Libby Davy

“On the other hand, wasn’t that the very definition of life? Constant adaptations brought about by a series of never-ending mistakes?”
― Bonnie Garmus, Lessons in Chemistry

“The existence of sensitive people is an advantage for humankind because it is this group that best expresses humanity’s creative urges and needs. Through their instinctual responses the world is best interpreted. Under normal circumstances, they are artists or artisans, seekers, inventors, shamans, poets, prophets. There would be valid and powerful evolutionary reasons for the survival of genetic material coding for sensitivity. It is not diseases that are being inherited but a trait of intrinsic survival value to human beings. Sensitivity is transmuted into suffering and disorders only when the world is unable to heed the exquisitely tuned physiological and psychic responses of the sensitive individual.”
― Gabor Maté, Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder – The International Bestseller

“Through the eyes of compassion, from your own regulated nervous system, you can see another person’s dysregulated system, respond with regulation, and connect with kindness. From the energy of your ventral vagal system, you can also connect inside and be with your own suffering in an act of self-compassion. Ongoing experiences build the capacity for connecting with compassion. Find the combination of practices that brings your ventral vagal system alive. Create your own compassionate connections.”
― Deb Dana, Polyvagal Exercises for Safety and Connection: 50 Client-Centered Practices

“We must be learning if we are to feel fully alive, and when life, or love, becomes too predictable and it seems like there is little left to learn, we become restless-a protest, perhaps, of the plastic brain when it can no longer perform its essential task.”
― Norman Doidge, The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science