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Understanding Pain

(Part One)

How can pain be minimized? The general rule is: Be agreeable or go away.

Celluloid Children

Grandma was a person of the Middle Kingdom. The center of civilized life. With one hand she propped up a star-gazer, and with the other she reached down to the bowels of life to offer a hand to the lost and bewildered.

Learning To Die

In every spiritual tradition life is not something that you automatically have, it is something that you must choose, and what makes you choose life is the challenge of death — learning to die, not eventually, but here and now.

A Neighbor At The Door

Then leo is saying listen, why don’t you come home with us for a cup of coffee, so I say really, like I have heard wifey-hostesses say all my life, and there is a flash of some kind of remembering across judas’s face that when people are being social this is the kind of thing they say and do.

Unlocking The Map Room

We can’t simply question these beliefs. Rational arguments don’t matter here. What matters is felt reality. What matters is going to that place within the person where these beliefs are vivid, active, current, and therefore, available for change. Bandler and Grinder call this process “accessing.” We’re going into the space where reality can be decided upon, the map room. We’re going to see if we can change any of the maps.

Sunbeams

The void is the creatrix, the matrix. It is not mere hollowness and anarchy. But in women it has been identified with lovelessness, barrenness, sterility. We have been urged to fill our “emptiness” with children. We are not supposed to go down into the darkness of the core

Adrienne Rich

The Bear

We have found that when we begin to turn towards or face our neurosis and unpleasant situations we become involved in working with ourselves and our conflicts in a meaningful way. When we no longer run from that which we are afraid there becomes the possibility of being responsible for our projections of aggression, ignorance, and fear.

Walls

I don’t like what I see around me: people with big cars, four bedroom houses and mobile homes and closets full of clothes. I don’t want to know I am one of the people who have so much in a world of people who have so little.

How I See God

As a combination of an elderly Abraham Lincoln and Uncle Sam; through the hole in my throat; through an innocent, crucified victim hanging on a tree

Insisting On Love

Oh you modest-living professional little bastards, giving in to all that mortgaged decency, all those inner rules of silence, as if the spirit of youth was an aberration to be got over and not the event itself, the event of your life, the adventure you ended up betraying for a house in Twit Acres and 2.3 kids you won’t ever understand.