Imagine the following famous experiment, which was carried out years ago by Judith Rodin and Ellen Langer, two very prominent social psychologists. They studied elderly residents in a nursing home. With the cooperation of the nursing home staff, Drs. Rodin and Langer divided the participants in the study into two groups that were the same in terms of age, sex, severity of illness, and kinds of illnesses. Then one group of people was explicitly encouraged to make more decisions for themselves about life in the nursing home, such as where to receive visitors and when to see movies, while the other group was explicitly encouraged to let the staff help them with these kinds of decisions.
As part of the study, each person was also given a plant for his or her room. However, the two groups of patients were told quite different things about the plant they were being given. People in the first group, those who were being encouraged to make more decisions for themselves, were told something like “This plant is to brighten up your room. It is your plant now, and whether it lives or dies is your responsibility. You decide when to water it and where it will do best.” The people in the other group, who were encouraged to let the staff make decisions for them, were told something like “This plant is to brighten up your room a little. But don’t worry, you don’t have to water it or take care of it. The housekeeper will do that for you.”
What Drs. Rodin and Langer found was that by the end of a year and a half, a certain number of people in both groups had died, as would have been predicted for these nursing home residents. But, remarkably, the two groups differed dramatically in how many people had died. It turned out that the people who were encouraged to let the staff help them with their decisions about visitors and other details of their lives and who were told that the staff would take care of the plant they had been given died at the same rate as was usually seen in that nursing home. But the people who were encouraged to make decisions for themselves and who were told that the plant was their responsibility died at about half the usual rate.
Rodin and Langer interpreted these findings to mean that enabling these nursing home residents to take more control in their lives, even over seemingly little decisions such as when to water the plant, protected them from an earlier death in some way. Anybody who is familiar with nursing homes knows that few things in that environment are ever really under a resident’s control. This interpretation is consistent with Dr. Kobasa’s work on psychological hardiness, which, as we saw in the preceding chapter, identified a sense of control as one important factor in resistance to illness.
There is a complementary interpretation to the nursing home experiment that I find myself drawn to, one that places the emphasis slightly differently. One might equally say that those people who were told that it was their responsibility to take care of the plant were given an opportunity to feel needed in some small way, and perhaps even to bond with the plant. In fact, they may have come to feel that the plant depended on them for its well-being. This way of looking at the experiment emphasizes the connectedness between the person and the plant rather than the exercise of control. It is at least plausible that the encouragement to make decisions for themselves about when and how to care for their plant, as well as decisions about where to meet visitors and when to go to the movies, led to them feeling as if they were participating more, were connected more with the nursing home, and belonged there more than the group that was not encouraged in this way.
When you feel connected to something, that connection immediately gives you a purpose for living. Relationship itself gives meaning to life. We have already seen that relationships, even relationships with pets, are protective of health. We have also seen that affiliation, meaning, and a sense of coherence are attributes of well-being. We have even said that at its core, mindfulness is about relationality.
Meaning and relationship are strands of connectedness and interconnectedness. They weave your life as an individual into a larger tapestry, a larger whole, which, you might say, actually gives your life its individuality. In the case of the plant experiment in the nursing home, we might suppose that those people who were given the plant but were not told that they were to be responsible for it would be less likely to develop this kind of connectedness with the plant. It is more likely that they saw the plant as just another neutral item in the room, like the furniture, rather than as something that depended on them for its well-being.
To my mind, connectedness (and interconnectedness, which emphasizes the intrinsic reciprocity of all relationships) may be what is most fundamental about the relationship of what we call mind to physical and emotional health. The studies of social involvement and health certainly suggest that this is so. They show that just the number of relationships and connections one has through marriage, family, church, and other organizations is a strong predictor of mortality. This is a very crude measure of relationship, since it does not take into account the quality of those relationships, their meaningfulness to the individuals studied, and how reciprocal they are experienced to be.
It would not be hard to imagine that a happy hermit, living in isolation, might feel connected to everything in nature and all people on the planet and not be at all affected by a dearth of human neighbors. We might speculate that such a person probably would not suffer ill health or premature death from such voluntary isolation. On the other hand, people who are married might have very rocky and tenuous connections, which might make for very high stress and a susceptibility to illness and premature death. Still, the fact that studies show a strong relationship between the sheer number of social connections and the death rate in large populations implies that our connections play very powerful roles in our lives. It suggests that even negative or stressful connections with people may be better for our health than isolation, unless we know how to be happy alone, which few of us do.
