"O mais doloroso era ter de guardar no íntimo todo o sofrimento. Não me sentia no direito de me queixar — aliás, ninguém teria compreendido que o fizesse. E ele, durante esse tempo, deixara de me dar parte de tudo o que o agitava, de tudo o que o atormentava. Daí em diante, era a outros que confiava as suas emoções, as suas dores, as suas ilusões, as suas decepções. Quanto a mim, ele não poderia suportar a ideia, disso estava certa, de que eu pudesse sofrer com qualquer faceta da minha vida. O meu marido tinha necessidade de me julgar insensível, inalterável, tão sólida como uma rocha. A rocha na qual se apoiava. Era uma esposa perfeita, uma mãe perfeita. Um prodígio de equilíbrio e de bom-senso. E, aos olhos de todos, constituíamos uma família ideal.
Mas, então, eu já não podia desempenhar aquela comédia. Chegara ao limite.
A mãezinha teve, então, uma reacção pasmosa. Desatou a rir. Como podia ela?... De mim, que lhe tinha confiado toda a minha dor, todo o meu desgosto?... Olhava-a, siderada. Ela abraçou-me.
— Não estou a fazer troça de ti, minha filha — murmurou. — Mas devo confessar que acho divertido ver a que ponto o teu marido, o ateu do teu marido, se conduz exactamente como o mais dos ortodoxos. Com certeza sabes, ou talvez te tenhas esquecido, que é isso que, nos talmudistas, se exige duma mulher: fazer tudo para que o marido tenha tempo de sobra para estudar. Ele, não sei o que ele estuda, mas com certeza que, para si, tem o mesmo valor que o Talmude para os nossos barbudos.
Olhou-me meigamente e, com um gesto muito doce, enxugou uma lágrima que me corria pela cara. Não me disse mais nada sobre o assunto."
Nicolle Rosen, in Martha Freud
Humanos, demasiado humanos
Molecules Of Emotion
Why do we feel the way we feel? How do our thoughts and emotions affect our health? Are our bodies and minds distinct from each other or do they function together as parts of an interconnected system? In her groundbreaking book Molecules of Emotion, Candace Pert provides startling and decisive answers to these and other challenging questions that scientists and philosophers have pondered for centuries. Her pioneering research on how the chemicals inside our bodies form a dynamic information network, linking mind and body, is not only provocative, it is revolutionary. By establishing the biomolecular basis for our emotions and explaining these new scientific developments in a clear and accessible way, Pert empowers us to understand ourselves, our feelings, and the connection between our minds and our bodies -- body-minds -- in ways we could never possibly have imagined before. Molecules of Emotion is a landmark work, full of insight and wisdom and possessing that rare power to change the way we see the world and ourselves.
meditação e sistema imunitário
"Buddhist traditions claim that meditation decreases psychological distress and promotes well-being (e.g., Dalai Lama and Cutler, 2009). Therefore, we investigated the effects of a 3-month meditation retreat on telomerase activity and two major contributors to the experience of stress."
Aqui
Yeshi Dhonden
Yeshi Dhonden is a Buddhist monk and was Dalai Lama’s personal physician for about twenty years from 1960 to 1980. His primary goal was to prove that these Tibetan formulas were safe and non toxic and have successfully done it. He now uses Tibetan herbal medicines and diet for curing cancer. Since 1967, he has long list of patients seeking his care and help at his clinic in Mcleod Ganj, Dharamsala.
