Mon, 15 Jun 2026 16:53:52 -0700WeeblyMon, 12 Nov 2018 16:24:06 GMThttps://www.positivelypolyanna.net/heartful-minds/stephen-porges"When we're with significant others, the responsibility of that relationship is to keep our autonomic nervous system out of states of defense." — Stephen Porges

Much thanks to Paul MacLean's book The Triune Brain in Evolution, a generation of popular phrases like "lizard brain" and "critter brain" have cropped up in Western culture, helping to evolve psychology storytelling about how and why people react and respond to different life stressors and traumas. Less popular — though steadily gaining traction — is a new neurobiological viewpoint that the cluster of neurons around the heart and the gut give meaningful reason to talk about the "heart brain" and the "gut brain," in addition to the head brain.

Stephen Porges is bringing these ideas together to support new understanding of how the heart brain shares information with the head brain (the gut brain does this also) through a three-part system for regulating human nervous activation, the Triune Autonomic Nervous System. Where previously scientists believed that the body had only two branches of the nervous system, fight/flight (sympathetic) and rest/rebuild (parasympathetic), Porges argues that there is also a third branch, the social nervous circuit, which is wired for integration of experience.

As with the most recently evolved part of the head brain, this third system is the first system to get knocked out under extreme duress. Nonetheless, where the triune (head) brain is sometimes broken down into the action brain, the emotional brain, and the thinking brain, Porges' theories suggest that there may also be a mobilizing heart and a feeling heart that seek to survive and find pleasure in life, as well as an intelligent heart that seeks to live in connection with others.

]]>Sun, 11 Nov 2018 16:52:23 GMThttps://www.positivelypolyanna.net/heartful-minds/louis-cozolino"We are not the survival of the fittest. We are the survival of the nurtured." — Louis Cozolino

As neuroscientists expand definitions of the mind beyond a direct corollary with the organic brain, Hebbian theory that brain cells that "fire together, wire together" has gotten an important update from psychosociobiologist Louis Cozolino: it turns out that minds that fire together, wire together also.

​This social brain — the mind — helps us to regulate each other's metabolic activations, emotions, and behavior, seeking sociostasis (or social equilibrium) through the social synapse. The social synapse is defined by Cozolino as the exchange of energy across the gap from one person to another (as with the neurosynaptic gap from one neuron to another). The social synapse binds us into larger organisms like families, tribes, societies, and the human species and acts as a high-speed information linkup that runs on ongoing physiological and emotional synchrony.

Cozolino has authored and co-authored multiple texts, helping pioneer a new way of joining psychotherapy practice, education, and neuroscience. Here are a few that stand out: The Neuroscience of Psychotherapy: Healing the Social Brain; The Social Neuroscience of Education: Optimizing Attachment and Learning in the Classroom; and The Neuroscience of Human Relationships: Attachment and the Developing Social Brain. 
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]]>Sat, 10 Nov 2018 17:17:25 GMThttps://www.positivelypolyanna.net/heartful-minds/jacob-l-moreno-and-zerka-t-moreno"Peace will come to men in the distant future when they learn to get along although they do not understand each other." — Jacob L. Moreno

"How can we say that the psyche is more sacrosant than the body, or that the body is more sacrosant than the psyche?" — Zerka T. Moreno

Psychotherapists Jacob L. Moreno and Zerka T. Moreno made a huge impact on psychotherapy practice through their work in defining, developing, and spreading the modality of psychodrama. Psychodrama offers a holistic approach to therapeutic inquiry, as it brings along people's total experiences — body, mind, and relationship — in the discovery process. Jacob and Zerka also helped to name and articulate sociometry as a way of studying social phenomena.

Their work and unique voices can be accessed through multiple texts (Who Shall Survive?, Psychodrama, Psychodrama, Surplus Reality, and the Art of Healing, To Dream Again: A Memoir, The Theater of Spontaneity, The Words of the Father), as well as original film footage.
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]]>Fri, 09 Nov 2018 16:28:54 GMThttps://www.positivelypolyanna.net/heartful-minds/stan-tatkin"There's actually nothing on the planet more difficult than another person." — Stan Tatkin

​Why does it hurt differently when one person in particular says, "I can't do this anymore," than when almost anyone else says the same words?

For decades, since John Bowlby outlined a theory of attachment in interpersonal relationships and Mary Ainsworth studied that theory in the Strange Situation Protocol, we have been training ourselves as a society toward greater self-understanding through a set taxonomy of biologically based infant attachment traits: secure, anxious-ambivalent, anxious-avoidant, and disorganized. In the 1980s, this theory got new legs in supporting adults navigate their relationships and thinking about how attachment continues to operate across the lifetime.

Among those working to share this theory widely and to support people in being the drivers of their own healing and growth, Stan Tatkin, author of Wired for Love, has changed the way we imagine attachment, bringing it out of the clinical linguistics of scientific research studies and into people's living rooms, where everyone can contribute to and help shape the knowledge embedded in attachment theory through dynamic lived experience.
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]]>Thu, 21 Jun 2018 18:22:00 GMThttps://www.positivelypolyanna.net/heartful-minds/tara-brach-take-2"There is something wonderfully bold and liberating about saying yes to our entire imperfect and messy life." — Tara Brach

Bringing Tara Brach back (first appearance here) because her explorations of equanimity changed me in a powerful way. I really wasn't conscious of how the line between peacefulness/ease and apathy/indifference lived inside of me and traveled through my relationships with the world until I heard Tara Brach speak on "duck meditation." Now I am friends with my inner duck. And I'm grateful for this part of me, this place and identity and awareness.