Many studies with animals also support the idea that connectedness is important for health. As we have seen, stroking and petting appear to be health-enhancing for both people and animals. Animals raised in isolation when they are young never function as normal adults and tend to die sooner than animals raised among littermates. Four-day-old monkeys will cling to a surrogate “mother” made of terry cloth if separated from their real mother. They will spend more time in physical contact with the soft cloth “mother” than with a wire-mesh surrogate, even when the wire one provides milk and the soft one doesn’t. Dr. Harry Harlow of the University of Wisconsin performed such experiments in the late 1950s and clearly demonstrated the importance of warm physical contact between mother and infant in monkeys. Harlow’s baby monkeys chose soft touch with an inanimate object over physical nourishment.
The renowned anthropologist Ashley Montagu documented the profound importance of touch and its relationship to physical and psychological well-being in a remarkable book called Touching: The Human Significance of the Skin. Physical touch is one of humanity’s most basic ways of connecting. For instance, shaking hands and hugging are symbolic rituals that communicate an openness to connecting. They are formalized acknowledgments of relationship. And, when engaged in with mindful and heartful presence, they become much more, transcending mere formality and tapping a deeper domain of connectedness. They serve as a channel for mutual recognition and acknowledgment, giving rise to the possibility of expressing authentic feelings and even differences in views and aspirations in ways that might be mutually beneficial.
While physical touch is a wonderful way in which to communicate our feelings, it is hardly the only one. We have many other channels for touching besides the skin. We make contact with each other and connect through all our senses—with our eyes, our ears, our noses, our tongues—our bodies, and our minds. These are our doors of connection to each other and to the world. They can hold extraordinary meaning when the contact is made with awareness rather than out of habit.
When touching is perfunctory or habitual, the meaning embodied in it rapidly changes from connectedness to disconnectedness and from there to feelings of frustration or annoyance. No one likes to be treated mechanically, and we certainly do not like to be touched mechanically. If we think for a moment about making love, one of the most intimate expressions of human connectedness through touching, we might recognize and admit to ourselves that lovemaking suffers when the touching is automatic and mechanical. It is almost always felt as lacking in affection and true intimacy, an absence of connection, a sign that the other person is not fully present. This distance can be felt in all aspects of the touching: in body language, timing, movement, and speech. Perhaps one person’s mind is elsewhere in a particular moment. This can lead to a break in the energy flow between the two people. When this happens, it seriously erodes positive feelings. If it becomes a chronic pattern, it can easily lead to resentment, resignation, and alienation. But usually an inability to bring awareness and embodied presence to making love and to experiencing a deep connectedness with the other person is only symptomatic of a larger pattern of disconnectedness, one likely to manifest itself in various ways in the relationship, not just in bed.
We might say that the degree to which a person’s mind and body are connected and in harmony reflects the degree of awareness that person brings to present-moment experience. If you are not in touch with yourself, it is very unlikely that your connections with others will be satisfactory in the long run. The more centered you are within yourself, the easier it will be for you to be centered in your relationships with others, to appreciate the various threads of connection that give meaning to your world, and to fine-tune them as things change and life unfolds. This is a very fruitful area of application of the meditation practice, as you will see in Part IV.
In the last chapter we saw that a lack of closeness to one’s parents during childhood was associated with an increased risk of cancer in Dr. Caroline Bedell Thomas’s study of doctors. We might speculate that this has something to do with the extreme importance of early experiences of connectedness to later health as an adult. Perhaps it is in childhood that all the positive attitudes, beliefs, and emotional competencies that we looked at in the last chapter, and in particular, basic human trust and the need for affiliation, take root. If we were denied such experiences in childhood, for whatever reasons, it is likely that special attention to the cultivation of those qualities will be particularly important if we are to experience ourselves as whole when we are adults.
The fact is that everybody’s original experiences of life were literally and biologically experiences of connectedness and oneness. Each of us came into the world through the body of another being. We were once part of our mother, connected to her body, contained within it. We all bear the sign of that connectedness. Surgeons know not to excise the belly button if they have to make a midline incision; nobody wants to lose his or her belly button, “useless” though it is. It’s a sign of where we came from, our membership card in the human race.
