To be free, to come to terms with our lives, we have to have a direct experience of ourselves as we really are, warts and all.
The self is a mystery. In our efforts to pin it down or make it safe, we dissociate ourselves from our complete experience of whatever it is or is not.
The only way to find out where I was was to get out of the way and let myself happen.
The early parent-child environment, the balance between being and doing, lives on in the mind. Mindfulness offers an opportunity to see these patterns clearly. In seeing them, in bringing them into th...
It is always true to say when reviewing one of this patient’s sessions that if she could scream she would be well, wrote Winnicott. The great non-event of every session is screaming.6 The Burmese mast...
We reduce, concretize, or substantialize experiences or feelings, which are, in their very nature, fleeting or evanescent. In so doing, we define ourselves by our moods and by our thoughts. We do not...
Much of what we think of as relational knowing—joking around, expressing affection, and making friends5—is based in this kind of memory. We know how to do it without thinking about it. It does not req...
In mindfulness meditation, the self that needs protection is put into neutral. The observing self slips into the space between the ego and the dissociated aspects of the personality and observes from...
Although there are occasions when it is more pronounced and awful and occasions when it is actually horrific, trauma does not just happen to a few unlucky people. It is the bedrock of our biology.