Stacy > Stacy's Quotes

“We know we’re right. We have adjusted to chasing down the data to support that gut feeling, but only to indulge the world around us and to reassure us that we’re not crazy.”
― Leela Sinha M.Div., You're Not Too Much: Intensive Lives in an Expansive World

“The bigger problem is this: Logic can be tweaked to say anything you want it to say. Only guts tell the truth, and your gut says this could be big if you can get the momentum you need. Your gut is processing all the data from everywhere. And the idea feels good.”
― Leela Sinha M.Div., You're Not Too Much: Intensive Lives in an Expansive World

“Expansives are often really uncomfortable with the size and scope of what we can see. But they call it “being realistic.” We learn, over time, that this is toxic to us. Instead, if you want to think big, THINK BIG.”
― Leela Sinha M.Div., You're Not Too Much: Intensive Lives in an Expansive World

“how each relates to all the others and to our health. I was reading Dancing Skeletons, a book by nutritional anthropologist Katherine Dettwyler about her time working in Africa, when I found a section about kwashiorkor. Kwashiorkor is a severe form of malnutrition common in young children throughout the tropics. The hallmark diet of this disease is high in calories (from sweet potatoes or other starches) but low in protein. In this case, the low protein is not the problem—other children who eat equally low amounts of protein but fewer total calories are not likely to develop the disease. It’s the ratio of the nutrients that contributes to the development of kwashiorkor. KEGEL EXERCISE A contraction of the pelvic floor often prescribed to prevent the leakage of urine when coughing or running. This section of Dettwyler’s book resonated with me because I recognize that the outcomes of an exercise program depend largely on the ratio of all the movements to each other. Exercise (a repetitive intake of an isolated muscle contraction to fill a hole of missing strength) is often prescribed like vitamins (a capsule ingested to decrease a nutritional void). One of the arguments I am most known for professionally is that the way the Kegel exercise is prescribed can actually be harmful and not helpful at all. A Kegel is like a starch in the case of kwashiorkor: when done excessively and in the absence of other movement vitamins, it can create a negative outcome—too much pelvic-floor tension. The Kegel (as I’ll expand upon in Chapter 10) is not inherently more “bad” than a sweet potato, but neither is a sweet potato (or Kegel) health-making when consumed in isolation.”
― Katy Bowman, Move Your DNA: Restore Your Health Through Natural Movement

“One of the arguments I am most known for professionally is that the way the Kegel exercise is prescribed can actually be harmful and not helpful at all. A Kegel is like a starch in the case of kwashiorkor: when done excessively and in the absence of other movement vitamins, it can create a negative outcome—too much pelvic-floor tension. The Kegel (as I’ll expand upon in Chapter 10) is not inherently more “bad” than a sweet potato, but neither is a sweet potato (or Kegel) health-making when consumed in isolation.”
― Katy Bowman, Move Your DNA: Restore Your Health Through Natural Movement

“Resentment is like taking poison and waiting for the other person to die.”
― Malachy McCourt

“Two painters were rivals in a contest. Each painter would try to make a picture that produced a more perfect illusion of the real world. One painter named Zeuxis painted a likeness of grapes so natural that birds flew down to peck at them. Then his opponent, Parrhasius, brought in his picture covered in a cloth. Reaching out to lift the curtain, Zeuxis was stunned to discover he had lost the contest. What had appeared to be a cloth was in reality his rival’s painting. A story from Ancient Greece”
― Greg Goode, The Direct Path: A User Guide

“Studies suggest that humans spend as much as 40 percent of our speech time informing others about our own subjective experiences. It’s believed that doing this fires up neural pathways associated with reward and activates addiction centers in the brain such as the nucleus accumbens.”
― Rangan Chatterjee, How to Make Disease Disappear

“What have you done today to make someone else happy? What has somebody else done today to make you happy? What have you learned? Now”
― Rangan Chatterjee, How to Make Disease Disappear

