"The most basic and powerful way to connect to another person is to listen. Just listen. Perhaps the most important thing we ever give each other is our attention…. A loving silence often has far more power to heal and to connect than the most well-intentioned words."
Rachel Naomi Remen
Artist: Elsbe Scholtz
Paired by Whispers from the Heart (Facebook)

Happy Diwali to everyone on here who celebrates it!

Credit: Pyramid Consciousness (Facebook)
"Most people relate to the behavior of others through one of three lenses: mockery, which puts you above the person you are judging, grief, which makes you a victim of what they did, or condemnation, which casts them as simply bad. Spinoza refused all three, and in doing so he was making a radical philosophical claim long before psychology existed as a discipline. He insisted that human emotions and actions, however destructive, follow from nature just as rigorously as geometry follows from its axioms. Anger, greed, cruelty, and fear are not mysterious failures of virtue to be scorned. They are patterns with causes, and causes can be understood.
This is not the same as excusing harm. Understanding is not approval. What Spinoza offers instead is a way out of the exhausting cycle of outrage that keeps a person reactive rather than clear. When you ridicule someone’s behavior, you learn nothing about why it happened, you only feel briefly superior. When you mourn it, you center your own suffering instead of seeing the mechanism at work. Understanding, by contrast, is the only stance from which real change, in yourself or in your relationship to others, becomes possible.
This is also a quiet form of freedom. The less you need to judge a thing in order to feel safe from it, the more clearly you can actually see it."
Art: Evan M. Cohen
#PyramidConsciousness #Spinoza #Philosophy #Psychology

Credit: Pyramid Consciousness (Facebook)
"Watch how a relationship changes the moment one person starts trying to control the other. It does not matter how the control is dressed up, as concern, as guidance, as knowing what is best. The instant one person needs to manage the other’s choices, feelings, or behavior, something essential has already left the room. What remains might look like love from the outside, but it has quietly become a transaction of power.
Jung is describing something sharper than a moral lesson here. He is naming a psychological law. Love, by its nature, requires the other person to remain free, genuinely free to leave, to disagree, to be fully themselves even when that is inconvenient. The will to power cannot tolerate that kind of freedom, because power needs an object to act upon, something to shape, direct, or possess. The two states are structurally incompatible, not because one is virtuous and the other sinful, but because they are built from opposite relationships to the other person’s autonomy.
This is why Jung calls them shadows of each other. Where you find one in true form, the other has receded. And it explains why so many relationships that claim to be about love are, underneath, elaborate negotiations for control, and why real love so often requires the harder work of releasing the grip rather than tightening it." #Love #Control
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Art: John William Waterhouse

Credit: Psychiatry with a Soul (Facebook)
"I wish more people understood that all it takes is one safe person to start rewiring your nervous system. One person who is consistent, calm, and non-judgmental. Just one person who can show you how safety can feel."
@h.e.le.n.m.a.r.i.e
Photo by Sarah Treanor