Julie Smith Quotes

Thoughts are not facts. They are a mix of opinions, judgements, stories, memories, theories, interpretations, and predictions about the future.

Our life is one, big proverbial coin toss.

The thing about the human brain is that, when you believe something, the brain will scan the environment for any signs that the belief is true.

Thoughts are not facts. They are suggestions offered up to us by the brain to help us make sense of the world.

When we focus on trying to fix the problem, it is easy to underestimate the power of simply being there.

you have to get to work being your own coach instead of your own worst critic.

Once," he says, "I was flying to California on the Fourth of July." She turns her head, just slightly. "It was a clear night, and you could see all the little fireworks displays along the way, these tiny flares going off below, one town after another.

Emotions are your brain’s attempt to explain and attach meaning to what is going on in your world and your body.

The more work we do on building self-awareness and resilience when all is well, the better able we are to face life’s challenges when they come our way.

It reminds us that our mood is not fixed and it does not define who we are; it is a sensation we experience.

When we feel anxious about something, the most natural human response is to avoid it. We know that if we stay away, we’ll feel safe, for now. But avoidance not only maintains anxiety, it makes it worse over time.

I ask is there anything with a little kick to drink. And this old lady says to me, We don’t approve of alcohol. And I says, Well, ma’am, we need to remember Jesus did turn water to wine. And she says, And we’re none too crazy about that stunt, neither.

...the world is a blade and dread is hope cut open and spread inside out.

But humans are not built to be in a constant happy state. We are built to respond to the challenges of survival.

Physically moving your body can help to shift your mind when it is otherwise very difficult.

From every mountain side Let Freedom ring.

we have to focus on making good decisions, not perfect decisions. A good decision is one that moves you in the direction you want to go.

Something that I have come to realize over the years of working as a psychologist is how much people struggle with low mood and never tell a soul.

Confident is not the same as comfortable.

Wild mushrooms and carpets of moss and bumblebees turning figure eights in the slashes of sun in the woods, as if they too are stupefied by the beauty of the place.

You might notice that you feel the need for more reassurance from others when your mood is low. If you don’t get that extra reassurance you might automatically assume that they are thinking negatively about you. But that is a bias, and it is quite possible that you are your worst critic.

At this point, even Jesus and Satan just wish you’d choose a fucking side.

Procrastination is something everyone does. It’s when we put something off because the job we need to do triggers a stress reaction, or some other feeling that is aversive.

wyoming forever. You could wyom all day and not make any progress. To wyom was to go from nowhere to nowhere. Through nowhere. To see nothing. To do nothing but sit. You turn on the radio and wyom through the dial slowly, carefully in search of a sliver of civilization only to find a man talking about the price of stock animals and feed. You listen to a dour preacher wyoming about your bored and dying and wyoming soul.

She is proof that there is nothing that cannot happen to someone. That the world doesn't need permission, that there is no novel evil it won't embrace.

So don’t concentrate on sleep, concentrate on relaxation, rest and calm. Your brain will do the rest.

When outbreaths are longer and more forceful than inbreaths, this slows the heart rate and calms the body.

Feeling down is more likely to reflect unmet needs than a brain malfunction.

When you are low on energy, the chance of exercising goes down, along with your mood. Low mood gives you the urge to do the things that make mood worse.

Just as thoughts are not facts, feelings are not facts either. Emotions are information, but when that information is powerful, intense and loud, as emotions can be, then we are more vulnerable to believing in them as a true reflection of what is going on. I feel it therefore it must be a fact. Emotional reasoning is a thought bias that leads us to use what we feel as evidence for something to be true, even when there might be plenty of evidence to suggest otherwise.

If we associate failure with unworthiness, then starting anything new is going to feel overwhelming and procrastination will be front and centre. We protect ourselves from the psychological threat of shame by sabotaging the process before it gets started.

If we don’t do the work to develop self-acceptance, we set ourselves up to live a life in which we may need constant reassurance, get trapped in jobs we hate or relationships that cause us harm, or find ourselves living with resentment.

