Mentally Challenged Quotes

Dead kids are put on pedestals, but mentally ill kids get hidden under the rug.

Whenever I think of something but can't think of what it was I was thinking of, I can't stop thinking until I think I'm thinking of it again. I think I think too much.

The scariest thing of all is never knowing what you're suddenly going to believe.

One of the things that baffles me (and there are quite a few) is how there can be so much lingering stigma with regards to mental illness, specifically bipolar disorder. In my opinion, living with manic depression takes a tremendous amount of balls. Not unlike a tour of Afghanistan (though the bombs and bullets, in this case, come from the inside). At times, being bipolar can be an all-consuming challenge, requiring a lot of stamina and even more courage, so if you're living with this illness and functioning at all, it's something to be proud of, not ashamed of. They should issue medals along with the steady stream of medication.

You see demons in the eyes of the world, and the world sees a bottomless pit in yours.

The fear of not living is a deep, abiding dread of watching your own potential decompose into irredeemable disappointment when 'should be' gets crushed by what is. Sometimes I think it would be easier to die than to face that, because 'what could have been' is much more highly regarded than 'what should have been.' Dead kids are put on pedestals, but mentally ill kids get hidden under the rug.

By freeze-framing the image of our lifestyle, by stopping our mental clock at times and letting time flow, 'psychological' time can replace 'chronological' time and our human condition can be called into question. This opens the door to a new challenge and a new future. ( "Svp "Arrêt sur image" )

We love being mentally strong, but we hate situations that allow us to put our mental strength to good use.

Never believe for a second that your weak, within all of us we have a reserve of inner hidden strength,

I'm staying," Henry said, annoyed. "Why?" "Because, if I leave, it would be like abandoning two mentally challenged people in a nuclear waste dump.

Don't live the same day over and over again and call that a life. Life is about evolving mentally, spiritually, and emotionally.

They all think medicine should be magic, and they become mad at me when it's not.

Lestat and Louie feel sorry for vampires that sparkle in the sun. They would never hurt immortals who choose to spend eternity going to high school over and over again in a small town ---- anymore than they would hurt the physically disabled or the mentally challenged. My vampires possess gravitas. They can afford to be merciful.

The current ruling ontology denies any possibility of a social causation of mental illness. The chemico-biologization of mental illness is of course strictly commensurate with its depoliticization. Considering mental illness an individual chemico-biological problem has enormous benefits for capitalism. First, it reinforces Capital’s drive towards atomistic individualization (you are sick because of your brain chemistry). Second, it provides an enormously lucrative market in which multinational pharmaceutical companies can peddle their pharmaceuticals (we can cure you with our SSRIs). It goes without saying that all mental illnesses are neurologically instantiated, but this says nothing about their causation. If it is true, for instance, that depression is constituted by low serotonin levels, what still needs to be explained is why particular individuals have low levels of serotonin. This requires a social and political explanation; and the task of repoliticizing mental illness is an urgent one if the left wants to challenge capitalist realism.

The day we are jettisoned back to the spring of our lives can be disorienting and emotionally challenging. By navigating the transformational milestones, a mental spark can discharge a fulguration in our memory and provoke confusion of existential questions about the nature of our identity, personal growth, and time perception. (“Paper Boats Forever »)

Everything feels right with the world... ...and the sad thing is that I know it's a dream. I know it must soon end, and when it does I will be thrust awake into a place where either I'm broken, or the world is broken.

People who are diagnosed as having "generalized anxiety disorder" are afflicted by three major problems that many of us experience to a lesser extent from time to time. First and foremost, says Rapgay, the natural human inclination to focus on threats and bad news is strongly amplified in them, so that even significant positive events get suppressed. An inflexible mentality and tendency toward excessive verbalizing make therapeutic intervention a further challenge.

God has a way of picking a “nobody” and turning their world upside down, in order to create a “somebody” that will remove the obstacles they encountered out of the pathway for others.

three decisions that we all control each moment of our lives: what to focus on, what things mean, and what to do in spite of the challenges that may appear to limit us.

Don Quixote - the famous literary madman - fought windmills. People think he saw giants when he looked at them, but those of us who've been there know the truth. He saw windmills, just like everyone else - but he believed they were giants. The scariest thing of all is never knowing what you're suddenly going to believe.

Thus it can be seen that mental health is based on a certain degree of tension, the tension between what one has already achieved and what one still ought to accomplish, or the gap between what one is and what one should become. Such a tension is inherent in the human being and therefore is indispensable to mental well-being. We should not, then, be hesitant about challenging man with a potential meaning for him to fulfill. It is only thus that we evoke his will to meaning from its state of latency. I consider it a dangerous misconception of mental hygiene to assume that what man needs in the first place is equilibrium or, as it is called in biology "homeostasis", i.e., a tensionless state. What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task. What he needs is not the discharge of tension at any cost but the call of a potential meaning waiting to be fulfilled by him.

I felt like that character in Flowers for Algernon. Not Charlie, the lady teacher from the college who realizes, 'I've got to stop dry-humping this mentally challenged guy!

Without being push to the wall, we will have remained in our comfortable zone. But this circumstance challenges us to find the courage to move on.

I begin to wonder if David was like me. Seeing monsters everywhere and realizing there aren't enough slingshots in the world to get rid of them.

If your mind is not strong enough to face the challenges that a business may bring, it’s very easy to fall in the clutches of despair and anxiety. Meditation can help you take your mental health into your own hands.

Even a mentally challenged shark would figure out that sea turtles did not wear boxer shorts printed in flying piggies, and no sea turtle would be yattering streams of obscenities between chain-smoker gasps of breath.

Do. The. Work. Every day, you have to do something you don’t want to do. Every day. Challenge yourself to be uncomfortable, push past the apathy and laziness and fear. Otherwise, the next day you’re going to have two things you don’t want to do, then three and four and five, and pretty soon, you can’t even get back to the first thing. And then all you can do is beat yourself up for the mess you’ve created, and now you’ve got a mental barrier to go along with the physical barriers.

teaching kids that failures, insults, and painful experiences will do lasting damage is harmful in and of itself. Human beings need physical and mental challenges and stressors or we deteriorate.

We have to have a sharp mind, keen insight, and believe we are capable of anything that mentally and physically challenges us.

I know exactly what he means. I had overheard Poirot talking to my parents. He was using words like "psychosis" and "schizophrenic". Words that people feel they have to whisper, or not repeat at all. The Mental-Illness-That-Must-Not-Be-Named.

If you view everything through the lens of fear, then you tend to stay in retreat mode. You can just as easily see a crises or problem as a challenge, an opportunity to prove your mettle, the chance to strengthen and toughen yourself, or a call to collective action. By seeing it as a challenge, you will have converted this negative into a positive purely by a mental process that will result in positive action as well. 

Not only is he mentally challenged, all he has is a couple of scary fangs and absolutely no idea what kind of fire is in this furnace.