“EATING THE RAINBOW When you start eating differently, your microbiome will start changing within two to three days. Getting five different vegetables into your diet every single day will accelerate the process of optimizing your microbiome. To enhance the benefits even further, try to make these vegetables as many different colors as you can. This means it’s much more likely that you will encourage the growth of more beneficial bacteria as well as getting maximum gut-bug diversity. But that’s not the only benefit.”
― Rangan Chatterjee, How to Make Disease Disappear

“Mysticism,” he likes to say, “is the antidote to fundamentalism.”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

“Furthermore, many of the same toxins that squeeze the life out of the thyroid affect other systems in the body—weight control, blood sugar balance, even proper brain/body function. These toxins, mostly endocrine disruptors, appear in hundreds of cosmetics, plastic bottles, metal cans, toys, and the pesticides on food that isn’t organic. They interfere with production, release, transportation, activity, and elimination of natural hormones, such as thyroid, insulin, estrogen, and testosterone—and as a result may cause a wide range of problems with the brain and body.”
― Sara Gottfried, Brain Body Diet: 40 Days to a Lean, Calm, Energized, and Happy Self

“There is nothing you can do to ever make yourself experience anything other than your own consciousness," I reply.”
― Göran Backlund, Refuting the External World

“Who knows how to make love stay?

1. Tell love you are going to Junior's Deli on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn to pick up a cheesecake, and if loves stays, it can have half. It will stay.

2. Tell love you want a momento of it and obtain a lock of its hair. Burn the hair in a dime-store incense burner with yin/yang symbols on three sides. Face southwest. Talk fast over the burning hair in a convincingly exotic language. Remove the ashes of the burnt hair and use them to paint a moustache on your face. Find love. Tell it you are someone new. It will stay.

3. Wake love up in the middle of the night. Tell it the world is on fire. Dash to the bedroom window and pee out of it. Casually return to bed and assure love that everything is going to be all right. Fall asleep. Love will be there in the morning.”
― Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker

“If you want to feel good, eat a chocolate bar. If you want to feel contentment, feel your pain.”
― Kyle Hoobin, How To Live With Zombies: (Or... How To Not Be One) A Little Book of Enlightenment

“Activity in a region of the brain called the postcentral gyrus correlates with conscious experiences of touch. The neurosurgeon Wilder Penfield reported in 1937 that stimulating this gyrus with an electrode in the left hemisphere prompted his patients to report conscious experiences of touch on the right side of the body; stimulating the right hemisphere led to feelings of touch on the left side of the body.13 The correlation is systematic: nearby points on the gyrus correspond to nearby points on the body, and regions of the body that are more sensitive, such as the lips and fingertips, occupy more real estate on the gyrus. Stimulate the gyrus near the middle of the brain, and you feel it in your toes. Slide the electrode along the gyrus, stimulating at ever more lateral points, and the feeling, with a few exceptions, slides systematically up the body. The exceptions are interesting. The face, for instance, resides next to the hand on the gyrus. The toes are next to the genitals—a fact perhaps relevant to foot fetishes, as V. S. Ramachandran has suggested.14”
― Donald D. Hoffman, The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes

“Be careful extending your ankles in bed, as the muscle spasm, the wrenching, twisting, knotting cramps caused by capillary hypoperfusion, which in turn, is caused by inflammatory compounds seen in some CIRS-WDB”
― Ritchie C. Shoemaker, Surviving Mold: Life in th Era of Dangerous Buildings

“When you start to find genuine love, the ways you used to manipulate people to get what you thought was love suddenly become clear and obvious. You might expect this to be embarrassing; in fact, it’s often funny, and you find that it’s easy to forgive yourself for your own humanity. You realize that the old ways of seeking approval were just a misunderstanding that has been cleared up now, and you are grateful for that. I sent out an e-mail asking how inquiry had worked for people. The replies kept coming in, five hundred pages of them. As I read, I was moved by how much people had suffered, in so many different ways, and by the delight they took in waking up from the dream of what they thought was happening in their lives and seeing what was really happening. Inquiry seemed like a magic realm that they could come home to after a long, amazing journey, a house where they could sit around the fire, telling tales of danger overcome, and laughing with old friends. When you don’t believe your stressful thoughts, all that’s left are love and laughter.”
― Byron Katie, I Need Your Love - Is That True?: How to Stop Seeking Love, Approval, and Appreciation and Start Finding Them Instead

