One of the great impediments to understanding our lives properly is our automatic assumption that we already do so. - A therapeutic journey by The School of Life.

If this matters, it’s because only on the basis of proper immersion in past fears, sadnesses, rages, and losses can we ever recover from certain disorders that develop when difficult events have become immobilized within us. To be liberated from the past, we need to mourn it, and for this to occur, we need to get in touch with what it actually felt like. - A therapeutic journey by The School of Life.

We’ve been brought up to act fast, to assume that we know everything immediately and to ignore the fact that consciousness is made up of layers, - A therapeutic journey by The School of Life.

We may also be hesitant because the answers that emerge from any descent into the depths and subsequent communion with our inner beings can sound at odds with the settled expectations we have of ourselves in daylight.- A therapeutic journey by The School of Life.

We might need a moment to locate our actual concern. Then, disengaged from the ordinary static, we should circle the matter and ask ourselves with unusual guilelessness: What is coming up for me here? Holding the partner, work challenge, invitation, or disagreement patiently in mind, we should whisper to ourselves: What do I really think? What is the real issue? What is truly going on? What is actually at stake? - A therapeutic journey by The School of Life.

What we will almost certainly find is that, in a quasi-mystical way, the answers are already there waiting for us, like the stars that were present all along and only required the sun to fade in order to come to light in the dome of the sky. A therapeutic journey by The School of Life.

Morning ☀️

One of the stranger aspects of feeling anxious is that we can be both suffering and markedly uninclined or unable to acknowledge that we are in fact so. - A therapeutic journey by The School of Life.

It helps to note that our minds can easily carry more than one mood. They are like movie theaters with a variety of screens; there tends to be a foreground and a background to our emotional horizon in which very different things may be happening. - A therapeutic journey by The School of Life.

It isn’t, of course, very pleasant to be bearing this sort of diffuse anxiety within us. But we are not powerless before it and the way to defeat it is, paradoxically, to engage with it more directly than we probably have to date. - A therapeutic journey by The School of Life.

we should never do ourselves the injustice of assuming that our misery rests on something overly complex at a procedural level. We are sometimes like a high-powered aeroplane that can be grounded because a small screw is missing. We should be humble in the face of the ostensibly simple things that can ruin our lives. - A therapeutic journey by The School of Life.

We should step outside the ordinary flow of the anxious day for a moment, close our eyes, take a deep breath and ask ourselves this: What am I really worried about right now?....
We can continue the questioning: Why is this thing so worrying?
And then: What could I tell myself to make this less bad?
And finally, we can ask ourselves to complete a sentence: I feel
compassion for myself because . . . - A therapeutic journey by The School of Life.
Reference - for when I'm Anxious

We need to create a small safe place in which we can ask ourselves some basic questions—and whisper to ourselves what we are truly finding difficult. - A therapeutic journey by The School of Life.

Modern psychotherapy is united on one point: Our problems require us to engage with our childhoods. - A therapeutic journey by The School of Life.

How dispiriting to be asked to believe that who we are was substantially determined by external factors before we reached the age of reason and, moreover, that if we are to have any hope of helping ourselves, we must undertake a painful and lengthy journey to understand the past in fine-grained detail. - A therapeutic journey by The School of Life.

Why does it so badly want us to return to, and circle, the messy claustrophobic start? ....
All that is required is a weary, dutiful realization that the principal way to overcome our history is to address it. We should try to remember not out of nostalgia, but in order to be able to forget, once and for all. - A therapeutic journey by The School of Life.

The human mind between the ages of one and ten is dauntingly receptive, infinitely attuned to its environment, which means that our whole identity can be decisively and near-permanently shaped by our young experiences. - A therapeutic journey by The School of Life.

And finally, as with standard language, with time we stand to realize how appallingly hard it can be to learn a new and different language, what a struggle we have ahead of us when we no longer want to speak in our allocated tongue—a tongue of anxiety, self-hatred, contempt, or cynicism— and seek to try to express ourselves instead in tones of trust, calm, and kindness.- A therapeutic journey by The School of Life.

morning

It’s a measure of how invisible the process of parental imprinting can be that most of us would be highly surprised to think that a parent or two might be living inside our heads. -A therapeutic journey by The School of Life.