You have to prepare physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually to conquer any mountain.

Not all activities are equal in this regard. Those that involve genuine concentration—studying a musical instrument, playing board games, reading, and dancing—are associated with a lower risk for dementia. Dancing, which requires learning new moves, is both physically and mentally challenging and requires much concentration. Less intense activities, such as bowling, babysitting, and golfing, are not associated with a reduced incidence of Alzheimer’s. (254)

if half the cells inside of you are not you, doesn't that challenge the whole notion of me as a singular pronoun, let alone as the author of my fate?

It's kind of like religion. It gives us comfort to believe we have defined something that is, by its very nature, indefinable. As to whether or not we've gotten it right, well, it's all a matter of faith.

You must realize from your studies, Miss Feng, with the complexity of our MEG society, algorithms have become indispensable for analysis and decision making in our data-saturated environment. Digitization creates information beyond the processing capacity of Human intelligence, yet provides a stable mental environment powered by a set of logical rules. That is how we keep order in Toronto MEG.” “Excuse me, Mr. Zhang,” Ke Hui said, somewhat uncomfortably, “but the invisibility of algorithmic systems and the obscurity of their operations hint at a society where algorithms do not reflect the public interest. Issues involving ethics and values I mean, from my reading of MEG history, challenge the assumptions of the neutrality of algorithmic systems. Would this not undermine democratic governance through reliance on technocratic resolutions?

Although he thinks he's awesome at them, Andrew really sucks at languages. Once, he tried to speak French to this woman who owned the C'est La Vie bakery back home, and she gave him a cookie because she thought he was mentally challenged. (Page 21)

Unless biblical literalism is challenged overtly in the Christian church itself, it will, in my opinion, kill the Christian faith. It is not just a benign nuisance that afflicts Christianity at its edges; it is a mentality that renders the Christian faith unbelievable to an increasing number of the citizens of our world. The

Eternity is the mentality for immortality. Make your mark; leave a positive legacy!

You see demons in the eyes of the world, and the world sees bottomless pit in yours.

For me, recovery from recovery was probably the most confusing time – the most lonely, frustrating and psychologically challenging time. It did not feel heroic and it was also incredibly tedious.

Challenges are part of life; We weaken our spirit, when we act in fear and lose hope. But we strengthen our spirit, when we fearlessly with faith and hope, rise up to meet and conquer the challenges.

It goes without saying that all mental illnesses are neurologically instantiated, but this says nothing about their causation. If it is true, for instance, that depression is constituted by low serotonin levels, what still needs to be explained is why particular individuals have low levels of serotonin. This requires a social and political explanation; and the task of repoliticizing mental illness is an urgent one if the left wants to challenge capitalist realism.

Lincoln's story confounds those who see depression as a collection of symptoms to be eliminated. But it resonates with those who see suffering as a potential catalyst of emotional growth. "What man actually needs," the psychiatrist Victor Frankl argued,"is not a tension-less state but rather the striving and struggling of a worthwhile goal." Many believe that psychological health comes with the relief of distress. But Frankl proposed that all people-- and particularly those under some emotional weight-- need a purpose that will both draw on their talents and transcend their lives. For Lincoln, this sense of purpose was indeed the key that unlocked the gates of a mental prison. This doesn't mean his suffering went away. In fact, as his life became richer and more satisfying, his melancholy exerted a stronger pull. He now responded to that pull by tying it to his newly defined sense of purpose. From a place of trouble, he looked for meaning. He looked at imperfection and sought redemption.

When you react emotionally, it gives him a feeling of control. And if you react emotionally frequently, over time he will come to see you as less of a mental challenge. If he can’t predict how you’ll always react, you remain a challenge.

~Any feeling is both mental and physical~

One thing is certain: the arts keep you alive. They stimulate, encourage, challenge, and, most of all, guarantee a future free from boredom. They allow growth and even demand it in that time of life we call maturity but too often enter it with a childish faith that what we learned in youth is sustenance enough for the years when most men are mentally famished but won't admit it—or when they are apt to curb their hunger with the sops of complacency, security, and the assurance of death.

A woman imagines what she wants, and plans mentally for the transition. She gathers strength to prepare for the emotional challenges in her life that lie ahead. Conflicts try to break her stride but although she is filled with pain, she still walks with confidence, and with a smile on her face. When there is a world of distractions and difficult decisions to make, when a woman finds herself straying off the tracks, she will not feel defeated. She is courageous! She is victorious! She is a pioneer!

The stigma of mental illness is first and foremost a social justice issue!

A sense of humor is a serious business; and it isn't funny, not having one. Watch the humorless closely: the cocked and furtive way they monitor all conversation, their flashes of panic as irony or exaggeration eludes them, the relief with which they submit to the meaningless babble of unanimous laughter. The humorless can programme themselves to relish situations of human farce or slapstick — and that's about it. They are handicapped in the head, or mentally 'challenged', as Americans say (euphemism itself being a denial of humour). The trouble is that the challenge wins, every time, hands down. The humorless have no idea what is going on and can't make sense of anything at all.

Jesus had no trouble with the exceptions, whether they were prostitutes, drunkards, Samaritans, lepers, Gentiles, tax collectors, or wayward sheep. He ate with outsiders regularly, to the chagrin of the church stalwarts, who always love their version of order over any compassion toward the exceptions. Just the existence of a single mentally challenged or mentally ill person should make us change any of our theories about the necessity of some kind of correct thinking as the definition of “salvation.” Yet we have a history of excluding and torturing people who do not “think” right.

If you are a person with mental illness, the challenge is to find the life that's right for you. But in truth, isn't that the challenge for all of us, mentally ill or not? My good fortune is not that I've recovered from mental illness. I have not, nor will I ever. My good fortune lies in having found my life.

There's memory clutter, which reminds you of an important person, achievement, or event from your past. I think memory clutter often gathers in the homes of people with some degree of depression. And then there's "I might need it one day clutter, in which people hang on to stuff in anticipation of an imagined future. Among these folks, I've noticed a recurring theme of anxiety...Maybe it's possible that the stuff we own and obsess over is the physical manifestation of the mental health issues that challenge our minds. --p29.

Fabulous and fucked up. Absolutely right. That’s what we all are. It’s called being human. Let’s celebrate that, not fear it. And let’s never, ever feel ashamed when the challenges of life become too overwhelming and the fucked-up part gets into the driving seat. That is called being normal.

The tantalizing and compelling pursuit of mathematical problems offers mental absorption, peace of mind amid endless challenges, repose in activity, battle without conflict, “refuge from the goading urgency of contingent happenings," and the sort of beauty changeless mountains present to sense tried by the present-day kaleidoscope of events.

