Healing through the Dark Emotions Quotes

“anyone who’s ever lost a parent, child, lover, spouse, or close friend, knows that grief is one of the most powerful emotional forces there is—powerful enough to shatter the self we’ve carefully constructed.”
― Miriam Greenspan, Healing through the Dark Emotions: The Wisdom of Grief, Fear, and Despair

“When we psychologize human suffering, we narrow our focus to the individual—perhaps in order to be less overwhelmed by the sheer enormity of human suffering, which, in the modern era, has reached a crescendo of atrocity. In doing so, we lose the connection to anything larger than our family of origin. The sense or meaning we give to pain keeps us stuck in a kind of narcissistic individualism that paradoxically fuels neurosis and emotional suffering.”
― Miriam Greenspan, Healing through the Dark Emotions: The Wisdom of Grief, Fear, and Despair

“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.”
― Miriam Greenspan, Healing through the Dark Emotions: The Wisdom of Grief, Fear, and Despair

“Finding the power of the sacred, not despite suffering, but in the midst of it: This is the alchemy of dark emotions. Through this alchemy, grief moves us from sorrow for what we’ve lost to gratitude for what remains. Fear of life’s fragility is transformed to the joy of living fully, with openness. And even despair becomes the ground of resilient faith - not just an opiate for our pain, but a profound commitment to life as it is.”
― Miriam Greenspan, Healing through the Dark Emotions: The Wisdom of Grief, Fear, and Despair

“Despair . . . is the only cure for illusion. Without despair we cannot transfer our allegiance to reality—it’s a kind of mourning period for our fantasies. Some people do not survive this despair, but no major change within a person can occur without it. —PHILIP SLATER, Earthwalk”
― Miriam Greenspan, Healing through the Dark Emotions: The Wisdom of Grief, Fear, and Despair

“aversion to suffering only worsens it.”
― Miriam Greenspan, Healing through the Dark Emotions: The Wisdom of Grief, Fear, and Despair

“the essence of healing emotional pain lies in listening to what hurts—in both knowing how to listen to oneself and being listened to by another.”
― Miriam Greenspan, Healing through the Dark Emotions: The Wisdom of Grief, Fear, and Despair

“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. Listening well to another’s pain is a primary form of nurturance, capable of healing even the most devastating of human afflictions, including the wounds and scars of violence, even the horrors of war and large-scale social trauma. Children speak their pain automatically when there is a listener, but learn to hide it when there is no ear to hear.”
― Miriam Greenspan, Healing through the Dark Emotions: The Wisdom of Grief, Fear, and Despair

“The Baal Shem Tov, a legendary eighteenth-century Jewish mystic, taught that to master our sorrows, we must know how to be fully immersed in emotion, yet not ruled by it. I call this process the alchemy of the dark emotions: knowing how to stay connected to the energy of painful emotions, to attend to and befriend it, to surrender to it, mindfully, without being overwhelmed. This is how we listen to the language of the heart.”
― Miriam Greenspan, Healing through the Dark Emotions: The Wisdom of Grief, Fear, and Despair

“I learned that the only way to handle feelings is to get hostile, drunk, or stoned. That’s what my parents did. That’s what my brothers did. And that’s what I did. I was addicted to drugs for years before I began to realize that if I didn’t deal with my feelings, I would be dead.”
― Miriam Greenspan, Healing through the Dark Emotions: The Wisdom of Grief, Fear, and Despair

“the skills of good listening are generally not taught to trainees in the art of psychotherapy. The would-be therapist learns to theorize and analyze, to diagnose and prognosticate, to interpret and interrogate. But not to listen.”
― Miriam Greenspan, Healing through the Dark Emotions: The Wisdom of Grief, Fear, and Despair

“The heart heals itself when it’s open to pain.”
― Miriam Greenspan, Healing through the Dark Emotions: The Wisdom of Grief, Fear, and Despair

“solipsistic.”
― Miriam Greenspan, Healing through the Dark Emotions: The Wisdom of Grief, Fear, and Despair

“In the Greek myth, Sisyphus, with great effort, rolls a large rock up a mountain. At the top, the rock, of its own inertia, rolls back down again. Doomed to roll the rock up the mountain over and over again to no avail—this is what life often feels like to those in extreme despair.”
― Miriam Greenspan, Healing through the Dark Emotions: The Wisdom of Grief, Fear, and Despair

“the urgent question: Should I stay in this relationship or leave? She had been living a good life with her husband and two daughters. Located in a quiet neighborhood in the suburbs, her house was immaculate and beautifully decorated, her well-tended gardens extensive. She’d been married for fifteen years, apparently happily. She and her gentle husband, Doug, were devoted to raising their”
― Miriam Greenspan, Healing through the Dark Emotions: The Wisdom of Grief, Fear, and Despair