One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light but by making the darkness conscious. C.G. Jung........I've been bouncing around alot lately regarding the books I have been reading. One day I am tackling politics, the next it's religion, or whatever suits my fancy or particular interest or need at the moment, but, one book I keep coming back to is a book I read last year called Healing Through the Dark Emotions: The Wisdom of Grief, Fear, and Despair, by internationally know psychotherapist Miriam Greenspan. Greenspan is well aquainted with the dark emotions of the soul having parents who lived in concentration camps during WWII and losing her first son Aaron shortly after he was born to a tragic death. Over the past six years I have had my fair share of grief and struggles myself on several fronts which is probably why I have made a connection with the book and it's author. I have recently decided to read the book again and intend to take my time and read it more carefully this time around and ponder it's implications for my own life. To supplement my reading I have also decided to share some quotes from the book on my blog. I find these types of exercises therapeutic for me but I also hope others might find the entries interesting, helpful, inspiring, insightful or thought provoking......

Healing Through the Dark Emotions:..........."This book will argue that our emotional illiteracy as a species has less to do with our inability to subdue negative emotions than it does with our inability to authentically and mindfully feel them. What looks like a problem with emotional control actually has its source ina widespread ignorance about how to tolerate painful emotional energies and use these energies for emotional, spiritual, and social transformation. And while emotional control has its uses, it is transformation that our anguished world so urgently calls for. In particular, we need to honor three basic emotions that are an inevitable part of every life: grief, fear, and despair......The inability to tolerate grief, fear, and despair, as most any psychologist knows, is a major feature of the epidemic of addictions to alchohol, drugs, technology, entertainment, work, sex, etc. that afflicts our civilization....In my view, there are no negative emotions, just unskilled ways of coping with emotions we can't bear....Grief, despair, and fear are really neither positive or negative but simply human emotions; it is our attitude toward them that's negative. The dark emotions can be our best guide, albeit most demanding, spiritual teachers, when we get beyond the compulsion to control them. By learning how to attend to, befriend, and surrender to the energies of grief, despair, and fear, we create the conditions for something new to arise in ourselves and in the world. We discover an unexpected gateway to healing and transformation."