Each person entering our world brings either a contribution or destruction. Trying to be “always nice” is to invite certain disaster. Those with poisonous attitudes, strange opinions, and caustic conversations love to look for someone nice who will listen to them. They love to dump their verbal garbage into the mental factory of anyone willing to listen. A major challenge in life is for each person to learn the art of standing guard at the doorway of their mind. Carefully examine the credentials and authority of those seeking to enter within that place where your attitudes are formed.

No, they would not be happy to take my place at your side, cara mia, because I would promptly end their lives in a most unhappy way.’ ‘You are such a caveman, Julian. You look tall and elegant and princely, yet you have not matured beyond the cave.’ …’I have no intention of riding above caveman mentality,’ he growled in her ear, his breath teasing tendrils of hair and sending little flames dancing through her bloodstream. ‘There are so many benefits for the caveman.

Like a bee in a flower bed, the human brain naturally flits from one thought to the next. In the high-speed workplace, where data and headlines come thick and fast, we are all under pressure to think quickly. Reaction, rather than reflection, is the order of the day. To make the most of our time, and to avoid boredom, we fill up every spare moment with mental stimulation…Keeping the mind active makes poor use of our most precious resource. True, the brain can work wonders in high gear. But it will do so much more if given the chance to slow down from time to time. Shifting the mind into lower gear can bring better health, inner calm, enhanced concentration and the ability to think more creatively.

Sometimes the darkness beyond is not glorious at all, it truly is an absolute absence of light. A clawing, needy tar that pulls you down. You drown but you don't. It turns you to lead so you sink faster in its viscous embrace. It robs you of hope and even the memory of hope. It makes you think you've always felt like this, and there's no place to go but down, where it slowly, ravenously digests your will, distilling it into the ebony crude of nightmares. And you know the darkness beyond despair, just as intimately as you know the soaring heights. Because in this and all universes, there is balance. You can't have the one without facing the other. And sometimes you think you can take it because the joy is worth the despair, and sometimes you know you can't take it and how did you ever think you could? And there is the dance; strength and weakness, confidence and desolation.

Miracles can be found in the most unlikely of places. I found the light not by swimming to the surface, but by letting myself drown in the seas of my deepest fears. Not by eradicating the dark, but by embracing it. I realized that there is no such a thing as darkness, only light and the absence of it. It is there in the light of unconditional love that I finally found the freedom I had been searching for so long.

Carol Dweck, a prominent Stanford psychologist, has found that people who believe their intelligence is fixed and unchanging have a very difficult time learning. The moment these people experience any form of difficulty or negative feedback, they mentally break and give up. Conversely, people who believe their intelligence is fluid and malleable are far more likely to grow and change. They are clay that can be transformed through experience, especially challenging and new experiences.

Charles Francis Adams was singular for mental poise — absence of self-assertion or self-consciousness — the faculty of standing apart without seeming aware that he was alone — a balance of mind and temper that neither challenged nor avoided notice, nor admitted question of superiority or inferiority, of jealousy, of personal motives, from any source, even under great pressure.

Politicians in our times feed their clichés to television, where even those who wish to disagree repeat them. Television purports to challenge political language by conveying images, but the succession from one frame to another can hinder a sense of resolution. Everything happens fast, but nothing actually happens. Each story on televised news is ”breaking” until it is displaced by the next one. So we are hit by wave upon wave but never see the ocean. The effort to define the shape and significance of events requires words and concepts that elude us when we are entranced by visual stimuli. Watching televised news is sometimes little more than looking at someone who is also looking at a picture. We take this collective trance to be normal. We have slowly fallen into it. More than half a century ago, the classic novels of totalitarianism warned of the domination of screens, the suppression of books, the narrowing of vocabularies, and the associated difficulties of thought. In Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, published in 1953, firemen find and burn books while most citizens watch interactive television. In George Orwell’s 1984, published in 1949, books are banned and television is two-way, allowing the government to observe citizens at all times. In 1984, the language of visual media is highly constrained, to starve the public of the concepts needed to think about the present, remember the past, and consider the future. One of the regime’s projects is to limit the language further by eliminating ever more words with each edition of the official dictionary. Staring at screens is perhaps unavoidable, but the two-dimensional world makes little sense unless we can draw upon a mental armory that we have developed somewhere else. When we repeat the same words and phrases that appear in the daily media, we accept the absence of a larger framework. To have such a framework requires more concepts, and having more concepts requires reading. So get the screens out of your room and surround yourself with books. The characters in Orwell’s and Bradbury’s books could not do this—but we still can.

There were many pioneers who came before you that also felt a sense of hopelessness. They were judged because they were women. At times they felt helpless but that didn’t stop them from making their mark as they made changes in the world which people thought were impossible. They made themselves into believers because of their accomplishments. These pioneers did not have the technology and resources that we have today. However, they used what they were given, which was their God-given talent. “We will be heard, seen, and are untouchable.” The pioneer’s voices were rising louder, stronger, and their voices were heard as they made the impossible, possible. Their mentality was, “We will not be ignored. We are human and we should be created equally, just like men.” As they rose to the challenges they endured, their great strength of determination spoke without the need for words.

Truth makes little sense and has no real impact if it is merely a collection of abstract ideas. Truth that is living experience, on the other hand, is challenging, threatening, and transforming. The first kind of truth consists of information collected and added, from a safe distance, to our mental inventory. The second kind involves risking our familiar and coherent interpretation of the world -it is an act of surrender, of complete and embodied cognition that is seeing, feeling, intuiting, and comprehending all at once. Living truth leads us ever more deeply into the unknown territory of what our life is.

What are you watching? Is it comforting? I don’t have the bandwidth to give a fuck about anything not comforting to me most of the time. I know that’s “uncultured,” but also I don’t care because who are you, person challenging me? I want to watch Veep before bed because it makes me laugh, and I want to watch true crime documentaries, and I want to watch British actors in terrific costumes battling through emotions they weren’t even aware they had. That’s all. I’m tired. Find your comforting shit. Build your mental fort and hang out there.

The thing is very clear to us that behind every person or family, who or which is going through a difficulty, you say any kind of challenge in life then there are some obvious reasons behind the story – whether it’s poverty, illiteracy, addiction, abuse, unemployment, disability, mental illness, discrimination or anything else like that. So, for all these adverse situations, a social worker.

If you’ve ever really loved anybody, then you know what true love means. It means that you love them more than you love yourself. If you truly love someone, your love sees past their humanness. It embraces their whole being, including past wrongs and current shortcomings. It is like the unconditional love of a mother. A mother devotes every moment of her life to a child who is physically or mentally challenged. She thinks the child is beautiful. She doesn’t focus on the shortcomings; in fact, she doesn’t even see them as shortcomings. What if that is how God looks upon His creation? Then you’ve lost out if you’ve been told otherwise. Instead of being encouraged to feel completely protected, loved, honored, and respected by the Divine Force, you’ve been taught that you’re being judged. Because you’ve been taught that, you feel guilt and fear. But guilt and fear do not open your connection to the Divine; they only serve to close your heart.

