I was listening to a podcast and Abby Wambach was talking about this book and how she was either reading it or needed to. I remember pausing and listening to what she was saying and instantly thinking to myself, “Wow- I NEED to read that”.  I purchased the book and then didn’t want to start it….I was a little taken aback by it. I then began it and was so impressed by it. It is a phenomenal read into the dark emotions. Yes, it made me cry many many times, but it really helped me in my life.

My favorite excerpts are below:

This book can be used as a guide and companion on rough emotional terrain. It describes a healing process through grief, fear, and despair to gratitude, joy, and faith that I call the alchemy of dark emotions. 

My family background as a daughter of two resilient survivors of the Holocaust has been the crucible in which my early awareness of grief, fear, and despair took shape, an awareness that has accompanied me all my life and is the formative experience of my life’s work. 

The metaphor of “emotional alchemy”, a transmutational process in which something ordinary, valuable, and beautiful- a nugget of gold- struck me as an apt description of the transmutation from grief to gratitude, fear to joy, and despair to faith. 

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. 

The inability to tolerate grief, fear, and despair, as most any psychotherapist knows, is a major feature of the epidemic of addictions to alcohol, drugs, technology, entertainment, work, sex, etc., that afflict our civilization. 

We are all experienced sufferers: grief, despair, and fear are our human birthright as much as joy, wonder, and love. There is no life without loss and therefore no life without grief. So long as we live in a world where terror, violence, environmental degradation, injustice, and scarcity exist, despair will find its unwelcome way into our hearts and souls. 

When I call them dark, I don’t mean that they are bad, unwholesome, or pathological. I mean that as a culture we have kept these emotions in the dark- shameful, secret, and unseen. As a result, we tend, for the most part, to shun them. 

In the throes of grief, fear, or despair, we generally believe that giving feelings like these too much space in our psyches is a sign of emotional weakness or breakdown. We turn away, not toward them. 

The last thing we want to do is go through them- even if doing so would lead us to unimaginable gifts on the other side. 

Perhaps, like many people today, you are deeply aware of living in a world that is both dangerous and endangered- an environment that triggers the dark emotions on a daily basis. 

There’s something good in so-called bad feelings- but that we can only get to the good by fully experiencing the “bad”. 

When we compulsively and chronically disconnect from the dark emotions, disavowed dark emotional energy can become stuck in the body, producing toxic emotional states such as depression, anxiety, and psychic numbing, as well as addiction and psychosomatic ailments. It can also run amok in the form of explosive anger and violence. 

Life is the ultimate guru, and pain the most effective wake up call. 

A culture that insists on labeling suffering as pathology, that is ashamed of suffering as a sign of failure or inadequacy, a culture bent on the quick fix for emotional pain, inevitably ends up denying both the social and spiritual dimensions of our sorrows. 

Experiencing our grief, fear, and despair in a new light, we renew our capacities for gratitude, joy, and faith. We grow in courage and compassion. We approach the world with less fear and more wonder. We have more energy for changing the things that matter. 

Healing through the dark emotions in an unarmed journey into vulnerability- a journey through, not a departure from, PAIN.

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. 

The absurdity of being left stranded in a dental chair because this decent man couldn’t bear to be in the presence of my pain sent profound shock waves through me. It tapped into something larger- a common experience for people who are grieving- a sense of living a life that cannot be listened to. The isolation of feeling this way is stark enough to drain the colors from one’s world. 

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. Listening well to another’s pain is a primary form of nurturance. 

I’m comfortable with suffering that is spoken rather than silenced. 

This is one of life’s little ironies: Though all emotional healing requires it, listening to pain is difficult- and the greater the pain, the more difficult it is to listen to. 

When a person’s suffering is well listened to in psychotherapy, an alchemical process is initiated. Something that starts out as a desperate but inarticulate anguish or a mysterious, painful sensation in the body begins to cohere as a story. Sometimes a new, unexpected story or story fragment emerges. 

The most profound healing often comes with the deepest suffering precisely because a great pain will not let up, forcing us to face into it, and the only alternative to paying attention is cutting ourselves off from life itself. In this way, pain can be a great teacher of listening. 

No one was there to hear me. I had to deal with my pain alone. I cried silently so no one would hear. 

It is in our families we first learn to distrust our feelings and to be shamed by them. Not listening to painful feelings is a family tradition shared by a variety of ethnically, racially, economically, and religiously diverse families. When shaming and ignoring emotion don’t work, there’s always the direct threat of punishment. Punishment for visible suffering is particularly visited on boys, but girls learn too to silence themselves. By and large, girls learn to suffer in silence, boys to deny that they are suffering at all. 

