What If the Body Politic Kept the Score?
Way back already in 1872, Charles Darwin wrote a book about emotions in which he talks about how emotions are expressed in things like heartbreak and gut-wrenching experience. So you feel things in your body. And then it became obvious that, if people are in a constant state of heartbreak and gut-wrench, they do everything to shut down those feelin
... See moreKrista Tippett • Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and the Art of Living
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.
Vincent Deary • How We Break
“Memory produces hope in the same way that amnesia produces despair,” the theologian Walter Brueggeman noted.
Rebecca Solnit • Hope in the Dark
The profound erosion of trust in the Digital City leaves a vacuum, and we look to our tools to fill it. We seem set upon interlocking trajectories: of ever greater swaths of the human experience being computationally managed, and of intractable human subjects increasingly breaking down or revolting against these conditions.
L. M. Sacasas • The Analog City and the Digital City
In trauma, the body’s alarm systems turn on and then never quite turn off. And we experience the intense suffering of never truly feeling relaxed, at ease in life, always intensely on guard, with the primitive brain constantly scanning for threat or opportunity. Our inner sentry is always on watch. We cannot sleep. Our trust in the rightness of thi
... See moreElizabeth Hopper • Overcoming Trauma through Yoga: Reclaiming Your Body
The effort required to ward off the possibility of trauma—the rush to normal that the absolutisms of daily life encourages—is itself traumatic.