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Rumination Quotes

Browse 37 quotes about Rumination.

Rumination Quotes

“Sitting to think of what to write will only set your ass on fire, give you headache, twist your face to look stupid, instead, walk around with a blank mind and something from somewhere will fill it up.”

“We must seek to tame this wanderer mind, not by chaining it to the immovable past or the unarrivable future, but by inviting it to rest in the embrace of the present moment. For in the now lies the true journey’s end of the wanderer, a place where dreams take root, grow, and flourish.”

“One of the most difficult things to remember is to remember to remember. We forget that we live in a body with senses and feelings and thoughts and emotions and ideas. We get caught up in rumination and fantasy, isolating us from the world of colors, shapes, sounds, smells, tastes, and sensations constantly bombarding our input sensors. To stop and pay attention to the moment is one way of snapping out of these mindscapes, and is a definition of meditation. This awareness is a process of deepening self-acceptance. Whatever it observes, it embraces. There is nothing unworthy of acceptance.”

“The act of consciously and purposefully paying attention to symptoms and their antecedents and consequences makes the symptoms more an objective target for thoughtful observation than an intolerable source of subjective anxiety, dysphoria, and frustration. In ACT, the act of accepting the symptoms as an expectable feature of a disorder or illness, has been shown to be associated with relief rather than increased distress (Hayes et al., 2006). From a traumatic stress perspective, any symptom can be reframed as an understandable, albeit unpleasant and difficult to cope with, reaction or survival skill (Ford, 2009b, 2009c). In this way, monitoring symptoms and their environmental or experiential/body state "triggers" can enhance client's willingness and ability to reflectively observe them without feeling overwhelmed, terrified, or powerless. This is not only beneficial for personal and life stabilization but is also essential to the successful processing of traumatic events and reactions that occur in the next phase of therapy (Ford & Russo, 2006).”

“Everyone's grief is on a different timetable. You'll know when you're ready. ... I lost my grandmother when I was nine, and while it's not the same as your grief, the loss was like a piece of gum. The longer I chewed it, the less flavor it had. And then one day I swallowed it. So I'm not chewing it every day, but it's still inside me. And I heard that gum takes, like, seventy-two years to digest, so ...”

“Rumination in grief is a form of avoidance. We know - this is completely counterintuitive. As we talked about [previously], avoidance is when you work hard not to think about something. How could rumination possibly be a form of avoidance? Margaret Stroebe, Henk Schut, Maarten Eisma, and an array of their colleagues first suggested this 'rumination as avoidance' hypothesis and then did research to investigate it. There is a lot to say on this topic, but here's what you need to know: studies have found that grieving people will often ruminate on very specific aspects of their loss. This keeps their brains so busy with those very focused events or details that they don't have to face the even more difficult and painful aspects of their grief.”

“When our thoughts turn towards the past, we are often mired in the seductive trap of regret or bathed in the illusory glow of nostalgia. We wallow in the murky waters of what once was, reaching out to the shadows of deeds done and words uttered. Yet, the past is but a deserted stage, the actors long departed, the play concluded. No amount of wandering in its hallowed halls can change the script that was once performed.”

“Most of us do not like not being able to see what others see or make sense of something new. We do not like it when things do not come together and fit nicely for us. That is why most popular movies have Hollywood endings. The public prefers a tidy finale. And we especially do not like it when things are contradictory, because then it is much harder to reconcile them (this is particularly true for Westerners). This sense of confusion triggers in a us a feeling of noxious anxiety. It generates tension. So we feel compelled to reduce it, solve it, complete it, reconcile it, make it make sense. And when we do solve these puzzles, there's relief. It feels good. We REALLY like it when things come together. What I am describing is a very basic human psychological process, captured by the second Gestalt principle. It is what we call the 'press for coherence.' It has been called many different things in psychology: consonance, need for closure, congruity, harmony, need for meaning, the consistency principle. At its core it is the drive to reduce the tension, disorientation, and dissonance that come from complexity, incoherence, and contradiction. In the 1930s, Bluma Zeigarnik, a student of Lewin's in Berlin, designed a famous study to test the impact of this idea of tension and coherence. Lewin had noticed that waiters in his local cafe seemed to have better recollections of unpaid orders than of those already settled. A lab study was run to examine this phenomenon, and it showed that people tend to remember uncompleted tasks, like half-finished math or word problems, better than completed tasks. This is because the unfinished task triggers a feeling of tension, which gets associated with the task and keeps it lingering in our minds. The completed problems are, well, complete, so we forget them and move on. They later called this the 'Zeigarnik effect,' and it has influenced the study of many things, from advertising campaigns to coping with the suicide of loved ones to dysphoric rumination of past conflicts.”

“Both past and future are but illusions, mere phantoms birthed by the wanderer mind. They are echoes and whispers, devoid of the tangible solidity of the present moment. We become the masters of time, not by traversing its illusory breadth, but by plunging into the depth of the present moment.”

“It is possible that the malice of writers has been overrated (by myself among others). Reading their ruminations on their craft, one sees why this writer could not possibly like that one, would indeed consider him a menace. Literature is a battleground of conflicting faiths, and nobler passions than envy are involved.”

“It would be much better if I could only stop thinking. Thoughts are the dullest things. Duller than flesh. They stretch out and there's no end to them and they leave a funny taste in the mouth. Then there are words, inside the thoughts, unfinished words, a sketchy sentence which constantly returns...It goes, it goes ... and there's no end to it. It's worse than the rest because I feel responsible and have complicity in it. For example, this sort of painful rumination: I exist, I am the one who keeps it up. I.”

“I have bad days. Sometimes I have a lot of bad days. By and large, I think most people fall into a bad mood because they're able to ruminate on whatever the problem at hand is, and that makes it worse. But when you intercept the rumination process with something that requires your full attention - that's stimulating and absorbing, that places a demand on your intellectual focus - you don't get to ruminate. In a way, it's a mental health aid to be able to do that so much. My routine, what I do, it just feels like home. It's my comfort food.”

“The music of the supreme architect, Bach, is filled with pages of discursive argument and rumination, glorifying the nameless whole by a rich embroidery of passages which lead everywhere and nowhere. The ideas are presented, stood on their head, dissolved into fragments, until the ultimate message becomes the connections of all things great and small, a chain of being which cannot be secured until the last note is in place.”

“Here is the interesting twist:[McLeod] Campbell came to his views through reading Jonathan Edwards who suggested at one point in his ruminations on the atonement that Christ could have offered up a perfect act of penitence instead of punishment, and that this would have been an acceptable offering suitable to remit our sinfulness.”

“I have neither the scholar's melancholy, which is emulation; nor the musician's, which is fantastical; nor the courtier's, which is proud; not the soldier's which is ambitious; nor the lawyer's, which is politic; nor the lady's, which is nice; nor the lover's, which is all these: but it is a melancholy of mine own, compounded of many simples, extracted from many objects, and indeed the sundry contemplation of my travels, which, by often rumination, wraps me in a most humorous sadness.”

“What is essential to practice the Tao is to get rid of cravings and vexations. If these afflictions are not removed, it is impossible to attain stability. This is like the case of the fertile field, which cannot produce good crops as long as the weeds are not cleared away. Cravings and ruminations are the weeds of the mind; if you do not clear them away, concentration and wisdom do not develop.”

“The combination of rumination and negative mood is toxic. Research shows that people who ruminate while sad or distraught are likely to feel besieged, powerless, self-critical, pessimistic, and generally negatively biased.”