Deborah Sandella

When we pay attention and listen instead of denying, suppressing, fearing, or disliking our spontaneous feelings, we gain great access to our natural intuition (knowing something without understanding how we know it)

We are born with three primal emotional states: curiosity, comfort, and discomfort. You can easily observe them in infants even though they cannot understand or verbalize their internal experience or thoughts. We come programmed with these neurological receptors

Growing up with a first-generation Italian father, my childhood experiences with raw anger were somewhat frightening. When I visited Italy in college, I witnessed angry outbursts frequently and began to understand my dad. The dramatic verbal expression of anger I saw there is common and fleeting; it is not necessarily personal or threatening. In fact, you frequently see it between people who are strangers on Italian streets. It is a dramatic acknowledgment that something has happened you did not expect and do not like. The speaker lets it be known in a passionate voice that there is a perceived offense, and then it is done. It is interesting to note that in stroke research anger did not increase the risk of stroke or ministroke, but hostility did. Anger like I saw in Italy is fleeting, whereas hostility is enduring. Furthermore, the incidence of stroke in southern Italy where my grandparents grew up is significantly lower than in other European countries.4 (Diet differences, however, were not considered in the study.)