Steven Hayes Quotes

What we need to learn to do is to look at thought, rather than from thought.

The process of living is like taking a very long road trip. The destination may be important, but the journey experienced day to day and week to week is what is invaluable.

Pain and purpose are two sides of the same thing. A person struggling with depression is very likely a person yearning to feel fully. A socially anxious person is very likely a person yearning to connect with others. You hurt where you care, and you care where you hurt.

Suppressing Your Thoughts Suppose you have a thought you don’t like. You’ll apply your verbal problem-solving strategies to it. For example, when the thought comes up, you may try to stop thinking it. There is extensive literature on what is likely to happen as a result. Harvard psychologist Dan Wegner (1994) has shown that the frequency of the thought that you try not to think may go down for a short while, but it soon appears more often than ever. The thought becomes even more central to your thinking, and it is even more likely to evoke a response. Thought suppression only makes the situation worse.

There is a tremendous irony in happiness. It comes from a root word meaning ‘by chance’ or ‘an occurrence’, which in a positive sense connotes a sense of newness, wonder, and appreciation of chance occurrences. The irony is that people not only seek it, they try to hold on to it—especially to avoid any sense of ‘unhappiness’. Unfortunately, these very control efforts can become heavy, planned, closed, rigid and fixed.

Psychological flexibility is the ability to feel and think with openness, to attend voluntarily to your experience of the present moment, and to move your life in directions that are important to you, building habits that allow you to live life in accordance with your values and aspirations. It’s about learning not to turn away from what is painful, instead turning toward your suffering in order to live a life full of meaning and purpose.

You can say it this way: if you learn to be less reactive to stress through the cultivation of flexibility pivots, the body starts turning off those reaction systems, including genetic expression switches that may have been originally thrown not by you but by your parents and grandparents. How cool is that?

Porque no hay nada como la pura fuerza de los números para retirar capas de confusión y contradicción.

Thoughts are like lenses through which we look at our world.

The problem with problem solving is that it is a mode of mind that does not know when to stop.

Does the client experience life as merely imposed or rather as something he or she can author in a meaningful and ongoing way?

The truth about mental health is that the causes of all of the mental conditions you hear about are unknown, and the idea that “hidden diseases” lurk behind human suffering is an out-and-out failure.

Why willingness? Because I absolutely know how my pain works when I am unwilling, and I’m sick and tired of it. It’s time to change my whole agenda, not just the moves I make inside a control and avoidance agenda.

Another key process in the cycle of suffering is experiential avoidance. It is an immediate consequence of fusing with mental instructions that encourage the suppression, control, or elimination of experiences expected to be distressing.

Deictic framing can be successfully taught, however, and when it is, perspective-taking and theory-of-mind skills improve

Vision without action is a daydream; action without vision is a nightmare.

You cannot be a good ACT therapist if you take words to be right, correct, and true rather than asking “How effectual are they?

Consumers of psychological change advice should demand broadly useful methods of change that work, and that do so through change processes that have precision, scope, and depth.

People whose cognitions fuse are likely to ignore direct experience and become relatively oblivious to environmental influences.

These skills involve consciously experiencing feelings as feelings, thoughts as thoughts, memories as memories, and so on.

As human beings increasingly look inward, life begins to seem more like a problem to be solved than a process to be fully experienced.

When you try not to think of something, you do that by creating this verbal rule: “Don’t think of x.” That rule contains x, so it will tend to evoke x, just as the sounds “gub-gub” can evoke a picture of an imaginary animal. Thus, when we suppress our thoughts, we not only must think of something else, we have to hold ourselves back from thinking about why we are doing that. If we check to see whether our efforts are working, we will remember what we are trying not to think and we will think it. The worrisome thought thus tends to grow. If

The central shift is from a focus on what you think and feel to how do you relate to what you think and feel. Specifically, the new emphasis is on learning to step back from what you are thinking, notice it, and open up to what you are experiencing. These steps keep us from doing the damage to ourselves that efforts to avoid or control our thoughts or feelings inflict, allowing us to focus our energies on taking the positive actions that can alleviate our suffering.

Psychological flexibility is the ability to feel and think with openness, to attend voluntarily to your experience of the present moment, and to move your life in directions that are important to you, building habits that allow you to live life in accordance with your values and aspirations.

The problem is that we are not trained to discriminate when the mind is useful and when it is not, and we have not developed the skills to shift out of a fused problem-solving mode of mind into a descriptively engaged mode of mind.

The goal is not to “fix” people but rather to empower them. What the psychological flexibility model provides is a characterization of key features that can be changed, but it does not specify how to link history to those features, nor precisely how to intervene in a step-by-step fashion.

