MY AWAKENING HAPPENED in January of 1996. I’d done a postdoctoral fellowship in evolutionary psychology and cognitive neuroscience, and now I was trying to understand a brain circuit involved in learning and clinical depression. It was a time of extreme focus on this project, and I let go of a serious relationship—a man I had considered marrying. What happened next was, in retrospect, neither uncommon nor surprising: I lost the desire to work, my ability to focus diminished, and I spent a lot of time in bed. But then, as I paused to consider this new state of mind, something remarkable happened: a flash of insight. What I realized is that the circuit in my brain that I had been studying, the circuit responsible for learning behavior and depression, must have down-shifted with the loss of the relationship. This was why my mood had darkened. And then, suddenly, the thrill of having had this insight reversed all my symptoms.
In an instant, I grokked that this learning circuitry in my brain was doing a remarkably complex accounting of the things that mattered to my present and future wellbeing. The loss of a potential life partner had dropped me down physically, behaviorally, emotionally, and cognitively. But the insight that proved critical to my professional future raised me back up.
Why, I wondered, would we have evolved to downshift and upshift so quickly in response to such different life experiences? What was the adaptive pressure that had created such a mechanism in our brains? My mind started to race across all that I knew from basic science as wells as years of research on the brain and behavior, trying to understand what evolution had wrought here. I went back to the most obvious facts of life.
OBVIOUS FACT 1
Bu hikaye Spirituality & Health dergisinin July/August 2023 sayısından alınmıştır.
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Bu hikaye Spirituality & Health dergisinin July/August 2023 sayısından alınmıştır.
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ONE WORD TO BEAT WINTER BLUES: BIOMIMICRY
CREATURELY REFLECTIONS
THINKING ABOUT RESTITUTION
THE HEART OF HAPPINESS
WAITING IN LINE
OUR WALK IN THE WORLD
ENTER THE SAUNA
Journalist Emily O’Kelly shares some uplifting research on the benefits of sweat bathing, a global healing practice not just limited to Northern climes.
the trail of ATONEMENT
One Ashkenazi Jewish family escaped pogroms in Russia and then flourished in South Dakota, but the “free land” of their new homestead had been unfairly taken from the Lakota by the United States. Generations later, a celebrated investigative journalist set out to tell the truth of the Lakota and her family, calculate The Cost of Free Land—and pay it back.
STALKING YOUR Mind
Stalking the Mind is part of an ancient Indigenous American Medicine Way to tame your guilt, fears, and shame. What we’re “stalking” are our thought patterns and beliefs that seem to create the opposite of happiness and wellbeing. It’s a powerful psychotherapeutic journey of healing without the diagnosis or labels.
LEAVING MESA VERDE
After 21 years of service at Mesa Verde National Park, RANGER DAVID FRANKS recently guided his last tour of the pueblos and cliff dwellings. He says he was fortunate to assist the archeologists with a variety of work and never lost his amazement with their ability to figure out how and when things happened. The question he still wrestles with is much deeper: Why they left?
BECOMING YOUR OWN LEAD RESEARCHER IN HEALTHCARE
PEGGY LA CERRA, PHD, downloaded a health app to aggregate her medical records and was stunned to see the phrase \"aortic atherosclerosis.\" What she did next is a helpful model for all of us.
ARCHETYPAL ASTROLOGY
\"Is astrology true?\" is the wrong question, writes RABBI RAMI SHAPIRO. He suggests that the truth is out there, but out there is really in here.
WELLNESS IN THE WILD
Spa aficionado MARY BEMIS takes the [cold] plunge at Mohonk Mountain House.