Healing Through the Dark Emotions: The Wisdom of Grief, Fear, and Despair by Miriam Greenspan

PART FIVE

Look for the context of your despair in the larger world around you: in relation to your family, your community, your society, the earth. 

Be aware of the difference between contextualization and blaming.

Try accepting how you feel without condemning yourself.

Ask questions of your despair: what do you want of me? What are you asking of me?

Fear arises in any situation where there is a threat of loss or harm to body, mind, and spirit.

It’s not fear but avoiding fear that leads to phobias. Because we are scared to feel fear, we avoid what triggers it. It’s the avoidance that locks the phobia in place.

It’s not the fear that stops you. It’s the fear of feeling the fear that stops you.

Acting out is about skipping a step in awareness, moving from repressed, shamed emotion to an act that expresses unconscious feelings in behaviours that we don’t consciously connect to the emotion.

Violence is often a direct consequence of denied fear, fear acted on because the person has lost the ability to feel it authentically and mindfully, and to express it without shame.

People act out because they are afraid to feel, afraid to speak, afraid of their fear.

Being aware of fear makes you stronger than pretending you don’t feel it.

Giving voice to fear goes a long way when it’s most needed. It’s a crucial key to the transformation of fear to joy.

The heart heals itself when it’s open to pain.

Being with fear in a state of awareness in which we don’t avoid, cling to, try to fix, or even try to understand, but are simply present: this is the precondition that makes the alchemy of fear possible.

When we master the way of non-action, we hear what fear is asking of us.

Healing Through the Dark Emotions: The Wisdom of Grief, Fear, and Despair by Miriam Greenspan

PART FOUR

Surrender is a form of deep acceptance.

Your ordinary ego wants relief, wants out, wants escape.

Emotional intelligence is a bodily intelligence, so if you want to do emotional alchemy, you have to know how to listen to your body.

To practice emotional alchemy, you have to be acquainted with the story you are currently telling about your emotional suffering and recontextualize it in a broader social, cultural, global or cosmic context.

Just as physical pain alerts you to pay attention to the body, emotional pain has a purpose for the soul.

We grieve because we are not alone, because we are interconnected; and what connects us to one another also breaks our hearts.

Grief is an opportunity not for “resolution”, as in the popular parlance, but for transformation: a wholly new awareness of reality, self, beloved, and world.

What people in grief need most is to be compassionately accompanied, to feel that those who care about them are willing and able to tolerate the pain that they are in, to be there with them, to be present.

The ego is a natural-born victim. Why me? is its central question.

The spiritual fulfillment of redemptive grief is the capacity to feel a vibrant gratitude for life.

Even when the gates of heaven are shut to prayer, they are open to tears.

Despair is profound dispiritedness, a fatiguing emotion that saps the life force.

When despair is in full sway, there is a overwhelming sense of futility.

When we’re in the throes of despair, a metamorphic process is at work.  The call for spiritual death and rebirth in despair can be easily mistaken for a call to suicide.

Despair asks us to make meaning out of apparent meaninglessness; to grieve our unmourned losses; to examine the unexamined life; to legitimate our anger at the world; to struggle out of the cocoon and be reborn.

When we hate ourselves for the “weakness” of despair, for the experience of helplessness that is so much a part of it, and when we panic in response to it, these reactions sink us into the condition we call depression.

In its density, despair brings us to the experience of existential emptiness.

Transform yourself or be damned, the voice of despair seems to say.  This call to transformation is the despair’s message.

Despair comes with an urgent call to grieve our losses and to examine the meaning of our lives. The agony of meaninglessness is at the heart of despair. Recovering faith in a meaningful universe is central to its alchemy.

Meaning-making is a defining characteristic of what it is to be human.

Spirit suffocation is the bedrock of the emotion we call despair.

Despair, mindfully held, brings us face-to-face with the darkness within ourselves and our world.

As you breathe, become aware of where despair lives in your body. acknowledge its presence without trying to change or eradicate it.

Healing Through the Dark Emotions: The Wisdom of Grief, Fear, and Despair by Miriam Greenspan

PART THREE

Emotional toxicity keeps us stuck in the same place or moves us into downward spirals that take us further and further away from emotional alchemy.

Without grieving our losses, listening to our fear and despair, we become lifeless and loveless, anxious and depressed, angry and destructive.

Through family conditioning and religious teachings, and in the culture as a whole, we are schooled to endure, deny, bypass, avenge, and escape painful emotions.  These five common ways of coping have their strengths and weaknesses, but for the most part they aren’t conducive to healing and transformation.

Endurance is the ability to withstand suffering without collapsing.

