The Tao of Fully Feeling Quotes

“We do not have to let other people’s irresponsible emotional expression alienate us from our feelings.”
― Pete Walker, The Tao of Fully Feeling: Harvesting Forgiveness out of Blame

“Emotional incest is yet another form of emotional abuse. Emotional incest commonly involves the reversal of the parent/child roles. When this occurs, the mother or father "parentifies" the child who is then manipulated to gratify the unmet childhood needs of the parent. This typically manifests as the parent pumping the child for the unconditional love that she should herself be giving.”
― Pete Walker, The Tao of Fully Feeling: Harvesting Forgiveness Out of Blame

“The only pain that can be avoided is the pain that comes from trying to avoid unavoidable pain.”
― Pete Walker, The Tao of Fully Feeling: Harvesting Forgiveness out of Blame

“Verbal abuse is the use of language to shame, scare or hurt another. Dysfunctional parents routinely use name-calling, sarcasm, and destructive criticism to overpower and control their children. Verbal abuse is as commonplace in the American family as homework and table manners. It is modeled as socially acceptable in almost every sitcom on television.”
― Pete Walker, The Tao of Fully Feeling: Harvesting Forgiveness Out of Blame

“Unfortunately, premature forgiveness strands us in relationships with our parents that are as devoid of genuine warmth and intimacy as ever. Unless we work through the unresolved fear and hurt our parents caused us, we will always be uneasy around them and hold them at an emotional distance. This is commonly the case even when they have outgrown their abusive ways.”
― Pete Walker, The Tao of Fully Feeling: Harvesting Forgiveness out of Blame

“I have been down many blind alleys in my attempts to come to terms with my emotions. I’ve repressed them, swallowed them, drowned them in drink, ascended above them in clouds of hemp, starved them out, interred them with food, transcended them in meditation, outrun them, outsmarted them with rationalization, exorcised them, handed them over to higher beings, transmuted them into pretty lights, and even briefly felt them before purging them in dramatic catharses that promised to render them finally extinct.”
― Pete Walker, The Tao of Fully Feeling: Harvesting Forgiveness out of Blame

“Time does not heal wounds without acknowledgement of what has happened. You need to clarify your feelings and express them in a way that defines in detail what you have lost and how much you care about what you have lost . . . – Peter Leech & Zeva Singer”
― Pete Walker, The Tao of Fully Feeling: Harvesting Forgiveness out of Blame

“Experiencing one’s own inadequacies and still going on in spite of them are two of the greatest achievements of adulthood.”
― Pete Walker, The Tao of Fully Feeling: Harvesting Forgiveness out of Blame

“The most expeditious way to get past an unpleasant emotional experience is to embrace it and to fully feel and express it.”
― Pete Walker, The Tao of Fully Feeling: Harvesting Forgiveness out of Blame

“words of existential psychotherapist Irwin Yalom: To be human is to be lonely. To become a person means exploring new modes of resting in our loneliness. When we are willing to accept loneliness as a normal, recurring experience of life, we can learn to integrate it more graciously. We do not have to make loneliness or any other “negative” emotion more painful by adding shame, self-abandonment, or self-loathing to it.”
― Pete Walker, The Tao of Fully Feeling: Harvesting Forgiveness out of Blame

“Man cannot remake himself without suffering. For he is both the marble and the sculptor. – Alexis Canell”
― Pete Walker, The Tao of Fully Feeling: Harvesting Forgiveness out of Blame

“How many tasks had I dared not attempt because I accepted their reverberating jibes that I was “good for nothing?”
― Pete Walker, The Tao of Fully Feeling: Harvesting Forgiveness out of Blame