Most of us are overly cerebral about feelings. We can spend 20 years in psychoanalysis and in the end know how to talk about emotions but not how to feel them. 

This kind of dissociation is a special requirement of masculinity in patriarchy. From boyhood on, men are subjected to a relentless conditioning process that teaches them to armor their bodies against emotion. 

The word Shaman means “to see in the dark”. 

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. 

Dark emotions don’t do away. They simply come to us in whatever form we can bear. We discover that the darkness has its own light. 

We think we are walking a path toward a planned destination. Then there is a turning in the road, and we find ourselves in a place nothing like the expected ground.

I was frightened of his fragility, of the slender thread that held him to this life. 

It is through surrender to the unwanted that we embrace our vulnerability. Our helplessness teaches us humility. When we are humbled by pain, we see our smallness in the vastness of the cosmos. 

When the ego is shattered, the heart of Love is found in this brokenness, where we least expect it. 

We can’t laugh heartily unless we know how to cry. We can’t be fearless unless we know the taste of fear. We can’t be happy if we’re afraid to feel sad. Our faith is not faith until it’s tested. To be at peace, we have to be at home with all our emotions, to get comfortable with vulnerability. 

Toxified fear and grief in men often result in masked depressions characterized by angry, impulsive behavior and in impairments in relational abilities. 

In our culture, endurance implies an ability to detach from emotion and to carry on as though we are not really torn up inside. 

Denial is a survival mechanism that must be gradually replaced by the authentic experience of the dark emotions before healing can happen. 

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

She was grieving and grateful at the same time. 

Emotional flow is not about letting it all hang out and acting in whatever way we are impelled, but about tolerating the energy of grief, fear, and despair in the body and allowing the wisdom of these emotions to unfold. 

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. 

The more we ignore the darker emotions, the louder they get. This is annoying, but it’s also a gift. Because the human organism wants to heal, dark emotional energy won’t give up until it’s gotten our attention. 

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. Think of a time when you felt inundated with sadness, fear, or despair. When emotions like these are intense, they flood the body and mind, often causing us to pull away or contract from them. 

SURRENDER. It means being fully present to emotional energy and letting it pass through the body until it’s gone. You don’t surrender by moving away from what hurts. You surrender by moving into what hurts, with awareness as your protection. Surrendering to grief, fear, or despair may sound ill-advised at first. You may ask, “If I surrender, won’t I become overwhelmed and dysfunctional?” Actually, the opposite is true. Surrender is a form of deep acceptance. It’s saying yes to emotional energy to flow and helps you to let go of it. 

Your ordinary ego wants relief, wants out, wants escape. But your spirit has a wider view of things, can be patient, wants to realize itself-even in the midst of pain. 

Changing what you think about what you feel is called “cognitive restructuring” or “reframing”. 

Feelings are in your body. Talking about feelings is not the same as experiencing them. 

Most of us never got enough soothing as children. When we were emotionally troubled, we were more likely ignored, shamed, or punished then soothed. 

Abuse and violence of all kinds are intergenerationally transmitted in families.

It is said that when someone we love dies, a part of us dies too. In my experience, it is not a part but the whole-the self we’ve known is all at once shattered. The self I knew was irreversibly shattered. 

Was I speaking in a long forgotten but suddenly remembered shamanic tongue to ritualize the moment of parting and make it bearable? One thing is certain: this was not a way I would have behaved if not for the power of grief. 

Walking into what was to be Aaron’s room, I felt myself pulled away from shore by a rip tide, toward death. All the life force in my body ached to go, to be with Aaron, wherever he was. A primitive howl emerged from my mouth. I understood, in this moment, how someone can die of a broken heart. 

The simultaneous shattering of ego and expansion of consciousness is a common experience for people who are grieving. The normal ego maintains its illusion of control and invulnerability until disaster strikes and it all begins to unravel. This ego dissolution is the first phase of the extraordinary healing process we call grief. 

In grief’s alchemy, however, the first phase is not about moving on but about being broken, a searing experience that cannot be pacified by all the compassionate counsel in the world. Healing through grief doesn’t start when we give up feeling bad; it begins with the agony of loss. The merciful numbing of shock must wear off and the reality of death take hold. Grief must sink in. In the alchemy of grief, going down always precedes coming up. Understandable but misguided attempts to speed up the process tend to derail it. Generally, a grief deferred is a grief prolonged. There are no short-cuts in the alchemy of the dark emotions. 

