I once saw a popular spiritual teacher addressing a recently bereaved woman. He said, "Your heartbreak is illusory and only the activity of the separate self. One day the separate self will vanish, along with all suffering".

And in that moment, I saw a deep, deep sickness and inhumanity at the heart of contemporary spirituality. The invalidation of trauma, the false promises, the power games, the suppression of the feminine. And I vowed to bow to that fucking broken heart as if it were God Herself.

Until the end of time.

~ Jeff Foster

A human life has seasons much as the earth has seasons, each time with its own particular beauty and power. …Life is neither linear nor stagnant. It is movement from mystery to mystery. Just as a year includes autumn and winter, life includes death, not as an opposite but as an integral part of the way life is made. 

~ Rachel Naomi Remen

I would rather be the child of a mother who has all the inner conflicts of the human being than be mothered by someone for whom all is easy and smooth, who knows all the answers, and is a stranger to doubt.

~ Donald Winnicott

 

The greatest hazard of all, losing one’s self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. 
No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss - an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc. - is sure to be noticed.

~ Søren Kierkegaard

Soul needs intimate connection, not only to individuate, but simply to live. For this we need relationships of the profoundest kind through which we can realize ourselves, where self-revelation is possible, where interest in and love for soul is paramount.

~ James Hillman, Myth of Analysis

Healing may not be so much about getting better, as about letting go of everything that isn't you - all of the expectations, all of the beliefs - and becoming who you are. 

~ Rachel Naomi Remen

Years ago I went to the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem and did what all tourists there do: wrote some words on a scrap of paper that I tucked into a crevice in the wall. When I closed my eyes and touched my head to the warm stone, it came to me: "All language is prayer." This must be so. Who is it we are speaking to when we speak to anyone? To that person, and also past him or her to Out There. If there is language, it means there is the possibility of being heard, being met, being loved. And reaching out to be heard, met, or loved is a holy act. Language is holy.

~ Zoketsu Norman Fischer

Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what's inside you, to make your soul grow. 

~ Kurt Vonnegut

"We are not here to fit in, be well balanced, or provide exempla for others. We are here to be eccentric, different, perhaps strange, perhaps merely to add our small piece, our little clunky, chunky selves, to the great mosaic of being. As the gods intended, we are here to become more and more ourselves."

 

~ James Hollis

"It took many years of vomiting up all the filth I'd been taught about myself, and half-believed, before I was able to walk on the earth as though I had a right to be here."

~ James Baldwin

"We have all hurt someone tremendously. Whether by intent or accident. We have all loved someone tremendously. Whether by intent or accident. It is an intrinsic human trait, and a deep responsibility. I think. To be an organ and a bade. But. Learning to forgive ourselves and others because we have not chosen wisely is what makes us most human. We make horrible mistakes. It's how we learn. We breathe love. It's how we learn. And it is inevitable."

~ Nayyirah Waheed

Psychotherapy: 

Psyche = Soul // Therapeia = Service

Not solving problems or improving a life, but caring for the soul.

~ Thomas Moore

“There is no linear evolution; there is only a circumambulation of the self… This insight gave me stability, and gradually my inner peace returned.” 

~ C. G. Jung (The Red Book)

 

"A woman’s issues of the soul cannot be treated by carving her into a more acceptable form as defined by an unconscious culture, nor can she be bent into a more intellectually acceptable shape by those who claim to be the sole bearers of consciousness. No, that is what has already caused millions of women who began as strong and natural powers to become outsiders in their own cultures. Instead, the goal must be the retrieval and succor of women’s beauteous and natural psychic form.”

~ Clarissa Pinkola Estés