Self Improvement.

I haven't had a nice deep angsty self psychology update in a while. I guess since I stopped seeing the shrink I haven't felt as much need. The plus to that is that I feel much healthier than I did while I was seeing her. The minus is that my weight is not in a happy place.

The current tack I'm taking is using the good old automobile university with a series of self help books on cd. These are the lovely tomes that I never get around to reading but always attract my attention. With 20 to 30 minutes of commute each way I've been plowing steadily through a pretty good list of them.

As in all things there's good and bad among the selections. Some are not what I thought they'd be at all - my current selection, for instance, is about meditation. I do seem to be getting bits and pieces of good information. Things I can work with and incorporate into a personal philosophy.

I've noticed recently that some of it is working. I'm getting a bit better at recovering balance in less than ideal situations and I'm really parsing stressful situations better than I was. There's room to improve, to be sure, but I'm feeling somewhat less reactive.

Even the meditation book has given me some good stuff. It covers a concept of "shen pa" which is sort of things (words, sights, smells, sounds, stimulus of any sort) that generate an involuntary visceral response. The presentation then goes into the ways a person habituates some generally unhealthy way of dealing with the response. It is an interesting concept. I'm pondering how to apply it to my own life.