The Soul of Desire: Discovering the Neuroscience of Longing, Beauty, and Community by Thompson MD, Curt (100%)

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Congrats on starting The God-Shaped Heart by Timothy R. MD Jennings, I hope you enjoy it! It has an average of 5/5 stars and 1 ratings on Google Books.

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I'm on page 34

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• Aaron had not considered that his desire—what he wanted, what he longed for—was central to his experience of depression and intermittent panic. Once he gathered himself, he answered, “I don’t know what I want.”
• Desire does not exist merely as some independent phenomenon to which we respond; it is also something that, like any good gardener knows, must be pruned. It must be shaped and will be shaped by whatever practices, habits, or (in Smith’s language) liturgies we develop—liturgies we practice whether we know it or not.
• René Girard points out, no small part of why I desire something is envy. Human behavior that is intentional is primarily learned through mimicry, by watching the intentional behavior of others.
• Perhaps I don’t desire God like I desire those other things because no one else possesses him like they possess anything else either.
• we must be aware that desire, on shame’s terms, is primarily about envy.19 And envy’s source is shame.
• When desire is bent by our sense that the world is one of scarcity, it devolves into devouring.
• A great deal of parenting energy is devoted to channeling and shaping a child’s desire in such a way that the child learns at least two important realities about the world. First, he learns that his desire is important. His parents attune not only to what he wants but that he wants, and they support the child’s experience of asking for things. In this way, a child is formed into someone whose inner emotional state expressed in longing finds a receptive audience, strengthening his capacity to live transparently in the world.
• But second, and equally important, the child learns that his desires may not always be met—he
• emotion as the neurobiochemical and interpersonal energy around which the brain organizes itself.
• “making sense of what we sense” is fundamental to how we humans, unique among living creatures, develop into storytellers.
• Best that we simply know what and where our desires are so that we can keep an eye on them. So that we can keep them from getting out of hand and leading us down paths we don’t want to travel.
• Hence, our desire needs to be validated in the context of proper boundaries, much like how the pruning of a tree
• These three needs—to be seen, soothed, and safe—make way for the fourth: to be secure (collectively referred to here as the four s’s).
• Our need to be seen, soothed, safe, and secure never stops. The only question is who is providing those experiences for us.
• increasing movement toward flourishing is what we refer to as the process of integration.1 Integration is like a river that flows between two banks, one bank being chaos and the other rigidity.
• “the window of tolerance.” With his landmark work The Polyvagal Theory,
• Should I be faced with a dangerous situation and run away from it due to my sympathetic system’s involvement, I can then reach safety and be better regulated. Likewise, shutting down at times keeps me from being so overwhelmed by my emotions that I cannot function at all.
• We are severely limited in accessing our right hemisphere’s capacity to imagine beauty, goodness, or joy because our brain is functionally on high alert to anything it suspects may be threatening, despite our desperate longing for intimacy.
• I’m hoping you get the point, which is that in the West, we believe that thinking is ultimately more important than what we experience with our physical senses, let alone what we know to be ethically good.
• He proposes that how we actually live requires a reversal of the order in which we approach the three transcendentals, so that beauty is first, followed by goodness, which is followed by truth. Why? He contends that before we “think” as humans, we must first encounter things with our senses—and
• What they needed from me was not, first, right theology; they needed me to be their embodied imaginer of beauty, if you will, while their brains tried to catch up.
• In this sense, God sees us not as problems to be solved or broken objects to be repaired but as beauty on the way to being formed.
• we often forget that the primary purpose of “learning” is not simply to inculcate information for its own sake into our students, but rather to facilitate their opportunity to practice making new things and thereby reflect God’s image.
• our society is hell-bent on paying attention to the world primarily through the functional mode of the left hemisphere of the brain, on “understanding” it in order to manipulate it.21 This means we end up not attuning to beauty—actively disregarding it, in fact, albeit often nonconsciously—and consumed with engaging our world as a problem to be solved or a pathology to be diagnosed. Shame and fear truncate our awareness of beauty, not least as it pertains to our own lives.
• it is our fear of repeating the experience of shame and trauma from our past that leads to the atrophy of our imaginations.

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• Is it an advantage to be more affected by shame? Because then you have an awareness of it. Are more intimately acquainted with it. Can use it, what it is pointing at to grow in that area and thereby become a stronger more well rounded person.

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