I spent an hour and a half reading beside the pool today. Only interrupted by some quick breaks to swim and cool down, before working on my tan and bettering my understanding of myself.
************************************************* A passage from - The Body Keeps the Score - by: Bessel Van der Kolk, M.D.
Imagination is absolutely critical to the quality of our lives. Our imagination enables us to leave our routine everyday existence by fascinating about travel, food, sex, falling in love, or having the last word ~ all the things that make life interesting. Our imagination gives us the opportunity to envision new possibilities ~ it is an essential launchpad for making our hopes come true. It fires our creativity, relieves our boredom, alleviates our pain, enhances our pleasure, and enriches our most intimate relationships. When people are compulsively and constantly pulled back into the past, to the last time they felt intense involvement and deep emotions, they suffer from a failure of imagination, a loss of the mental flexibility. Without imagination there is no hope, no chance to envision a better future, no place to go, no goal to reach. *************************************************
I shared this for 3 reasons.
1.) despite the fact that I am well past this page it's just staying with me, and I can't shake the relation I feel to it and the way it explains simply things I've gone through myself and have seen in others at times.
2.) It seems like some good fodder for the minds of a few friends of mine that seem to contemplate deeply the world and matters of understanding people.
3.) It's my hope that some of the understanding and clarity it brought to me as I read it and spent time going over it in my head, will be replicated in others as they see these words, and that perhaps it helps in some small way.
I took a break from books of self-help and betterment for a while just to gain back some of my own personal space and a sense of self, after having the distinct sensation of drowning under all the weight of my own expectations for myself on my journey of growth and betterment, and my ideas of what "Whole" and "Healing" should mean to me ? I tackle this book from a space so much closer to center and I'm looking forward to whatever I may discover about myself inside of its pages.
The book is called - The Body Keeps the Score, if anyone is interested.
As always, my SW friends, I really do hope that you all can:
