#The School of Life

[lovejunkie97]

[9w1inprogress]

The tragedy is that, deep down, the people pleaser is terribly afraid. Something in their past has proven to them they can never be forgiven for speaking their minds. Their childhood has been a lesson in shapeshifting. Surrounding cruelty means that they had to grow into geniuses at detecting what other people wanted and at serving it up with them with near total fidelity.

— People Pleasers in Relationships

[judgingbooksbycovers]

Mind & Body

By The School of Life.

[xuniqo]

"The way to greater confidence isn't to reassure ourselves of our own dignity; it's to grow at peace with the inevitable nature of our ridiculousness. We are idiots now, we have been idiots in the past, and we will be idiots again in the future - and that is OK. There aren't any other options available for human beings."

[ruler-of-neptune]

The emotionally intelligent person knows that love is a skill, not a feeling, and will require trust, vulnerability, generosity, humor, sexual understanding, and selective resignation. The emotionally intelligent person awards themselves the time to determine what gives their working life meaning and has the confidence and tenacity to try to find an accommodation between their inner priorities and the demands of the world. The emotionally intelligent person knows how to hope and be grateful, while remaining steadfast before the essentially tragic structure of existence. The emotionally intelligent person knows that they will only ever be mentally healthy in a few areas and at certain moments, but is committed to fathoming their inadequacies and warning others of them in good time, with apology and charm. There are few catastrophes, in our own lives or in those of nations, that do not ultimately have their origins in emotional ignorance.

[sittingonfilm]

How To Cope When Mental Illness Shuts Down Our Minds

"It may sound odd or impolite to suggest that most of us, when we are in the grip of mental illness, are no longer capable of thinking. That’s not how it feels, of course. From the inside the inside, our minds have probably never felt so busy and so focused.

"From the moment we wake up in panic and self-disgust, we are ruminating, pondering, exploring catastrophic scenarios, scanning our past, attacking ourselves for things we have done and not done, questioning. We may rub our temples to cool them down and when eventually we fall asleep, we are exhausted by the marathons our thoughts have run inside us. Nevertheless, we may still want to insist (for the kindest and most redemptive of reasons) that we have not been thinking at all, that none of this hive of activity deserves the title of thinking; it is just illness.

"To be mentally ill is to be swamped by secretions of fear, self-hatred and despair that – like surging seawater through a pumping station control desk – knock out all our higher faculties, all our normal ability to sensibly distinguish one thing from another, to find perspective, to weigh arguments judiciously, to see the wood for the trees, to correctly assess danger, to plan realistically for the future, to determine risks and opportunities, and, most importantly, to be kind and generous to ourselves.

"None of these faculties function any longer, but – and this is the true nastiness of the illness – we are never and nowhere alerted to our loss. We are both very ill and very unaware. It looks as though we are continuing to think as we have always done – with all the usual intelligence and reliability – but that we just have a lot more to worry about.

"Nowhere along the way does our mind generously tell us that it has begun to look at reality through a distorted lens, that it has – at some point in the day – to all effects, stopped working. No bell goes off, no hazard lights start to flash. The mind merely insists that it is giving us all the normal readings, and that we have objectively entered hell.

"Yet the truth is that we have lost command of about a third of our minds and are pulling together our ideas from the most degenerate, traumatized, unreliable and vicious aspects of ourselves.

It’s as if a group of terrorists had donned white coats and were impersonating prestigious scientists in order to lay out a set of vicious theories and prognoses.

"Once we have been through a few cycles of distorted thinking and recovered contact with reality, we should do ourselves the kindness of accepting that – on an intermittent basis – we will lose command of our higher faculties and that there is nothing embarrassing in recognizing the possibility and accommodating ourselves to it very carefully. This is the nature of an illness around which we will need to take the greatest care.

"We should start to get better at detecting when illness might be drawing in on us, what the triggers for it might be. Then when it is upon us, we should do and decide nothing. We shouldn’t start to send emails, deliver judgement on our lives or plan for the future. We should – as much as possible – stop all mental activity and rest. We might listen to music, have a long bath, watch something untaxing on television and perhaps take a calming pill.

"We should also try to plug our brain into that of someone else, to benefit from their greater powers of reason. We should have a trusted friend or therapist whom we can call on at such moments and ask them if they might re-calibrate and regulate our thoughts with an injection of their wisdom and insight. We should willingly put them in charge of determining how things are for us: they should be allowed to tell us what we are worth, what we have done, what there is to worry about – and we should do our best to discount the contrary, doom-laden signals that come from inside us.

