17 May
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Man is the artificer of his own happiness.
Henry David Thoreau, Journal, January 21, 1838
US Transcendentalist author (1817 – 1862)
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Way back in 1838 happiness followed the same rules, stay present, live now and be happy.
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Let go of thought if you want to be the artificer of happiness in life.
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Reach out and find the joy beneath the surface of now.
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15 May
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Somedays, we need to navigate the rapids, the hard knocks of life, which can be unpleasant to heart breaking.
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We need to tread water and stay afloat, being aware of now, letting the fear of thought fade downstream.
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It may feel scary, anxious or horrible or any combination of these emotions.
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Maybe we are triggered, jolted by the cortisol dumping and body reacting to a supposed lethal threat.
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All the more reason to be aware, staying present, resisting with each breath.
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It is like an attack of the mind. Tragedy hits home and thoughts, stories, invade our consciousness.
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This is the moment of truth for healing or powering PTSD.
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Resist leaving during these frightening times, staying present, and healing happens.
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PTSD has lost some power and we have reinforced our daily practice with success.
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9 May
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Fear, described in neuroscience terms coincides with the dumping of cortisol, that big jolt in the chest. Also, the loss of fine motor skills, blood pumping to our extremities, and cognitive skills blurred along with tunnel vision.
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Life feels small, dangerous, even terror grips us with PTSD, as we look for a way to defend or escape.
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Those who grasp these triggers as real, bring super sized symptoms, hyper vigilance, avoidance, dissociation and paranoia. In this space, life has misery, sorrow and terror.
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Personally, dissociation and avoidance grew into agoraphobia, sentencing me to hide out inside my garage during the day. Leaving home seemed dangerous, filled with catastrophe and urgent reaction to flee.
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I tried to think my way out, discover what healed looked like, how it functioned. It goes back to neuroscience, what fires together wires together, spend time thinking, fearing, fleeing and suffer.
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Fear, was ruling my life, erecting barriers, walls of supposed protection which led to a narrowing of my existence.
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After I hit bottom, one way out was left, mindfulness and acceptance.
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Acceptance, true acceptance took time, penetrated my soul slowly because of the fear.
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Once, I accepted my fear and observed the mechanism, the sensations
in the body, a familiarity and calm entered my body, nervous system.
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I sat with my fear without grasping the story, day in, day out for a month. Fear became a friend, a complex mechanism inside my own body without the attributes of thought, discretion or intent.
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Fear was not scary after a while. My soul, true self or me did not react to triggers anymore. Then triggers lost their power over me.
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I was fine with my adrenal response mechanism firing, safe, calm, not needing to react or respond. C-PTSD had lost power and faded quickly.
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Daily work without goals, except maximum effort and focus.
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8 May
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this is the cortisol, adrenaline dump, plus heart rate, BP and respiration rising, blood is pumped to our extremities. Next, we lose our fine motor skills, some hearing, cognitive skills and maybe even experience panic, a frozen, shocked state.
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naturally, we would look to defend or flee a lethal threat, expediently.
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This disorder, PTSD, is a delusional fear with access to our switch to panic. The drugs released and body reaction is real, the thoughts air at best, worthless without the disorder.
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We attach importance to our judgments, life and death sometimes, like a devotion to emotional desires. We value status, approval, affluence or power above all else.
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While exercising aerobically, push your body to a place where it wants to quit. Then visualize walking in the woods with grandparents and kids, when a huge bear raises up in front of us and lets out a frightening noise.
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It is our plight to step out and defend the helpless we are with.
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Draw from the depths of your soul, summon the amygdala to react, release our fight or flight mechanism.
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It is us and the bear, we have offered ourself, stepped out front to buy time for the rest.
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Turn the music up and push the legs onward as determined as possible.
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Now all have found safety in the group and we turn and propel our legs with life and death consequences.
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our body wants to quit, exactly when we gain power from enduring, continuing to move our legs no matter what is present, fear, terror, anxiety or avoidance.
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Being able to experience the adrenal stress response separate from one of our triggers heals us.
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It informs us that thoughts add nothing to the power of our fight, flight or freeze mechanism.