Life is perpetually testing us not only by administering these "thousand natural shocks" but by making us choose among them. Rarely is the answer as easy and obvious as "cake." In the most challenging predicaments, perceived causality for an undesirable outcome, even if there was no clearer or better choice, can be a debilitating burden. We frequently pay a mental and emotional tax for freedom of choice.

What good is your reality, when justice fails and dishonesty is glossed over and the ones who keep faith suffer .... What good is your reality then?" " .... I never promised you a rose garden. I never promised you perfect justice .... and I never promised you peace or happiness .... The only reality I offer is challenge, and being well is being free to accept it or not at whatever level you are capable. I never promise lies, and the rose-garden world of perfection is a lie...and a bore, too!

  If your expectations are always those of someone content to live without physical challenge, then when it comes time for mental, moral, or emotional challenge you fail to meet it because you are out of practice. Meeting and overcoming obstacles are skills that can be honed, as opposed to talents with which we are born. The best way to prepare for the inevitable shit that life occasionally hands us all is to live in a way that prepares you for it. If you can treat personal tragedy like a heavy set of 20 squats, you'll do better than someone who has never met any challenge. Intentionally placing yourself in the position of having to complete a task when you don't know if you can is the single best way of preparing to be in that position unintentionally.

Humanity's "progress of knowledge" and the "evolution of consciousness" have too often been characterized as if our task were simply to ascend a very tall cognitive ladder with graded hierarchical steps that represent successive developmental stages in which we solve increasingly challenging mental riddles, like advanced problems in a graduate exam in biochemistry or logic. But to understand life and the cosmos better, perhaps we are required to transform not only our minds but our hearts. For the whole being, body and soul, mind and spirit, is implicated. Perhaps we must go not only high and far but down and deep. Our world view and cosmology, which defines the context for everything else, is profoundly affected by the degree to which all out faculties–intellectual, imaginative, aesthetic, moral, emotional, somatic, spiritual, relational–enter the process of knowing. How we approach "the other," and how we approach each other, will shape everything, including out own evolving self and the cosmos in which we participate.

Too often, poverty and deprivation get covered as events. That is, when some disaster strikes, when people die. Yet, poverty is about much more than starvation deaths or near famine conditions. It is the sum total of a multiplicity of factors. The weightage of some of these varies from region to region, society to society, culture to culture. But at the core is a fairly compact number of factors. They include not just income and calorie intake. Land, health, education, literacy, infant mortality rates and life expectancy are also some of them. Debt, assets, irrigation, drinking water, sanitation and jobs count too. You can have the mandatory 2,400 or 2,100 calories a day and yet be very poor. India’s problems differ from those of a Somalia or Ethiopia in crisis. Hunger—again just one aspect of poverty—is far more complex here. It is more low level, less visible and does not make for the dramatic television footage that a Somalia and Ethiopia do. That makes covering the process more challenging—and more important. Many who do not starve receive very inadequate nutrition. Children getting less food than they need can look quite normal. Yet poor nutrition can impair both mental and physical growth and they can suffer its debilitating impact all their lives. A person lacking minimal access to health at critical moments can face destruction almost as surely as one in hunger.

It was Freud's ambition to discover the cause of hysteria, the archetypal female neurosis of his time. In his early investigations, he gained the trust and confidence of many women, who revealed their troubles to him.Time after time, Freud's patients, women from prosperous, conventional families, unburdened painful memories of childhood sexual encounters with men they had trusted: family friends, relatives, and fathers. Freud initially believed his patients and recognized the significance of their confessions. In 1896, with the publication of two works, The Aetiology of Hysteria and Studies on Hysteria, he announced that he had solved the mystery of the female neurosis. At the origin of every case of hysteria, Freud asserted, was a childhood sexual trauma. But Freud was never comfortable with this discovery, because of what it implied about the behavior of respectable family men. If his patients' reports were true, incest was not a rare abuse, confined to the poor and the mentally defective, but was endemic to the patriarchal family. Recognizing the implicit challenge to patriarchal values, Freud refused to identify fathers publicly as sexual aggressors. Though in his private correspondence he cited "seduction by the father" as the "essential point" in hysteria, he was never able to bring himself to make this statement in public. Scrupulously honest and courageous in other respects, Freud falsified his incest cases. In The Aetiology of Hysteria, Freud implausibly identified governessss, nurses, maids, and children of both sexes as the offenders. In Studies in Hysteria, he managed to name an uncle as the seducer in two cases. Many years later, Freud acknowledged that the "uncles" who had molested Rosaslia and Katharina were in fact their fathers. Though he had shown little reluctance to shock prudish sensibilities in other matters, Freud claimed that "discretion" had led him to suppress this essential information. Even though Freud had gone to such lengths to avoid publicly inculpating fathers, he remained so distressed by his seduction theory that within a year he repudiated it entirely. He concluded that his patients' numerous reports of sexual abuse were untrue. This conclusion was based not on any new evidence from patients, but rather on Freud's own growing unwillingness to believe that licentious behavior on the part of fathers could be so widespread. His correspondence of the period revealed that he was particularly troubled by awareness of his own incestuous wishes toward his daughter, and by suspicions of his father, who had died recently. p9-10

To be a hero requires great moral courage. And each of us has an inner hero waiting to be expressed. We are all “heroes in training.” Our hero training is life, the daily circumstances that invite us to practice the habits of heroism: to commit daily deeds of kindness; to radiate compassion, starting with self-compassion; to bring out the best in others and ourselves; to sustain love, even in our most challenging relationships; to celebrate and exercise the power of our mental freedom.

Feminists believe that women should be protected from certain aspects of public life, including speech..... Feminists do not want to engage in aspects of life they disagree with. Instead, they want to silence what they don’t like through censorship and criminalisation. Feminists believe that women need protection from words. Finally, contemporary feminists do not believe that women are independent, free-thinking individuals. Feminists promote a cliquey, sisterhood mentality, but not through a collective and positive sharing of ideas. They’re the kind of group you’d encounter at school who would shun you if you weren’t wearing the right kind of hairband. Today’s feminism is opposed to criticism and nuance, refusing to allow women to form their own opinions or challenge preconceived ideas.

When a person internalizes a mental schema so thoroughly, and has become conditioned to it for so long, it becomes an integral part of their personality. So to attack the belief is to, literally, attack the person. This is why we see such a violent reaction to people’s political, religious, inter-social/inter-sexual, inter-gender, etc. expressions of belief – they perceive it as a personal attack, even when presented with irrefutable, empirical evidence that challenges the veracity of those beliefs.

