_bradley-manning-pride014_, a photo by savemanning on Flickr.
'The great majority of us are required to live a life of constant,
systematic duplicity. Your health is bound to be affected if, day after
day, you say the opposite of what you feel, if you grovel before what
you dislike and rejoice at what brings you nothing but misfortune. Our
nervous system isn’t just a fiction, it’s a part of our physical body
and our soul exists in space and is inside us, like the teeth in our
mouth. It can’t be forever violated with impunity.'
White King Orchid, a photo by Brisbane City Council on Flickr.
'Science writer David Dobbs is intrigued by this notion that the
genes and traits that underlie some of our greatest weaknesses like
despair, difficult behaviour and mental illness could also underlie our
more positive aspects like optimism, empathy and resilience.'
'So
the conclusion that the researchers drew was that this gene is not
really a gene that simply makes you vulnerable to bad behaviour and bad
environments, it makes you more sensitive to your environment and your
experience and the kind of parenting you have ...
So
it's not a gene for vulnerability, it's a gene for sensitivity to your
environment and accordingly it can steer you on a lower darker path if
you have a poor environment or a brighter sunnier happy more sociable
path if you are luckier in your draw of parents and other things that
affect your life.'
'The big change is that it sort of
turns inside out the predominant genetic paradigm in psychiatry and much
of behavioural genetics over the last 20 years or so ...
This plasticity hypothesis replaces vulnerability with overall responsiveness and it turns inside out the disease model ...
it's not a matter of resilience and vulnerability but how responsive you are to your experience in the environment.'
'And
the idea there is to recognise that the patient, the person who is
struggling, is not simply vulnerable and doomed through genetics and a
history of bad environment to a life of depression or what not but the
same responsiveness to environment can be an asset to them because to
the extent that they can change their own environment they'll respond to
those positive changes more.'
from Radio National, All In The Mind
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/allinthemind/orchids-dandelions-genes/4420952
Different Strokes (re-edited), a photo by litratcher on Flickr.
from Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit
Jeanette Winterson 1985
http://www.jeanettewinterson.com/
published by Vintage Books London 2011
p. 137
'...
the principle of personal space is always the same whether you're
fending off an elemental or someone's bad mood. It's a force field
around yourself ...
they
push out their power bit by bit, first within their hearts, then within
their bodies, then within their immediate circle. It is not possible to
control the outside of yourself until you have mastered your breathing
space. It's not possible to change anything until you understand the
substance you wish to change ...'
