![]() ![]() He’s led a number of other organizations and received a wide variety of professional awards. He is a former president of the Society for Psychophysiological Research and has been president of the Federation of Behavioral, Psychological, and Cognitive Sciences, which represents approximately twenty-thousand biobehavioral scientists. Stephen Porges is a Distinguished University Scientist at Indiana University, Professor of Psychiatry at the University of North Carolina, and Professor Emeritus at both the University of Illinois at Chicago and the University of Maryland. Durvasula’s research on personality disorders has been funded by the National Institutes of Health and she is a Consulting Editor of the scientific journal Behavioral Medicine.ĭr. Her work has been featured at SxSW, TEDx, and on a wide range of media platforms including Red Table Talk, the Today Show, Oxygen, Investigation Discovery, and Bravo, and she is a featured expert on the digital media mental health platform MedCircle. She is the author of Should I Stay or Should I Go: Surviving a Relationship With a Narcissist, and Don't You Know Who I Am? How to Stay Sane in an Era of Narcissism, Entitlement, and Incivility. ![]() She has spoken on these issues to clinicians, educators, and researchers around the world. Ramani’s clinical, academic, and consultative work is the etiology and impact of narcissism and high-conflict, entitled, antagonistic personality styles on human relationships, mental health, and societal expectations. She is a Professor of Psychology at California State University, Los Angeles, and also a Visiting Professor at the University of Johannesburg. Ramani Durvasula is a licensed clinical psychologist, author, and expert on the impact of toxic narcissism. Beyond words, this offers “the peace that passeth understanding,” and I include it here because it is meaningful to many people (including myself).ĭr. Third, you could have a sense of something transcendental, something eternal, call it God, Spirit, the Unconditioned, or by no name at all. The sense of this, even if fleeting, can really put you at peace. You can get an intuition of this by recognizing that you are a local wave in a vast sea of human culture, nature, and the physical universe yes, you are changing, but within an unchanging allness. While the contents of the universe are changing, the universe as universe is not. Second, while individual waves come and go, the ocean is always ocean. Things that don’t change are reliable, which feels peaceful. The good thing you did this morning or last year will always have happened. As either a bare witness or the space through which the stream of consciousness flows, awareness itself is always at peace.įirst, while most things continually change, some don’t for example, the fact that things change doesn’t itself change. I’m not speaking of anything mystical here, only what you can see directly in your own mind. Or you may have the sense of awareness as an open space in which sights and sounds, thoughts, and feelings, arise and disappear the space itself is never ruffled or harmed by what passes through it. and at the same time there is a place inside that is simply witnessing, untroubled by what it sees. Perhaps you’ve had the experience of being upset and your mind is racing. There is inner freedom, a non-reactivity, which is wonderful. When mind and body are this settled, there is no sense of deficit or disturbance, and no struggling with anything, or grasping after it, or clinging to others. At the end of a workout, meditation, or yoga, you might have felt serene. Or while sitting next to a mountain pond, something of its stillness seeps into your heart. Perhaps you’ve felt this on first waking before the mind kicks into gear. It’s easy to underestimate this sort of peace but it really counts. You were worried about something but finally, get good news. You exhale slowly, activating the soothing parasympathetic wing of your nervous system. ![]() You look out a window and feel calmer, talk through a problem with a friend, or finally make it to the bathroom. This is the peace of relaxation and relief, and it comes in many forms. ![]() When you experience it, enjoy it, which will help it sink into you, weaving its way into your brain so it increasingly becomes the habit of your mind. In our culture of pressure, invasive demands for attention, and jostling busyness, inner peace must be protected. In particular, enjoy your peacefulness, wherever you find it. It’s OK to focus on just one for a while any peace is better than none! It’s helped me to notice, appreciate, and (hopefully) practice each of these. The first two kinds are pretty straightforward, while the third and fourth take a person into the deep end of the pool. I think there are four kinds of peace, and I’ll point out where each might be found. ![]()
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