"We may have grown up with the idea that so long as we are conscious, our minds will be working optimally. But mental illness teaches us a more complicated lesson: our higher faculties (those that give us access to reality) are extremely vulnerable and perilously prone to shut down under the sway of our emotional complexities – and to do so without telling us. We should strive to become thinkers who recognize when they are no longer able to think."

─── ･ ｡ﾟ⟡ 🌑 ⟡ ˚｡ ･ ───

[Transcript obtained from video posted on YouTube.]

[remember-this-inspiration]

Our stories are guaranteed to end in loss and sadness. Why are we such addicts of these sorts of painful stories?

Because these stories play out, in our adult present, the essence of scenarios that unfolded in substantially similar ways in childhoods that we have neither understood nor liberated ourselves from at the hands of our caregivers. 

Once upon a time, the characters that are now played by our romantic partners or people we meet on dating sites were played by Mother or Father, in scripts we have lost sight of.

We repeat a narrative because specific sorts of pain and unfulfillment feel seductively familiar and because we privilege familiarity over happiness. We have an impression that a story ‘should’ go a certain way, towards darkness, while joy and satisfaction give off a feeling of eerieness and illegitimacy.

Liberation comes when we can dare to start an audit of our narrative choices. 

To help us, we might sketch out the last few relationship or dating fiascos and see what similarities there might be between them. Who left who and why? Where was the pain coming from? How did we act? And how might this be a palimpsest of what happened somewhere long ago? 

- Youtube, the school of life. Unleash your potential: mastering your mind.

[dknightlight]

Posting this iconic piece of media that I just NEVER found online isolated except in an archived reddit thread

[milkway-snippets]

On Confidence

By The School of Life

"One of the most charming books written in early modern Europe was In Praise of Folly (1509), by the Dutch scholar and philosopher Erasmus."

" Bruegel and Erasmus’s work proposes that the way to greater confidence is not to reassure ourselves of our own dignity; it’s to come to peace with our inevitable ridiculousness." "We grow timid when we allow ourselves to be overexposed to the respectable sides of others."

"We would grow free to try things by accepting that failure was the norm."

"We start out in life with a very strong impression that competent and admirable people are not like us at all."

"...institutions as they actually were: occasionally well-meaning, but frequently lazy, casual, corrupt or indifferent." "...but in private, over the ensuing months, we simply cannot dismiss their judgements, because we have accorded them a status logically prior to our own in our deep minds."

"Success isn’t simply a pleasant prize to stumble upon when we enjoy a subject or a task interests us; it is a psychological necessity, something we must secure in order to feel we have the right to be alive."

"We should keep in mind a confident distinction between the hater and the critic, aim to correct our genuine flaws, and otherwise forgive the injured, roaring winds that seek to punish us for pressures that have nothing to do with us."

"We should not worry so much about the latter, nor complain quite so bitterly about the former. We should accept from the start, with good grace and dark premonition, the sheer randomness and amorality of fate."

"We should come to terms with, and help others to see, just how hard and unnerving it can sometimes be to get close to the things we truly want."

"Our lack of confidence in confidence may allow degraded versions of self-assertion to thrive."

"It might be brutishness, not confidence, that we hate."

"We should take care not to dress up our base deficiencies as godly virtues."

"Unfortunately it isn’t enough to be kind, interesting, intelligent and wise inside: we need to develop the skill that allows us to make our talents active in the world at large."

"Confidence is what translates theory into practice. It should never be thought of as the enemy of good things; it is their crucial and legitimate catalyst."

[lovejunkie97]

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by The School of Life Berlin (@theschooloflifeberlin)

[senecalui]

"We are, all of us, hellish. We have a panoply of unfortunate psychological traits. Are beset by bad habits. Are anxious, jealous, ill-tempered, and vain. Everyone seen closeup has an appalling amount wrong with them."

—The School of Life

from An Emotional Education by The School of Life, (2022)

[sunday-sidequest]

Sometimes we don't need 'solutions.' We need sympathy for our impasses.

[mindpose]

Of the Origin of Ideas - David Hume

[philogyny08]

HISTORY OF IDEAS - Wabi-sabi

At the heart of Japanese philosophy and wisdom lies a concept called ‘wabi-sabi’; a term which denotes a commitment to the everyday, the melancholic, the somewhat broken and the imperfect. It’s a term we need a lot more of in our lives.