Awakening Intuition: Using Your Mind-body Network for Insight and Healing by Mona Lisa Schulz

Families don’t just shape our lives; they also shape our bodies.

Receptivity is a function of vulnerability, not a function of power.

The word “emotion” derives from a Latin verb meaning “to move” or “move out”.  This is what our emotions do.  They move us in the direction in which we need to go in life.  They direct us toward health and fulfillment, like love and joy, or they move us away from the wrong tract, like fear and anger.  

If you’re stuck in an emotion, it’s not an emotion anymore.  It’s a problem. Being immobilized by any emotion is unhealthy, because it’s the opposite of what emotion means, which is to move on or out. 

It seems paradoxical, but more of your brain is awake when you’re asleep than when you are in a conscious state.  When you’re awake, only about 10% of your brain is firing at any given time.  But when you’re asleep, the whole thing lights up.

As one scientist defined it, intuition is “the process of reaching accurate conclusions based on inadequate information”. 

In life, if you focus on possibilities, they become probabilities.  

The frontal lobe is our grand censor.  But when we’re asleep, it’s suppressed.

We have other memories besides those in our brains.  Memories and experiences and the emotions associated with them are also encoded systematically in all the tissues and organs of our bodies.  These memories and emotions speak to us not via the rational processes of the brain, but by means of symptoms and disease in our bodily organs. 

Even while your dreams are creating various scenarios for you to pursue, your sleeping body is also trying out various ways to achieve your heart’s desires.  Although most actual movement is suppressed during sleep, the body’s neurons are still firing, often in ways that correspond to the content of your dreams.  So when you walk up to your dream person in your dream, the neurons in your legs are actually firing, and laying down a real neuronal pathway in your brain that you might be able to follow in the waking future.

When you dream, certain areas of your body can communicate information to you about the past or the present.  They send you emotional information about what needs to be changed in your life. 

Memory, in other words, is the experience of an emotion encoded and empatterned in our brains and bodies.  A memory that is unusually happy or pleasant, and not particularly stressful, is usually encoded mostly by way of the hippocampus in the temporal lobe which helps record verbal memory, or memory that can be talked about.  When an experience is painful or traumatizing, however, the hippocampus is unable to encode it because it’s suppressed by stress hormones released by the brain and body.  That’s when the amygdala, another area in the temporal lobe, steps in and takes over, encoding the experiences as a nonverbal memory, or one that can’t be expressed easily in words.  The memory is stored in body memory.  You may not consciously recollect it, but it still lives in your brain and the tissues of your body. 

We are not responsible for our illnesses, but we must be responsive to them.

Fear doesn’t just affect your emotional behavior; it also causes changes in the way your organs behave.

Trauma in the form of experiences such as child abuse, military combat, man-made or natural disasters, witnessing violence, or even lesser emotional and mental trauma increases levels of dissociation.  This means that certain emotions and memories are split off; they lie in the body tissue or areas of the brain we can’t talk about.  If not dealt with properly, they can create disease in the body.

Hearing your intuition really requires little more than simply paying attention, even to seemingly random, insignificant, irrelevant thoughts, ideas, sensations, and emotions. 

The Good Heart: A Buddhist Perspective on the Teachings of Jesus by the 14th Dalai Lama

If you examine the nature of your existence, including your physical survival, you will find that all the factors that contribute to your existence and well-being – such as food, shelter, and even fame – come into being only through the cooperation of other people. 

To a large extent it is our mental attitude – our outlook on life and the world – that is the key factor for the future. 

Leonardo Da Vinci by Walter Isaacson

His scientific explorations informed his art.  He peeled flesh off the faces of cadavers, delineated the muscles that move the lips, and then painted the world's most memorable smile.

When he groped for a theory of why the sky appears blue, it was not simply to inform his paintings.  His curiosity was pure, personal, and delightfully obsessive.

The ability to make connections across disciplines -- arts and sciences, humanities and technology -- is a key to innovation, imagination, and genius.

Leonardo had almost no schooling and could barely read Latin or do long division.

Circle of Life: Traditional Teachings Of Native American Elders by James David Audlin

Ancestry never makes anyone a better person, but that humility, honesty and commitment do.

All there is is perception, so the very fact that you perceive a problem makes the problem real.

Opening the Energy Gates of Your Body: Qigong for Lifelong Health by Bruce Frantzis

Imagine the body to be full of water, with the water being slowly let out from the bottom of your feet.  As the water level drops, dissolve everything at the new level – front, back and sides. 

