

feels like and how you think it could inform us in different ways, how it changes us? BA: I’m learning about this, Tami, from my own children, especially my daughter. My daughter would hold up something like this remote control and say, “It’s a dragon.” There’s something improvisational, playful about that. The way children meet the world, they don’t meet a world of already-made things, they seem to perform a relational universe, like a world of relationships that often conduce into things, but those things are never stable. So it’s also true that this remote control is a dragon and this remote and this doll here, which is given to me b... posted on Jun 16 2022 (2,471 reads)

humble. Knowing how intellectually humble you are isn’t an easy task, and being intellectually humble itself isn’t any easier! At the heart of these difficulties lie human characteristics and biases that we all share: We self-enhance, we’re prone to defensiveness in disagreements, we judge books by their covers, and the list goes on. Yet, the science tells us that fostering these four aspects of intellectual humility can help you learn new things, improve your relationships, and create a less divided world. 

If you’d like to dig deeper and take a science-based quiz assessing your intellectual humility, please visit our new Greater Good&nb... posted on Jul 24 2022 (4,383 reads)

have to face a lifetime of suffering and struggle. Researchers Jonathan Rottenberg and Todd Kashdan examined prior surveys from over 4,000 U.S. adults and nearly 16,000 U.S. adolescents who had been diagnosed with depression or anxiety disorder, or who had attempted suicide. People were considered to be “thriving” if they were doing better than 75% of their peers who hadn’t received such diagnoses, measured in terms of their positive and negative emotions, personal growth, relationships, purpose, self-acceptance, and more.  For example, 10 years after being diagnosed with depression, about 10% of adults were thriving. Although that might sound like a small numbe... posted on Feb 4 2023 (7,928 reads)

manner, at ideas that can only be grasped from the side In the tea room it is left for each guest in imagination to complete the total effect in relation to himself. The art of the extreme Orient has purposely avoided the symmetrical as expressing not only completion, but repetition. Uniformity of design was considered as fatal to the freshness of imagination. (Book of Tea) Asymmetry invites an engagement with elements of dissimilar types. As you place them in creative new relationships — a rusted old hook and a verse from the Buddha — energy is released, catalyzing our thinking with every connection. [...] Neither the Same nor Opposite: Asymmetry... posted on Mar 6 2023 (2,505 reads)

(2022) by Neil Douglas-Klotz. For a longer excerpt and more information, please see: www.revelationsofthearamaicjesus.com Why consider Jesus’ sayings in this language, much less use them in prayer or meditation? Language determines our way viewing the world. Languages have different words for the same thing, but also unique words that cannot be put into words in another language. In ancient languages, these unique expressions were all about the way people perceived their relationships to nature, other human beings, and Reality itself (a reality often translated “God”). Aramaic offers a way of looking at life as an interrelated whole, not simply at spiri... posted on Mar 22 2023 (3,726 reads)

your behalf, on my behalf, maybe it just takes a little bit of nothing. Anyway, I suppose that's the response. Steve: Yeah, that's interesting. And our culture, most cultures, do not provide any sort of support or training - not that it necessarily needs training - but this idea that you're talking about, or rather the experience that you're talking about, is not something that we're raised with. It's not normal. We almost have to discover it on our own in our relationships with others. And it actually reminds me of -- this is the last comment I'll make before I switch over to the audience questions -- but it reminds me of a filmmaker in Alaska who I gr... posted on Apr 11 2023 (3,139 reads)

forged by a process of slow incubation and incremental becoming, and that how we govern our interiority — how we tend to those processes as they shape us — shapes every outward expression of our lives. Khan writes: The capacity for lying fallow is a function of the process of personalization in the individual. This process of personalization achieves its sentient wholeness over a slow period of growth, development and acculturation, and its true matrix is a hierarchy of relationships… This is a long process and it is waylaid by many a traumata — personal, familial and social. But if all goes well — and it does, more often than not — what crys... posted on Apr 20 2023 (4,918 reads)

I want to name that, and that is hard. I hesitate to give advice, though what I will say is what I found helpful for me is to find those people and to invite people who do not judge me, people who would love me, people who love me and, to invite positive energy. In my case particularly, some of my friend groups kind of shifted. Cancer and other such diagnoses can be really scary for other people. Sometimes those people fade away. The other piece I found useful was to just release those relationships that clearly weren't serving me in that moment and to focus on the ones that were helpful. The other piece to this is that if you aren't already in a relationship with your bo... posted on Apr 21 2023 (3,716 reads)

and the idea is this: Stress makes you social. To understand this side of stress, we need to talk about a hormone, oxytocin, and I know oxytocin has already gotten as much hype as a hormone can get. It even has its own cute nickname, the cuddle hormone, because it's released when you hug someone. But this is a very small part of what oxytocin is involved in. Oxytocin is a neuro-hormone. It fine-tunes your brain's social instincts. It primes you to do things that strengthen close relationships. Oxytocin makes you crave physical contact with your friends and family. It enhances your empathy. It even makes you more willing to help and support the people you care about. Some peop... posted on Jun 7 2023 (15,765 reads)

person might notice a subtle sense that the forest has a mind of its own, full of vitality and vibrant interdependence. Another person might hear the grief cries of the sea.  Another might experience an electrifying, felt-sense of being witnessed – or called! – by a particular pine or stone.   Engaging directly, intimately, and imaginatively with other-than-human presences can enliven human awareness, which increases the likelihood of mutually beneficial relationships with all of life. In this fragile time of species extinctions, habitat loss, and climate disruption, becoming more sensitive to the longing-pains and voices of the wilder ones may be ess... posted on Jul 1 2023 (2,379 reads)

environmental causes. Now, these are some serious investors, but being 100 percent isn’t just about money; it’s about making a 100 percent commitment to ensuring your life reflects your values. As Kleissner says, “social transformation begins with personal transformation.” Just think of all the decisions you make every day, from the big to the mundane—where you invest your super, what you eat for dinner, where you buy your coffee, what you do for work, the relationships you have. Imagine if you could align these choices with your core beliefs. We’re on the road to doing that, and while we’re still working a lot of it out ourselves, this two-... posted on Aug 21 2023 (2,929 reads)