In the Stew - Karen Oliver

Stew. To stew. Beef stew. Strew. Strong, Bong, Long. Fong. Taiwan. Taiwan? It doesn’t take long to travel in the mind. I can stew in the words in my mind all day long, and I do. When i pause and notice, it astounds me the places I go. In seconds I have taken my mind and senses from the cinders I got in my knees as a child living near a coal–heated building to a particularly gory scene in a book I read yesterday to the palpable feeling of grace in the Blue Mosque in Istanbul. There is even an expression, don’t stew over it, Don’t obsess and let those thought spin around and around, biting the snake’s tail. It is fascinating to think that the thoughts are ephemeral; they have no substance at all. They are pure energy or pure nothingness. Thinking about a traumatic event, however, will make the body excrete the same hormones and have the same sensory reactions as the original event until we disconnect the two. That is why they think Eye Movement DR works for Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. It works on the brain to unfreeze the brain and stop the body from having the knee jerk reaction to the thought. I work on that with every thought.