Pearl E > Recent Status Updates

"No man owns his own life," he said. "Part of you is always in someone else's hands. All ye can do is hope it's mostly God's hands you're in."

What makes the traditional family remarkable, a work of high religious art, is what it brought together: sexual drive, physical desire, friendship, companionship, emotional kinship and love, the begetting of children and their protection and care, their early education, and induction into an identity and a history.

The texted "I'm sorry" means, on the one hand, "I no longer want to have tension with you; let's be okay," and at the same time says, "I'm not going to be next to you while you go through your feelings; just let me know when our troubles are over."

I am looking out of my window in an anxious and resentful frame of mind, oblivious of my surroundings, brooding perhaps on some damage done to my prestige. Then suddenly I observe a hovering kestrel. In a moment, everything is altered. The brooding self with its hurt vanity has disappeared. There is nothing now but kestrel. And when I return to the thinking of the other matter it seems less important.'

Frankl's transforming insight was that, although the Nazis had taken away virtually every freedom and vestige of humanity from the camp inmates, there was one freedom they could not take away: the freedom to choose how to respond.

Judaism tends to have a strong communal dimension. As one famous joke has it, Levy, the atheist, is asked why, when he does not believe, does he go regularly to synagogue? His reply: "I go with Mar-kowitz. Markowitz goes to talk to God, and I go to talk to Markow-itz."

Simply playing cards with friends once a week, or getting together over a cup of coffee, adds as many years to life expectancy as giving up a pack-a-day smoking habit." People with active social lives recover faster after illness.

I realized that health is not a matter of never being ill. It is the ability to
recover.

In the end she didn’t have to make a decision; her body made it for her. One morning she woke up with her belly cramping and blood between her legs, and that was the first of many babies she would lose.

She knew the feeling, the relief at being active rather than simply waiting for something to happen.

a life sentence that made the limits of your world a prison, or the prison your world became when your sentence was simply to live.

"You know it's never fifty-fifty in a marriage. It's always seventy-thirty, or sixty-forty. Someone falls in love first. Someone puts someone else up on a pedestal. Someone works very hard to keep things rolling smoothly; someone else sails along for the ride.

You simply could not define freedom to someone who did not realize they were caged.

A child was a temptation of the flesh, as well as of the spirit; I knew the bliss of that unbounded oneness, as I knew the bittersweet joy of seeing that oneness fade as the child learned itself and stood alone.

"That is what God is for. Worry doesna help-prayer does. Sometimes," he added honestly.
"Yes," she said, sounding uncertain. "But if"
"And if she had not come back to me"—he interrupted firmly—"if you had not come—if I had never known—or if I had known for sure that both of you were dead.."… "Then I would still have lived, a nighean, and done what must be done. So will you."

Two miracles I had been given, carried beneath my heart, born of my body, held in my arms, separated from me and part of me forever. I knew much too well that neither death nor time nor distance ever altered such a bond because I had been altered by it, once and forever changed by that mysterious connection.

When that first, eternal link is formed between mother and child.
When the small blind entity, unique in its union of egg and sperm, comes to anchor from the perilous voyage of beginning, in a connection that belongs to neither side, but to both. That link, which cannot be severed, either by birth or by death.

What a mystery blood was—how did a tiny gesture, a tone of voice, endure through generations like the harder verities of flesh? He had seen it again and again, watching his nieces and nephews grow, and accepted without thought the echoes of parent and grandparent that appeared for brief moments, the shadow of a face looking back through the years-that vanished again into the face that was now.

Not loneliness, but solitude. Not suffering, but endurance, the discovery of grim kinship with the rocks and sky. And the finding here of a harsh peace that would transcend bodily discomfort, a healing instead of the wounds of the soul.

They were all mine; the unconscious body in my hands, its secrets open to me; the men who held it, their eyes on me. It didn't always happen, but when it did, the sensation was unforgettable; a synthesis of minds into a single organism. And as I took control of this organism, I became part of it, and lost myself.

I think it will maybe be all right. I thought so, too. There was no telling what lay on the other side of life, but I had sat many times through an hour where time stops, empty of thought, soothed of soul, looking into ... what? Into something that had neither name nor face, but which seemed good to me, and full of peace. If death lay there ...

This tendency may become deeply buried unav. layer after layer of encrusted psychological defenses; it may be hidden behind elaborate façades which deny its existence; it is my belief however, based on my experience, that it exists in every in-dividual, and awaits only the proper conditions to be released and expressed.

In individual and family life the same picture holds true. In the clothes we wear, the food we eat, the books we read, and the ideas we nold, there is a strong tendency toward conformity, toward seotypy. To be original, or different, is felt to be "dangerous."

The incongruence is between awareness and coromuni-cation. Thus it might be noted that when there is an incongruence between experience and awareness, it is usually spoken of as defen-siveness, or denial to awareness. When the incongruence is between awareness and communication it is usually thought of as falseness or deceit.

It is such a relief, such a blessed relaxation of defenses, to find oneself understood, that the individual wishes to create this atmosphere for others. To find, in the therapeutic relationship that one's most awful thoughts, one's most bizarre and abnormal feelings, one's most ridiculous dreams and hopes, one's most evil behaviors, can all be understood by another, is a tremendously releasing experience.

It is as though the client discovers in therapy that it is possible to drop the mask he has been wearing, and become more genuinely himself.

But this was like life, flowing on like a river, seemingly futile, with never the same water there, flowing on, with no one knowing what would happen the next moment.

It is an odd feeling, to sense one's aliveness, for perhaps the very first time, to understand that life up until this point was not being lived, exactly; it was being endured.

We are all a bit like patient TN, blind to certain things, being advised by our unconscious to dodge to the left and right. That advice can often save us, if we are willing to open ourselves to the input.

We don't consciously perceive everything that registers in our brain, so our unconscious mind may notice things that our conscious mind doesn't. When that happens we may get a funny feeling about a business associate or a hunch about a stranger and, like Peirce, not know the source.