If you were on a bus trying to go east in a maze of dirt roads in a large valley, you might not be able to tell your direction from moment to moment. If someone took a series of snapshots, sometimes the bus might be facing north, or south, or even west, even though all the while this is a journey to the east.

Putting It into Practice: Neutralizing Negativity Use the techniques below anytime you’d like to lessen the effects of persistent negative thoughts. As you try each technique, pay attention to which ones work best for you and keep practicing them until they become instinctive. You may also discover some of your own that work just as well. ♦ Don’t assume your thoughts are accurate. Just because your mind comes up with something doesn’t necessarily mean it has any validity. Assume you’re missing a lot of elements, many of which could be positive. ♦ See your thoughts as graffiti on a wall or as little electrical impulses flickering around your brain. ♦ Assign a label to your negative experience: self-criticism, anger, anxiety, etc. Just naming what you are thinking and feeling can help you neutralize it. ♦ Depersonalize the experience. Rather than saying “I’m feeling ashamed,” try “There is shame being felt.” Imagine that you’re a scientist observing a phenomenon: “How interesting, there are self-critical thoughts arising.” ♦ Imagine seeing yourself from afar. Zoom out so far, you can see planet Earth hanging in space. Then zoom in to see your continent, then your country, your city, and finally the room you’re in. See your little self, electrical impulses whizzing across your brain. One little being having a particular experience at this particular moment. ♦ Imagine your mental chatter as coming from a radio; see if you can turn down the volume, or even just put the radio to the side and let it chatter away. ♦ Consider the worst-case outcome for your situation. Realize that whatever it is, you’ll survive. ♦ Think of all the previous times when you felt just like this—that you wouldn’t make it through—and yet clearly you did. We’re learning here to neutralize unhelpful thoughts. We want to avoid falling into the trap of arguing with them or trying to suppress them. This would only make matters worse. Consider this: if I ask you not to think of a white elephant—don’t picture a white elephant at all, please!—what’s the first thing your brain serves up? Right. Saying “No white elephants” leads to troops of white pachyderms marching through your mind. Steven Hayes and his colleagues studied our tendency to dwell on the forbidden by asking participants in controlled research studies to spend just a few minutes not thinking of a yellow jeep. For many people, the forbidden thought arose immediately, and with increasing frequency. For others, even if they were able to suppress the thought for a short period of time, at some point they broke down and yellow-jeep thoughts rose dramatically. Participants reported thinking about yellow jeeps with some frequency for days and sometimes weeks afterward. Because trying to suppress a self-critical thought only makes it more central to your thinking, it’s a far better strategy to simply aim to neutralize it. You’ve taken the first two steps in handling internal negativity: destigmatizing discomfort and neutralizing negativity. The third and final step will help you not just to lessen internal negativity but to actually replace it with a different internal reality.

El enfoque económico no pretende describir el mundo como cualquiera de nosotros quisiera que fuera, o teme que sea, o reza por que llegue a ser, sino más bien explicar lo que hay en la realidad. La mayoría de nosotros querría arreglar o cambiar el mundo de alguna manera. Pero para cambiar el mundo, primero hay que comprenderlo.

We are in this stew together. We are caught in the same traps. With a small twist of fate, I could be sitting across from you, and you could be sitting across from me—both of us in opposite roles. Your problems are a special opportunity for you to learn and for me to learn. We are not cut from different cloths, but rather from the same cloth.

We can have a large impact on the prevention and amelioration of abuse, drug problems, violence, mental health problems, and dysfunction in families.

Dile a la gente que hay un hombre invisible en el cielo que creó el universo y la inmensa mayoría te creerá. Dile que la pintura está húmeda y tendrá que tocar para asegurarse.

The key verbal relations in the development of perspective taking are “deictic,” which means “by demonstration.

Psychological rigidity is at its core an attempt to avoid negative thoughts and feelings caused by difficult experiences, both when they occur and in our memory of them.

Gedachten zijn als lenzen waardoor we naar onze wereld kijken.

For example, the client who values education might be asked, “What if you received the education, but no one knew. Would that still be of importance?

The constructive alternative to fusion is defusion, and the preferred alternative to experiential avoidance is acceptance.

It is based on a pragmatic philosophy of science called functional contextualism

Hmmm. Let’s do this and see what happens. Say out loud, ‘I can’t stand up or I will have a panic attack,’ and then while doing that, slowly stand up”).