Cancer and emotions
"It is becoming increasingly clear that stressful life events can affect cancer growth and metastasis by modulating nervous, endocrine, and immune systems. The purpose of this review is to briefly describe the process by which stress may potentiate carcinogenesis and how reducing body stress may prevent cancer growth and progression. The opioid peptide β-endorphin plays a critical role in bringing the stress axis to a state of homeostasis. We have recently shown that enhancement of endogenous levels of β-endorphin in the hypothalamus via β-endorphin neuron transplantation suppresses stress response, promotes immune function, and reduces the incidence of cancer in rat models of prostate and breast cancers. The cancer-preventive effect of β-endorphin is mediated through the suppression of sympathetic neuronal function, which results in increased peripheral natural killer cell and macrophage activities, elevated levels of anti-inflammatory cytokines, and reduced levels of inflammatory cytokines. β-endorphin inhibition of tumor progression also involves alteration in the tumor microenvironment, possibly because of suppression of catecholamine and inflammatory cytokine production, which are known to alter DNA repair, cell-matrix attachments, angiogenic process, and epithelial-mesenchymal transition. Thus, β-endorphin cell therapy may offer some therapeutic value in cancer prevention."
Aqui.
Basic income
"Perhaps the most transformative effect of basic income I’ve personally experienced is the power it gives in any negotiation. For many people, this will be experienced as the power to refuse to work for insufficiently low wages (potentially nullifying the need for minimum wage laws), or unacceptable terms of any kind, be it work conditions, hours, benefits, etc. For freelancers like me, it means asking for what I’m worth, and also being able to choose to work for free on anything I consider important enough."
Aqui.
the brain-vagina connection
"We have to conclude from this and other studies with similar numbers that the Western sexual revolution sucks. It has not worked well enough for women.
In this liberated, postsexual revolution, postfeminist era, when women can do "whatever" they wish sexually and be "bad girls" with little stigma — when any fantasy is available at the touch of a remote control and any sex appliance available rush delivery at the click of a mouse — an astonishingly high percentage of ordinary women, from one in five to one in three, still report feeling little desire, or have trouble regularly reaching orgasm, or report being angry about something involving sexual intimacy. Now that I know more completely how connected the vagina is to female mood and consciousness, I will coin a phrase and say that between one woman in five and one woman in three seems to be suffering from something very like sexual, or even like vaginal, depression.
Oddly enough, our ostensibly pro-sex culture seems very comfortable with this incredibly high rate of female sexual unhappiness. There are no campaigns calling urgent attention to this epidemic of female sexual absence and sorrow. Australian sex therapist Bettina Arndt's book 'The Sex Diaries' (2009) sold widely in part because it addresses directly many women's startingly low levels of desire. Arndt reported that it is quite common, in her clinical experience, for women to want sex less often than their husbands do, and that this is the unacknowledged secret behind many divorces, and even behind many male infidelities.
We will see that new studies show that when circumstances are supportive, virtually every woman can reach orgasm. What if so many women are suffering from low levels of desire, from frustration, and from sexual withdrawal, because — there is no way to say this but honestly — many men are taught about women in such a way that they don't really know what they are doing? These numbers must mean, too, that even in this post-sexual-revolution era, many women don't know how to identify, and then ask for, what they need and want.
If a man follows this culture's sexual "script" about what the vagina is, what female sexuality is, and how in general to relate to a woman — he is very likely, against all of his dearest wishes and best intentions, to miss, over time, knowing what is necessary to keep her aroused. The most destructive thing that men are being taught about women is that the vagina is just a sexual organ, and that sex for women is a sexual act in the same way it is for men. But neither gender is being taught about the delicate mind-heart-body connection that, it turns out, is female sexual response."
Naomi Wolf, in Vagina
Naomi Wolf, in Vagina
to gain from disorder
"Crucially, if antifragility is the property of all those natural (and complex) systems that have survived, depriving these systems of volatility, randomness, and stressors will harm them. They will weaken, die or blow up. We have been fragilizing the economy, our health, political life, education, almost everything... by suppressing randomness and volatility. Just as spending a month in bed (preferably with an unabridged version of War and Peace and access to The Sopranos' entire eighty-six episodes) leads to muscle atrophy, complex systems are weakened, even killed, when deprived of stressors. Much of our modern, structured, world has been harming us with top-down policies and contraptions (dubbed "Soviet-Harvard delusions" in the book) which do precisely this: an insult to the antifragility of systems.