The energy gates are major relay stations of the body, where the strength of the life current (chi) moving through the system is regulated. Many gates are located at joints or, more precisely, in the actual space between the bones of a joint.  These gates should not be conceived of as simple anatomical locations.  They must be felt with the mind, for they are part of your subtle energy body.

He then demonstrated what he meant with two piles of coins.  He put the first pile in a paper bag and laid a knife next to it.  He said, “you want sung be like money.  Make body be like money.”  Then he took the knife and cut the bag.  The coins poured out (letting go of physical tension), fell (releasing chi downward), separated (loosening the insides of the body), scattered over the floor and soon stopped moving (the body fully sung). 

Strengthening and balancing the energy of your mind enhances your ability to detect subtle nuances and to perceive the world and its patterns at every increasing levels of complexity.  People who do not practice some form of energy development may never acquire these abilities.

Coming to Our Senses: Perceiving Complexity to Avoid Catastrophes by Viki McCabe

Systems and their components have a reciprocal relationship that cannot be breached without courting harm to both.  In complex systems, parts and wholes are two sides of the same coin.

Our perceptions typically occur below the level of our conscious awareness and unless we trust our "intuitions" (which are simply our perceptions of structural information), we can easily default to acting on a theory.

Our interdependent perceptual and body-information signaling systems often "know" a great deal more than our rational minds.

Expectancy bias occurs when people expecting something to happen allow this to distort their view of what is actually happening to match their expectations.

His intuition was simply the gut feeling all of us get when we perceive the structural information that specifies and summarizes a complex system or event.  As a result of that perception, we "know" exactly what is going on, even though we are not consciously aware of the information that triggers our feeling of knowing.

Intuition is simply the act of directly detecting structural information on a subliminal level.

We do not perceive things.  We perceive the structural information that reflects an entity's organization and reveals multiple layers of information. 

Our memory is not a reliable recorder of reality; it tends to slot similar items into the same general category to reduce our information load.

The amygdala's primary role, along with the insula and thalamus, is to review what our eyes see and, when necessary, to instantly alert us to its emotional content, especially if that content spells danger.

Over the centuries, all major rivers -- the Yellow, Mekong, Po, Indus, Volga, Tigris, and Euphrates -- have changed their courses by as much as four hundred miles.

When deer graze on sagebrush, the damaged plants emit a particular smell that is detected by neighboring wild tobacco plants.  The tobacco immediately girds up its defenses by emitting an odor that repels deer.  This is more than a two-way conversation between the sagebrush and the tobacco.  It is a three-way relationship among the sagebrush, the tobacco, and the deer.

Evolution is a tinkerer, not a planner, it creates change from whatever is at hand.

Anxiety can further exacerbate our pain because "catastrophizing" the situation recruits brain areas that respond to fear, thereby removing us further from the reality of our actual sensory input.

99% of industrial potato farming in America is limited to one type of potato, the Russet Burbank, because it makes French fries that fit best into McDonald's packaging.

In Glacier National Park in Montana only 30 of the 150 glaciers present in 1850 are still visible.

Intuitive Wellness: Using Your Body's Inner Wisdom to Heal by Laura Alden Kamm

Your cells are the guardians and pillars of your living temple – your body.  The body’s intricate nature is woven together as an extraordinary matrix of form, spirit, energy, emotion, and function.

You are entrusted with the care of your body.  It is a dynamic, energetic space that will change form, ebb and flow, increase and decrease all of the time. Like any ecosystem, your energy, mind, bones, muscles, blood and tissues are always in a state of dynamic change.  Most often, these changes are subtle and seamless. They occur virtually unnoticed. 

Healing does not equal curing the body, at least not in all cases.  Even if that is what we want, it may not be what we get. 

Don’t wait until your body shakes you up by screaming at you through a disorder or disease; instead, ask your body what sort of movement or exercise it would like to engage in – and do it.

If you know but do not do, you don’t really know.

We all have experienced the power of prayer, whether we recognize it or not.  Just do it.  Pray.  Stay humble.  Question, yell, cry, and smile at the Gods above and ask for what you need, want, and desire.  You just have to let those in the ether know what you want, pack a bit of emotion behind it, and move your thoughts and thought forms into alignment with your desires.  Then stand back, watch, and be grateful!