Fue cuando dije: «Las palabras no son formas de una única palabra. En la suma de las partes, no hay más que partes. El mundo deben medirlo los ojos». WALLACE STEVENS, «On the Road Home»

ACT uses acceptance and mindfulness processes and commitment and behavioral activation processes to produce psychological flexibility. It seeks to bring human language and cognition under better contextual control so as to overcome the repertoire-narrowing effects of an excessive reliance on a problem-solving mode of mind as well as to promote a more open, centered, and engaged approach to living.

Once there is a verbally stated goal, however, we can assess the degree to which analytic practices help us achieve it. This option allows successful working toward a goal to function as a useful guide for science.

Supongamos, no obstante, que se puede desarrollar un algoritmo bancario con un 99 por ciento de precisión. Supongamos que en el Reino Unido hay 500 terroristas. El algoritmo identificaría correctamente a 495 de ellos, el 99 por ciento. Pero en el Reino Unido hay aproximadamente 50 millones de adultos que no tienen nada que ver con el terrorismo, y el algoritmo también identificaría erróneamente al 1 por ciento de todos ellos, es decir, 500.000 personas. Al final de las cuentas, este maravilloso algoritmo con un 99 por ciento de precisión daría demasiados falsos positivos: medio millón de personas que se indignarían con razón cuando fueran detenidas por las autoridades por sospechosas de terrorismo.

Het is niet eenvoudig contact te krijgen met het leven dat je wenst en te leren hoe je je dromen in het heden kunt verwezenlijken, omdat het menselijke verstand de ene na de andere val laat dichtklappen en de ene na de andere hindernis opwerpt

Psychologist Steven Hayes calls this connecting with our “core values.” His research shows that focusing on values has an almost magical ability to accomplish the very things we think we’ll get by attacking our enemies. Simply shifting our attention from attacking our enemies to defining our values can “reduce physiological stress responses, buffer the impact from negative judgments of others, reduce our defensiveness, and help us be more receptive to information that may be hard to accept.

Psychological flexibility can be defined as contacting the present moment as a conscious human being, fully and without needless defense—as it is and not as what it says it is—and persisting with or changing a behavior in the service of chosen values.

The reason is that the English language treats a changing entity (a loaded wagon, sprayed roses, a painted door) in the same way that it treats a moving entity (pitched hay, sprayed water, slopped paint). A state is conceived as a location in a space of possible states, and change is equated with moving from one location to another in that state-space. In this way, locative constructions illustrate a second discovery in the hidden world down the rabbit hole, the ubiquity of metaphor in everyday language.

Bien, pues esto es como caer directamente al agua helada. Tratas desesperadamente de nadar hacia la superficie, con los pulmones en llamas, todo enfocado hacia el pedazo de luz que hay encima de ti. Y cuando al final lo consigues, el hielo ha tapado el agujero.

If we are afraid of being rejected by others, we see signs of imminent rejection everywhere. We know that buying into that fear will not liberate us, but the possibility of rejection is so fear-inducing that it seems like a violation of basic logic not to focus on it.

To what extent does the client live in a world of “musts” and “shoulds” and “can’ts”? To what extent does the client live in a world of well-rehearsed excuses for why things are as they are—a world in which change is either impossible or for a time other than right now?

In the ACT approach, a goal of healthy living is not so much to feel good as to feel good. It is psychologically healthy to have unpleasant thoughts and feelings as well as pleasant ones, and doing so gives us full access to the richness of our unique personal histories

About 30 percent of all adults have a major psychiatric disorder at any given point in time, about 50 percent will have such a disorder at some point in their lives, and nearly 80 percent of these will have more than one serious psychological problem (Kessler et al. 1994).

When one loads hay onto a wagon, it can be any amount, even a couple of pitchforkfuls. But when one loads the wagon with hay, the implication is that the wagon is full.36 This subtle difference, which linguists call the holism effect, can be seen with the other locative verbs:

I begin to experience myself as a conscious human being at the precise point at which I begin to experience you as a conscious human being. I see from a perspective only because I also see that you see from a perspective. Consciousness is shared. Moreover, you cannot be fully conscious here and now without sensing your interconnection with others in other places and other times. Consciousness expands across times, places, and persons. In the deepest sense, consciousness itself contains the psychological quality that we are conscious—timelessly and everywhere.

Popular books promise that we can and should learn how to feel good, manage our anxiety, or get rid of our depression—but not so much information about how to learn from our own experiences. Our medications are anti-depressants, or anti-anxiety, or anti-psychotics, as if the only sensible goal is to subtract them. Our disorders are called “mood disorders” or “thought disorders” or “anxiety disorders”—once again feeding a cultural view that is often outright hostile to anything painful. We’ve got to put aside this unhelpful messaging to create some space to try truly new things.

