How to Stay Sane

Hold your beliefs lightly.’ Certainty is not necessarily a friend of sanity, although it is often mistaken for it.

It may help to remember when you receive a complaint that it is only nominally about you; it is really information about the person making the complaint.

If I do not keep on testing my limits, my comfort-zone shrinks back. Challenges that had seemed comfortable one year took courage to achieve the next. I do not want to get into that position again, so onwards and outwards.

As we get older it is our short term memory that fades rather than our long term memory. Perhaps we have evolved like this so that we are able to tell the younger generation about the stories and experiences that have formed us which may be important to subsequent generations if they are to thrive. I worry though, about what might happen to our minds if most of the stories we hear are about greed, war, and atrocity

Extremes appear not to be the best way forward for sanity. I say make a mark, put a foot onto the path, see (and feel and think) how it lands; and then you can make a good guess about where to put the next foot.

A novel, or a book on philosophy, is going to use both sides of the brain: not only will you have feelings about what you read, but your mind will also get more of a work-out because you will make connections between what you are learning and what you already recognize.

The practice of self-observation mirrors the way in which a mother observes and attunes to her baby. Self-observation is a method of re-parenting ourselves. ... What am I feeling now? What am I thinking now? What am I doing at this moment? How am I breathing? What do I want for myself in this new moment?

You may find that you have been telling yourself that practicing optimism is a risk, as though, somehow, a positive attitude will invite disaster and so if you practice optimism it may increase your feelings of vulnerability. The trick is to increase your tolerance for vulnerable feelings, rather than avoid them altogether. […] Optimism does not mean continual happiness, glazed eyes and a fixed grin. When I talk about the desirability of optimism I do not mean that we should delude ourselves about reality. But practicing optimism does mean focusing more on the positive fall-out of an event than on the negative. … I am not advocating the kind of optimism that means you blow all your savings on a horse running at a hundred to one; I am talking about being optimistic enough to sow some seeds in the hope that some of them will germinate and grow into flowers.

Change happens, if it needs to, when we become aware of what we are, not when we try to become what we are not.

...re-writing the narratives that define us, making new meanings and imagining different endings. ... As our earliest caregivers transcribed our sensations, feelings and actions into words for us, our narratives took shape. We used these narratives to integrate our experience into coherent meanings.

...many of our ideas, feelings and actions come from the right brain, while the left brain makes up reasons for those ideas, feelings and actions retrospectively.

I remember saying to some of my fellow students, 'Does anyone want a coffee?' They all shook their heads and asked me to rephrase my question to reflect my real feelings. So I had to feel and think and then I came up with, 'I want coffee and I want you to come with me.' Having tried it, I found I really liked this process of turning a ritualized question into a statement, and I still try to do this when I remember.

A feeling cannot be ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. It is how we act out our feelings that is moral or immoral.

[it may be necessary] to oversteer in the opposite direction for a while, in order to find your true trajectory.

Examining our assumptions and checking them out with our partner ensures that we have a relationship with the person instead of a fantasy of them, or avoid falling into the sort of "I—I" relationship I spoke of earlier.