We naturally look for evidence that confirms our beliefs. We then experience what we believe, even when there is evidence to suggest otherwise.

There is a period in which we have to grind, doing things that matter to us, even when we don’t feel like it, in order to re-engage with the pleasure we used to feel.

Grief is a normal part of human experience. It is a necessary process to go through when we experience the loss of someone or something that we loved, needed, felt connected to and that held meaning in our life.

Getting better at relationships does not mean learning how to get the other person to do or be what you want them to be. In couples therapy, you can work on your relationship together. But you can also work on your relationships by understanding your own individual needs and patterns and the cycles you tend to get stuck in.

Allowing all thoughts to be present, but choosing which ones we give our time and attention to, can have a powerful impact on our emotional experience.

Every time we say no to something because of fear, we reconfirm our belief that it wasn’t safe or that we couldn’t handle it. Every time we cut something out of our lives because of fear, life shrinks a little.

Anything that you link to your self-worth can give rise to shame. In order to build and maintain a sense of self-worth, we need to understand that our worthiness as a human being is not dependent on living mistake-free.

Mess with Texas. No live human being could mess with Texas. If you succeed in messing with Texas, it's a sure bet you're as dead as a Junebug in July.

Chromed long-haulers glinted like showgirls among logging trucks caked in oatmealy mud, white exhaust thrashing flamelike in the wind from their silvery stacks.

The one person you most need the approval of is you.

How we think is not the whole picture. Everything we do and don’t do influences our mood too.

The thoughts we spend time with affect how we feel, but how we feel also has an effect on the thought patterns that come up.

If you had lived with the meaning and purpose that you chose, how would you behave day to day? What would you work hard on? What would you let go? What would you commit to, even if you might not be able to complete it? Exploring death in that way can help us get clear on what matters now.

Not all low mood is unidentified dehydration, but when dealing with mood it is essential to remember that it’s not all in your head. It’s also in your body state, your relationships, your past and present, your living conditions and lifestyle. It’s in everything you do and don’t do, in your diet and your thoughts, your movements and memories. How you feel is not simply a product of your brain.

Describe any significant events that happened. What thoughts did you have at the time? How did that way of thinking impact on how you felt? Describe any emotions you noticed. What triggered those emotions? What urges did you have? How did you respond to the feeling? What were the consequences of your response?

How trout looked in that water, brown and wavering and glinting all the colors there were and maybe some that didn’t really exist on the color wheel, a color, say, that was moss and brown-spotted like peppercorns and a single terra-cotta-colored stone and a flash of sunlight all at once. That color existed in the water here.

Adam Smith FRSE (baptised June 5, 1723 O.S. / June 16 N.S. – July 17, 1790) was a Scottish moral philosopher and a pioneering political economist. He is also the founder of economics. One of the key figures of the intellectual movement known as the Scottish Enlightenment, he is known primarily as the author of two treatises: The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), and An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776). The latter was one of the earliest attempts to systematically study the historical development of industry and commerce in Europe, as well as a sustained attack on the doctrines of mercantilism. Smith's work helped to create the modern academic discipline of economics and provided one of the best-known intellectual rationales for free trade, capitalism, and libertarianism. Adam Smith is now depicted on the back of the Bank of England £20 note. Source: Wikipedia

Henry O. Sturges, born in England, March 2nd, 1563. Landed at Roanoke, July 27th, 1587. Friend to the American Revolution, present at the Battles of Trenton and Yorktown, staunch supporter of the North in its hour of need, adviser to presidents, a decorated soldier who distinguished himself in the trenches of the Great War, and member of the Union Brotherhood—a collective of vampires dedicated to preserving the freedom of man and his dominion over the earth.

When stress becomes sustained over long periods, our brain tends towards more habitual behaviours that demand less energy. Our ability to control our impulses, remember information and make decisions becomes impaired. Over time, our immune system is affected.

