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21 tips to keep your shit together when you're depressed.

Of all the automatic functions of the body...only the breath can be easily controlled, explain Richard P. Brown M.D. and Patricia L. Gerbarg, M.D. in their book The Healing Powers of the Breath: 

"By voluntarily changing the rate, depth, and pattern of breathing, we can change the messages being sent from the body’s respiratory system to the brain. In this way, breathing techniques provide a portal to the autonomic communication network through which we can, by changing our breathing patterns, send specific messages to the brain using the language of the body, a language the brain understands and to which it responds. Messages from the respiratory system have rapid, powerful effects on major brain centers involved in thought, emotion, and behavior."

On settling in relationships: Rather than focus on the comparisons and rankings of different people, always looking for more attractive, more intelligent, or more successful, we should focus on the unique connection that we can make - a connection which is with a whole person, not just a set of characteristics. These characteristics are undeniably important, but they should not be a regarded as crucial in themselves: they are aspects of complex person who cannot be understood simply as the sum of his or her parts. (Psychology Today)

"Bloom where you are planted."- a quote a stranger wrote in the back of my notebook at a coffee shop in Portland, OR.