“The heart area is where we feel most intimately touched by kindness, gratitude, and appreciation.
It is where we feel most loving and loved.
It is where we point when we refer to ourselves and where we feel the full poignancy of our human existence, richly flavored by both joy and grief.
It is where and how we know ourselves and others most intimately.
It is where we simply are, free of any definition.
And it is where we move from when we are most at ease and in touch with ourselves.
When the heart has awakened, we are intimate with all things.
Conversely, the heart is also where we feel most emotionally wounded by the words and acts of others, especially when we struggle with our own sense of worth.
It is where we feel the impact of our harshest self-judgments and where we feel most hurt by the judgments of others.
When we find it difficult to accept and love ourselves, our heart feels numb or disturbed.
It is where we loathe and reject ourselves, it is where we are least kind to ourselves and others, and it is one of the primary centers of shame.
It is where we feel brokenhearted when we have lost someone dear to us.
It is the seat of despair, and it is where we feel most alone, empty, alienated, and disconnected.” . .
“Traumatized brains look different from non-traumatized brains in three predictable ways:
The Thinking Center is underactivated.
The Emotion Regulation Center is underactivated.
The Fear Center is overactivated.
What these activations indicate is that, often, a traumatized brain is “bottom-heavy,” meaning that activations of lower, more primitive areas, including the fear center, are high, while higher areas of the brain (also known as cortical areas) are underactivated.
In other words, if you are traumatized, you may experience chronic stress, vigilance, fear, and irritation.
You may also have a hard time feeling safe, calming down, or sleeping.
These symptoms are all the result of a hyperactive amygdala.
At the same time, individuals who are traumatized may notice difficulties with concentration and attention, and often report they can’t think clearly.
This, not surprisingly, is due to the thinking center being underactivated.
Finally, survivors of trauma will sometimes complain that they feel incapable of managing their emotions.” . .
A soap manufacturer in Japan received a complaint from a consumer that she received an empty box.
An internal investigation revealed that once in a while, for reasons the company engineers could not explain, an empty box got through.
while management worked on a long term fix, a group of engineers were told to devise a way to prevent any empty boxes being shipped out.
This was an expensive, high tech, scanning devise, causing a big inconvenience in production.
In the meantime, one of the line workers took it upon himself to rig up a temporary solution, while the engineers worked at perfecting their scanning equipment.
He placed a fan near the conveyor belt, where the sealed boxes came out.
Any empty boxes passing in front of the fan were simply blown off the line!!!!!!
. . “The first involves spicy food, hot baths, frightening movies, rough sex, intense exercise, satisfy curiosity, and enhance social status.
The second is the sort involved in climbing mountains and having children. Such activities are effortful and often unpleasant. But they are part of a life well lived.
These two sorts of chosen pain and suffering—for pleasure and for meaning—differ in many ways.
The discomfort of hot baths and BDSM and spicy curries is actively pursued; we look forward to it—the activity wouldn’t be complete without it.
The other form of suffering isn’t quite like that.
When training for a marathon, nobody courts injury and disappointment. And yet the possibility of failure has to exist.
When you start a game, you don’t want to lose, but if you know you will win every time, you’re never going to have any fun.
So, too, with life more generally.
This is why, in case you were wondering, omnipotence is boring.
If there were no kryptonite, who would care about Superman’s adventures? Actually, true omnipotence would be misery.
There is an old Twilight Zone episode that elaborates on this point. A gangster dies and, to his surprise, wakes up in what seems to be paradise. He gets whatever he wants—sex, money, power.
But boredom sets in, and then frustration, and finally he tells his guide that he doesn’t belong in heaven. “I want to go to the other place,” he says.
And his guide responds that this isn’t heaven; he is already in the other place.” . .
. . “Under the right circumstances and in the right doses, physical pain and emotional pain, difficulty and failure and loss, are exactly what we are looking for.
Think about your own favorite type of negative experience.
Maybe you go to movies that make you cry, or scream, or gag. Or you might listen to sad songs.
You might poke at sores, eat spicy foods, immerse yourself in painfully hot baths.
Or climb mountains, run marathons, get punched in the face in gyms and dojos.
Psychologists have long known that unpleasant dreams are more frequent than pleasant ones, but even when we daydream—when we have control over where to focus our thoughts—we often turn toward the negative.
Some of this book will explain why we get pleasure from these experiences.
It turns out that the right kind of pain can set the stage for enhanced pleasure later on; it’s a cost we pay for a greater future reward.
Pain can distract us from our anxieties, and even help us transcend the self.
Choosing to suffer can serve social goals; it can display how tough we are or, conversely, can serve as a cry for help.
Unpleasant emotions such as fear and sadness are part of play and fantasy and can provide certain moral satisfactions.
And effort and struggle and difficulty can, in the right contexts, lead to the joys of mastery and flow.” . .
PTSD - A Way Out.com 