Attention (Self-awareness): the third side of the square.

Remember earlier I talked about the fact that emotions are in the body. This has a lot to do with the vagus nerve, that “wandering” nerve (named from the same root as “vagabond”) that travels from the head down through our core. This nerve acts as the break on our powerful heart.

"There are three basic attachment styles:

Securely attached. This is how most of us experience the world when we are very young. We handle new things with some curiosity, we trust that we and other people are basically good, and we feel relaxed enough when we are around people we love and trust that we can let people get close to us. "

“Attuning means matching, or getting “in tune” with, someone else on a deep emotional level. There are some people who seem to have that magical knack for settling people down, just by talking quietly with them. Sometimes their simply being in the room brings the temperature down. These people probably don't have actual magic powers, or spells that only they know, to soothe that difficult person."

“I sometimes talk with my clients about their “inner weather,” a shorthand term for their sensations, feelings, and thoughts. We always work with that as the primary goal, rather than changing or fixing the people in that person's life. You are only in charge of the weather inside of you—you can't change somebody else's weather for them.

When I was in college, I worked at a runaway shelter for teens, where we were constantly cleaning up cuts and scrapes from the latest brawl or dealing with a teen who came in drunk and throwing up-lots of blood, sweat, and worse. This was in the early nineties, in the days of the full-blown AIDS crisis, and it was drummed into all our heads that bodily fluids were to be handled cautiously. We were all trained in universal precautions.