This is the tragedy of modernity: as with neurotically overprotective parents, those trying to help are often hurting us the most.
If about everything top-down fragilizes and blocks antifragility and growth, everything bottom-up thrives under the right amount of stress and disorder. The process of discovery (or innovation, or technological progress) itself depends on antifragile tinkering, agressive risk bearing rather than formal education."
Nassim Taleb, in Antifragile – Things That Gain From Disorder
of antifragility
The tragedy of trying to lead a good life. When the course of life produces terrible conflicts.
"Tragedy happens when you try to live well."
"I think that the language of philosophy has to come back from the abstract heights on which it so often lives, to the richness of everyday discourse and everyday humanity. It has to listen to the ways people talk about themselves, talk about what matters to them, in human life. And one very good way to do this is to listen to literature. To stories."
"You should care about things in a way that makes it a possibility that tragedy will happen to you."
Martha Nussbaum
The body keeps the score / Memórias de Território
"The body keeps the score: If the memory of trauma is encoded in the viscera, in heartbreaking and gut-wrenching emotions, in autoimmune disorders and skeletal/muscular problems, and if mind/brain/visceral communication is the royal road to emotion regulation, this demands a radical shift in our therapeutic assumptions."
"The natural state of mammals is to be somewhat on guard. However, in order to feel emotionally close to another human being, our defensive system must temporarily shut down. In order to play, mate, and nurture our young, the brain needs to turn off its natural vigilance. Many traumatized individuals are too hypervigilant to enjoy the ordinary pleasures that life has to offer, while others are too numb to absorb new experiences — or to be alert to signs of real danger."
"Such posttraumatic reactions make it difficult for survivors to connect with other people, since closeness often triggers the sense of danger."
"Traumatized people are often afraid of feeling. It is not so much the perpetrators (who, hopefully, are no longer around to hurt them) but their own physical sensations that now are the enemy. Apprehension about being hijacked by uncomfortable sensations keeps the body frozen and the mind shut. Even though the trauma is a thing of the past, the emotional brain keeps generating sensations that make the sufferer feel scared and helpless. It’s not surprising that so many trauma survivors are compulsive eaters and drinkers, fear making love, and avoid many social activities: Their sensory world is largely off limits."
Mais aqui.
"… He had nightmares. And so the story's about… I knew about nightmares because I've always been a part time scientist and I worked in a sleep lab and I studied the electrophysiology of nightmares. And so I heard his nightmares and gave him a drug to make his nightmares go away.
He comes back a week later and I, triumphantly, as doctors do, expected him to be profusely grateful for the wonderful drugs I gave him. And I said: So how did the drugs work? How did my drugs work? And he said: I did not take your drugs, because I realized that I need to have my nightmares because I need to be a living memorial to my friends who died in Vietnam. And that statement […] was the opening of my career, because I was so astounded because he was a person who was just like his father, got stuck on love. And we barely think about love as being an antecedent of trauma. This is something that we see pervasively throughout peoples lives. If the people who you love as a little kid (and we are all programmed to love our parents) hurt you, this whole relationship to our parents, who we love, who hurt us becomes extremely complex. And it becomes very hard to move away.
And so, as time went on, and we learned more and more by biology, people started talking more and more about trauma as a fear reaction. And indeed, the fear sensors in the brain do get changed and do get activated. But what we tend to leave out is that, as human beings, we are a connected species. As we all are interacting with each other and that love is actually the glue that keeps our lives together. And that life without love has no meaning. And that love is also a very important part of traumatic stress. And it gets very messed up in traumatic stress.
So you get to love people who do terrible things to you. You get to hate people who are very nice to you. And you get sexually excited about things that hurt you. And you get numbed out to things that are pleasurable. And all of these things get very messed up.
And many of these dimensions are being left out of our over simplistic stupid diagnostic system that we basically built up to firm up our relationship with the drug companies. […] And we forgot about human beings."
