Articles on Self-Knowledge, Relationships and Calm - The School of Life

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Relationships

Why We All End up Marrying Our Parents

Psychoanalysis doesn’t merely insist that we will marry someone like our parent. It also proposes that what we really want to do is to give the story with a parent-type figure a different ending.

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Self-Knowledge

How Music Can Heal Us

Intuitively, we know that music can heal but rarely is it asked to do so as directly and explicitly as it has been here. These extraordinary musical pieces carry the listener on a representative journey from psychological distress to understanding recovery and liberation.

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Self-Knowledge

A Bedtime Meditation

We need to create — every day — a small safe period in which we can reorient ourselves and exchange worried confusion for open-minded kindly self-awareness.

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Self-Knowledge

What Your Body Reveals About Your Past

Our bodies are repositories of pain. The more difficult our trajectory to life has been, the more we are likely to feel negatively towards our bodies and the more troubles they are likely to give us.

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Calm

How to Sleep Better

Our 3am awakenings are signs that we have repeatedly not been doing the sort of self-reflection we need to do in order to be at peace. If we are to regain sleep, we should begin to visit some of the bolted and locked rooms of our mind.

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Relationships

Parenting and People-Pleasing

Proper emotional development requires that, at a young age, a child should be given a degree of leeway to speak its mind to people who are far bigger, busier and more powerful than they are.

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  • Self-Knowledge
  • Melancholy

The Pessimist’s Guide to Mental Illness

The anxious should defiantly accept that they can never eradicate certain risks but that these can be shouldered — and a habitable life made among the ruins.
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  • Calm
  • Failure

A Life Without Narcissism

By letting go of narcissism, we become entirely focused on what is beyond us; pure observers of the world outside of our selves. 
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  • Sociability
  • Communication

In Praise of Small Chats with Strangers

Small sympathetic chats matter above all because few of us are ever very far from sadness and vicious despondency.
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Relationships

Two Questions to Repair a Relationship

To prevent their relationship from breaking down, lovers should regularly make room to ask themselves — in a spirit of openness and curiosity — two ostensibly simple questions…

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How Music Can Heal Us

Self-Knowledge

How Music Can Heal Us

Intuitively, we know that music can heal but rarely is it asked to do so as directly and explicitly as…
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A Bedtime Meditation

Self-Knowledge

A Bedtime Meditation

To foster ever greater self-awareness, we should carve out time for introspection during two highly conducive periods: late at night…
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How to Sleep Better

Calm

How to Sleep Better

Sometimes we have simply had too much coffee, or the bedroom is too hot…but most often, insomnia is psychological. It…
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Two Questions to Repair a Relationship

Relationships

Two Questions to Repair a Relationship

Few couples appreciate the need for ongoing relationship-maintenance. Every day brings with it small challenges — disappointments, frustrations, irritations —…
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