Bessel van der Kolk Quotes
Practicing mindfulness calms down the sympathetic nervous system, so that you are less likely to be thrown into fight-or-flight.11 Learning to observe and tolerate your physical reactions is a prerequisite for safely revisiting the past. If you cannot tolerate what you are feeling right now, opening up the past will only compound the misery and retraumatize you further.12 We can tolerate a great deal of discomfort as long as we stay conscious of the fact that the body’s commotions constantly shift. One moment your chest tightens, but after you take a deep breath and exhale, that feeling softens and you may observe something else, perhaps a tension in your shoulder. Now you can start exploring what happens when you take a deeper breath and notice how your rib cage expands.13 Once you feel calmer and more curious, you can go back to that sensation in your shoulder. You should not be surprised if a memory spontaneously arises in which that shoulder was somehow involved.
Quotes to Explore
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I don't think I think when I play. I have a photographic memory for chords, and when I'm playing, the right chords appear in my mind like photographs long before I get to them.
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I think it was a good challenge for me to get my reactions across without being able to speak.
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Memory tempers prosperity, mitigates adversity, controls youth, and delights old age.
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The moral backbone of literature is about that whole question of memory. To my mind it seems clear that those who have no memory have the much greater chance to lead happy lives.
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It was one of those perfect English autumnal days which occur more frequently in memory than in life.
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I'm a writer who simply can't know what I'm writing about until the writing lets me discover it. In a sense, my writing process embraces the gapped nature of my memory process, leaping across spaces that represent all I've lost and establishing fresh patterns within all that remains.
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Necessity is blind until it becomes conscious. Freedom is the consciousness of necessity.
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To my mind, it seems clear that those who have no memory have the much greater chance to lead happy lives. But it is something you cannot possibly escape: your psychological make-up is such that you are inclined to look back over your shoulder.
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People don't realize that now is all there ever is; there is no past or future except as memory or anticipation in your mind.
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I'd love a super human memory. My memory has never been good.
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Our sense of self is a kind of construct. It is in some ways like a novel, and it's like a fabric of fictions that we patch together from memory.
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A liar should have a good memory.
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I'm very conscious of people having pretty short attention spans: I know, I'm guilty of it. I'm 17 now: what happens by the time I'm 21, am I a burn-out or something? Will they still listen to my record?
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Unbelievers can tolerate Christ only as long as He is stripped of His real identity.
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I came to dedicate my life to opening space to the average person and crafting designs for new spaceships that could take us far from home. But since Apollo ended, such travels were only in our collective memory.
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What people think, believe, and feel affects how they behave. The natural and extrinsic effects of their actions, in turn, partly determine their thought patterns and affective reactions.
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Authors frequently say things they are unaware of; only after they have gotten the reactions of their readers do they discover what they have said
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Remember, when we're conscious of something, that state is quite often generated by unconscious processes that happen right before it.
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The writer isn't made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century.
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The point is that although love may die, what is said on its behalf cannot be consumed by the passage of time, and forgiveness is everything.
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They say that a few minutes each day of petting your dog can raise your serotonin levels.
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Practicing mindfulness calms down the sympathetic nervous system, so that you are less likely to be thrown into fight-or-flight.11 Learning to observe and tolerate your physical reactions is a prerequisite for safely revisiting the past. If you cannot tolerate what you are feeling right now, opening up the past will only compound the misery and retraumatize you further.12 We can tolerate a great deal of discomfort as long as we stay conscious of the fact that the body’s commotions constantly shift. One moment your chest tightens, but after you take a deep breath and exhale, that feeling softens and you may observe something else, perhaps a tension in your shoulder. Now you can start exploring what happens when you take a deeper breath and notice how your rib cage expands.13 Once you feel calmer and more curious, you can go back to that sensation in your shoulder. You should not be surprised if a memory spontaneously arises in which that shoulder was somehow involved.