There are many forms of poverty: economic poverty, physical poverty, emotional poverty, mental poverty, and spiritual poverty. As long as we relate primarily to each other's wealth, health, stability, intelligence, and soul strength, we cannot develop true community. Community is not a talent show in which we dazzle the world with our combined gifts. Community is the place where our poverty is acknowledged and accepted, not as something we have to learn to cope with as best as we can but as a true source of new life. Living community in whatever form - family, parish, twelve-step program, or intentional community - challenges us to come together at the place of our poverty, believing that there we can reveal our richness.

Although most psychotherapeutic approaches "agree that therapeutic work in the 'here and how' has the greatest power in bringing about change" (Stern, 2004, p. 3), talk therapy has limited direct impact on maladaptive procedural action tendencies as they occur in the present moment. Although telling "the story" provides crucial information about the client's past and current life experience, treatment must address the here-and-now experience of the traumatic past, rather than its content or narrative, in order to challenge and transform procedural learning. Because the physical and mental tendencies of procedural learning manifest in present-moment time, in-the-moment trauma-related emotional reactions, thoughts, images, body sensations, and movements that emerge spontaneously in the therapy hour become the focal points of exploration and change.

Well I want something to do, to create, to achieve, to whatever.... Something I can’t get enough of. You know something that I can't wait to get up in the morning to do something I can't get enough of, something that brings me joy and makes my heart sing. It could be anything, could be more than one thing but something that grabs me. Even a job, if it grabs me so that I could hardly wait to get there. Something that makes me feel good, allows me to be me, gives me freedom to grow and expand, something that grasps my heart, my joy, my excitement and leads me down the path to more joyful things, exciting challenges and challenging things. Barely stopping to take a breath I continued. Need a new journey a new destination, I want to grow to be or become, tread a new path, see what I haven't seen be what I haven't been ask what I haven't asked dare to what I haven't dared to . . . I don't even think it is so much a physical thing or mental it's just sort of un-learning some of what I learned It’s being happy, while I am happy but I want something to do that creates even more. (..) Doing it for the joy of doing it not for any other reason; also I want it from and un-edited creativity free flowing something… I have some things that seem very interesting and somehow just don’t feel right almost like I’m taking the wrong path and yet there are other things that I could be doing like writing but it seems that it does not feel good to sit and write but yet some part of me seems to love it and something in me hates it sort of like it could be the thing for me to do and yet it might not be.

The medical profession's classic prescription for coping with such predicaments, Primum non nocere (First, do no harm), sounds better than it is. In fact, it fails to tell us precisely what we need to know: What is harm and what is help? However, two things about the challenge of helping the helpless are clear. One is that, like beauty and ugliness, help and harm often lie in the eyes of the beholder--in our case, in the often divergently directed eyes of the benefactor and his beneficiary. The other is that harming people in the name of helping them is one of mankind's favorite pastimes.

In his seminal book, Man’s Search for Meaning, the psychiatrist Victor Frankl described the essence of what has come to be known as an existential approach to the human condition with this metaphor: “If architects want to strengthen a decrepit arch,” he wrote, “they increase the load which is laid upon it, for thereby the parts are joined more firmly together.” It is similarly true, he said, that therapy aimed at fostering mental health often should lay increased weight on a patient, creating what he described as “a sound amount of tension through a reorientation toward the meaning of one’s own life.

Come to me, cara mia,come to me.You are mine.No one else will ever do for you.You want me with you. You need me.Feel the emptiness without me. Julian was implacable in his pursuit. He ruthlessly applied more pressure. Find me.Know that you are mine. You cannot bear another's touch, cara mia.You need me with you to fill the terrible emptiness.You are no longer happy and content without me. You must find me. He sent the imperious command, his entire focus bent on finding her mental channel. He did not stop until he was certain he had connected with her, that his words had penetrated any barriers separating them and found their way to her soul.

Cognitive science has something of enormous importance to contribute to human freedom: the ability to learn what our unconscious conceptual systems are like and how our cognitive unconscious functions. If we do not realize that most of our thought is unconscious and that we think metaphorically, we will indeed be slaves to the cognitive unconscious. Paradoxically, the assumption that we have a radically autonomous rationality as traditionally conceived actually limits our rational autonomy. It condemns us to cognitive slavery - to an unaware and uncritical dependence on our unconscious metaphors. To maximize what conceptual freedom we can have, we must be able to see through and move beyond philosophies that deny the existence of an embodied cognitive unconscious that governs most of our mental lives.

YOU SHOULD NOW be well on your way to using disputation, the prime technique for learned optimism, in your daily life. You first saw the ABC link—that specific beliefs lead to dejection and passivity. Emotions and actions do not usually follow adversity directly. Rather they issue directly from your beliefs about adversity. This means that if you change your mental response to adversity, you can cope with setbacks much better. The main tool for changing your interpretations of adversity is disputation. Practice disputing your automatic interpretations all the time from now on. Anytime you find yourself down or anxious or angry, ask what you are saying to yourself. Sometimes the beliefs will turn out to be accurate; when this is so, concentrate on the ways you can alter the situation and prevent adversity from becoming disaster. But usually your negative beliefs are distortions. Challenge them. Don’t let them run your emotional life. Unlike dieting, learned optimism is easy to maintain once you start. Once you get into the habit of disputing negative beliefs, your daily life will run much better, and you will feel much happier.

When we strike a balance between the challenge of an activity and our skill at performing it, when the rhythm of the work itself feels in sync with our pulse, when we know that what we're doing matters, we can get totally absorbed in our task. That is happiness. The life coach Martha Beck asks new potential clients, "Is there anything you do regularly that makes you forget what time it is?" That forgetting -- that pure absorption -- is what the psychologist Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi calls "flow" or optimal experience. In an interview with Wired magazine, he described flow as "being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you're using your skills to the utmost." In a typical day that teeters between anxiety and boredom, flow experiences are those flashes of intense living -- bright against the dull. These optimal experiences can happen when we're engaged in work paid and unpaid, in sports, in music, in art. The researchers Maria Allison and Margaret Duncan have studied the role of flow in women's lives and looked at factors that contributed to what they call "antiflow." Antiflow was associated with repetitive household tasks, repetitive tasks at work, unchallenging tasks, and work we see as meaningless. But there's an element of chaos when it comes to flow. Even if we're doing meaningful and challenging work, that sense of total absoprtion can elude us. We might get completely and beautifully lost in something today, and, try as we might to re-create the same conditions tomorrow, our task might jsut feel like, well, work. In A Life of One's Own, Marion Milner described her effort to re-create teh conditions of her own recorded moments of happiness, saying, "Often when I felt certain that I had discovered the little mental act which produced the change I walked on air, exulting that I had found the key to my garden of delight and could slip through the door whenever I wished. But most often when I came again the place seemed different, the door overgrown with thorns and my key stuck in the lock. It was as if the first time I had said 'abracadabra' the door had opened, but the next time I must use a different word. (123-124).

