More threads by David Baxter PhD

Daniel E.

daniel@psychlinks.ca
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“Use distanced self-talk. One way to create distance when you’re experiencing chatter involves language. When you’re trying to work through a difficult experience, use your name and the second-person “you” to refer to yourself.”

“Engage in mental time travel. Another way to gain distance and broaden your perspective is to think about how you’ll feel a month, a year, or even longer from now. Remind yourself that you’ll look back on whatever is upsetting you in the future and it’ll seem much less upsetting.”

“Studies show that when people are going through a difficult experience, asking them to imagine how they’ll feel about it ten years from now, rather than tomorrow, can be another remarkably effective way of putting their experience in perspective. Doing so leads people to understand that their experiences are temporary, which provides them with hope.”

“One of the most chilling discoveries I’ve had in my career is that chatter doesn’t simply hurt people in an emotional sense; it has physical implications for our body as well, from the way we experience physical pain all the way down to the way our genes operate in our cells."

"When it comes to our inner voice, the game of dominoes provides a more appropriate metaphor. When we focus on a negative aspect of our experience, that tends to activate a related negative thought, which activates another negative thought, and another, and so on. These dominoes continue to hit one another in a game where there is a potentially infinite supply of tiles.”

― Ethan Kross, Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It
 
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Daniel E.

daniel@psychlinks.ca
Administrator

As the Buddha may or may not have said (or both, or neither): ‘There are only two mistakes one can make along the road to truth: not going all the way, and not starting.’
 
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Daniel E.

daniel@psychlinks.ca
Administrator
“It’s as if we are the sky—always blue, always clear, with the sun always shining. That is our never-wavering spiritual essence. And our human experience is weather. Weather (thought, emotion, behavior) rolls in and covers up the blue sky at times. The storms can be so violent that they are all we can see; the clouds can be so thick that we forget the sun is there. But the weather doesn’t disturb the sky. The sky contains the weather but is not affected by it, just like our spiritual nature contains our human experiences but is not affected by them. And the weather, like thought and emotion, is always temporary. Sometimes it comes and goes quickly. Other times, it lingers. Sometimes the weather is pleasant, and sometimes we curse it. But it is all surface-level and temporary.”

“This steady stream of experience that makes up your life is like a river. New thoughts, emotions, and other experiences are always flowing toward you and then away. The source of the river is something beyond the psychological, human realm. The nonphysical, spiritual side of life is the source of our physical, human experiences.”

― Amy Johnson, The Little Book of Big Change
 
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Daniel E.

daniel@psychlinks.ca
Administrator
“For me, becoming isn’t about arriving somewhere or achieving a certain aim. I see it instead as forward motion, a means of evolving, a way to reach continuously toward a better self. The journey doesn’t end.”

― Michelle Obama, Becoming
 

Daniel E.

daniel@psychlinks.ca
Administrator

Research suggests that self-compassion goes hand and hand with balanced and calmer parenting. When parents practice self-compassion, they’re better able to be gentle with themselves and feel more connected with others, as opposed to feeling isolated. This enables them to better handle difficult situations, such as divorce and other traumas, and feel less stress. That ability to be mindful and kind to themselves is then extended to the children, as they learn by example and get the benefit of a more relaxed and engaged parent.


Indeed, our capacity for self-compassion is often formed by our relationship with our own parents. The 2015 study by Pepping and colleagues also found that college students who remembered parents as cold and rejecting were more likely to feel anxious about their close relationships, and in turn, tended to have lower levels of self-compassion.
 

Daniel E.

daniel@psychlinks.ca
Administrator
“The thing that looks the most ordinary might end up being the thing that leads you to victory.”'

“As Thoreau wrote, ‘It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.”

― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library
 
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Daniel E.

daniel@psychlinks.ca
Administrator
"I have good news and I have bad news: The bad news is that there is no key to the universe. The good news is that the door has never been locked."

“The world is in serious condition largely due to our conditioning to be serious. Seriously.”

~ Swami Beyondananda
 
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Daniel E.

daniel@psychlinks.ca
Administrator
“A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.”

“Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.”

"Grief is different. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life. Virtually everyone who has ever experienced grief mentions this phenomenon of “waves.”"

“I could not count the times during the average day when something would come up that I needed to tell him. This impulse did not end with his death. What ended was the possibility of response.”

― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
 
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Daniel E.

daniel@psychlinks.ca
Administrator

"Who says you have to get married or have kids or work a job you hate that looks good on paper? Who says you have to look a certain way or do certain things with your free time that don’t appeal to you? Why are you restless in your life? What idea keeps popping up, begging for your attention? Are you living your truth? What’s in the way? What pile of shoulds are you buried under?"

~ Jill Andersen
 

Daniel E.

daniel@psychlinks.ca
Administrator
"The walking of which I speak has nothing in it akin to taking exercise … as the Swinging of dumb-bells or chairs; but is itself the enterprise and adventure of the day.”

"In my afternoon walk I would fain forget all my morning occupations and my obligations to society. But it sometimes happens that I cannot easily shake off the village…What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of something other than the woods?"

~ Thoreau, “Walking”
 
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Daniel E.

daniel@psychlinks.ca
Administrator
“Americans may have no identity, but they do have wonderful teeth.”

“Animals have no unconscious, because they have a territory. Men have only had an unconscious since they lost a territory.”

Jean Baudrillard
 
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