After babies are born, they immediately seek another channel for connecting to their mother’s body. They find it through nursing if their mothers are aware of this channel and value it. Nursing is reconnecting, a merging again into oneness, this time in a different way. Now the baby is on the outside, her body separate yet drawing life from the mother’s body through the breast while touching her, being warmed by her body, enveloped in her gaze and sounds. These are early moments of connectedness, moments that cement and deepen the bond between mother and child even as the baby gradually learns about being separate.
Without parents or others to care for them, human babies are completely helpless. Yet protected and cared for within the web of connectedness that the family represents, babies thrive and grow, complete and perfect in themselves yet utterly dependent on others for their basic needs. Each one of us was at one time this complete and also this helpless.
As we grew older, we found out more and more about our separateness and individuality, about having a body, about “me,” “my,” and “mine,” about having feelings, about being able to manipulate objects. As children learn to separate and to feel themselves as separate selves with increasing age, they also need to continue to feel connected in order to feel secure and in order to be psychologically healthy. They need to feel that they belong. It is not a matter of being dependent or independent, but of being interdependent. They can no longer be one with their mothers in the old ways, but they do need to experience ongoing emotional connections with them and with their fathers and others in order ultimately to feel whole themselves.
The energy that feeds this ongoing connectedness, of course, is love. But love itself needs nurturing to flower fully, even between children and parents. It’s not that it isn’t “always there” so much as that it can easily be taken for granted and remain underdeveloped in its expression. It needs to be “always here” as well as always there. It means little if you love your children (or your parents for that matter) deep in your heart but the expression of it is constantly being subverted or inhibited by strong feelings of anger, resentment, or alienation. Love means little if the major way you have to express it is to pressure others to conform to your views of how they should be or what they should do. It is particularly unfortunate if you have no awareness of what you are doing at such times and no sense of how it is being perceived by others, especially your child.
The path to developing our capacity to express love more fully is to bring awareness to our actual feelings, to observe them mindfully, to work at being non-judgmental and more patient and accepting. If we ignore our feelings and the ways in which we behave, and just coast in the belief that the love is there and that it is strong and good, sooner or later our connections with our children may become strained, badly frayed, or even broken. This is especially so if we are unable to see and accept them for who they actually are. This is an area in which regular practice of lovingkindness meditation (see Chapter 13), even for brief moments, can provide strong nourishment for the outward expression of our unconditional loving feelings. It also raises the possibility of bringing greater mindfulness to the ongoing adventure of parenting. Indeed, there is now a whole new field in psychology studying mindful parenting.
The majority of pediatricians and child psychologists used to believe that babies were senseless when they were born, that either they couldn’t feel pain in the way adults do or that it wouldn’t affect them if they did, because they wouldn’t remember it later, and that therefore it didn’t matter how you treated children when they were babies. What the mothers felt was probably quite different, but even a mother’s instinctive responses to her baby are strongly influenced by cultural norms and especially by the authoritative pronouncements of pediatricians.
More recent studies of newborn babies have dispelled the viewpoint that they are insensitive to pain and unaware of the outside world at birth. They show that babies are alert and aware even in the womb. From the time they are born and even before, their view of the world and their feelings are being shaped by the messages they receive from the surrounding environment. Some studies suggest that if a newborn baby and its mother are separated at birth for a prolonged period, usually due to medical circumstances totally beyond the control of the mother, and if consequently the normal infant-maternal bonding process is unable to occur within that time, the future emotional relationship between the child and the mother may be more emotionally disturbed and distanced. The mother may never feel the strong attachment toward that child that mothers usually do. There may be a lack of feelings of deep connectedness. No one can say with certainty how this might translate into specific emotional or health problems for this child twenty or thirty years later, but there appears to be some connection.
The work of John Bowlby, Mary Ainsworth, D. W. Winnicott, and others has led to the emergence of a new field in psychology called attachment research, which emphasizes the quality of the parent-child relationship and its effects on the child’s development. Secure attachment leads to a robust sense of well-being in the child as he or she gets older. Insecure attachment or other disordered forms of attachment often lead to significant problems right across the developmental spectrum and into adulthood. Psychiatrist Daniel Siegel has argued that the tenets of secure attachment exactly mirror the elements of mindfulness as taught in MBSR.