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Thoughts are air without action, air I say!!!!!
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Play with the body mechanisms, emotions, sensations,,spasms and bliss.
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7 May
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Numerous ways to say , meditate and observe, listen intently for the sound of our breath.
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Slow the nervous system with focus on the breath, becoming one with the breath movement.
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The rise of the inhale, balanced by the purging exhale, connected by similar pauses.
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Let emotions exist on their own, arriving, staying a while, then fading from consciousness.
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A great practice, enabling us to focus our attention on now.
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The soul and true self may be the same?
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Quiet the mind, practice the breathing track, daily!
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Practice, practice, practice, practice, practice,practice!!!!!!
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2 May
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Abuse during childhood is different. A study of adult civilians with PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) has shown that individuals with a history of childhood abuse have distinct, profound changes in gene activity patterns, compared to adults with PTSD but without a history of child abuse.
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A team of researchers from Atlanta and Munich probed blood samples from 169 participants in the Grady Trauma Project, a study of more than 5000 Atlanta residents with high levels of exposure to violence, physical and sexual abuse and with high risk for civilian PTSD.
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The results were published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Early Edition. “These are some of the most robust findings to date showing that different biological pathways may describe different subtypes of a psychiatric disorder, which appear similar at the level of symptoms but may be very different at the level of underlying biology,” says Kerry Ressler, MD, PhD, professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Emory University School of Medicine and Yerkes National Primate Research Center.
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“As these pathways become better understood, we expect that distinctly different biological treatments would be implicated for therapy and recovery from PTSD based on the presence or absence of past child abuse.”
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“Traumatic events that happen in childhood are embedded in the cells for a long time,” Binder says. “Not only the disease itself, but the individual’s life experience is important in the biology of PTSD, and this should be reflected in the way we treat these disorders.”
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Full article here: http://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-05-ptsd-distinct-gene-patterns-childhood.html#jCp
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Thoughts?
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2 May
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One may understand the cosmos, but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star. ~G.K. Chesterton, “The Logic of Elfland,” Orthodoxy, 1908
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The self is more distant than the farthest star because we must lose the ego temporarily, to find the true self.
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When the ego is leading consciously, the true self is more distant than the farthest star. In fact not viewable from this space of consciousness.
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Being able to let go of the pull, generated by the ego, the “I”, frees us, heals us.
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Do the daily work, make it habit and enjoy life openly, enthusiastically.
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30 Apr
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First, trace the breath in the model a few times with your finger to experience the parts of the breath and the transitions.
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Second bring entire focus to the opening of the nostrils. Our goals are to feel the pause after the exhale, till the inhale brings cool air in an expansive fill of the lungs. The inhale starts at the lower right hand corner.
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Next we remain with focus on the opening of the nostrils as we transition or pause before we start the exhale. We would be at the top right corner doing this. This is the opposite feel of warm air deflating from the lungs slowly.
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The focus while following the breathing track is in this finite space, the opening of the nostrils. This will help letting thoughts go or not having as many thoughts explode into our consciousness.
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Relax, let tension go with each breath as we slow and calm the nervous system. No right or wrong, good or bad, not even dialogue or the alphabet, no conscious communication available on the right side of the mind/brain.
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Practice, forget thought or goals, just take mental action, fight for your happiness. Give effort, some of your heart and soul into healing, improving.
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25 Apr
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Everything changes, over, over and over again, life continues.
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Our joy or grief does not stop or slow time or the world.
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Few care or even know us or our plight.
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Let the ego fade from consciousness, explore this current moment, openly.
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Beauty or terror experience now, and live again!
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Let worry, fear and helplessness fade, explore this second intensely!
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Reach out a little farther, risk a little more, explore life.
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24 Apr
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If you can’t see what you are looking for,
see what’s there.
It’s enough.
Mark Nepo
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Accepting life and ourselves exactly as we are, right now, having gratitude for our circumstance is the key to happiness.
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Yearning for things to be different wastes time and living life.
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Happiness can be found in our current place, with our current abilities and in this moment.
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Look deeper and appreciate all that we overlook, discount or ignore.
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Life has everything we need, now, to be fulfilled, happy, and productive.
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