Burnout is a term used to describe the response to excessive and prolonged stress at work, although paid employment is not the only environment in which we can experience burnout. Anyone in a caring role, parenting role or volunteering role may also experience burnout.

A minute ago it was June. Now the weather is September. The crops are high, about to be cut, bright, golden, November? unimaginable. Just a month away. The days are still warm, the air in the shadows sharper. The nights are sooner, chillier, the light a little less each time. Dark at half-past seven. Dark at quarter past seven, dark at seven. The greens of the trees have been duller since August, since July really. But the flowers are still coming. The hedgerows are still humming. The shed is already full of apples and the tree's still covered in them. The birds are on the powerlines. The swifts left week ago. They're hundreds of miles from here by now, somewhere over the ocean.

It took only three years for Jonathan Papelbon to surpass Bill Campbell, Lee Smith, Tom Gordon, Sparky Lyle, Derek Lowe, Jeff Reardon, Ellis Kinder, and Dick Radatz as he climbed the franchise leader board into second place all-time for saves. Papelbon closed out 2008 with 113 career saves—and on July 1, 2009, with his 20th save of the season he surpassed Bob Stanley to become the all-time franchise leader in saves.

What are the first signs for you that emotional discomfort is present? Is it a behaviour? Do you recognize your blocking or protective behaviours? Where do you feel the emotion in your body? What thoughts are there? What beliefs are you buying into about this situation? What effect is that having on you?

Pete slept too, his chin resting on his chest. He dreamed as well. A diamond turned on his forehead. A tree. He was a landscape. He was covered with trees. He was the Yaak. He was Glacier. He was all the tremendous valleys of western Montana, cloud shadows grazing over him. Storm fronts broke against his nose. He was sparsely populated. He was a city. He teemed with highways and lights. He dreamed he had a sister, a beautiful girl, and in the dream he reasoned out that the girl was Rachel and what he was actually dreaming was a spirit inside of his, a sibling she’d never had, a son. He dreamed that we all contain so many masses and that people are simply potentialities, instances, cases. That all of life can be understood as casework. That DFS was a kind of priesthood.

Charles Snow had been as spiritually curious as a fence post, and Pete doubted that his father had ever changed in any meaningful way, even after Pete’s mother died. But there was an aptness to his late conversion, as though he always knew that at the end of his life he’d have to do something to avoid going to hell.

Dissociation can be interpreted as an “emergency defense,” or a “shut off mechanism.”[6] According to Allen and Smith,[6] it is understood as an attempt by the individual to “prevent overwhelming flooding of consciousness at the time of trauma.” It is argued that the individual subconsciously cannot tolerate being present emotionally during the trauma but cannot control the situation, and therefore protects him- or herself from experiencing it in the moment via dissociation.

Dealing with emotion is much the same as standing in the waves. When we try to stop feelings in their tracks, we easily get knocked off our feet and find ourselves in trouble, struggling to catch a breath and work out which way is up. When we allow the emotion to wash over us, it rises, peaks and descends, taking its natural course.

Thoughts are not facts. They are guesses, stories, memories, ideas and theories.

There are thousands of potential alternatives to the story my mind has offered as an explanation for this.

The words we use can powerfully determine the meaning of a situation and our approach to it.

Emotions are real and valid, but they are not facts. They are a guess.

Here are a few tips on how to establish a new habit: Make the new behaviour as easy as possible to do, especially in moments when you might not feel like taking action.

So keep it small. Keep it consistent. Slow change is sustainable change.

It was something about all the stupid stuff Torian wouldn’t have to do anymore—like put up with asshole tourists who peed on your house at Mardi Gras.

On Friday, the thirteenth of July, I gave a reading in memory of Jim Morrison on the roof of underground filmmaker Jack Smith’s loft at Greene Street and Canal.

You gotta believe. You can’t just go through life acting like there are answers to every—

Maybe it was the state of childhood to not question and fear everything, it’d been so long, Pete couldn’t remember.

When it comes to thoughts, attention is power.

What would I do if I was at my best?

Stop!’, quickly followed by physical movement, such as standing up and moving away from the position you are in.