Early childhood experiences of isolation, cruelty, violence, and abuse, the exact opposite of secure attachment, can lead to severe emotional disabilities in later life. They strongly shape a person’s view of the world as meaningful or meaningless, benevolent or uncaring, manageable or unmanageable, and of himself or herself as worthy or unworthy of love and esteem. While some children are true survivors and find ways of growing and healing from such experiences no matter what, countless others may not recover from the early rupture of their connections with warmth, acceptance, and love. They carry around scars that have never healed and that are seldom even understood or defined. This is now understood to be a signature of post-traumatic stress disorder. More and more therapies are now available to treat it, with mindfulness-based approaches increasingly at the forefront of these efforts, both for early childhood trauma and for veterans returning from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And let us keep in mind, as we have already noted, that while the most horrific experiences in early childhood come from abuse of all kinds, accidents and loss, murderous assaults in schools, and all-out war often, what we have referred to as “big-T trauma,” there is also increasing recognition that all of us, to one degree or another, may be suffering from “little-t trauma,” disorganizing events from our past that may be harder to pinpoint but which, unrecognized and unmet, can also lead to significant suffering and a sense of being impaired or stuck in dysfunctional patterns of behavior. Children of alcoholics and drug addicts, as well as young victims of physical or sexual abuse, often suffer grievously in this way in addition to the big-T trauma they experience, but others who may have been less overtly abused can also carry deep emotional scars and wounds from simply feeling unseen or unmet by their parents or others while they were growing up.
A lack of closeness with your parents when you were a child can leave a deep wound, whether you are conscious of it or not. It is a healable wound, but it needs to be recognized as a wound, as a broken connection, if deep psychological healing is to occur. It may well express itself in feelings of alienation, even from your body. This too is healable. The woundedness of our connection to our own body at times cries out for healing. Yet too often these cries go unheeded or unrecognized, even unheard.
What would it take to initiate the healing of such wounds? First, an acknowledgment that they are here. Second, a systematic way of listening to and reestablishing a sense of connectedness with your own body, and with your positive feelings toward it and toward yourself.
We see such wounds and the scarring they produce every day in the Stress Reduction Clinic. Many people come to the clinic with much more pain than only that caused by their physical problems and by the stress in their lives. Many find it difficult to feel much, if any, love and compassion for themselves. Many feel unworthy of love and unable to express warmth toward members of their own family, even when they want to. Many feel disconnected from their bodies and have a hard time feeling anything, or knowing what they are feeling. Their lives may feel devoid of any sense of personal or interpersonal coherence or connectedness. Many got messages from their parents or from school, or from church, or sometimes from all three when they were children, that they were bad, stupid, ugly, unworthy, or selfish. Those messages were internalized, becoming part of their self-image and of their view of the world, and were carried into adulthood deep in their own psyches.
Of course, for the most part adults, whether they be parents, teachers, or clergy, don’t mean to give children such messages. It is just that if we don’t pay attention to this domain in our relationships, we may hardly ever be aware of the real import of what we are doing or saying. We have elaborate psychological defenses that allow us to believe unquestioningly that we know what is best for children, that we know exactly what we are doing and why. Most of us would be shocked if a neutral third party were to suddenly stop the action at certain times and point things out from the perspective of the child, or to highlight the likely consequences to the child of what we were saying or doing.
To take a simple example, when a parent calls a child a “bad boy” or a “bad girl,” in all likelihood what is really meant is that the parent does not like what the child is doing. But that is not what is actually being communicated. What is being communicated is that the child is “bad.” When a child hears this, the tendency is to take it literally: that he or she is unworthy of love. This message is all too easily internalized by the child. It is all too easy to think that there really is something wrong with you. Sometimes parents even say outright, “I don’t know what is the matter with you!”
It is likely that the sum total of subtle psychological violence perpetrated on children by parents, teachers, and other adults who are not conscious of their actions and the effects of these actions on the self-esteem of children far exceeds the epidemic proportions of outright physical and psychological abuse of children in our society, and influences generation after generation of people in terms of how they feel about themselves and what they conceive of as possible in their lives. We carry around the scars of such treatment in the form of a lot of missed connections and sometimes imprisoning schemas we can continually recreate for ourselves related to core issues such as abandonment, unworthiness, failure, or victimization. We try to compensate in many ways in order to feel good deep in our hearts. But until the wounds are healed rather than covered over and denied, our efforts are not likely to result in wholeness or health. They are more likely to result in disease. We have already seen quite a few examples of this.