Grief for human beings is an important and largely neglected aspect of psychospiritual development, as well as a profound healing process. 

Many in mourning ask: How is it that the world can go on turning, just as it did before, that people go about their business in precisely the same way, that the mail comes and the sun shines, and everyone looks pretty much the same, when in fact life, as it has been lived, has been destroyed? This question is asked from the strikingly narcissistic point of view of the conventional self, based on its “normal” distortion of reality: the illusion of being the center of the universe. the world turns as it did before precisely because the conventional ego is not at the center of it! Loss, particularly sudden or unexpected death, shatters the ego’s normal grandiosity, it’s center-stage illusion of control. 

We don’t choose grief, it chooses us. 

The “get back to normal” message impedes the flow of grief. If we are in a hurry to dispel grief in order to get back to baseline, we are in danger of wasting the profound opportunity in grief for transformations of consciousness that make baseline appear quite limited. Grief, like despair, is an emotion that asks us to depart from the “normal”- to be still, like a pool of frozen water in the winter. From out of this apparent stillness, an imperceptible movement occurs, from sorrow for what has been lost to gratitude for what remains. The trick is to let go and descend into grief’s cold waters. 

We are rarely counseled to understand that it is precisely the surrender of the normal self that makes grief transformative. 

Among observant Jews, the practice of “sitting shivah” keeps the mourner from returning to routine too soon. In the 7 days following the burial (shivah means “7” in Hebrew), the mourners stay at home and receive visitors for most of the day. People come to comfort and console; to bring food and drink; and perhaps most of all, to give the mourners an opportunity to remember the dead and to give voice to their grief. 

Grief is a birth process from ego to spirit. 

It is common for mourners to feel utterly inconsolable and yet to feel buoyed up by the indestructible love of the person who has passed away. The ego is gripped by its loss, but the larger self is actually expanded by it. 

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

People say all sorts of crazy things to others who are grieving-mostly, I think, to soothe themselves.

The mysteries of loss and death are not yours to understand through the rational, analytic mind.

Through this process of meditative grief, I came to believe that Aaron and I (in our larger-self forms) chose his fate together, prior to his birth. Each of us must make some meaning of loss or be devastated by it. Without meaning, despair sets in and stays, a permanent, uninvited guest. 

The tears kept my grief from turning into these chronic states of negativity, which commonly afflict mourners who ignore grief’s compelling call to make space for its powerful energy. Tears are the medium of the ego’s surrender to death. 

The future is an illusion and that every moment is precious. 

Surrendering to death changes the way we see, and the way that we feel about being alive. 

Gratitude comes from seeing through the eyes of grief. We can stop clinging to life and just live it gratefully. 

One doesn’t “do” grief and then get to the other side, where one is “done” with it. 

My advice to all readers who have grieved, are grieving, or will one day grieve a major loss. Do it in your own way, in your own time. You can’t run at someone else’s pace. The alchemy of grief is not a timed, linear process. Grief comes and goes, ebbs and flows like the tide- but without the predictability. 

In the storm of grief, everyone needs someone who can be present without fear of being overwhelmed. 

We live in a culture that denies death. The conventional wisdoms related to grief are, at best, contradictory. Grieve but don’t show it too much, especially in public. Too little grief is cold but too much is unacceptable. Get your grieving over as quickly as possible and move on. Yet a peaceful acceptance of death looks suspiciously like a lack of love for the departed. 

STEP 1- INTENTION: TO GRIEVE IS TO HEAL

If you’re grieving the death of a loved one, you need to bring a clear intention to this process. Don’t let anyone tell you how or when to grieve. Let this be a time that you trust your heart to guide you. 

STEP 2- AFFIRMATION: THE VALUE OF GRIEF

On one side of your emotional alchemy journal, write down every “negative” thought you have about grief and sorrow, about grieving too much or too little, or about how you express your grief. Example: crying in front of others is shameful. Then, on the other side of the page, write a set of affirmations in your own words, about the value of grieving. Example: Mourning is a universal expression of interconnection and loss. It’s wise to feel sorrow and express it. My grief is a measure of my love.

STEP 3- BODILY SENSATIONS

Grief can be a very depleting emotion- physically and mentally. Start with the soothing breath.

STEP 4- CONTEXTUALIZATION: WIDENING YOUR STORY OF GRIEF

Certain kinds of remarks only make you feel worse, don’t hesitate to let people know that these kinds of statements are not helpful to you at this time. 

STEP 5- THE WAY OF NON-ACTION: MINDFUL GRIEVING

Distraction is an important balance to grief’s cruel shattering. 

