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Quote by Helen Knott

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Becoming a Matriarch: A Memoir

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Helen Knott

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“We'll find that practicing metta changes our behavior at every level. Of course we can only do our own personal practice of metta, just as other people must do their own practice. And when we do so our mental patterns change over time. These thoughts are transformed into our speech and actions, which in turn affect other people.”

EmotionsMoodQuality Of Life
Book:Loving-Kindness in Plain English: The Practice of Metta
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“Seating himself crosslegged on a bale of straw, he formed the image of a flame in his mind and fed emotion into it, hate, fear, everything, every scrap, until it seemed that he floated in emptiness. After years of practice, achieving ko'di, the oneness, needed less than a heartbeat. Thought and even his own body seemed distant, but in this state he was more aware than usual, becoming one with the bale beneath him, the stable, the scabbarded sword folded behind him. He could 'feel' the horses, cropping at their mangers, and flies buzzing in the corners. They were all part of him. Especially the sword. This time, though, it was only the emotionless void that he sought.”

EmotionsOnenessVoidStableStateHorsesSwordDistantEmotionlessScabbard
Book:New Spring
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“I used the role of fight-or-flight in human survival as an excuse to justify my addiction to depression and anxiety; I saw them as survival traits, believing that I would perish without them. However, the key here is that fight-or-flight is an automatic physiological reaction, making it often more dependent on instinct, not initiative. When a person starts getting stressed, or when their fight-or-flight response is activated, they don’t carefully evaluate whether or not this is something worth getting anxious about; they just get anxious automatically. Having their brains become numb, their hearts palpitate, and their adrenaline course their veins just happens automatically; you don’t intentionally control that. That is what makes the woman so blank and emotionless—it is her, or my, strict and rigid dependency on fight-or-flight! By being so deeply contingent on an automatic instinct, I had little time for true introspection. It is like the instinct controlled me, instead of the other way around.”

EmotionsMental HealthIntrospectionEmotional IntelligenceFight Or Flight
Book:For the Intellect
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