PTSD – A Way Out.com A mindful way to heal

Sesshu Toyo is one of the greatest masters of Japanese painting. Born into a prominent samurai family, he was educated to become a Zen Buddhist monk, which he did at age 11.
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“And few internal forces are as effective as gratitude at making our life-condition rise.
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Gratitude not only brings joy but also improves our sense of satisfaction with life to an even greater extent than either pleasure, meaning, or engagement.
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In fact, the strength of gratitude’s ability to make us feel good about life is second only to that of love.
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And as an added bonus, gratitude also increases the frequency with which we feel other positive emotions, like warmth, altruism, and tenderness. .
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Yet gratitude doesn’t increase resilience only in the manner of other positive emotions, by making us feel good.
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It also does so by making us feel less bad, lowering our levels of anxiety, anger, depression, self-consciousness, and emotional vulnerability.
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As a result, gratitude can be leveraged to improve our sleep (making a list of things for which we’re grateful before going to bed both increases positive thoughts and decreases negative thoughts, both of which independently decrease worry and stress), as well as to decrease our anxiety about death (which decreases, apparently, when we’re made to feel that our lives have been well-lived by making a list of things that happened in it for which we’re grateful).
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In short, gratitude represents a powerful tool to help us construct and maintain an undefeated mind.
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It improves our well-being and buffers us against a wide range of maladies, including major depression, generalized anxiety disorder, phobias, nicotine dependence, drug abuse, posttraumatic stress disorder, and even bulimia.
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