Bessel Van der Kolk
EMDR, aqui
Iasnaia Poliana
A questão do destino a dar a Iasnaia permanecia por resolver. A propriedade incluía cerca de 967 hectares de terra de cultivo e floresta – um quarto pertencia conjuntamente a Sofia e aos seus filhos. O sonho de Sofia era conservar tudo intacto – edifícios, jardim e florestas, pastos e terra arável. Todavia, os seus filhos não tinham meios para manter a propriedade: os filhos homens estavam empobrecidos e tinham famílias numerosas. Em 1910, Sofia tinha vinte e cinco netos.
No início de 1911, ao ter conhecimento de que os seus filhos Ilya, Andrei e Mikhail tencionavam vender Iasnaia a um grupo de industriais americanos ricos por uma soma de 1,5 milhões de rublos, Sofia protesta: "Parece-me de muito mau gosto e triste. Não gosto nada. Gostaria de ver Iasnaia Poliana em mãos russas, como propriedade pública." Em acréscimo, não deixou o seu filho Andrei contestar o testamento.
A 10 de maio, Sofia dirige uma carta a Nicolau II, pedindo-lhe que Iasnaia seja comprada pelo Estado. Seria mais rentável para a família vendera propriedade em parcelas a entidades privadas, mas o seu dever e "desejo mais fervoroso" era conservá-la como monumento cultural russo, sob proteção estatal.
Alexandra Poppoff, in Sofia Tolstoi – Uma Biografia
Motivated reasoning
"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up your men to collect wood, and give orders and distribute the work. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea."
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
You think you're right, even when you're wrong.
"If you really want to improve your judgement as individuals and as societies, what we need most is not more instruction in logic or rhetoric or probability or economics. Even though those things are quite valuable. But what we most need to use those principles well, is the 'scout mindset'. We need to change the way we feel. We need to learn how to feel proud, instead of ashamed, when we notice we might have been wrong about something. We need to learn how to feel intrigued instead of defensive, when we encounter some information that contradicts our beliefs. What do you most yearn for? Do you yearn to defend your own beliefs? Or do you yearn to see the world as clearly as you possibly can?"
Julia Galef
"This is a case of what scientists refer to as “motivated reasoning,” a phenomenon in which our unconscious motivations, desires and fears shape the way we interpret information. Some pieces of information feel like our allies — we want them to win; we want to defend them. And other pieces of information are the enemy, and we want to shoot them down."
Everyday sexism - Não há pachorra
Fucking patriarchy!
Acreditem que convencer as pessoas a respeitarem-nos é desgastante, humilhante, uma total perda de tempo, logicamente inútil mas recorrentemente necessário.
Sei o que isso é em ambiente de trabalho e nos contactos sociais de uma forma geral.
E se por acaso sentirmos (intuirmos) que nos consideram inteligentes, então a coisa torna-se tristemente exasperante.
Sei o que isso é em ambiente de trabalho e nos contactos sociais de uma forma geral.
E se por acaso sentirmos (intuirmos) que nos consideram inteligentes, então a coisa torna-se tristemente exasperante.
Aqui.
Sofia, uma enorme mulher por detrás de um grande homem
Os seus dias eram preenchidos por questões enfadonhas como essas que não lhe interessavam. "Estou cansada desta interminável batalha e de tantas horas de trabalho árduo que dedico à casa e à educação dos meus filhos, dos negócios, da editora, de gerir os bens dos meus filhos, de cuidar do meu marido e de zelar pela paz familiar." Sofia continuava a trabalhar, apesar da apatia, da insónia e dos distúrbios nervosos, comentando no seu diário que nada disso era visível para quem estava de fora. A sua alma tornara-se "frágil" e levava-a a perturbar-se facilmente. Para além disso, os dois filhos mais novos apresentavam comportamentos problemáticos. Sofia escreve a Tolstoi, queixando-se que o seu trabalho não lhe dava satisfação e que se sentia como um cavalo movido a chicote. No seu diário, confessa sentir-se atemorizada com ele própria, com o seu desespero e os seus pensamentos suicidas. A partir de então passa a discernir dois caminhos: um para a perfeição espiritual e outro para a fraqueza e a deterioração. "Sinto que enveredo por este último caminho e isso assusta-me e entristece-me." É com Tolstoi que desabafa o seu temor de declínio espiritual, juntamente com o seu desejo de não desistir – no fundo, rezava para que Deus lhe desse a força da sabedoria.