In this moment, however you are searching, stop. Whether you are searching for peace and happiness in a relationship, in a better job, or even in world peace, just for one moment stop absolutely. There is nothing wrong with these pursuits, but if you are engaging in them to get peace or to get happiness, you are overlooking the ground of peace that is already here. Once you discover this ground of peace, then whatever pursuits you engage in will be informed by your discovery. Then you will naturally bring what you have discovered to the world, to politics, to all your relationships. This discovery has infinite, complex ramifications, but the essence of it is very simple. If you will stop all activity, just for one instant, even for one-tenth of a second, and simply be utterly still, you will recognize the inherent spaciousness of your being that is already happy and at peace with itself. Because of our conditioning, we normally dismiss this ground of peace with an immediate, “Yes, but what about my life? I have responsibilities. I need to keep busy. The absolute doesn’t relate to my world, my existence.” These conditioned thoughts just reinforce further conditioning. But if you will take a moment to recognize the peace that is already alive within you, you then actually have the choice to trust it in all your endeavors, in all your relationships, in every circumstance of your life. It doesn’t mean that your life will be swept clean of conflicts, challenges, pain, or suffering. It means that you will have recognized a sanctuary where the truth of yourself is present, where the truth of God is present, regardless of the physical, mental, or emotional circumstances of your life.

If you think about it, the public perception of funky brain chemistry has been as varied and weird as the symptoms, historically speaking. If I had been born a Native American in another time, I might have been lauded as a medicine man. My voices would have been seen as the voices of ancestors imparting wisdom. I would have been treated with great mystical regard. If I had lived in biblical times, I might have been seen as a prophet, because, let’s face it, there are really only two possibilities: either prophets were actually hearing God speaking to them, or they were mentally ill. I’m sure if an actual prophet surfaced today, he or she would receive plenty of Haldol injections, until the sky opened up and the doctors were slapped silly by the Hand of God. In the Dark Ages my parents would have sent for an exorcist, because I was clearly possessed by evil spirits, or maybe even the Devil himself. And if I lived in Dickensian England, I would have been thrown into Bedlam, which is more than just a description of madness. It was an actual place—a “madhouse” where the insane were imprisoned in unthinkable conditions. Living in the twenty-first century gives a person a much better prognosis for treatment, but sometimes I wish I’d lived in an age before technology. I would much rather everyone think I was a prophet than some poor sick kid.

Imagine what it would be like if we went through life never encountering an enemy, or any other obstacles for that matter, if from the cradle to the grave everyone we met pampered us, held us, hand fed us (soft bland food, easy to digest), amused us with funny faces and the occasional ‘goo-goo’ noise. If from infancy we were carried around in a basket (later on, perhaps on a litter), never encountering any challenge, never tested – in short, if everyone continued to treat us like a baby. That might sound good at first. For the first few months of life it might be appropriate. But if it persisted it could only result in one becoming a sort of gelatinous mass, a monstrosity really – with the mental and emotional development of veal. It’s the very struggle of life that makes us who we are. And it is our enemies that test us, provide us with the resistance necessary for growth.

Centering, however, is easier said than done. This I learned from a ceramics class I once took. The teacher made throwing a pot look easy, but the thing is, it takes lots of precision and skill. You slam the ball of clay down in the absolute center of the pottery wheel, and with steady hands you push your thumb into the middle of it, spreading it wider a fraction of an inch at a time. But every single time I tried to do it, I only got so far before my pot warped out of balance, and every attempt to fix it just made it worse, until the lip shredded, the sides collapsed, and I was left with what the teacher called “a mystery ashtray,” which got hurled back into the clay bucket. So what happens when your universe begins to get off balance, and you don’t have any experience with bringing it back to center? All you can do is fight a losing battle, waiting for those walls to collapse, and your life to become one huge mystery ashtray.

The thing about groupthink or social media bubbles is that they aggressively feed and amplify repetition. And repetition, however familiar and comforting, will never challenge us mentally, emotionally or behaviorally. Echoes simply reiterate what has already been said at some point in time, long gone. Like dead stars, they might seem to have a presence from a distance, but in truth, they are completely devoid of life and light. Echo chambers, therefore, severely limit the breadth and depth of the views we subject ourselves to, they ration knowledge. And, at the same time, they limit wisdom: wisdom which connects the mind and the heart, activates emotional intelligence, expands empathy and understanding, allows us to reach beyond the lonely confines of our own minds and engage with the rest of humanity, to listen to them and learn from them. To leave one echo chamber for another is not a solution either. We must strive to become intellectual nomads, keep moving, keep learning, resist confining ourselves in any cultural or mental ghetto, and spend more time not in select centers but at the margins, which is where real change always comes from.

It’s like I have this demon inside of me, and I want it gone, but the idea of removing it via pill is . . . I don’t know . . . weird. But a lot of days I get over that, because I do really hate the demon.” “You often try to understand your experience through metaphor, Aza: It’s like a demon inside of you; you’ll call your consciousness a bus, or a prison cell, or a spiral, or a whirlpool, or a loop, or a—I think you once called it a scribbled circle, which I found interesting.” “Yeah,” I said. “One of the challenges with pain—physical or psychic—is that we can really only approach it through metaphor. It can’t be represented the way a table or a body can. In some ways, pain is the opposite of language.” She turned to her computer, shook her mouse to wake it up, and then clicked an image on her desktop. “I want to share something Virginia Woolf wrote: ‘English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache. . . . The merest schoolgirl, when she falls in love, has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her; but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry.’ And we’re such language-based creatures that to some extent we cannot know what we cannot name. And so we assume it isn’t real. We refer to it with catch-all terms, like crazy or chronic pain, terms that both ostracize and minimize. The term chronic pain captures nothing of the grinding, constant, ceaseless, inescapable hurt. And the term crazy arrives at us with none of the terror and worry you live with. Nor do either of those terms connote the courage people in such pains exemplify, which is why I’d ask you to frame your mental health around a word other than crazy.

You see what I am driving at. The mentally handicapped do not have a consciousness of power. Because of this perhaps their capacity for love is more immediate, lively and developed than that of other men. They cannot be men of ambition and action in society and so develop a capacity for friendship rather than for efficiency. They are indeed weak and easily influenced, because they confidently give themselves to others; they are simple certainly, but often with a very attractive simplicity. Their first reaction is often one of welcome and not of rejection or criticism. Full of trust, they commit themselves deeply. Who amongst us has not been moved when met by the warm welcome of our boys and girls, by their smiles, their confidence and their outstretched arms. Free from the bonds of conventional society, and of ambition, they are free, not with the ambitious freedom of reason, but with an interior freedom, that of friendship. Who has not been struck by the rightness of their judgments upon the goodness or evil of men, by their profound intuition on certain human truths, by the truth and simplicity of their nature which seeks not so much to appear to be, as to be. Living in a society where simplicity has been submerged by criticism and sometimes by hypocrisy, is it not comforting to find people who can be aware, who can marvel? Their open natures are made for communion and love.