We are literally the creators of our anatomy.  You construct your body through the innumerable events and encounters with people and other stimuli that enter your life and energetic field over time. 

You have authored your anatomy based on how you have lived your life up to this point.

As you listen more carefully and act upon your wisdom, you will realize something very important: your body and its energy always tell you the truth.  It is your rather sophisticated but undisciplined mind that takes you for a ride.  

Critically Sovereign: Indigenous Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies by Joanne Barker, editor

Imperialism and colonialism require Indigenous people to fit within the heteronormative archetypes of an Indigeneity that was authentic in the past but is culturally and legally vacated in the present. Joanne Barker (Chapter: Introduction:  Critically Sovereign)

There is a fundamental divide between Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination and the mainstream women's or feminist movement's concerns for civil rights…. Feminism does not merely counter Indigenous women's concerns and is not only ignorant of Indigenous teachings about gender and sexuality, but it undermines Indigenous claims to the collective rights of their nations. Joanne Barker (Chapter: Introduction:  Critically Sovereign)

Decolonizing Indigenous nations and communities requires scrutinizing the intersections of settler colonialism, tribal nations, and gender because every facet of Navajo life came under the purview of federal policy makers, including the domestic sphere. Jennifer Nez Denetdale (Chapter: Return to "The Uprising at Beautiful Mountain in 1913": Marriage and Sexuality in the Making of the Modern Navajo Nation)

Although Indigenous resistance or challenge to colonial authority is most often represented as moments in isolation, in fact Indigenous peoples continued to challenge authorities. Jennifer Nez Denetdale (Chapter: Return to "The Uprising at Beautiful Mountain in 1913": Marriage and Sexuality in the Making of the Modern Navajo Nation)

The bodies of Native women are dangerous because they produce knowledge and demand accountability, whether at the scale of their individual bodily integrity, of their communities' ability to remain or their bodies of land and water, or as citizens of their nations.  Mishuana R Goeman (Chapter: Ongoing Storms and Struggles: Gendered Violence and Resource Exploitation)

Decolonizing the "self" includes decolonizing our whole beings: body, mind, heart, spirit, and more.  Decolonizing requires a fierce reexamination of our colonial, and often sexist and homophobic, conditioning and an honest inventory of our pansexual natures and visceral connections to the more-than-human world. Melissa K Nelson (Chapter: Getting Dirty: The Eco-Eroticism of Women in Indigenous Oral Literature)

What Are We Doing Here? by Marilynne Robinson

Southern slavery was part of an industrial workforce whose great center was in England.

Self-interest is universal and constant.

We have surrendered thought to ideology.

Conscience can be slow to awake, even to abuses that are deeply contrary to declared values.

Stigma is a vast oubliette. Amazing things are hidden in it.

A society is moving toward dangerous ground when loyalty to the truth is seen as disloyalty to some supposedly higher interest.

The Book of Ceremonies: A Native Way of Honoring and Living the Sacred by Gabriel Horn

An old man once said, in the end, when your name is spoken, the sentiment evoked by its vibration will show how well you have lived your life.

There is no death, only a change of worlds.

You mustn’t think that only people can be your role models. Look around you. Your teachers are everywhere.

Know in your hearts that no matter how two people choose to become companions, no traditional way requires a legal document that declares their marriage.  None demands a state witness.  None needs a mediator to stand between two people in love and the Great Holy Mystery.  For a union of marriage is first formed when the eyes of the beholder meet those of the beloved, when a deep and old kind of knowing beckons two hearts that will be forever young.  When the dreams and life events of two lovers intertwine, and when the feelings are right, the sacred union forms and takes place within the sacred Circle of Life.

And though anyone who chooses can purchase the conduits of ceremony, not everyone can enter into a ceremonial state of consciousness.

The Book of Forgiving by Desmond Tutu and Mpho Tutu

We all have a part in creating a society that creates a perpetrator.

There can be no reconciliation without responsibility.

It seems there is no end to the creative ways we humans can find to hurt each other, and no end to the reasons we feel justified in doing so.

The quality of human life on our planet is nothing more than the sum total of our daily interactions with one another.

When we cannot admit our own woundedness, we cannot see the other as a wounded person who has harmed us out of his or her own ignorance, pain, or brokenness.

Healing does not mean reversing.