“I love to have you near me, Pete. You are such a joy to me. I love it when you talk to me and tell me how it is for you. I want to hear everything you have to say. I want to be the one person you can always come to whenever you need help. You can come to me when you are hurting, when you just want company, or when you want to play. You are always welcome. You are a delight to my eyes, and I always enjoy having you around. You are a good boy, very special and absolutely worthy of love, respect, and all good things. I am so proud of you and so glad that you are alive. I will help you in any way that I can. I want to be the loving mom and dad you were so unfairly deprived of, and that you so much deserve. And I want you to know that I have an especially loving place in my heart for you when you are scared or sad or mad or ashamed. You can always come to me and tell me about such feelings, and I will be with you and try to soothe you until those feelings run their natural course. I want to become your best friend and I will always try to protect you from unfairness and humiliation. I will also seek friends for you who genuinely like you and who are truly on your side. We will only befriend people who are fair, who treat us with equality and respect, and who listen to us as much as we listen to them. I want to help you learn that it really is good to have needs and desires. It’s wonderful that you have feelings. It’s healthy to be mad and sad and scared and depressed at times. It’s natural to make mistakes. And it’s okay to feel good too, and even to have more fun than mom and dad did.”
― Pete Walker, The Tao of Fully Feeling: Harvesting Forgiveness out of Blame

“Self-esteem cannot be reclaimed while perfectionism prevails. Self-esteem is in many ways the opposite of perfectionism.”
― Pete Walker, The Tao of Fully Feeling: Harvesting Forgiveness out of Blame

“Fully feeling people are also rewarded with increasing richness in their relationships – both with themselves and with others. Love manifests as a palpable warmth and excitement when it is grounded in the heart and body by feeling. Emotional love is so much more profound than the lightweight intellectual experiences of thought-bound people for whom love is often only an ideal, a dream, or a hungry expectation.”
― Pete Walker, The Tao of Fully Feeling: Harvesting Forgiveness out of Blame

“Without the full spectrum of emotions, we are not whole human beings. We are instead like the artist whose palette only has room for light and cheery colors. Our self-expression is boring and superficial like discount store paintings, unconvincingly ethereal in their insipid feathery pastels. The “negative” emotions add dark colors to an artist’s palette. They open up an infinite range of color, hue, and tone. Without black on the palette there are no rich colors, no depths, no contrasts, no intricacies. Without the dark colors it is impossible to capture the infinitely diverse themes and landscapes of life.”
― Pete Walker, The Tao of Fully Feeling: Harvesting Forgiveness out of Blame

“Ambivalating is one of the healing processes of psychotherapy. When clients are encouraged to thoroughly explore their conflicting feelings about job or relationship issues, they eventually connect with a deep intuitive sense about what is best for them.”
― Pete Walker, The Tao of Fully Feeling: Harvesting Forgiveness out of Blame

“I pray that I may be graced with the cleansing waters of forgiveness. I pray that I may relate to forgiveness in a beneficial and non-grasping way. Let me know who to forgive and be with, who to forgive and avoid, and who I do not need to forgive. Let me learn to forgive others by becoming more forgiving of myself.”
― Pete Walker, The Tao of Fully Feeling: Harvesting Forgiveness out of Blame

“Perfectionism also prevents us from letting in the love of others, no matter how abundant and genuine it is. When we are preoccupied with our deficiencies, we are often untouched by the nurturance others offer us. How tragic that so many of us are convinced we only deserve to be loved when we are happy or excelling.”
― Pete Walker, The Tao of Fully Feeling: Harvesting Forgiveness out of Blame

“Many of us have forgotten how we used to be bedazzled by such everyday wonders as marveling at a spider web, finding an animal shape in the clouds, exploring the delicate intricacy of the pistils and stamens of a flower. It is time to rediscover the emotional vitality of the child within us. Our inner child can find enduring satisfaction in simple pleasures because s/he does not pursue them purely to escape inner emotional turmoil. Perhaps the vision of the emotionally vital poet Walt Whitman will motivate you to reconnect with the ardor of your abandoned inner child: I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars, And the running blackberry would adorn the parlours of heaven, And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels . . . And I or you pocketless of a dime may purchase the pick of the earth, And to glance with an eye or show a bean in its pod confounds the learning of all times . . .”
― Pete Walker, The Tao of Fully Feeling: Harvesting Forgiveness out of Blame