Rea­sons Why I Loved Be­ing With Jen I love what a good friend you are. You’re re­ally en­gaged with the lives of the peo­ple you love. You or­ga­nize lovely ex­pe­ri­ences for them. You make an ef­fort with them, you’re pa­tient with them, even when they’re side­tracked by their chil­dren and can’t pri­or­i­tize you in the way you pri­or­i­tize them. You’ve got a gen­er­ous heart and it ex­tends to peo­ple you’ve never even met, whereas I think that ev­ery­one is out to get me. I used to say you were naive, but re­ally I was jeal­ous that you al­ways thought the best of peo­ple. You are a bit too anx­ious about be­ing seen to be a good per­son and you def­i­nitely go a bit over­board with your left-wing pol­i­tics to prove a point to ev­ery­one. But I know you re­ally do care. I know you’d sign pe­ti­tions and help peo­ple in need and vol­un­teer at the home­less shel­ter at Christ­mas even if no one knew about it. And that’s more than can be said for a lot of us. I love how quickly you read books and how ab­sorbed you get in a good story. I love watch­ing you lie on the sofa read­ing one from cover-to-cover. It’s like I’m in the room with you but you’re in a whole other gal­axy. I love that you’re al­ways try­ing to im­prove your­self. Whether it’s running marathons or set­ting your­self chal­lenges on an app to learn French or the fact you go to ther­apy ev­ery week. You work hard to be­come a bet­ter ver­sion of your­self. I think I prob­a­bly didn’t make my ad­mi­ra­tion for this known and in­stead it came off as ir­ri­ta­tion, which I don’t re­ally feel at all. I love how ded­i­cated you are to your fam­ily, even when they’re an­noy­ing you. Your loy­alty to them wound me up some­times, but it’s only be­cause I wish I came from a big fam­ily. I love that you al­ways know what to say in con­ver­sa­tion. You ask the right ques­tions and you know ex­actly when to talk and when to lis­ten. Ev­ery­one loves talk­ing to you be­cause you make ev­ery­one feel im­por­tant. I love your style. I know you think I prob­a­bly never no­ticed what you were wear­ing or how you did your hair, but I loved see­ing how you get ready, sit­ting in front of the full-length mir­ror in our bed­room while you did your make-up, even though there was a mir­ror on the dress­ing ta­ble. I love that you’re mad enough to swim in the English sea in No­vem­ber and that you’d pick up spi­ders in the bath with your bare hands. You’re brave in a way that I’m not. I love how free you are. You’re a very free per­son, and I never gave you the sat­is­fac­tion of say­ing it, which I should have done. No one knows it about you be­cause of your bor­ing, high-pres­sure job and your stuffy up­bring­ing, but I know what an ad­ven­turer you are un­der­neath all that. I love that you got drunk at Jack­son’s chris­ten­ing and you al­ways wanted to have one more drink at the pub and you never com­plained about get­ting up early to go to work with a hang­over. Other than Avi, you are the per­son I’ve had the most fun with in my life. And even though I gave you a hard time for al­ways try­ing to for al­ways try­ing to im­press your dad, I ac­tu­ally found it very adorable be­cause it made me see the child in you and the teenager in you, and if I could time-travel to any­where in his­tory, I swear, Jen, the only place I’d want to go is to the house where you grew up and hug you and tell you how beau­ti­ful and clever and funny you are. That you are spec­tac­u­lar even with­out all your sports trophies and mu­sic cer­tifi­cates and in­cred­i­ble grades and Ox­ford ac­cep­tance. I’m sorry that I loved you so much more than I liked my­self, that must have been a lot to carry. I’m sorry I didn’t take care of you the way you took care of me. And I’m sorry I didn’t take care of my­self, ei­ther. I need to work on it. I’m pleased that our break-up taught me that. I’m sorry I went so mental. I love you. I always will. I'm glad we met.

Soon you shall be landing In the battleground, ensure you have the right weapons to fight the enemy; ensure you know your enemy and what he is capable of; take them unprepared to gain the victory and stand with your head held high; show it to the world the cause you have been fighting for, deception is the key, challenge your enemy when it is least expected; break them mentally before breaking them physically. You are a soldier; your enemy is a soldier and you are facing the best, both sides have a lot of similarities only variation lies in the cause. Cause is driver for the battle; cause is binding comrades together and even if the victory is gained the cause stays undefeated. You stand defeated for your strategy, tactics and leaders but never for the cause, it’s still alive, it shall always be alive with the men who have sacrificed their lives, with the men who are still alive. They stand defeated with the physical strength but not for the cause they have believed in and you can never take it away from them. Fight for a cause and you shall stay invincible. A war story is always biased towards one side and it’s hard to narrate a true war story. We choose and make our heroes from what we have read, heard and believed in. If we know the cause both sides are standing for, it will become difficult to take sides. Always respect your enemy, respect for the fact they are standing neck to neck with you, respect them for the courage they have shown to defend the other side, their land, respect them for whatever you have earned the respect for from your men, from your country and from your people. Powerful strategies, tactics, weapons, leaders are allies to the war, they support but never claims victory all my themselves Greatest wars won always had the greater cause. Rebel without a cause is never a rebel just an aimless person whose fate lies in the defeat.

There can be no doubt that the chief fault we have developed, through the long course of human evolution, is a certain basic passivity. When provoked by challenges, human beings are magnificent. When life is quiet and even, we take the path of least resistance, and then wonder why we feel bored. A man who is determined and active doesn't pay much attention to 'luck'. If things go badly, he takes a deep breath and redoubles his effort. And he quickly discovers that his moments of deepest happiness often come after such efforts. The man who has become accustomed to a passive existence becomes preoccupied with 'luck'; it may become an obsession. When things go well, he is delighted and good humored; when they go badly, he becomes gloomy and petulant. He is unhappy—or dissatisfied—most of the time, for even when he has no cause for complaint, he feels that gratitude would be premature; things might go wrong at any moment; you can't really trust the world... Gambling is one basic response to this passivity, revealing the obsession with luck, the desire to make things happen. The absurdity about this attitude is that we fail to recognize the active part we play in making life a pleasure. When my will is active, my whole mental and physical being works better, just as my digestion works better if I take exercise between meals. I gain an increasing feeling of control over my life, instead of the feeling of helplessness (what Sartre calls 'contingency') that comes from long periods of passivity. Yet even people who are intelligent enough to recognize this find the habit of passivity so deeply ingrained that they find themselves holding their breath when things go well, hoping fate will continue to be kind.

