What My Bones Know

In order to heal, would I really have to throw away everything that made me who I was?

There is a ton of information now—including TED Talks and Michael Pollan’s book How to Change Your Mind—about psilocybin and MDMA being highly effective medications for PTSD.

Some therapists believe that you can learn everything there is to learn about how to heal in the first session. The rest of the time spent with your therapist is just theme and variation, practicing fractals of your first conversation, repeating the lessons until they finally ingrain themselves in you as fundamental beliefs.

Dr. Ham would tell me that PTSD is only a mental illness in times of peace. The whole point of PTSD is to prepare you for being on the verge of death at any moment.

If a simple flower arrangement could make this world just a little more bearable, then perhaps my own small actions meant more than I was giving them credit for.

The more childhood trauma someone had suffered, the worse their health outcomes were in adulthood.

A generous, accessible meditation teacher at the Brooklyn Zen Center insisted to me that even the most practiced monks sometimes got lost and stressed during their meditations, too.

We achieved the American Dream because we had no other choice.

At the beginning of each meeting, we would go around in a circle and say how we were doing that month. And we almost never said “good.” Okay, we said. Meh.