Therefore, doing anything positive, however small, is a healthy step in the direction you want to go.

The things you do most of the time become your comfort zone. So, if you want to feel less anxious about something, do it as often as you can.

Self-compassion, on the other hand, treating yourself with kindness, respect, honesty and encouragement after a failure, is associated with increased motivation and better outcomes

Individuals take home just one task at a time and focus on that. We can only focus on one thing at a time and we only have limited ability to do things that we don’t feel like doing.

In acceptance, the new reality is still not OK. It is still not as we want it to be. But we begin to take on the new reality, listen to our needs, open up to new experiences and make connections.

When it comes to tackling low mood, we have to focus on making good decisions, not perfect decisions. A good decision is one that moves you in the direction you want to go. It doesn't have to catapult you there.

So what does help when positive change demands that we resist temptation? One of the biggest factors is managing stress. The physiology of self-control is optimal when stress is low and heart-rate variability is high.

The act of getting those thoughts and feelings out on to the page can help to unravel some of what is going on in your mind and body. It is through the processing of those painful feelings that the work of grieving is done.

Focus on making good decisions, not perfect ones. ‘Good enough’ steers you towards real change. Perfectionism causes decision-making paralysis, whereas improving your mood demands that you make decisions and take action. Keep changes small and sustainable. When someone is down, we show them kindness because we know it is what they need. So, if you are committed to managing your mood and overall mental health, commit to practising self-compassion.

Around them the stubbled land was marked off by plaques and signs that explained to visitors what had happened here on a long-ago July day not unlike this one. But Peter already knew all they said and more. He looked around at the people with their noses tucked in brochures and guidebooks, and those trailing, sheeplike, after tour guides and park employees. He was used to feeling somewhat out of place most everywhere he went--at school or the barbershop, even at home, but here, where he knew everything, all the names and dates and facts, he somehow seemed to fit, and the knowledge of this welled up inside him. It was like he'd been born a blue flower in a field full of red ones and had only now been plunked down in a meadow so blue it might as well have been the ocean.

Feelings are often accompanied by urges. Those urges are suggestions, nudges, persuasions telling us to try this or that to relieve the discomfort that we feel or to seek the reward that we anticipate. While those urges can be powerful, we don’t have to do what they say.

the reservation population turned out. As Smith walked the horse by, an ancient Indian leaned up and looked the horse over. “Racehorse?” he said. Smith nodded. “Looks like a cow pony to me.”1 Smith was pleased. The rumors followed them west. The backstretch at Hollywood was thick with stories, chief among them that Seabiscuit was lame. The stewards listened and worried that they would be burned by Seabiscuit as Belmont and Suffolk Downs had been. They had some reason to be wary. Earlier in the meet, a much-anticipated meeting between Kentucky Derby winner Lawrin and Preakness winner Dauber had to be canceled at the last moment when Dauber suffered a minor injury. The event had been traumatic for the Hollywood Park officials and seemed to make them overly concerned about Smith. On July 11, 1938, Smith walked Seabiscuit onto the track for his first workout at Hollywood. The trainer didn’t like the looks of the track, which was so deep and crumbly that it was playing at least a second slower than usual.2 “It looked like they were trying to grow corn on the track,” he said.3

In the short term, adrenaline gives our immune function a boost to help fight bacterial and viral infections. But in the longer term, over-production of adrenaline and abnormal patterns of cortisol are linked with shorter life expectancy (Kumari et al., 2011). When adrenaline is repeatedly propping up our immune system through chronic stress and then we stop and the adrenaline goes down, so does the immune system. This is why you often hear of people who work incredibly hard around the clock for months on end and when they finally stop to take a holiday they almost immediately fall ill.