Ireland, like Ukraine, is a largely rural country which suffers from its proximity to a more powerful industrialised neighbour. Ireland’s contribution to the history of tractors is the genius engineer Harry Ferguson, who was born in 1884, near Belfast. Ferguson was a clever and mischievous man, who also had a passion for aviation. It is said that he was the first man in Great Britain to build and fly his own aircraft in 1909. But he soon came to believe that improving efficiency of food production would be his unique service to mankind. Harry Ferguson’s first two-furrow plough was attached to the chassis of the Ford Model T car converted into a tractor, aptly named Eros. This plough was mounted on the rear of the tractor, and through ingenious use of balance springs it could be raised or lowered by the driver using a lever beside his seat. Ford, meanwhile, was developing its own tractors. The Ferguson design was more advanced, and made use of hydraulic linkage, but Ferguson knew that despite his engineering genius, he could not achieve his dream on his own. He needed a larger company to produce his design. So he made an informal agreement with Henry Ford, sealed only by a handshake. This Ford-Ferguson partnership gave to the world a new type of Fordson tractor far superior to any that had been known before, and the precursor of all modern-type tractors. However, this agreement by a handshake collapsed in 1947 when Henry Ford II took over the empire of his father, and started to produce a new Ford 8N tractor, using the Ferguson system. Ferguson’s open and cheerful nature was no match for the ruthless mentality of the American businessman. The matter was decided in court in 1951. Ferguson claimed $240 million, but was awarded only $9.25 million. Undaunted in spirit, Ferguson had a new idea. He approached the Standard Motor Company at Coventry with a plan, to adapt the Vanguard car for use as tractor. But this design had to be modified, because petrol was still rationed in the post-war period. The biggest challenge for Ferguson was the move from petrol-driven to diesel-driven engines and his success gave rise to the famous TE-20, of which more than half a million were built in the UK. Ferguson will be remembered for bringing together two great engineering stories of our time, the tractor and the family car, agriculture and transport, both of which have contributed so richly to the well-being of mankind.

THE WISDOM OF SURRENDER It is the quality of your consciousness at this moment that is the main determinant of what kind of future you will experience, so to surrender is the most important thing you can do to bring about positive change. Any action you take is secondary. No truly positive action can arise out of an unsurrendered state of consciousness. To some people, surrender may have negative connotations, implying defeat, giving up, failing to rise to the challenges of life, becoming lethargic, and so on. True surrender, however, is something entirely different. It does not mean to passively put up with whatever situation you find yourself in and to do nothing about it. Nor does it mean to cease making plans or initiating positive action. SURRENDER IS THE SIMPLE but profound wisdom of yielding to rather than opposing the flow of life. The only place where you can experience the flow of life is the Now, so to surrender is to accept the present moment unconditionally and without reservation. It is to relinquish inner resistance to what is. Inner resistance is to say “no” to what is, through mental judgment and emotional negativity. It becomes particularly pronounced when things “go wrong,” which means that there is a gap between the demands or rigid expectations of your mind and what is. That is the pain gap. If you have lived long enough, you will know that things “go wrong” quite often. It is precisely at those times that surrender needs to be practiced if you want to eliminate pain and sorrow from your life. Acceptance of what is immediately frees you from mind identification and thus reconnects you with Being. Resistance is the mind. Surrender is a purely inner phenomenon. It does not mean that on the outer level you cannot take action and change the situation. In fact, it is not the overall situation that you need to accept when you surrender, but just the tiny segment called the Now. For example, if you were stuck in the mud somewhere, you wouldn't say: “Okay, I resign myself to being stuck in the mud.” Resignation is not surrender. YOU DON'T NEED TO ACCEPT AN UNDESIRABLE OR UNPLEASANT LIFE SITUATION. Nor do you need to deceive yourself and say that there is nothing wrong with it. No. You recognize fully that you want to get out of it. You then narrow your attention down to the present moment without mentally labeling it in any way. This means that there is no judgment of the Now. Therefore, there is no resistance, no emotional negativity. You accept the “isness” of this moment. Then you take action and do all that you can to get out of the situation. Such action I call positive action. It is far more effective than negative action, which arises out of anger, despair, or frustration. Until you achieve the desired result, you continue to practice surrender by refraining from labeling the Now

Where is everybody?” “Hiding,” she said. “Except for Doolittle. He was excused from the chewing-out due to having been kidnapped. He’s napping now like he doesn’t have a care in the world. I got to hear all sorts of interesting stuff through the door.” “Give.” She shot me a sly smile. “First, I got to listen to Jim’s ‘it’s all my fault; I did it all by myself’ speech. Then I got to listen to Derek’s ‘it’s all my fault and I did it all by myself’ speech. Then Curran promised that the next person who wanted to be a martyr would get to be one. Then Raphael made a very growling speech about how he was here for a blood debt. It was his right to have restitution for the injury caused to the friend of the boudas; it was in the damn clan charter on such and such page. And if Curran wanted to have an issue with it, they could take it outside. It was terribly dramatic and ridiculous. I loved it.” I could actually picture Curran sitting there, his hand on his forehead above his closed eyes, growling quietly in his throat. “Then Dali told him that she was sick and tired of being treated like she was made out of glass and she wanted blood and to kick ass.” That would do him in. “So what did he say?” “He didn’t say anything for about a minute and then he chewed them out. He told Derek that he’d been irresponsible with Livie’s life, and that if he was going to rescue somebody, the least he could do is to have a workable plan, instead of a poorly thought-out mess that backfired and broke just about every Pack law and got his face smashed in. He told Dali that if she wanted to be taken seriously, she had to accept responsibility for her own actions instead of pretending to be weak and helpless every time she got in trouble and that this was definitely not the venue to prove one’s toughness. Apparently he didn’t think her behavior was cute when she was fifteen and he’s not inclined to tolerate it now that she’s twenty-eight.” I was cracking up. “He told Raphael that the blood debt overrode Pack law only in cases of murder or life-threatening injury and quoted the page of the clan charter and the section number where that could be found. He said that frivolous challenges to the alpha also violated Pack law and were punishable by isolation. It was an awesome smackdown. They had no asses left when he was done.” Andrea began snapping the gun parts together. “Then he sentenced the three of them and himself to eight weeks of hard labor, building the north wing addition to the Keep, and dismissed them. They ran out of there like their hair was on fire.” “He sentenced himself?” “He’s broken Pack law by participating in our silliness, apparently.” That’s Beast Lord for you. “And Jim?” “Oh, he got a special chewing-out after everybody else was dismissed. It was a very quiet and angry conversation, and I didn’t hear most of it. I heard the end, though—he got three months of Keep building. Also, when he opened the door to leave, Curran told him very casually that if Jim wanted to pick fights with his future mate, he was welcome to do so, but he should keep in mind that Curran wouldn’t come and rescue him when you beat his ass. You should’ve seen Jim’s face.” “His what?” “His mate. M-A-T-E.” I cursed. Andrea grinned. “I thought that would make your day. And now you’re stuck with him in here for three days and you get to fight together in the Arena. It’s so romantic. Like a honeymoon.” Once again my mental conditioning came in handy. I didn’t strangle her on the spot.