Andrew Weil quotes - page 5

There's no limit to what working with the breath can accomplishmy own first-hand experiences with this natural healing method have convinced me that breathing well may be the master key to good health. I recommend breath work to all my patients. (Andrew Weil)
Another very common use, in all cultures, of psychoactive substances is to give people transcendent experiences. To allow them to transcend their human and ego boundaries to feel greater contact with the supernatural, or with the spiritual, or with the divine, however they phrase it in their terms. View quote
Andrew Weil
I know of no culture in the world at present or any time in the past that has not been heavily involved with one or more psychoactive substances. View quote
Andrew Weil
Drugs don't have spiritual potential, human beings have spiritual potential. And it may be that we need techniques to move us in that direction, and the use of psychoactive drugs clearly is one path that has helped many people. View quote
Andrew Weil
Just the attempt to learn a [new] language is like running different software through the brain. View quote
Andrew Weil
In my experience, the more people have, the less likely they are to be contented. Indeed, there is abundant evidence that depression is a 'disease of affluence', a disorder of modern life in the industrialized world. View quote
Andrew Weil
The desire to transcend one's own ego boundaries, to share completely, even for a moment, the consciousness of another person must be a universal longing. It motivates many of our activities from taking drugs to making love, and lies behind the search for new ways of getting close to one another that is so intense in our society today. View quote
Andrew Weil
The choice is ours: we can keep on craving what we don't have, and so perpetuate our unhappiness, or we can adjust our attitude toward what we do have so that our expectations conform to our experience. View quote
Andrew Weil
I think instead [of happiness] we should be working for contentment... an inner sense of fulfillment that's relatively independent of external circumstances. View quote
Andrew Weil
I believe that it may be normal, healthy, and even productive to experience mild to moderate depression from time to time as part of the variable emotional spectrum, either as an appropriate response to situations or as a way of turning inward and mentally chewing over problems to find solutions. View quote
Andrew Weil
My personal opinion is that the neutral position on the mood spectrum-what I called emotional sea level-is not happiness but rather contentment and the calm acceptance that is the goal of many kinds of spiritual practice. (Andrew Weil)
When people are told to "eat many small meals," what they may actually hear is "eat all the time," making them likely to respond with some degree of compulsive overeating. It's no coincidence, I think, that obesity rates began rising rapidly in the 1980s more or less in tandem with this widespread endorsement of more frequent meals. View quote
Andrew Weil
I don't think you can live without stress; I think the human life is stressful, and it probably always has been, although the forms of stress may change from culture to culture, and from time to time. View quote
Andrew Weil
While sleep is clearly vital to emotional well-being, what is it, exactly, about sleep that is so necessary? As it turns out, mood disorders are strongly linked to abnormal patterns of dreaming. View quote
Andrew Weil
We have known for many years that we need vitamin D to facilitate calcium absorption and promote bone mineralization. View quote
Andrew Weil
The usual justification for eating extra meals is that it keeps the metabolism 'revved up' so that weight loss is easier. There is, however, very little hard evidence that supports this idea, and a fair amount that disputes it. View quote
Andrew Weil
Excess exercise tends to be counterbalanced by excess hunger, exemplified by the phrase 'working up an appetite.' A few people with extraordinary willpower can resist such hunger day after day, but for the vast majority, weight loss through exercise is a flawed option. View quote
Andrew Weil
There's a great deal of scientific evidence that social connectedness is a very strong protector of emotional well-being, and I think there's no question that social isolation has greatly increased in our culture in, say, the past 50 years, past 100 years. View quote
Andrew Weil
As an undergraduate at Harvard in the 1960s, I was fascinated by my visits to psychologist B.F. Skinner's laboratory. View quote
Andrew Weil
The ways that my dogs can make me - and my visitors - happy constantly amazes me. View quote
Andrew Weil