Denial is unconscious detachment from emotion and the truth that emotion holds.

To transcend suffering authentically, we must be willing to live it fully.  To rise above, we must go through – without any guarantees of what we’ll find on the other side.

In visions of vengeance, we find some small relief for feelings that are intolerable.

Americans are the most addicted people in the world – and our primary addiction is to feeing good.

We learn not to feel through what we think, not to think through what we feel.

Conscious awareness is not something promoted in our culture, while avoidance, distraction, and escape are.

People who chronically suppress their emotions need to have their emotions artificially stimulated.

Without the free flow of emotional energy, we’re all deader than we want to be, and like any addict, we want a fix that makes us feel better – something that allows us to feel more alive and cellulary connected to emotional energy.

Emotional flow is the state in which one is connected to the energy of emotion yet able to witness it mindfully. We ride the wave of emotion on the surfboard of awareness. When we do this skillfully, emotional energy in a state of flow naturally moves toward healing, harmony, and transformation.

To attend to the dark emotions is to sense them in the body, focus your awareness on them, and name them accurately.

The dark emotions are attention grabbers, goading us into awareness.

Attending to emotional energy is a bodily-grounded awareness. It means knowing how to feel your feelings, as opposed to knowing how to describe them without feeling them.

You can’t be emotionally flabby and expect to come to a place of emotional transformation and spiritual power.

To befriend the dark emotions, your intention must be to get close to what you want to run away from.  You need to take your time and give yourself permission to let yourself feel whatever you’re feeling without shame, doubt, analysis, or condemnation.

You surrender by moving into what hurts, with awareness as your protection.

Connected detachment: staying connected to emotional energy mindfully. The detachment comes from being mindful, not from disconnecting.

Healing Through the Dark Emotions: The Wisdom of Grief, Fear, and Despair by Miriam Greenspan

PART TWO

When we listen closely to what hurts, we learn what life is asking of us.

The common denominator in our emotional education is suppression, intolerance, sharing, punishment, and neglect.

It is in our families we first learn to distrust our feelings and to be shamed by them.

Ignoring, stopping, and shaming or punishing emotion are the three parenting styles that most often result in emotional illiteracy in children.

Ours is a dissociative culture – a culture that separates body from mind, body from spirit, feeling from thinking.

Emotional vitality and authenticity, a mature sense of emotional wholeness and freedom – these human capacities are hard to come by in a culture that doesn’t honor the body and the heart. 

We must learn to listen not only to our bodies but to the wider social context if we want to find the larger roots of our pain.

We live in the world and the world lives in us.  The dark emotions that our bodies carry are transpersonal energies housed in our flesh and rooted in our responses to the world – to the inevitable pain of being alive and being humanely connected to others.

It is in the spirit that emotional alchemy takes place – a spirit not divorced from the body but that flows from what the body knows.

Our aversion to pain actually sabotages our search for happiness.

Painful emotions challenge us to know the sacred in the broken; to develop an enlarged sense of self beyond the suffering ego, an awareness that comes from being mindful of life’s difficulties, rather than disengaging from them; to arrive at a wider and deeper perspective not limited by our pain but expanded by it.

Whether we listen to them or not, the dark emotions will emerge one way or another, they exert their call through the body – as an act of grace or an act of violence, a cancerous growth or a surge of creative energy.

Life is larger than our ego’s agenda.

There is no safety net against vulnerability so long as one has a body and an ego.

Vulnerability is not just about hurting. It is about openness.

It is through surrender to the unwanted that we embrace our vulnerability.

Conscious surrender is often what life asks of us in those times when we most want to control the outcome.

Embracing vulnerability does not mean wallowing in passivity, abdicating responsibility, or relishing being a victim.  It means being fully present to what is happening and staking no claims on the outcome.

 To become larger spiritually, it is often necessary to get smaller.

What vulnerability asks of us, ultimately, is not control of our emotions but transformation of our consciousness through emotional openness.

The ego can’t see beyond its own pain.

Life hurts. We are not here to be free of pain.  We are here to have our hearts broken by life.

Grief arises because we are not alone, and what connects us to others and to the world also breaks our hearts.

Emotions are energies in the body that convey information, seek expression, and motivate action.

Emotions, while “inner”, are responses to the larger world.

Human beings have the capacity to feel mindfully and to act consciously, informed by our emotions.

The essence of emotional alchemy is the mindful flow of emotional energy – a process in which we are consciously attentive to what is happening.

Stuck, toxified emotional energy is an important aspect of what keeps the physical ailments in place and prevents healing.

Healing Through the Dark Emotions: The Wisdom of Grief, Fear, and Despair by Miriam Greenspan

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.