Les Fehmi > Quotes

“We are a species and a culture that, through our attention habits, carry past wounds that cause anger, fear, longing, and sorrow. These affect our lives far more deeply than we realize. We see the world through an imperfect lens, which deeply colors our perceptions, making us more angry, fearful, sorrowful, and overwhelmed than we need to be. Our attention habits, and the emotions they repress, keep us separate from the world, from feeling part of it; they prevent us from fully sensing what is around us and participating in it. As a result, we are unable to fully engage the here and now. The cruel irony is that because we have no other frame of reference, because we do not pay attention to how we pay attention, we think we are seeing the world as it is.”
― Les Fehmi, The Open-Focus Brain: Harnessing the Power of Attention to Heal Mind and Body

“feelings, if left unacknowledged and unaddressed, can eventually surface as pain of some kind. Then the pain, in turn, causes us to narrow-focus on distractions, from television to the Internet or a range of things. By using narrow-focus avoidance to hold back our unwanted thoughts and feelings, our nervous system goes into overarousal, creating muscle tension and blood flow disturbances, which lead to the production of auxiliary pain.”
― Les Fehmi, Dissolving Pain: Simple Brain-Training Exercises for Overcoming Chronic Pain

“(Shame is different from guilt, which is about a particular act; shame is about the unworthiness of the whole self and so is more powerful.) Some researchers say it is the most difficult of emotions to discharge. And it is likely one of the main problems at the center of much of our experience of both physical and emotional pain, because it is the most powerful emotion, and resisting it causes the brain to become unstable.”
― Les Fehmi, Dissolving Pain: Simple Brain-Training Exercises for Overcoming Chronic Pain