The Dilemma of Human Suffering Nothing external ensures freedom from suffering. Even when we human beings possess all the things we typically use to gauge external success—great looks, loving parents, terrific children, financial security, a caring spouse—it may not be enough. Humans can be warm, well fed, dry, physically well—and still be miserable. Humans can enjoy forms of excitement and entertainment unknown in the nonhuman world and out of reach for all but a fraction of the population—high-definition TVs, sports cars, exotic trips to the Caribbean—and still be in excruciating psychological pain.

We began crafting ways to apply defusion and self skills to coping with the fear and pain of acceptance. Learning to defuse from the voice of the Dictator helps us keep a healthy distance from the negative messages that pop uninvited into our minds, like “Who are you kidding, you can’t deal with this!” It also helps diminish the power of the unhelpful relations that have been embedded in our thought networks, which are often activated by the pain involved in acceptance. For example, the relation between smoking a cigarette and feeling better will be triggered by the discomfort of craving a smoke. Reconnecting with our authentic self helps us practice self-compassion as we open up to unpleasant aspects of our lives, not berating ourselves for making mistakes or for feeling fear about dealing with the pain. We see beyond the image of a broken, weak, or afflicted self to the powerful true self that can choose to feel pain.

The fields of psychology and psychiatry have also inadvertently contributed to the problem. Ideas that are not evidence-based proliferate, such as Freud’s Oedipus complex (you are sexually attracted to your parents, which creates a hidden conflict, giving rise to anxiety), while evidence-based ones lie dormant.

Conscious content now is known in the context of a consistent locus or point of view that can integrate that knowledge. Infantile amnesia begins to drop away. Events are held in memory in a verbal temporal order. A conscious person shows up—not as the object of reflection but as a perspective from which knowing can occur.

Suffering occurs when people so strongly believe the literal contents of their mind that they become fused with their cognitions. In this fused state, the person cannot distinguish awareness from cognitive narratives since each thought and its referents are so tightly bound together. This combination means that the person is more likely to follow blindly the instructions that are socially transmitted through language. In some circumstances, this result can be adaptive; but in other cases, people may engage repeatedly in ineffective sets of strategies because to them they appear to be “right” or “fair” despite negative real-world consequences.

The single hardest burden for a human being to carry is a lack of nurturance in childhood. Physical or sexual abuse, neglect, constant criticism: in the face of such treatment, our bodies and minds brace for a tough life ahead, even down to the level of how our genes are expressed. Genetics research has revealed that our life experiences influence which of our genes will become more or less active. For example, a specific group of genes is involved in responding to stress. A lack of nurturance intensifies their activity, making us less able to handle stress and decreasing our resistance to disease. We can also experience emotional instability or emotional blunting that can be lifelong.

The classic self-problem seen in clinical settings is fusion with the content of verbal self-knowledge—such as “I am depressed” where “depressed” has the quality of a personal identity. This aspect of self—the conceptualized self—can be “positive” or “negative” or both, but its most dominant features are that it is rigid, evaluative, and evocative.

Most of us think of evolution only in terms of genetics, but that is a mistake. Culture, thought, behavior, and the expression of genes (the genes you have can be turned on or off) also evolve. In addition, we humans can influence our evolution by the environments we construct and the choices we make; our evolution is not just a matter of chance. We have been given the great gift of being able to adapt our thinking and behavior intentionally, and to change our circumstances deliberately, to better suit healthy, purposeful living. The six flexibility skills form such a powerful set because each allows us to meet one of the six essential criteria for evolution to occur. They provide us with the tools to intentionally evolve our lives.

Metaphorically we walk in circles—watching silly TV shows, surfing the net, posting to our Facebook page—while waiting for a sense of wholeness, or peace of mind, or purpose to arrive. The rug-scratches of distraction, avoidance, and indulgence are not changing anything of importance. We need a place we can be comfortable, in the original etymological sense of that word: with (com) strength (fort, like “build a fort,” from the Latin fortis). Living with our strength in the world requires far more of us than distraction, avoidance, and indulgence. If you want to find peace of mind and purpose, you will have to let go of finding a way out and instead pivot toward finding a way in. I am acutely aware that this is easier said than done.

Comparison and Evaluation. Listen for excessive comparison and evaluation in the client’s speech, as contrasted with description. The clinician can probe the strength of such patterns of fusion by asking the client to simply describe the troublesome situation and what it evokes without injecting evaluations. Clients with high levels of fusion may not be able respond at all or may quickly lapse, injecting personal evaluations into the ongoing narrative.

