 Three weeks on holidays. After an exhausting year of work, work, work. Three books chosen. (Or, let to be chosen.)
1. One from the classics: The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway. (Actually that was a re-read. I first read it during my school years. Different eras, different perspectives, totally different insights.) 2. One from my favorites authors: What I talk when I talk about running, Haruki Murakami. (Or, how a writer can blow your mind, even if he's talking about his running marathons) 3. One from a random pick (someone's suggestions, somewhere in the web): A tale for the time being, Ruth Ozeki. (It turned out to be my first book written by a Zen Buddhist priest which didn't seem at all to be written by a Zen Buddhist priest.)
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 A really wise insight from a 6-year-old talking about how she deals with scary thoughts, how she lets go from circumstances that are about to "close" and how she recognizes that time is necessary to heal these negative feelings and to make these thoughts go away. It's as if she has been trained in mindfulness.
Amazed, speechless and moved by this story. Share with everybody, it's worth spreading, really!  This is a story, a pattern which comes up very frequently when discussing with people: we all want to know whether we made the right decion or now. Or we are struggling hard in order to be 100% that we will make the right decision in a given upcoming conflicting situation.
Take for example, those who live as expats in a foreign country. They move to a new country for an unspecified period. They don't know whether it was a good decision or not. Some of them struggle with life there: don't like the place, the weather, the system, the people, the traditions, the mentality. And when comparing the new life with the former one, the latter is always the winner. At the same time, they keep asking themselves: “Did I make the right decision?" In the end, they may move back to their home country with a feeling of relief, but also bitterness regarding the time “wasted” there. Some other expats, though, adjust pretty well to the new place. They have anticipated there would be difficulties in the beginning, but they are ready to compromise and to try. And above all, they never ask themselves if they made the right decision. If we take the place as a stable factor, how come some of the expatriates feel they made the right decision while some others regret it and go back?  One of the most thrilling moments of my career was when I was working with an autistic child. Actually, not much of a child, Carl(*) was 21 years old. His mental age however was closer to that of a 4-5 year old.
His mother told me that from now on he would be my teacher and would teach me how to behave towards him. The short life we would share inside his room for a few hours a week would be the mirror of the bigger life that I have "out there", Interesting concept I thought, and at least a rather challenging assignment. To start with, one of my goals was to make eye contact with him. Taken for granted? No. Easy? Not at all.  It seems like an overwhelming - externally imposed - new trend obsession. All we hear or read around us is "How to be happy", "10 ways to be happy", "How to avoid people that are not happy", etc. But what is actually implied between the lines is "Try to be happy, because everyone else is happy, except you, and, actually: What's wrong with you?".
Happiness is moments. Happiness is something circumstantial and is attached to external situations. Something happens, something that you have expected for a long time, or something that you have never expected and it surprises you in a positive way, and Bang! you feel happy. But you cannot make your inner peace dependent from something "unpredictable" like that. You cannot define yourself by being happy or not happy, and be labeled by such an unfair stereotype.  While most people have heard of panic attacks, those who have not experienced it may find it hard to understand how frightening it can be. A panic attack is not just an intense feeling of anxiety, but rather a blast of terror that the brain produces only for truly frightening events. Panic attacks are also often associated with intense physical reactions, which often lead those experiencing them to falsely identify them as a serious health issue. Although they are relatively common, panic attacks are often not fully understood. Many suffer unnecessarily because they are unaware that what they are experiencing is mainly psychological rather than physical and that there is an effective treatment for it.
The Basics The first and most important thing to know about panic attacks is that they are not dangerous. Panic attacks are experienced as dangerous because they activate the emergency system in our brain, which thinks us in immediate danger. A bit like placing a fire alarm near a toaster, the security system in our brain releases false alarm during panic attacks. |
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