Winnie Lim

“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.”

In other words, when you don’t know how much things have changed, you don’t see that they are changing or that they can change.

They 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.

If 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.

Attachment 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.

Amino acids are the letters. Peptides, including polypeptides and proteins, are the words made from these letters. And they all come together to make up a language that composes and directs every cell, organ, and system in your body.

But the amygdala, operating with lightning-fast acuity beneath the level of conscious awareness, perceives the distressing faces and flares in the fMRI. Some subjects report feeling anxiety at these moments—but they can’t identify its source. This would seem to be neuroscientific evidence that Freud was right about the existence of the unconscious: the brain reacts powerfully to stimuli that we are not explicitly aware of.

“we can begin to understand why it is that many patients with inflammatory diseases may also experience depression at different times in their lives. Thus, the psychosomatic notion that inflammatory and allergic diseases originate in a disordered upbringing and repressed emotions can now be reexamined in more precise physiological terms.”

One such unexpected source is our own shadow, that dumping ground for all those characteristics of our personality that we disown. As we will see later, these disowned parts are extremely valuable and cannot be disregarded. As promised of the living water, our shadow costs nothing and is immediately—and embarrassingly—ever present. To honor and accept one’s own shadow is a profound spiritual discipline. It is whole-making and thus holy and the most important experience of a lifetime.