“When we do not attend to our feelings, they accumulate inside us and create a mounting anxiety that we commonly dismiss as stress.”
― Pete Walker, The Tao of Fully Feeling: Harvesting Forgiveness out of Blame

“Well-adjusted has come to mean unaffected. – Theodore Rubin”
― Pete Walker, The Tao of Fully Feeling: Harvesting Forgiveness out of Blame

“Writing touches the unconscious in a way that talking does not. It gets beyond the old, to the truth of the real stories within.”
― Pete Walker, The Tao of Fully Feeling: Harvesting Forgiveness out of Blame

“We suffer many dire consequences when we are unwilling to feel. The price of emotional repression is a constant, wasteful expenditure of energy that leaves many of us depressed and taciturn. Perpetually enervated, more and more of us sink into the apathy and ennui of the “seen that - been there - done that” syndrome. When this occurs, we forfeit our destiny of growing into the vitally expressive and life-celebratory beings we were born to be. Our war on feelings forces our emotions to turn against us. Much of our unnecessary suffering is caused by the ghosts of our murdered emotions wafting into consciousness and haunting us as hurtful thinking. Denied emotions taint our thoughts with fearful worry, dour self-doubt, and angry self-criticism. We also risk “acting out” our emotions unconsciously when we are unwilling to feel them. Sarcasm, criticality, habitual lateness, and “forgotten” commitments are common unconscious expressions of anger. Ironically, these passive-aggressive behaviors leave us in even greater emotional pain because they cause others to distrust and dislike us. The epidemics of overeating, over-medicating, and overworking that plague America are also rooted in our mass retreat from feeling. When we are feeling-phobic, we are compelled to distract ourselves from our emotions with mood-altering substances, workaholism or constant busyness. Many of us, as Anne Wilson Schaef points out in When Society Becomes An Addict, are addicted to at least one self-destructive substance or process.”
― Pete Walker, The Tao of Fully Feeling: Harvesting Forgiveness out of Blame

“There is a Native American story that highlights the dearth of love in our culture. A Western anthropologist living with and studying the Hopi Indians noticed over time that most of the Hopi songs were about water. One day he asked the shaman: How is it that you sing so much about water? In my culture, love is the theme that is most commonly expressed in our songs? Do your people not value love? The shaman of this desert culture replied: In my culture our songs are frequently prayers, and we sing and pray for the precious things in life of which we do not have enough. Love is not one of them.”
― Pete Walker, The Tao of Fully Feeling: Harvesting Forgiveness out of Blame

“Stress is also the painful internal pressure of accumulated emotional energy. Grieving, explored at length herein, is the most effective stress-release mechanism that human beings have. Grieving is a safe, healthy release valve for our internal pressure cookers of emotion.”
― Pete Walker, The Tao of Fully Feeling: Harvesting Forgiveness out of Blame

“MIRRORING Out of this will come a person who is going to have a good image of herself. Someone who will be able to walk into rooms without undue shyness, believe that other people like her, accept praise for her work as due, and smile at the nice reflection of herself in other people’s eyes just as she smiles back at what she sees in the mirror. – Nancy Friday”
― Pete Walker, The Tao of Fully Feeling: Harvesting Forgiveness out of Blame

“To reach out for another is – to risk involvement. To expose feelings is – to risk exposing your true self. To place your ideas, your dreams before the crowd is – to risk their loss. To love is – to risk not being loved in return.”
― Pete Walker, The Tao of Fully Feeling: Harvesting Forgiveness out of Blame

“Profound loneliness is the terrible price we pay when we only relate to others from a guise or stance of feeling good. Those who are only there for others during the good times are fair-weather friends who are strangers to loyalty and trust.”
― Pete Walker, The Tao of Fully Feeling: Harvesting Forgiveness out of Blame

“When we disburden ourselves of old unresolved traumas, energy wasted holding the past at bay becomes available for celebrating daily life.”
― Pete Walker, The Tao of Fully Feeling: Harvesting Forgiveness out of Blame