In the late seventies, a general self-regulatory model was proposed by Gary Schwartz, then at Yale University, that attributed the ultimate origin of disease to disconnectedness and the maintenance of health to connectedness. This model was based on a systems perspective, which, as we saw in Chapter 12, considers complex systems of any kind as “wholes” rather than reducing the whole to its component parts and only considering the parts in isolation. This model has been developed and deepened over the years by Dr. Schwartz’s student, Dr. Shauna Shapiro, of Santa Clara University, herself a mindfulness researcher, and is one example of how the new paradigm in science is finding ongoing expression within medicine.
We saw in Chapter 12 that living systems maintain inner balance, harmony, and order through their capacity to self-regulate via feedback loops between particular functions and systems. We saw that heart rate varies with the degree of muscle exertion, and when we eat varies as a function of hunger. Self-regulation is the process whereby a system maintains stability of functioning and, at the same time, adaptability to new circumstances. It includes regulating the flow of energy in and out of the system and the use of that energy to maintain the living system’s organization and integrity in a complex and ever-changing dynamical state as it interacts with the environment—what is technically called allostasis. In order to achieve and maintain a condition of self-regulation, the individual parts of the system need to continually relay information about their status to the other parts of the system with which they interact. That information can be used to regulate, in other words, to selectively control or modulate the functioning of the network of individual parts to maintain an overall balance of energy and information flow within the system as a whole.
Dr. Schwartz used the term disregulation* to describe what happens when a normally integrated self-regulating system, such as a human being, becomes imbalanced with regard to its feedback loops. Disregulation follows as a consequence of a disruption or disconnection of essential feedback loops. A disregulated system loses its dynamic stability, in other words, its inner balance. It tends to become less rhythmic and more disordered and is then less able to use whatever feedback loops are still intact to restore itself. This disorder can be seen in the behavior of the system as a whole and by observing its component parts in interaction. The disordered behavior of a living system such as a person is usually described medically as a disease. The specific disease will depend on which particular subsystems are most disregulated.
The model emphasized that one major cause of disconnection in people is disattention, that is, not attending to the relevant feedback messages of our body and our mind that are necessary for their harmonious functioning. In his model, disattention leads to disconnection, disconnection to disregulation, disregulation to disorder, and disorder to disease.
Conversely, and very importantly from the point of view of healing, the process can work in the other direction as well. Attention leads to connection, connection to regulation, regulation to order, and order to ease (as opposed to dis-ease), or, more colloquially, to health. So, without going into all the physiological details of our feedback loops, we can simply say in general terms that the quality of the connections within us and between us and with the wider world determines our capacity for self-regulation and healing. And the quality of those connections is maintained and can be restored by paying attention to relevant feedback.
So it becomes important to ask, what does relevant feedback mean? What does it look like? Where should we be putting our attention in order to move from disease toward “ease,” from disorder toward order, from disregulation toward self-regulation, from disconnectedness toward connectedness? Some concrete examples may help you to grasp the simplicity and power of this model in practical terms and relate it to the meditation practice. When your whole organism, your body and your mind together, is in a relatively healthy state, it takes care of itself without too much attention. For one thing, almost all of our self-regulatory functions are under the control of the brain and the nervous system and are ordinarily occurring without our conscious awareness. And we would hardly want to control them consciously for any length of time, even if it were possible. It would leave us no time for anything else.
The beauty of the body is that ordinarily our biology takes care of itself. Our brain is continually making adjustments in all of our organ systems in response to the feedback it gets from the outside world and from the organs themselves. But some vital functions do reach our consciousness and can be attended to with awareness. Our basic drives are one example. We eat when we are hungry. The message in the “hungry” feeling is feedback from the organism. We eat, and then we stop eating when we are full. The message in the “full” feeling is feedback from the body that it has had enough. This is an example of self-regulation.
If you eat for other reasons than because your body is producing a “hungry” message—perhaps because you are feeling anxious or depressed, emotionally empty or unfulfilled, and you seek to fill yourself in any way you can—a lack of attention to what you are doing and the consequences of it may throw your system seriously and dangerously out of whack, especially if it becomes a chronic behavior pattern. You might wind up eating compulsively, overriding the feedback messages from the body telling you that it has had enough. The simple process of eating when hungry and stopping when full can become highly disregulated in this way and lead to disease, in this case a range of eating disorders from binge eating to anorexia, as well as to the obesity epidemic in postindustrial societies.