STEP 6- THE WAY OF ACTION: DON’T LET YOUR GRIEF STOP YOU 

Grief, like despair, invites stillness. Grieving alone is dangerous. It has a tremendous power. Allow grief’s power to propel you. Now is the time to take good care of yourself and indulge your authentic needs and wishes.

STEP 7- THE WAY OF SURRENDER: LET GRIEF FLOW

Start with asking for help. Every grieving person needs help. No one can do this alone. The purpose of grief is to teach you this wisdom: that we are all interconnected, and in our interconnectedness is our hope and our solace. You may want help from friends, family, spouses. Sometimes these people may be there for you. And invariably they will disappoint you as well, because the need for help and solace at this time is inordinate.  And then open your heart to receive the help you’ve asked for. Open your ears to hear the response. 

The dark enclosed place of the cocoon is necessary for metamorphosis to complete itself. 

Feeling despair for a prolonged period doesn’t mesh with our culture’s vision of the good life. 

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation” said Thoreau.

The Universe holds Esther, you don’t need to do it all yourself”. 

Where there had  been emptiness and pain, there was once again some sense of meaning: I was here to love my daughter and to learn what she was here to teach me, not to single-handedly rescue her. Esther’s spirit needed no rescuing; rather it was my spirit that needed care. 

All the parents I know who have a child with complex disabilities go through this process time and again as our children mature. 

Whatever way it arrives, despair comes with an urgent call to grieve our losses and to examine the meaning in our lives. 

Long-standing grief over unnamed or unmourned losses is one of the most common sources of despair.

Buried in the frozen landscape of despair, there is usually a seed of grief.

Time and again, I have seen how being truly loved and appreciated by just one person, even in the wake of catastrophic trauma or neglect, can make all the difference in someone’s ability to get through despair and to heal brokenness of body, heart, and spirit. 

When a flower opens, it opens equally to sun and rain. An open heart requires the willingness to be in pain. 

“Maybe the real issue is that our culture doesn’t give people a sense of community, support, and connection”.

Being numb is a problem for anyone who wants to live with joy. 

We can’t heal what we don’t feel. 

The human condition is scary. Pain, loss, and death are guaranteed the moment we are born. 

We are in the grip of unavoidable fear is when we have most to learn from it. 

Fear is our emotional alarm system. 

Don’t be afraid to explore your fear- you never know where it could take you!

The value of irrational fear is that it humbles us. It tells us we are human and less than perfect. It lets us know that we are in need of healing. 

Because fear is culturally “feminine”, men who show it are emasculated, dishonored, humiliated. Women, on the other hand, are often considered threatening when they adopt a more macho style of fearlessness. The culture of patriarchy punishes fearful mean and fearless women. It sets men up to be archetypal Warriors and women to be obedient Victims.

The experts keep searching for the causes of the epidemic of violence amount young males. Violence is often a direct consequence of denied fear, fear acted out 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. 

Andrea had ignored the normal fear that women carry in patriarchy, and she had paid dearly. Her cry to live free in a world without fear is the expression of a universal yearning. But living without listening to fear, throwing caution to the winds, it not a solution to this yearning. Without fear, we feel safe when we aren’t safe, compromising our ability to protect ourselves. 

In patriarchy, men are systematically trained to become bystanders to their emotions and the emotions of others, while women are socialized to feel and express not only their own but others’ emotions- including the emotions that men don’t feel and express. Girls learn early to be little empathic emotional connectors, boys to be masters of the emotional cutoff. 

Men who are socially conditioned to compulsively control the energy of the dark emotions often cease to experience them altogether. At the same time, they are socially allowed, if not encouraged, to feel and express anger- a more active, and therefore more culturally masculine emotion. This particular mix, by which the energy of unfelt grief, fear, and despair is funneled into anger, can be destructive and dangerous. Men who are unable to identify their own woundedness and who armor themselves against it through compulsive control and dissociation, while allowing their anger full sway, tend to have severe relational impairments. They also tend to act out in aggressive and violent ways. 

To generalize with a very broad stroke, it’s men’s lot in patriarchy to have their capacity for emotion damaged or broken, and it’s woman’s lot to carry the accumulated sorrows of the systems in which they live, while being devalued for it. It’s hard to say who is more wounded by this division (not to mention the suffering of those who don’t fit neatly into these gendered emotional styles). When it comes to emotional wholeness, we are all the walking wounded in need of healing. 

The first and most essential skill of emotional alchemy: attending to emotional energy with awareness. 

Give yourself this subliminal message: I will dream tonight, and I will remember what I dream. 

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