Body Alive

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“Neurologically, contemplative moments are pauses in the automatic activity of conditioned brain-cell patterns. Psychologically, they are transient suspensions of compulsion. Philosophically they are “naked intuition,” the momentary direct perception that happens before we begin to think or react. Spiritually, they are tastes of freedom for love …, the spaciousness of salvation. Gerald G. May M.D. The Awakened Heart

Feeling anxious or overwhelmed? Try this simple, fast nervous system reset: Place something cold under your arms. I often recommend this because the cold directly stimulates the vagus nerve, sending a signal of safety to the body, heart rate slows, breathing steadies, and stress hormones begin to drop, often within seconds. Cold input can be as simple as an ice pack, a chilled drink bottle, splashing cool water on the face, or a brief cold shower, all of which help interrupt the stress loop and support regulation when anxiety or panic rises. Sometimes the most powerful form of stress relief isn’t medication or force, it’s understanding how your body works and giving it the right signal at the right time.

Conversation with a client: [she] “My sister had hot flashes until she was 95.” [me]“And then they stopped?” [she]“No, then she died.”

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“Later I learned from a healer that there is a term for the seeming paradox of, at last, pitching yourself into a stable situation, only to self-sabotage or otherwise break-down. This, she said, is a healing crisis. The individual intent on healing, will, in the end, feel and express every information-packed wound. Past symptoms, repressed sensations, and unacknowledged trauma will rise up even as you prepare to relax. Living, she concluded, is not for the faint of heart. And then she laughed. She laughed so hard I felt embarrassed for her so I joined in. Then I was really laughing. Later that day I thought, for the first time in a long time, maybe there was hope for a person like me.” — Selah Saterstrom, from Rancher: an essay lifeinpoetry

“Healing is coming to terms with the actuality of things.”

We inhabit systems designed as though people are things, solid objects, nouns, when in fact we are verbs, giant swirls of flows and processes. (that’s just biochemistry, biogeochemistry, culture, knowledge, learning, language).

–Dr. Elizabeth Sawin / Beth Sawin

“Damage, growth, and time are all the same thing to a body.”

Laura Makabresku - The Anatomy of Melancholy.

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“Life damages us, every one. But now, I am also learning this: We can be mended. We mend each other.”

- Veronica Roth

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Rudolf Nureyev photographed

by Richard Avedon 1961

(Follies of God)

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@MajaSenda :: ©Ikko Narahara

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Anthony Goldsmith

James Nares - Sans Titre

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“The body is itself a kind of place - not a solid object - but a terrain through which things pass, and in which they sometimes settle and sediment.

Sometimes they are transformed by the passage. And sometimes they reshape the doorway itself.”

Growing up, we say, as though we were trees, as though altitude was all that there was to be gained, but so much of the process is growing whole as the fragments are gathered, the patterns found. Human infants are born with craniums made up of four plates that have not yet knit together into a solid dome so that their heads can compress to fit through the birth canal, so that the brain within can then expand. The seams of these plates are intricate, like fingers interlaced, like the meander of arctic rivers across tundra.

The skull quadruples in size in the first few years, and if the bones knit together too soon, they restrict the growth of the brain; and if they don’t knit at all the brain remains unprotected. Open enough to grow and closed enough to hold together is what a life must also be. We collage ourselves into being, finding the pieces of a worldview and people to love and reasons to live and then integrate them into a whole, a life consistent with its beliefs and desires, at least if we’re lucky.

–Recollections of My Nonexistence

[animal skull found on a hike]

Recollections of My Nonexistence

(Antonin Artaud, La Révolution surréaliste, 1st january 1925)

In Libro Veritas :: @InlibroV