Yufa

“Fearlessness is what love seeks,” Hannah Arendt wrote in her superb early work on love and loss. “Such fearlessness exists only in the complete calm that can no longer be shaken by events expected of the future… Hence the only valid tense is the present, the Now.”

What would it be like if I could accept life--accept this moment--exactly as it is?

Seeking social support, deflating the situation with humour, better planning our workload, accepting our emotional and psychological struggle, focusing on solving the problem, and positively reinterpreting our challenges are all constructive coping mechanisms. On the other hand, drowning our emotions in alcohol, disengaging, venting, and denying... See more

Vulnerability at its heart is the willingness to show up and be seen when you can’t control perception.[…]The one thing that we all have in common is… the paradox of vulnerability: that when I meet you, the very first thing I look for in you is vulnerability, and the very last thing I want to show you is my vulnerability.

Emotion regulation is not about not feeling. Neither is it exerting tight control over what we feel. And it’s not about banishing negative emotions and feeling only positive ones. Rather, emotion regulation starts with giving ourselves and others the permission to own our feelings—all of them.

The greatest challenge, of course, is the perennial challenge of the human mind — how to integrate seemingly contradictory needs or ideas in such a way that they coexist harmoniously, perhaps even magnify each other, rather than cancel each other out.

The richest relationships are often those that don’t fit neatly into the preconceived slots we have made for the archetypes we imagine would populate our lives—the friend, the lover, the parent, the sibling, the mentor, the muse. We meet people who belong to no single slot, who figure into multiple categories at different times and in different... See more