That did it. Mackenzie was seething. Someone suggested that mercenaries be sent over to the Howard barn to forcibly haul Smith into the office. Setting that popular idea aside, the stewards fired the leg-weary Greenberg back to the barn again, bearing yet another message. “Seabiscuit will either be a positive starter tomorrow, or we will refuse his entry entirely.” A few minutes later, Greenberg dragged himself back to the offices with Smith’s counterdemand: No one was to show up at his barn asking to examine the horse. The stewards complied, and Greenberg stumbled back to the Howard barn. In late morning, the administrative office door swung open. The officials looked up, expecting to see Greenberg. It was Smith. The stewards sat blinking at him. “All right,” Smith said. “Take the ‘doubtful starter’ off the blank. Seabiscuit will run all right.” Back at the barn, resting his sore legs, Greenberg saw Smith laughing. “The madder they got, the better he liked it,” Greenberg remembered. “He just done that for bein’ onery.” On July 16 a record sixty thousand people pressed into Hollywood Park to see Seabiscuit try for the Gold Cup, while millions more crowded around radio sets to hear NBC’s national

There was a time with his wife on this river or a river just like it, it can't be this river, but in his memory it is this one. A time on a wash just like this where he lay shirtless with her shivering in the August night, jeans pasted dark and wet to his knocking legs, his torso white to glowing in the moonlight. Her hair tendriled and framed about her face like an outlandish black tattoo. Her wet dress like a sleeve of molting skin, which of a sort it had been that whole night in their dancing. Her heart in its red and white cage knocking just inches from his own, like two young prisoners tapping out simpleton Morse I am here I am here I am here. Here I am for your pleasure for you forever. On a river like this where he impregnated her. A river promise too, he said I love you I love you. Seventeen years old. A pleasure so total that even then he knew he had mortgaged years to her and he did not care.

the feeling does not arrive spontaneously, we need to create it through action. Doing nothing feeds the lethargy and that ‘can’t be bothered’ feeling and makes it worse. Motivation is a wonderful by-product of action. It’s that great feeling you get when you are on your way out of the gym, not on your way in.

When we get caught in self-criticism and shame, we feel inadequate, defective and inferior. When we feel that way we want to hide, get smaller, disappear. It produces urges to escape and avoid, rather than to dust ourselves off and try again. In fact, it is so painful that it induces strong urges to block that feeling, which is risky for anyone living with addiction.

When anxiety is triggered, you start breathing more quickly. This is your body’s way of getting in extra oxygen to fuel the survival response. You feel as though you cannot catch your breath. So you breathe faster with rapid, shallow breaths, then you have an excess of oxygen in your system. If you slow your breathing down, you can calm the body and, in turn, slow your breathing. Not only this, but if you can extend the outbreath so that it is longer or more vigorous than the inbreath, this helps to slow your heart rate down. When the pounding heart comes down, so does the anxiety response. Some people like to count the breaths when doing an extended outbreath, such as breathing in for a count of 7 and out for a count of 11, or a variation that works for you.

Anything that increases stress is going to have a negative impact on our ability to make wise choices for our future. Stress increases the likelihood that we will instead act based on how we feel right now and sabotage our goals. So if you are sleep-deprived, depressed, anxious or not eating well, your heart-rate variability goes down, along with your chances of sticking to your goals.

Try writing down those thoughts and narratives. What can they tell you about what you are afraid of? What behaviours tend to follow a strong emotion? Do those behaviours help you in the short-term? What is their longer-term impact? Ask a trusted friend to go over the story with you and help you identify any biases or misunderstandings. Explore with them the different perspectives you might have.

Solemn three-day fasts, which were instituted by Adhemar of Le Puy, were decreed after an earthquake which took place on 30 December 1097, before the battle of Antioch on 28 June 1098, before an ordeal undergone by Peter Bartholomew on 8 April 1099 and before the procession round Jerusalem on 8 July 1099. These fasts certainly made an impression on the crusaders; they could hardly have failed to have done so, since they can only have made their hunger worse. It was reported that during their fast at Antioch Turks came up to walls with loaves of white bread, with which they tempted and mocked the starving men within. The achievement of the crusaders becomes even more remarkable — in fact it is quite incredible - when one considers that soldiers already weakened by starvation, who certainly appreciated die importance of taking food before battle since they took care to give their horses extra rations, deliberately fasted before their more important engagements. One wonders how they managed to fight at all.

did I do that?” She reached over and took two cigarettes from the pack and lit one for him and handed it to him and then one for herself. She got out of the bed and walked naked into the hall and returned with a bottle. He felt the force of this uncanny tableau. As though they had no child. As though this were a different version of things. He took a small comfort that somewhere such an iteration as this one existed, where Rachel had never been born and the only damage he and Beth did was to each other. “I was already gone,” Pete said.

Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common.—The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth July is yours, not mine. * * * I left Ashton Villa and began my trek to Galveston’s Old Central Cultural Center, about a half mile away from Ashton Villa. The building was formerly part of Central High School, which

Bring to mind a recent memory of a failure or setback. Then work through the following exercise. Notice what emotions are brought up by that memory and where you feel them in your body. How did the self-criticism sound? What words and phrases came up and how did they influence how you felt? How did you then respond to the feelings? Bring to mind someone that you love or respect. If they experienced the same failure, how might you have responded to them differently? Why would you have shown them that respect? How would you want them to perceive the setback in order to get them back on track?

Questions to explore: If you were to look back on this next chapter of your life and feel proud and content with how you faced life’s challenges, how would you be approaching daily life? What would the next chapter look like? In your answer try to focus on your own choices, actions and attitude, not other people or events that are out of your control. Try to consider how you would approach life, whatever happens. What do you want to stand for in your relationship with yourself, your health and personal growth? What is important to you about these? What kind of person do you want to be for the people in your life? How do you want to interact with them and contribute to their lives? How do you want the people in your life to feel when you are around? What do you want to represent in your circle of friends and family? If you only get to live once, what impact do you want to have while you are here? If no one knew how you spent your time, would you still be doing this? As you move forward through this day or this week, what is one value that you will try to bring to each choice and action? Examples here might be ‘Today I choose to bring enthusiasm/courage/compassion/curiosity to each experience, choice and action. I will do this by . . .

Pete realized that to Pearl, Satan had staged the world in this and every ancient particular. Pete imagined what it would feel like to believe such a thing, to see the very Devil ranging about the Earth like an art director, crafting fictions in the schists and coal seams and limestone. All to cast doubt on the Bible’s timeline. All for the harvest of lost souls. Maybe it would be worth it for the Devil. You could almost picture it. Almost. You could almost believe a book more real than the real, more actual and relevant than terra firma and all the dull laws that govern it. “You know, Jeremiah,” Pete said, “if I believed the things you did, I’d act at least as batshit as you do.

We were scarecrows in blue uniforms. After a grand total of five days of blackboard instruction and fifty rounds at the NYPD firing range, my new police academy classmates and I were standing out on the sidewalks of central Brooklyn pretending to be police officers. They gave us badges. They gave us handcuffs. They gave us guns—standard police-issue Smith & Wesson .38 Specials. They told us, “Good luck.” In early July 1966, riots had broken out in East New York, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and Brownsville, Brooklyn. Hundreds of angry young men were roaming the streets and throwing bottles and rocks. Already they had injured police officers and attempted to flip over a radio car. On one corner, police found eighteen Molotov cocktails. The borough commander was calling for reinforcements—and fast.

it is the end of july and the idle breeze of gentle childhood befogs my mind once more, as the foreign dull heat holds my body so close i feel it’s scarce and quiet breathing brush against my stomach. i have not written since paris and i feel true in my youth at last. the sun strips me of my fatigued masquerading while summer feeds me plump peaches and wrinkly with ripeness figs ; softly reciting the writings of sylvia plath and patti smith. my bare feet greedily absorb the coolness of the cerulean tiles carpeting the guest bathroom floor. the sea covers my ears it’s waves plaiting my hair with the pacific touch of a mother lulling me to a somnolent state as the lenient light of the afternoon blinks through my fluttering eyes and the sparse flare of wind relieves the creases between my eyebrows.