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

"The art of letting things happen, action in non-action, letting go of oneself, as taught by Meister Eckhart, became a key for me by which I was able to open the door to the “Way”. The key is this: we must be able to let things happen in the psyche. For us this becomes a real art of which few people know anything. Consciousness is forever interfering, helping, correcting, and negating, and never leaving the simple growth of the psychic processes in peace."

C.G. Jung (commentary on The Secret of the Golden Flower, p. 90.)

"The doors to the world of the wild Self are few but precious. If you have a deep scar, that is a door, if you have an old, old story, that is a door. If you love the sky and the water so much you almost cannot bear it, that is a door. If you yearn for a deeper life, a full life, a sane life, that is a door."

~ Clarissa Pinkola Estés

For Someone Awakening To The Trauma of His or Her Past

For everything under the sun there is a time. 

This is the season of your awkward harvesting, 

When the pain takes you where you would rather not go,  

 

Through the white curtain of yesterdays to a place 

You had forgotten you knew from the inside out; 

And a time when that bitter tree was planted  

 

That has grown always invisibly beside you 

And whose branches your awakened hands 

Now long to disentangle from your heart.  

 

You are coming to see how your looking often darkened 

When you should have felt safe enough to fall toward love, 

How deep down your eyes were always owned by something  

 

That faced them through a dark fester of thorns 

Converting whoever came into a further figure of the wrong; 

You could only see what touched you as already torn.  

 

Now the act of seeing begins your work of mourning. 

And your memory is ready to show you everything, 

Having waited all these years for you to return and know.  

 

Only you know where the casket of pain is interred.  

You will have to scrape through all the layers of covering 

And according to your readiness, everything will open.   

 

May you be blessed with a wise and compassionate guide 

Who can accompany you through the fear and grief 

Until your heart has wept its way to your true self.  

 

As your tears fall over that wounded place, 

May they wash away your hurt and free your heart. 

May your forgiveness still the hunger of the wound  

 

So that for the first time you can walk away from that place,  

Reunited with your banished heart, now healed and freed, 

And feel the clear, free air bless your new face.

 

~ John O'Donohue, To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings

"Either you walk inside your story and own it OR you stand outside your story and hustle for your unworthiness." 

~ Brené Brown

"Before we strive after perfection, we ought to be able to live the ordinary man without self-mutilation. As for instance the ordinary physician neither imagines nor hopes to make of his patient an ideal athlete, so the psychological doctor does not dream of being able to produce saints."

~ C.G. Jung, Letters Vol. II, p. 474.