“Emotional competence requires the capacity to feel our emotions, so that we are aware when we are experiencing stress the ability to express our emotions effectively and thereby to assert our needs and to maintain the integrity of our emotional boundaries the facility to distinguish between psychological reactions that are pertinent to the present situation and those that represent residue from the past. When the Body Says No: The Cost of Hidden Stress Each of the seven A’s addresses one of the embedded visceral beliefs that predispose to illness and undermine healing.” “Sometimes the biggest impetus to healing can come from jump-starting the immune system with a burst of long-suppressed anger.” Anger, or the healthy experience of it, is one of the seven A’s of healing. “Health is not just a matter of thinking happy thoughts,” writes the molecular researcher Candace Pert. Genuine positive thinking - or, more deeply, positive being - empowers us to know that we have nothing to fear from truth. We have seen in study after study that compulsive positive thinkers are more likely to develop disease and less likely to survive.

Negative thinking allows us to gaze unflinchingly on our own behalf at what does not work. If a refusal saddles you with guilt, while consent leaves resentment in its wake, opt for the guilt. “A therapist once said to me, “If you face the choice between feeling guilt and resentment, choose the guilt every time.” It is wisdom I have passed on to many others since. In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction Even our 24/7 self-exposure to noise, e-mails, cell phones, TV, Internet chats, media outlets, music downloads, videogames, and nonstop internal and external chatter cannot succeed in drowning out the fearful voices within.” In fact, the harder the mind struggles to get rid of the pain, the greater the pain.”14 So writes Eckhart Tolle. “One of the main tasks of the mind is to fight or remove the emotional pain, which is one of the reasons for its incessant activity, but all it can ever achieve is to cover it up temporarily. The constant, intrusive, and meaningless mind-whirl that characterizes the way so many of us experience our silent moments is, itself, a form of addiction-and it serves the same purpose. Our consumerist, acquisition-, action-, and image-mad culture only serves to deepen the hole, leaving us emptier than before. Many of us resemble the drug addict in our ineffectual efforts to fill in the spiritual black hole, the void at the center, where we have lost touch with our souls, our spirit-with those sources of meaning and value that are not contingent or fleeting. The addict dreads and abhors the present moment she bends feverishly only toward the next time, the moment when her brain, infused with her drug of choice, will briefly experience itself as liberated from the burden of the past and the fear of the future-the two elements that make the present intolerable. “At the core of every addiction is an emptiness based in abject fear.

Gabor mate scattered minds pdf