We have an inbuilt cognitive and behavioural resistance to the new; we work to try to make our ‘now’ just another version of our ‘then,’ so that nothing new needs to be decided, no extra effort needs to be made, no discomfort felt. But a tendency to get stuck in old ways, even in the face of new demands, can become a source of our trembling and bre

Before you are body, or nervous system or brain or mind, your most immediate experience of yourself is as a medium through which, in which, a world is manifested with you at its centre.

The work of wellbeing is not to change the play but to be the theatre… hold your self-stories lightly and be lightly held by them.

The unsafe person is in a state of situationally induced paranoia; they are put in a position of terrible alertness', as Sedgwick observes in her essay on paranoia. … The threatened individual can only ensure their safety by feeling unsafe, by maintaining a constant state of anticipatory vigilance. This is the emotional logic of the threatened self

We are a deeply enmeshed republic of physiological, emotional and symbolic systems whose interactions can be thrown into disorder with frightening ease. Our story about our struggles and our suffering needs to try to capture this complexity, and how it will show up differently in every case.

The more we identify with a limited and fixed version of our self, the more vulnerable this self is to hurt and harm, to the effects of change, accident and turbulence. If it has no flexibility, it is fragile.

Our best defence against the turbulence of life is not self-transformation but self-knowledge and self-acceptance.

Neuroticism is a personality trait, a particular way of approaching and responding to the world. Those of us who are more neurotic approach the world with caution; we look for and expect danger and difficulty. We are always on guard. When we do meet danger and difficulty, we tend to react more strongly to it; we experience more distress, more frust

The inability to switch off, to switch from sympathetic to parasympathetic activation, is a hot topic in medicine and psychology right now. It is measured by heart rate variability (HRV). Which should, if you are well balanced, be high: your heart rate should vary a lot. If you can gear up when you have to, and then switch quickly and comfortably i