For the longest time I felt as though I was in a tug-of-war with a gigantic anxiety monster who was trying to pull me into a bottomless pit. I fought and pulled, but no matter how hard I tried I could not win, but neither could I give up and be cast into oblivion. It was very hard for me to realize that I did not need to win this war. Life is not asking that of me. It was asking me to drop the rope. Once I did that, I could use my arms and hands for more interesting things.

Minds are great when it comes to inventing new devices, constructing business plans, or organizing daily schedules. But, by themselves, minds are far less useful in learning to be present, learning to love, or discovering how best to carry the complexities of a personal history. Verbal knowledge is not the only kind of knowledge there is. We must learn to use our analytical and evaluative skills when doing so promotes workability and to use other forms of knowledge when they best serve our interests. In effect, the ultimate goal of ACT is to teach clients to make such distinctions in the service of promoting a more workable life.

In humans, self-elimination can fulfill a variety of purposes, but its stated purposes are usually drawn from the everyday lexicon of emotion, memory and thought. For example, when suicide notes are examined, they tend to be messages emphasizing the immense burdens of living and conceptualizing a future state of existence (or nonexistence) in which those burdens will be lifted (Joiner et al., 2002). Although suicide notes frequently express love for others and a sense of shame for the act, they also commonly express that life is just too painful to bear (Foster, 2003). The emotions and most common states of mind generally associated with suicide include guilt, anxiety, loneliness, and sadness (Baumeister, 1990).

The Example of Suicide There is no more dramatic example of the degree to which suffering is part of the human condition than suicide. Death by deliberate choice is obviously the least desirable outcome one can imagine in life; yet, a surprisingly sizable proportion of the human family at one time or another seriously considers killing themselves, and a shockingly large number of them actually attempt to do so. Suicide is the conscious, deliberate, and purposeful taking of one’s own life. Two facts are starkly evident about suicide: (1) it is ubiquitous in human societies, and (2) it is arguably absent among all other living organisms. Existing theories of suicide are hard-pressed to logically account for both of these facts. Suicide is reported in every human society, both now and in the past. Approximately 11.5 per 100,000 persons in the United States actually commit suicide every year (Xu, Kochanek, Murphy, & Tejada-Vera, 2010), accounting for nearly 35,000 deaths in 2007.

Each new human life retraces this ancient story. Young children are the very essence of human innocence. They run, play, and feel—and, as in Genesis, when they are naked they are not ashamed. Children provide a model for the assumption of healthy normality, and their innocence and vitality are part of why the assumption seems so obviously true. But that vision begins to fade as children acquire language and become more and more like the creatures adults see reflected every day in their mirrors. Adults unavoidably drag their children from the Garden with each word, conversation, or story they relate to them. We teach children to talk, think, compare, plan, and analyze. And as we do, their innocence falls away like petals from a flower, to be replaced by the thorns and stiff branches of fear, self-criticism, and pretense. We cannot prevent this gradual transformation, nor can we fully soften it. Our children must enter into the terrifying world of verbal knowledge. They must become like us.

Two events were critical in this regard. The first was the infamous Compromise of 1877, which ended the 1876 presidential election dispute and elevated Republican Rutherford B. Hayes to the presidency in exchange for a promise to remove federal troops from the South. The pact effectively ended Reconstruction, which, by stripping away hard-fought federal protections for African Americans, allowed southern Democrats to undo basic democratic rights and consolidate single-party rule.

1. Nhiều người từ bỏ việc học sau khi họ ra trường vì mười ba hoặc hai mươi năm giáo dục với động lực từ bên ngoài vẫn là một nguồn ký ức khó chịu. Sự chú ý của họ đã bị thao túng đủ lâu từ bên ngoài bởi những quyển sách giáo khoa và các giáo viên, và họ đã coi ngày tốt nghiệp là ngày đầu tiên của tự do. 2. Truyền thuyết xưa cũ này tiếp tục truyền đi qua hàng thế kỷ. Phòng chờ của các bác sĩ tâm thần được lấp đầy bởi những bệnh nhân giàu có và thành công, những người ở độ tuổi bốn mươi, năm mươi bất chợt thức tỉnh trước sự thật rằng một căn nhà ngoại ô sang trọng, những chiếc xe hơi đắt tiền và ngay cả một nền giáo dục đẳng cấp ở Ivy League15 cũng không đủ để mang lại sự bình yên trong tâm trí. Thế nhưng mọi người vẫn tiếp tục hy vọng rằng sự thay đổi các điều kiện bên ngoài trong đời sống của họ sẽ mang lại một giải pháp. Họ tin rằng chỉ cần có thể kiếm được nhiều tiền hơn, có diện mạo đẹp hơn, hay có một người bạn đời thấu hiểu hơn thì họ sẽ thật sự hạnh phúc. Mặc dù chúng ta nhận ra rằng thành công về mặt vật chất có thể không mang lại hạnh phúc, song chúng ta vẫn lao vào một cuộc chiến đấu không hồi kết để đạt tới các mục tiêu bên ngoài, trông mong rằng chúng sẽ cải thiện cuộc đời mình. 3. TẠI NHỮNG THỜI ĐIỂM NHẤT ĐỊNH trong lịch sử, các nền văn hóa đã mặc định rằng một cá nhân không hoàn toàn được xem là con người trừ khi anh ta hoặc cô ta học được cách làm chủ các suy nghĩ và cảm xúc của mình

