The Great Courses

Unlike the well-founded theories you've studied so far in this series, turn to one that is as-yet-unproven -- but mindboggling in its implications. Cosmic inflation proposes that a period of explosive expansion occurred in the first instants of the Big Bang. This startling idea accounts for two puzzling features of today's universe: the observed uniformity of matter and the flat geometry of space.

Every time you watch baseball, you’re participating in the latest chapter of a compelling story that goes back hundreds of years. In 24 lectures that paint a portrait of the sport’s remarkable past and take you from the decades before the Civil War to the pivotal year of 1920, Play Ball! The Rise of Baseball as America’s Pastime strikes a perfect balance between sports lore and cultural history.

Resilience, one of the most important skills we can master, is essential to navigating life successfully and reaching our fullest potential. As we each go through our own hero’s journey, we venture through life’s trials and tribulations, but also through its beauty and rewards. Learn how to identify and evaluate your personal strengths, and how they will help you on your own hero’s journey.

In this practice, you’ll learn how to trigger your body’s parasympathetic nervous system, your relaxation response, whenever you want to calm down. You’ll use your breath to continually invite your body to relax, and then notice your body’s response without judgment. These techniques are always available to you and can be applied at any time throughout your day.

All trauma, whether caused by a single event or prolonged exposure to a traumatic pattern, affects our physical body and our mind. Trauma causes specific changes in the brain and even in the genetics of reproduction. Learn why, without help, the mind and body can get stuck in the loop of the sympathetic nervous system’s trauma response. And how, with appropriate help, the mind and body can heal.

We often think of physical resilience as our body’s physical strength and fitness (the stronger we are, the quicker we’ll bounce back). But that’s only part of it. Learn about the additional skills needed to recover well from physical stress, illness, or injury. You’ll see that building physical resilience is not just what you do, it’s also how and why you do it.

Will we be crippled by adversity or see an opportunity for growth? The answer lies in our ability to be resilient. Meet the eight themes of resilience this course will bring to life: core values and purpose, finding meaning in adversity, equanimity, self-care, healthy coping skills, a positive sense of self, support and connection with others, and a proactive worldview.

Our mind has the power to make or break our ability to recover from adversity. While we can’t completely control what we think, we can control how we understand and react to those thoughts. Explore the important relationships between your thoughts, belief systems, and core values, and learn why psychological flexibility is the foundation of mental resilience.

You'll thoroughly enjoy this enlightening conversation between your instructor and Suzi Landolphi, a well-known leader in the post-traumatic growth movement, who currently works with combat veterans as a PATHH Guide (Progressive and Alternative Training for Healing Heroes). Just as trauma can be transmitted to successive generations, so can post-traumatic growth.

We’ve been socialized to believe positive emotions are good and negative emotions are bad, but that is far from the truth. Our emotions are simply our individual responses to the situations we experience; we can accept, pay attention to, and learn from all of them. Explore some coping mechanisms for regulating your emotions, which some scientists see as the single most vital aspect of resilience.