* * *

The Little Duck
​by Donald Babock

Now we’re ready to look at something pretty special.
It is a duck,
riding the ocean a hundred feet beyond the surf.
No it isn’t a gull.
A gull always has a raucous touch about him.
This is some sort of duck,
and he cuddles in the swells.
He isn’t cold,
and he is thinking things over.
There is a big heaving in the Atlantic,
and he is a part of it.
He looks a bit like a mandarin,
or the Lord Buddha meditating under the Bo tree.
But he has hardly enough above the eyes
to be a philosopher.
He has poise, however,
which is what philosophers must have.
He can rest while the Atlantic heaves,
because he rests in the Atlantic.
Probably he doesn’t know how large the ocean is.
And neither do you.
But he realizes it.
And what does he do, I ask you?
He sits down in it!
He reposes in the immediate as if it were infinity
– which it is.
He has made himself a part of the boundless
by easing himself into just where it touches him.
I like the duck.
He doesn’t know much,
but he’s got religion.
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]]>Wed, 20 Jun 2018 16:05:35 GMThttps://www.positivelypolyanna.net/heartful-minds/gene-lushtak“When the story gets good, and this TV show in the mind about us — when that character who we take ourselves to be is winning — it’s pretty awesome, right? And so I found that my capacity to put that down and not be seduced by it really came with holding with compassion and understanding just how much I long for those states.” — Gene Lushtak

Few have taken the time to look closely at, understand, and teach about what happens when joy in the form of excitement becomes problematic. But this gem from writer, filmmaker, and dharma teacher Gene Lushtak is a really great start to an important conversation about joy with others or shared joy. Understanding the ways that exuberance can override a holistic approach to both individual as well as collective transformational well-being — an approach that actually listens fully to all parts and all people — may be, in fact, a much needed antidote to unconscious mechanisms that perpetuate status quo power structures.
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]]>Tue, 19 Jun 2018 07:00:00 GMThttps://www.positivelypolyanna.net/heartful-minds/larry-ward"Everybody is not having the same experience of America." — Larry Ward

Pity is not just an interpersonal problem. We need to do more than adjust the way we treat each other in everyday situations when hard things happen or suffering is present, moving from a passive stance of witness that says, "poor you," to an active stance of will that commits to your relief as everyone's uplifting. In the collective, the way that pity continues to snake through social systems of care requires radical rethinking and redoing. Among many who are addressing this issue, Larry Ward is making a unique space to bridge compassion work and social justice in order to root out pity. He is working to make a truly more compassionate world. I love this person.

]]>Mon, 18 Jun 2018 15:57:30 GMThttps://www.positivelypolyanna.net/heartful-minds/jalal-ad-din-muhammad-rumi-persian​Thirteenth-century poet, scholar, theologian, and mystic, Rumi grappled with love in the form of words like no other. And yet, perhaps to grapple with love, to grapple with loving above selfish affection, is simply what we do and who we are at the most basic level, words or not.
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This is love: to fly toward a secret sky,
to cause a hundred veils to fall each moment.
First to let go of life. Finally, to take a step without feet.

♡

Your depression is connected
to your insolence and refusal to praise.

♡

Listen!
Clam up your mouth and be silent like an oyster shell,
for that tongue of yours is the enemy of the soul, my friend.
When the lips are silent, the heart has a hundred tongues.

♡

Your task is not to seek for love,
but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself
that you have built against it.

♡

Love will find its way through all languages on its own. 

♡

Sunlight fell upon the wall; the wall received a borrowed splendor.
Why set your heart on a piece of earth, O simple one?
Seek out the source which shines forever.

♡

There is an invisible strength within us;
when it recognizes two opposing objects of desire, it grows stronger.

♡

However much I might try to expound or explain Love,
when I come to Love itself, I am ashamed of my explanations . . .
Love alone can explain the mysteries of love and lovers. 

♡

Beg of God the removal of envy,
that God may deliver you from externals,
and bestow upon you an inward occupation,
which will absorb you so that your attention is not drawn away. 

♡

Free of who I was,
free of presence,
free of dangerous fear, hope,
free of mountainous wanting.
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]]>Fri, 11 May 2018 07:00:00 GMThttps://www.positivelypolyanna.net/heartful-minds/pema-chodron“The more you just try to get it your way, the less you feel at home.” — Pema Chödrön

Equanimity, an integral Brahma-vihara, brings courage and balance to help light the way for love, compassion, and resonant joy. At the same time, love, compassion, and resonant joy can support calm, peacefulness, and stamina. Pema Chödrön's work on becoming more intimate with life's challenges, facing fear, and connecting to our basic goodness all support deep inner work in equanimity. She is a beacon for me in grounding myself within the beautiful chaos of the cosmos.
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]]>Thu, 10 May 2018 23:40:00 GMThttps://www.positivelypolyanna.net/heartful-minds/dalai-lama-and-desmond-tutu"Share the joy." — Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu

In 2016 the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu published a book together called The Book of Joy: Lasting Happiness in a Changing World. It's such a delight to resonate with the joy that resonates between these two, and with their commitment to the joy of all — of the infinite.
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