When we’ve adopted behavior because we think it helps us avoid emotional pain, whether we’re aware of that thinking or not, change is challenging.

I want you to think of the most empowering relationship in your life. This should be a relationship with someone who lifted you up, who somehow carried you forward. It could be with a spouse or a sibling; a lover or a friend; a teacher or a coach; a priest, rabbi, or minister; a parent or guardian—it could be anyone.

para cambiar el mundo, primero hay que comprenderlo.

For too many of us, the occasional binge becomes habitual. That extra drink at the party turns into substance dependence. Procrastinating on a deadline unfolds into life dreams that are not pursued. Picking fights with the people you love becomes a method for avoiding the intimacy you so desperately crave.

The psychologist Steven Hayes, who helped develop what is known as acceptance and commitment therapy, takes a quite Buddhist approach to meeting the full spectrum of human emotions. He encourages people to stop mentally suppressing uncomfortable feelings, which leads to psychological inflexibility--a factor that, alongside loneliness, leaves us more vulnerable to stress. In the face of overwhelming global social, political, and economic upheavals and nagging worries about health, safety, financial security, childcare, and so much more, it's both harder and more important than ever to be mentally flexible.

Si no hay alivio en los frutos de nuestra investigación, hay al menos algún consuelo en la investigación misma. Los hombres no se contentan con consolarse mediante cuentos de dioses y gigantes, o limitando sus pensamientos a los asuntos cotidianos de la vida. También construyen telescopios, satélites y aceleradores, y se sientan en sus escritorios durante horas interminables tratando de discernir el significado de los datos que reúnen. El esfuerzo para comprender el Universo es una de las pocas cosas que eleva la vida humana por sobre el nivel de la farsa y le imprime algo de la elevación de la tragedia.

Los medios de comunicación necesitan a los expertos tanto como los expertos a los medios. Todos los días hay páginas de periódicos e informativos de televisión que llenar, y un experto que aporte una noticia discordante siempre es bienvenido. Juntos, periodistas y expertos son los artífices de gran parte de la sabiduría conven-cional.

There’s something else, too, Miss Emmie.” Stevens had gone bashful now, and Emmie was intrigued. “Here.” Stevens beckoned her to follow him out the back of the stables, to where a separate entrance led to a roomy foaling stall. “He said you needed summat other’n t’mule, and you’re to limber her up, as Miss Winnie will be getting a pony soon.” A sturdy dapple-gray mare stood regarding Emmie from over a pile of hay. She turned a soft eye on Emmie and came over to the half door to greet her visitors. “Oh, Stevens.” Emmie’s eyes teared up again. “She is so pretty… so pretty.” “He left ye a message.” Stevens disappeared back into the barn and came out with a sealed envelope. “I can tack her up if ye like.” Emmie tore open the envelope with shaking fingers. How dare he be so thoughtful and generous and kind? Oh, how dare he… She couldn’t keep the horse, of course; it would not be in the least proper, but dear Lord, the animal was lovely… My dear Miss Farnum, Her name is Petunia, and she is yours. I have taken myself to points distant, so by the time I return, you will have fallen in love with her, and I will be spared your arguments and remonstrations. She is as trustworthy and reliable a lady as I have met outside your kitchen, and at five years of age, has plenty of service yet to give. Bothwell has been alerted you will be joining him on his rides, should it please you to do so. And if you are still determined not to keep the horse, dear lady, then consider her my attempt at consolation to you for inflicting Scout on the household in my absence. St. Just He’d drawn a sketch in the corner of Scout, huge paws splayed, tongue hanging, his expression bewildered, and broken crockery scattered in every direction. The little cartoon made Emmie smile through her tears even as Winnie tugged Scout out behind the stables to track Emmie down. “Are you crying, Miss Emmie?” Winnie picked up Emmie’s hand. “You mustn’t be sad, as we have Scout now to protect us and keep us company.” “It isn’t Scout, Winnie.” Emmie waved a hand toward the stall where Petunia was still hanging her head over the door, placidly watching the passing scene. “Oh.” Winnie’s eyes went round. “There’s a new horse, Scout.” She picked up her puppy and brought him over to the horse. The mare sniffed at the dog delicately, then at the child, then picked up another mouthful of hay. “Her name’s Petunia,” Emmie said, finding her handkerchief. “The earl brought her from York so I can ride out with the vicar.” “She’s very pretty,” Winnie said, stroking the velvety gray nose. “And not too big.” The mare was fairly good size, at least sixteen and a half hands, and much too big for Winnie. “Maybe once I get used to her, I can take you up with me, Winnie. Would you like that?” “Would I?” Winnie squealed, setting the dog down. “Did you hear that, Scout? Miss Emmie says we can go for a ride. Oh… We must write to the earl and thank him, Miss Emmie, and I must tell Rose I have a puppy, too. I can knight Scout, can’t I?” “Of course you may,” Emmie said, reaching for Winnie’s hand. “Though you must know knights would never deign to be seen in the castle kitchens, except perhaps in the dead of winter, when it’s too cold to go charging about the kingdom.” “Did knights sleep in beds?” “Scout can stay with Stevens above the carriage house when you have repaired to your princess tower for your beauty sleep.” “I’ll ask Scout.” It

