A collection of things (and possibly people) that have changed my life.
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Tao Te Ching
completed: 06 Jun 2015What seeks to shrink must first have grown; what seeks weakness surely was strong. What seeks its ruin must first have risen; what seeks to take has surely given.
This contains the paradoxical and counter-intuitive nature of this world.
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The Power of Habit
completed: 25 Jun 2012I started making my bed after reading this.
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The Power of Myth
completed: 11 Aug 2015“When a spider makes a beautiful web, the beauty comes out of the spider’s nature. It’s instinctive beauty. How much of the beauty of our own lives is about the beauty of being alive?”
The myths perpetuated by society influence and condition us in unseen ways.
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The brain changes itself
completed: 25 Jul 2017For people, postmortem examinations have shown that education increases the number of branches among neurons. An increased number of branches drives the neurons farther apart, leading to an increase in the volume and thickness of the brain. The idea that the brain is like a muscle that grows with exercise is not just a metaphor.
It taught me that it is never too late to change the structure of our brains.
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On Becoming a Person
completed: 22 Apr 2016If I can create a relationship characterized on my part: by a genuineness and transparency, in which I am my real feelings; by a warm acceptance of and prizing of the other person as a separate individual; by a sensitive ability to see his world and himself as he sees them; Then the other individual in the relationship: will experience and understand aspects of himself which previously he has repressed; will find himself becoming better integrated, more able to function effectively; will become more similar to the person he would like to be; will be more self-directing and self-confident; will become more of a person, more unique and more self-expressive; will be more understanding, more acceptant of others; will be able to cope with the problems of life more adequately and more comfortably.
What does it even mean to become a person? Have we ever contemplated this? This book transformed how I view therapy and human psychology.
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Spark
completed: 12 Jun 2016They don’t know that toxic levels of stress erode the connections between the billions of nerve cells in the brain or that chronic depression shrinks certain areas of the brain. And they don’t know that, conversely, exercise unleashes a cascade of neurochemicals and growth factors that can reverse this process, physically bolstering the brain’s infrastructure. In fact, the brain responds like muscles do, growing with use, withering with inactivity. The neurons in the brain connect to one another through “leaves” on treelike branches, and exercise causes those branches to grow and bloom with new buds, thus enhancing brain function at a fundamental level.
I didn't consider incorporating exercise into my routine until I read this book.
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A General Theory of Love
completed: 14 Mar 2016Attachment security continues to be a powerful predictor of life success. The securely attached children have a considerable edge in self-esteem and popularity as high school students, while the insecurely attached are proving excessively susceptible to the sad ensnarements of adolescence—delinquency, drugs, pregnancy, AIDS. Almost two decades after birth, a host of academic, social, and personal variables correlate with the kind of mother who gazed down at her child in the cradle.
A friend recommended me this book, and my life was changed permanently, the way I love and want to be loved, the way I see and understand people.
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Memories, dreams, reflections
completed: 06 Jul 2015Everything in the unconscious seeks outward manifestation, and the personality too desires to evolve out of its unconscious conditions and to experience itself as a whole.
This was the book that got me deeply interested in psychoanalysis, and made me aware of the power of the unconscious.
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Care of the Soul
completed: 02 Jul 2015Sometimes we may need to stop growing. We may need to backstep and regress. Growth, so often these days assumed automatically to be a goal in psychology and in life in general, can become a sentimental value that overlooks the necessity of such things as stagnancy and slippage. The child is not honored if we always expect him to grow up, because a child is not grown up.
I was obsessed with growth even at the expense of being violent to myself, and this book altered the way I think about caring for myself.
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Thinking in Systems
completed: 13 Dec 2016Systems happen all at once. They are connected not just in one direction, but in many directions simultaneously.
Everyone should understand how systems work instead of thinking in binary terms.
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Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study
completed: 07 Nov 2016view meta | in 1 collections | 0 responses“There are two pillars of happiness revealed by the seventy-five-year-old Grant Study (and exemplified by Dr. Godfrey Minot Camille). One is love. The other is finding a way of coping with life that does not push love away.”