Books

I genuinely thanked her for her feedback, and I’ve tried ever since not to tell my patients that they should not feel the way they do. Kathy taught me that my responsibility goes much deeper: I have to help them reconstruct their inner map of the world.

When asked how he survived the horrors of the Holocaust, renowned Austrian psychiatrist (and my personal hero) Viktor Frankl said, “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In that response lies our growth and freedom.” The experience of Frankl, who lost everything and everyone he loved in

I stroll picturesque stream-flanked ippon-uras and watch kids walk before me in zigzaggy lines and think about how adults are so point-to-point specific, but these children try their hardest to stretch out their walks home, ducking into little nooks in the entryways of houses and behind stone walls, poking one another, tugging on tree branches,

“Every marriage is made up of two ingredients, togetherness and separateness. In good marriages, the partners carry equal loads of both of those. Let’s say there are 100 points of togetherness and 100 points of separateness. In a good relationship, one partner expresses 50 points of togetherness and 50 points of separateness, and the other does the

Some 80 percent of the fibers of the vagus nerve (which connects the brain with many internal organs) are afferent; that is, they run from the body into the brain.6 This means that we can directly train our arousal system by the way we breathe, chant, and move, a principle that has been utilized since time immemorial in places like China and India,

But while I may look impassive, I am frantically paddling my feet underwater, always overcompensating to hide my devouring feelings of inadequacy.