Es verdad lo que Steven Pressfield dice: hay una fuerza que se opone a lo bello que hay en el mundo y muchísimos nos estamos rindiendo. Robert McKee afirma al final de su libro que el mundo necesita que seamos valientes. El mundo requiere que escribamos algo mejor.

El islam impone un ayuno de comida y bebida durante las horas diurnas de todo el mes del Ramadán. La mayoría de las mujeres musulmanas participa, aunque estén embarazadas; al fin y al cabo, no hay que ayunar todo el día. Aun así, como descubrieron Almond y Mazumder analizando datos de natalidad de varios años, los niños que estaban en el útero durante el Ramadán tienen más probabilidades de presentar efectos secundarios en su desarrollo. La magnitud de estos efectos depende del mes de gestación en que está el feto cuando llega el Ramadán. Los efectos son más fuertes cuando el ayuno coincide con el primer mes de embarazo, pero pueden darse si la madre ayuna en cualquier período hasta el octavo mes.

carbono. No hay nada especial en el nivel actual de dióxido de carbono, ni en el nivel actual del mar, ni en las temperaturas actuales. Lo perjudicial son los cambios rápidos. En general, el aumento de dióxido de carbono es probablemente bueno para la biosfera; solo que está aumentando demasiado deprisa.» Los caballeros de IV aportan nuevos ejemplos de creencias erróneas sobre el calentamiento global. La

Vivir de un modo congruente con nuestros valores es un viaje que no termina nunca; dura toda la vida.

In recent studies by David Barlow and Steven Hayes, many adulthood psychological issues were found to be rooted in the habit of emotional avoidance. Although emotional avoidance eases feelings of unpleasantness in the short-term, it can go as far as to inhibit ambitions, create chaos in relationships, and limit the individual’s ability to meet life’s challenges. By avoiding feelings such as anxiety, one will become hypervigilant to scenarios where this anxiety may arise. Moreover, emotional avoidance is often futile. It essentially creates a self-fulfilling prophecy where anxiety arises about anxiety. To make the situation even worse, anticipatory anxiety can then arise, which tends to be even more challenging to cope with than the event that may bring about anxiety itself. As you can see, without the use of proper emotional coping mechanisms, emotional avoidance can create serious turmoil in an individual’s life. This is why allowing is imperative. It softens the emotions felt and it prevents emotional repression.

Compassion and acceptance; stigma and defusion. As described thus far, acceptance and defusion seem, superficially, to be intrapsychic issues, but self-as-context expands their nature. Because perspective taking is social, it is not possible to take a loving, open, accepting, and active perspective on yourself without doing likewise for others.

In ACT, values are freely chosen, verbally constructed consequences of ongoing, dynamic, evolving patterns of activity, which establish predominant reinforcers for that activity that are intrinsic in engagement in the valued behavioral pattern itself

Another aspect of self is contact with the ongoing stream of private experience, or “self-as-process.” This contact has to do with the ability to observe and describe experiences in the present moment. Statements such as “I am feeling angry right now” reveal that the client is both aware of the content of ongoing awareness and aware of the distinct process of observing that content. This aspect of self-relatedness is a crucial part of “contact with the present moment.