“Although the surface of our planet is two-thirds water, we call it the Earth. We say we are earthlings, not waterlings. Our blood is closer to seawater than our bones to soil, but that's no matter. The sea is the cradle we all rocked out of, but it's to dust that we go. From the time that water invented us, we began to seek out dirt. The further we separate ourselves from the dirt, the further we separate ourselves from ourselves. Alienation is a disease of the unsoiled.”
― Tom Robbins, Another Roadside Attraction

“cause of cavities, even more damaging than sugar consumption, bad diet, or poor hygiene. (This belief had been echoed by other dentists for a hundred years, and was endorsed by Catlin too.) Burhenne also found that mouthbreathing was both a cause of and a contributor to snoring and sleep apnea. He recommended his patients tape their mouths shut at night. “The health benefits of nose breathing are undeniable,” he told me. One of the many benefits is that the sinuses release a huge boost of nitric oxide, a molecule that plays an essential role in increasing circulation and delivering oxygen into cells. Immune function, weight, circulation, mood, and sexual function can all be heavily influenced by the amount of nitric oxide in the body. (The popular erectile dysfunction drug sildenafil, known by the commercial name Viagra, works by releasing nitric oxide into the bloodstream, which opens the capillaries in the genitals and elsewhere.) Nasal breathing alone can boost nitric oxide sixfold, which is one of the reasons we can absorb about 18 percent more oxygen than by just breathing through the mouth. Mouth taping, Burhenne said, helped a five-year-old patient of his overcome ADHD, a condition directly attributed to breathing difficulties during sleep. It helped Burhenne and his wife cure their own snoring and breathing problems. Hundreds of other patients reported similar benefits. The whole thing seemed a little sketchy until Ann Kearney, a doctor of speech-language pathology at the Stanford Voice and Swallowing Center, told me the same. Kearney helped rehabilitate patients who had swallowing and breathing disorders. She swore by mouth taping. Kearney herself had spent years as a mouthbreather due to chronic congestion. She visited an ear, nose, and throat specialist and discovered that her nasal cavities were blocked with tissue. The specialist advised that the only way to open her nose was through surgery or medications. She tried mouth taping instead. “The first night, I lasted five minutes before I ripped it off,” she told me. On the second night, she was able to tolerate the tape for ten minutes. A couple of days later, she slept through the night. Within six weeks, her nose opened up. “It’s a classic example of use it or lose it,” Kearney said. To prove her claim, she examined the noses of 50 patients who had undergone laryngectomies, a procedure in which a breathing hole is cut into the throat. Within two months to two years, every patient was suffering from complete nasal obstruction. Like other parts of the body, the nasal cavity responds to whatever inputs it receives. When the nose is denied regular use, it will atrophy. This is what happened to Kearney and many of her patients, and to so much of the general population. Snoring and sleep apnea often follow.”
― James Nestor, Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art

“The Fetters 2 (Doubt) and 3 (Clinging to Rites and Rituals) fall together with the first one. They don’t need to be inquired into separately. If one of them is still there, the first fetter hasn’t fully dissolved yet.”
― Christiane Michelberger, Finding Awakening: A No-Nonsense Buddhist Path to Peace and the End of Suffering

“long-term use of glucosamine and chondroitin supplements “is associated with lower incidence of colorectal and lung cancers and with lower mortality.”
― Kellyann Petrucci, Dr. Kellyann's Bone Broth Diet: Lose Up to 15 Pounds, 4 Inches--and Your Wrinkles!--in Just 21 Days