Sofia tocava piano para se descontrair: "Mesmo quando sou eu a tocar, tudo se torna subitamente claro, a música enche-me de alegria e permite-me vislumbrar as preocupações da vida sob uma nova luz, com calma e lucidez." Taneev fez-lhe uma visita inesperada e proporcionou-lhe uma agradável distracção: para além de lhe trazer uma nova peça que acabara de compor, tocou-lhe outra da sua nova sinfonia. "Sentámo-nos a conversar tranquilamente e lemos um artigo de crítica musical. ele é sempre uma companhia tão pacífica, sincera e interessante. Damo-nos tão bem – tenho tanta pena que o ciúme do L. N. pese tanto sobre esta amizade tão pura e simples. "Taneev vinha pedir-lhe a opinião sobre a sua nova obra, tal como Tolstoi fizera no passado.
Ainda nesse ano, Sofia organizou um serão musical com Taneev e Elizaveta Lavrovskaya, cantora e professora do Conservatório de Moscovo. Entretanto, Tolstoi recebeu muitos artistas, incluindo o pintor Repin, o compositor Rimsky-Korsakov e o jovem cantor de ópera Feodor Shalyapin, que começava na altura a conquistar os palcos. sofia descrevia-o como "um gigante louro, de bom fundo e espantosamente talentoso em todos os aspetos, no canto, no desenho e como contador de histórias".
A presença de Tolstoi em Moscovo atraía outros visitantes – muitos deles perfeitos desconhecidos. Para além de ser um grande escritor, era um sábio e um mestre na arte de viver e as pessoas queriam saber a sua opinião acerca de tudo. Sofia ouviu um visitante perguntar-lhe o que é que ele pensava sobre o segundo advento de Cristo. Camponeses, mestres-escola, correspondentes estrangeiros e operários fabris vinham consultar o escritor Lev Tolstoi. Dotado de uma "curiosidade sem limites", recebia-os a todos. "Enlouqueceria se tivesse de viver como o Lev Nikolaevich", reflecte Sofia. "Passa a manhã inteira a escrever, desgastando-se mentalmente, e passa o serão a falar sem parar, ou antes, a pregar, pois os seus seguidores tendem a procurá-lo para pedir conselhos ou orientações."
Todos os dias, Sofia recebia pessoas que não vinham visitá-la a ela, mas que pretendiam conhecer Tolstoi. Enquanto produzia a mais recente edição das obras completas, anota no seu diário: "Provas, solidão, tristeza." Tolstoi já estava "constantemente rodeado de pessoas" e a fama dele distanciava-os.
mais coisas do patriarcado
"Aquela [Canções Sem Palavras], porém, era a sua última novela e jamais seria publicada. Para crescer como autora, Sofia [Tolstoi] teria de investir um consistente esforço e isso era inviável. "Ainda hoje me perguntava por que razão não existem mulheres autoras, artistas ou compositoras de génio. Isso deve-se ao facto de toda a paixão e de todas as capacidades de uma mulher enérgica serem consumidas pela sua família [...] Quando acabou de carregar e educar os filhos, despertam-lhe as necessidades artísticas, mas já é demasiado tarde.""
Alexandra Popoff, in Sofia Tolstoi, Uma Biografia
What does it mean to regret, when you have no choice?
It's what you can bare.
There it is. No one's going to forgive me.
It was death. I chose life.
To look life in the face.
Always to look life in the face.
And to know it.
For what it is.
At last. To know it. To love it.
For what it is.
And then... To put it away.