Pain and feeling sick are also messages that should cause us to pay attention, because they help reconnect us to some basic needs of the organism. For example, if our response to stomach pain from repeatedly eating certain foods, from stress, or from too much alcohol or smoking, is simply to take antacids and continue to live in the same old way, we are not heeding this highly relevant message from our own body. Instead, we are unknowingly disconnecting from the body and thus overriding its efforts to restore balance and order. On the other hand, when we attend to such a message, we are likely to modify our behavior in some way or other in order to seek relief and restore regulation and order to the system. We will return to the whole question of paying appropriate attention to our body’s messages in Chapter 21.
When we seek help from doctors, they become part of our feedback system. They pay attention to our complaints and to what they can detect in our bodies using their diagnostic tools. Then they prescribe whatever treatments they believe appropriate to reconnect the feedback loops within the organism so that it can self-regulate once again. And what we tell them about the effects of their treatment gives them feedback that might cause them to modify their approach, since we are usually closer to what is happening within our body than they are.
We function relatively well without awareness because so many of our connections and feedback loops within the body take care of themselves when we are relatively healthy. But when the system goes out of balance, the restoring of health requires some attention to reestablish connectedness. We must be aware of the feedback to know whether the responses we are making are moving us in a direction of greater health and well-being. And even when we are relatively healthy, the more we intentionally tune in to and establish sensitive connections with our body, our mind, and the world, the more likely we will be able to move the system as a whole to even greater levels of balance and stability. Since the processes of healing and “diseasing” can be thought of as happening all the time within us, their relative balance at any point in our lives may hinge on the quality of attention we bring to the experience of our body and mind and the degree to which we can establish a comfortable level of connectedness and acceptance. While this may happen automatically to some degree on its own, the intentional cultivation of attention and sustaining it over time in a disciplined way, as Shauna Shapiro emphasizes in her modification of Schwartz’s original model, is usually necessary to drive the system in the direction of connection, regulation, order, and health. And this is, of course, where mindfulness comes into the picture, since mindfulness is the intentional cultivation of attention, coupled with the foundational attitudes presented in Chapter 2. Dr. Shapiro and her colleagues have developed this model, which they now call the IAA (intention, attention, attitude) model, over the years and have used it to great advantage to explore the ways in which mindfulness may be exerting the positive effects on health that are increasingly being seen in research studies at both the biological and psychological levels.
Most of us are not particularly sensitive to either our body or our thought processes. This becomes all too clear when we begin to practice mindfulness. We can be surprised at how difficult it is just to listen to the body or attend to our thoughts simply as events in the field of awareness. When we work systematically to bring our undivided attention into the body, as we do when we practice the body scan or the sitting meditation, or the yoga, we are increasing our connectedness with it. We inhabit it more fully; we befriend it. Therefore, we are more intimate with it. We know our body better as a result. We trust it more, we read its signals more accurately, and we know how good it can feel to be completely at one with our body, at home in our own skin, even for brief moments. We also learn to regulate its level of tension during the day, intentionally, in ways that are not possible without awareness.
The same is true for our thoughts and emotions and for our relationship to the environment. When we are mindful of the process of thought itself, we can more readily catch our own lapses of mind, the inaccuracies in our thinking, and the self-subverting behaviors that often follow from them. As we have seen, the great delusion of separateness that we indulge in, coupled with our deeply conditioned habits of mind, the scars we carry, and our general level of unawareness, can result in particularly toxic and disregulating consequences for both our body and our mind. The overall result is that we may feel deeply inadequate when it comes to facing, living within, and working with the full catastrophe of our lives.
On the other hand, the more conscious we are of the interconnectedness of our thoughts and emotions, our choices and our actions in the world, the more we can see with eyes of wholeness, the more effective we will be when faced with obstacles, challenges, and stress.
If we wish to mobilize our most powerful inner resources to help us to move toward greater levels of health and well-being, we will have to learn how to tap into them in the face of the sometimes blistering levels of stress that we live immersed in. Toward this end, in the following section we will examine what we mean by stress in the first place. We will look at the common ways we react to it and how stress can disregulate our bodies, our brains, our minds, and our very lives. We will also explore how we might make use of that very same stress to learn, to grow, to make new choices, and thus, to heal and to come to peace within ourselves.
* Commonly spelled dysregulation as well.