PART ONE (because this book has too many incredible quotes)
The inability to bear the core triad of grief, fear, and despair is
the source of much of our
individual and collective emotional ills.
Suppressed
grief often turns into depression, anxiety, or addiction.
Benumbed fear can easily lead to irrational prejudice, toxic rage, and acts of violence.
Overwhelming
or unconscious despair often leads to severe psychic numbing or expresses
itself through destructive acts to oneself and others.
There
are no negative emotions, just unskillful ways of coping with emotions we can’t
bear.
Emotions,
including those we mark as negative, have a wisdom of their own, their own kind
of “reason”.
The
dark emotions can be our best, albeit most demanding, spiritual teachers, when
we can get beyond the compulsion to control them.
In the
end, life is the ultimate guru, and pain the most effective wake-up call.
To master our sorrows,
we must know how to be fully immersed in emotion, yet not ruled by it.
Your
life exactly as it contains just what is needed for your own journey of
healing.
Without
a listener, the healing process is aborted. Human beings, like plants that bend
toward the sunlight, bend toward others in an innate healing tropism. There are
times when being truly listened to is more critical than being fed.
The
essence of healing emotional pain lies in listening to what hurts.
Listening
to suffering can result in a dangerous knowing. What will we find out, if we
really listen? Will we be able to bear what we then know? What will knowing ask
of us? This journey takes courage.
Listening
to oneself is the secret of self-healing.