The Art of Bliss: Finding Your Center, Getting in the Flow, and Creating the Life You Desire by Tess Whitehurst

The observer in your mind -- your conscious awareness -- traverses dreams and waking life in the same way, and neither seems to have rhyme or reason.

When our hearts are truly open, every emotion -- every smile, every tear, every victory, and every heartbreak -- is characterized by joy.  Joy is an aliveness, a depth, and a courage to be fully present in our lives -- to feel our feelings and let our emotions run deep.

A good way to override our linear thinking minds and access our intuition is to ask, "If I knew, what would it be?"

I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer by Michelle McNamara

The hunt to find the Golden State Killer, spanning nearly four decades, felt less like a relay race than a group of fanatics tethered together climbing an impossible mountain.

From an Internet search I learned that boys' names beginning in N were relatively rare, appearing only once in the top one hundred names of the 1930s and '40s.

When the Orange County Crime Lab began incorporating DNA testing in the early 1990s, it would take up to four weeks for a criminalist to work one case. The biological sample being tested needed to be sizable -- a bloodstain the size of a quarter, for example -- and in good shape.  Now a smattering of skin cells can reveal someone's genetic fingerprint in a matter of hours.

She Means Business: Turn Your Ideas into Reality and Become a Wildly Successful Entrepreneur by Carrie Green

Success is not an accident; it's something we have to create on purpose.

Success is all about doing a few things consistently. 

In order to succeed, we have to be prepared to push past all of the resistance -- fear, overwhelm, chaos, lack of time, money, and any other obstacles that get in our way -- in order to show up.

The biggest problem you will have to overcome in order to show up for your dreams is YOU.

What's going on inside of you (your thoughts and feelings) determines the decisions you make, and these decisions are creating your future and determining which path you're walking down.

Allow yourself the space to open up and spot the 'divine breadcrumbs' in your life.

That's all it takes -- consistent action to move forward.  That's how you create success on purpose.

When you keep going and stay consistent, that's when the momentum builds.

Native Science: Natural Laws of Interdependence by Gregory Cajete

As we experience the world, so we are also experienced by the world.

Life and death are transformations of energy into new forms, the material & energetic fuel of nature’s creativity. 

Creative participation with the living earth extends from birth to death and beyond.  At birth, humans come new yet recycled through the elegant cycles of metamorphosis, transformation, and regeneration that form the basis for all life on earth.

The body is a creative, shape-shifting entity.

Native science continually relates to and speaks of the world as full of active entities with which people engage.  To our sensing bodies, all things are active.  Therefore, native languages are verb based, and the words that describe the world emerge directly from actively perceived experience.  In a sense, language “choreographs”  and/or facilitates the continual orientation of native thought and perception toward active participation, active imagination, and active engagement with all that makes up natural reality.

The verb-based nature of Native languages is also connected to the Native cosmological assumption that we live in an interrelated living world in perpetual creative motion.

A healer choreographs or facilitates a process in which the patient is the real leader.  

The Complete Game of Life and How to Play It by Florence Scovel Shinn

Fear is inverted faith.

If one asks for success and prepares for failure, he will get the situation he has prepared for.

Man must prepare for the thing he has asked for, when there isn't the slightest sign of it in sight.

Evil is a false law man has made for himself.

If you do not run your subconscious mind yourself, someone else will run it for you.

In order to demonstrate her supply, she must first feel that she had received -- a feeling of opulence must precede its manifestation.

Life is a mirror, and we find only ourselves reflected in our associates.

Doughnut Economics: 7 Ways to Think Like a 21st Century Economist by Kate Raworth

Economics is the mother tongue of public policy, the language of public life and the mindset that shapes society.

Pre-analytic vision. Worldview. Paradigm. Frame. These are cousin concepts. What matters more than the one you choose is to realize that you have one in the first place, because then you have the power to question and change it.

What enables human beings to thrive? A world in which every person can lead their life with dignity, opportunity and community -- and we can all do so within the means of our life-giving planet. 

Mainstream economic theory is obsessed with the productivity of waged labour while skipping right over the unpaid work that makes it all possible, as feminist economists have made clear for decades.  That work is known by many names: unpaid caring work, the reproductive economy, the love economy, the second economy.  However, as economist Neva Goodwin has pointed out, far from being secondary, it is actually the "core economy", and it comes first every day, sustaining the essentials of family and social life with the universal human resources of time, knowledge, skill, care, empathy, teaching and reciprocity. 

Wherever people are present, so too are power relations.