Here she goes. The less healthy the personality, the less flexible that it is. So very healthy people have extraordinarily flexible personalities. So the core of mental health is flexibility. It's almost like physical health, right? A person who's physically healthy has a lot of flexibility in their muscles and joints. A mentally healthy person has a lot of flexibility in their psyche. How do we define flexibility in our psyche? I would say it's an adaptability
Chris Gritti
@InteGritti · 2:38
But I'll stay on topic. I used to feel like I was drowning, suffocating. It wasn't until years later I realized that even though I felt that way, I wasn't perishing. It was the panic that made me feel as if my head was underwater. I grew up in Maui and developed a deep love and respect for the ocean, and I grew to be a strong swimmer. And if I wasn't in reality drowning, that meant I was not thinking clearly like a person panicking
Susi Lawson
@susisouljourney · 4:19
So to me, artists are very flexible by personality. And I'm even thinking right now of moving, although that's kind of scary. But to me, that requires flexibility, the ability to uproot yourself, move to a place where you don't know many people, and start over, even at a late age. That I'm thinking of doing that. But you've really got me
Darrain …
@TheBriefOne · 5:00
As compared to having to peek at life or peek through the rustic door in the back alley that leads to the old irish pub or, like, urban club. Like, I'm in the shadier side of life. It's a very strange landscape of mind when you have to think about flexibility of mind because I always think about the movie inception, where it's like, once you realize you have to spend majority of your life living a dream within a dream, and we all kind of do
Rugged flexibility acknowledges that skillfully working with transformation requires strength and agency. That's the ruggedness part. And at the same time letting go of resistance, rigidity and over controlling. That's the flexibility part. And I really love the notion of agency. I think when we think about psychological flexibility, I think agency should be a part of that. I think there was a tendency for us to sort of give up our agency sometimes because maybe that's the easiest thing to do. I don't know
Swell Team
@Swell · 0:15
Susi Lawson
@susisouljourney · 1:50
Even if they're targeting you, it doesn't really have a whole lot to do with you. It's their mood, their personality, their past traumas that they're coming from. And to be flexible, you have to be resilient to that and to kind of wear a soft, empathetic armor, if that makes sense, that they're just doing their best, too, and to embrace the best of them. So that's what I got from what you said
Chhaya Saini
@shimmythatsoul · 4:28
So be it changing my self talk, be it changing the way I looked at life, be it not blaming the outside, because outside is a reflection of inside. So what you think actually becomes your reality. So all of these things, and even, I would say, at some point of time, then I was told that it's your childhood trauma that's making you behave in this way. I was open to understand that. Is it? So I actually went for some
Mental Wellness Stories
@hope · 0:41
I kind of took a pause and listened to people's relationship to flexibility, and it's very the myriad of ways to approach it and it was just very interesting. Thank all of you for finding time to reply to this
Tonya Dewhurst
@BeKind2 · 4:49
And I look back on it now, I'm 60, and I look back and I see a child who went with the ebb and the flow, and my parents stayed together. And my sister had a very turbulent life as a teenager. Actually, she still does. And so I watched her. She's three years older than I am, and at that time was my only sibling for ten years. And so I kind of learned from her and I learned from my parents
Mental Wellness Stories
@hope · 0:36
Hi, Tonya. I'm so happy that you knew of Dr. Armani. Her words are really powerful in this and in so many other things. And I really like your comment about reading the room and that becoming just a second nature to people. I think that's an amazing skill to have. In fact, I did a session on that in my giving voice. So swellcast, I'll just tag giving voice here so you can go to it