Taking care of yourself

I finished the Gabor Maté book "When the Body Says No" it is worth  read and if you don't have a lot of time I would focus on the first and last chapters.  I found a lot of good stuff in the last chapter where he looked at how you would respond if you followed his argument around the relationship between the body and the mind.

I really appreciated this book and the discussion around how our bodies wear our histories.  It raised a lot of interesting questions.

Here are a couple of quotes that I really liked

"Do I live life according to my own deepest truthes or in order to fulfull someone else's expectations?"

"If you face a choice between guild and resentment, choose guilt every time."  He says that resentment is suicide.

"Being hard with yourself uses up a lot of energy."

" Emotional competence is the capacity that enables us to stand in a responsible non-victimized relationship with our environment."

"Negatuve thinking is the ability to ask what is not working?  What is not in balance? What is my body is saying no to?  Not posing the questions themselves is a source of stress."

"What I really believe in is the power of thinking.  When you qualify the word thinking with the word positive we exclude those parts of thinking that strike us as negative.  Genuine positive thinking begins with including all reality.  It is guided by the confidence that we can trust ouraelves to face the full truth what ever that truth might be."

In particular that last two quotes struck me.  I find myself sometimes in situations where I am seen as too negative, and Barbara Erieghnright wrote a great essay about the pitfalls of positive thinking.

Just think and positive or negative let the thoughts flow.  That will let you move forward.