The “I/here/nowness” of consciousness itself is an aspect of self that transcends any particular content of awareness—it is the context of verbal knowing itself.

This relationship is learned over hundreds if not thousands of examples; what is consistent across examples is not the content of the answer but rather the context, or perspective, from which the answer occurs. That is the case with all other deictic frames, such as I/you, we/they, and now/then.

These include the Self-Compassion Scale (Neff, 2003); White Bear Suppression Inventory (Wegner & Zanakos, 1994); Cognitive-Behavioral Avoidance Scale (Ottenbreit & Dobson, 2004); Thought Control Questionnaire (Wells & Davies, 1994), Distress Tolerance Scale (Simons & Gaher, 2005), the Emotional Nonacceptance subscale of the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (Gratz & Roemer, 2004), or similar subscales on various mindfulness measures such as the Kentucky Inventory of Mindfulness Skills (Baer, Smith, & Allen, 2004) or the Five Facets of Mindfulness Questionnaire (Baer et al., 2008), among several others. The definitions of acceptance vary in all of these approaches.

A good way to assess for self-as-context is to examine the flexibility of perspective taking via the interview itself.

The core of the ACT approach is built upon the idea that human language gives rise to both human achievement and human misery.

The resulting progress is astounding, outstripping our ability to appreciate the multifarious changes. Some 200 years ago the average human lifespan in the United States was 37 years; it now approaches 88! About 100 years ago, an American farmer could feed on average just four others; today, it is 200! Fifty years ago the Oxford English Dictionary weighed 300 pounds and took up 4 feet of shelf space; today, it fits on a 1-ounce flash drive or can be accessed via the Web from virtually anywhere!

The Origins of Suffering, according to the Judeo-Christian Tradition The Bible is very clear about the original source of human suffering. In the Genesis story, “God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, in our likeness’ ” (Gen. 1:26 [New International Version]), and Adam and Eve were placed in an idyllic garden. The first humans were innocent and happy: “The man and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame” (Gen. 2:25). They are given only one command: “You must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die” (Gen. 2:17). The serpent tells Eve that she will not die if she eats from that tree, but rather that “God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (Gen. 3:5). The serpent turns out to be correct, to a degree, because when the fruit is eaten, “The eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked” (Gen. 3:7).

When you confront a core problem within yourself, you are at a choice point much like the figure below illustrates. Off to the right lies your old path of avoidance and control. This is the path the negative passengers on the bus most want you to take. It is the logical, reasonable, sensible, verbal path. Your mind will chatter on about dangers, risk, and vulnerabilities and will present avoidance as a method of solution. You’ve been down this path, over and over and over again. It’s not your fault; you’ve done what any reasonable person would do. It just turns out not to be effective, vital, or empowering. It’s not your fault, but now that you know, it is your responsibility. Life can and will make you hurt. Some of that you don’t get to choose: it comes regardless. An accident may confront you with physical pain; an illness may confront you with disability; a death may confront you with feelings of loss. But even then you have the ability to respond (the response-ability).

Me pregunto por qué los brillantes puntitos del cielo no nos resultan tan asequibles como los puntos negros que llenan el mapa de Francia. Cogemos un tren para ir de Tarascón a Ruán, pero para llegar hasta una estrella hemos de morir. Sin duda, hay algo cierto en este razonamiento: no podemos alcanzar estrella alguna mientras sigamos vivos, igual que ya no podemos coger el tren una vez muertos. (Vincent Van Gogh, en una carta a tu hermano Theo).

¿Y dónde iríamos entonces, Garrapata? Ni siquiera sabemos dónde estamos. ¿Qué reino es este? ¿Qué mundo hay al otro lado del bosque? Primo, no tenemos otro lugar al que ir. —A ningún lugar, y a cualquier lugar. En las circunstancias, Nimander, lo primero lleva a lo último, como alcanzar una puerta que todo el mundo cree obstruida, cerrada a cal y canto, y, oh, milagro, se abre de par en par solo con tocarla. Ningún lugar y cualquier lugar son estados mentales. ¿Ves el bosque que nos rodea? ¿Es una barrera, o diez mil caminos que llevan al misterio y la maravilla? Decidas lo que decidas, el bosque sigue siendo el mismo. No cambia para adaptarse a tu decisión.

The Zen master Seng-Ts’an was fond of saying “If you work on your mind with your mind, how can you avoid great confusion?

Is there something you hope will happen by telling me that thought?”).