Quotes About Healing

The most basic and powerful way to connect to another person is to listen. Just listen. Perhaps the most important thing we ever give each other is our attention…. A loving silence often has far more power to heal and to connect than the most well-intentioned words.

Perhaps the most important thing we bring to another person is the silence in us, not the sort of silence that is filled with unspoken criticism or hard withdrawal. The sort of silence that is a place of refuge, of rest, of acceptance of someone as they are. We are all hungry for this other silence. It is hard to find. In its presence we can remember something beyond the moment, a strength on which to build a life. Silence is a place of great power and healing.

Perhaps wisdom is simply a matter of waiting, and healing a question of time. And anything good you've ever been given is yours forever.

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. (in Bill Moyers' Healing and the Mind)

Every great loss demands that we choose life again. We need to grieve in order to do this. The pain we have not grieved over will always stand between us and life. When we don't grieve, a part of us becomes caught in the past like Lot's wife who, because she looked back, was turned into a pillar of salt.

How strange to think that great pain may be impermanent. Something in us all seems to want to carve it in granite, as if only this would do full honor to its terrible significance. But even pain is blessed with impermanence... p 259

It has been said that sometimes we need a story more than food in order to live. p 374

And she'd felt an opening in her chest where she hadn't known anything was closed.

Writing, it was like a heavenly balm, it was like the flowing out of deep waters, it was like the lifting of a load from the spirit; it brought with it a sense of relief, of assuagement. One could say things in writing without feeling self-conscious, without feeling shy and ashamed and foolish -- one could even write of the days of young Nelson, smiling a very little as one did so.

He was suffering from the loss of an illusion.

A lo largo de esa semana comprendió que los libros podían ser una tabla de salvación en un océano de silencio y pena.

A lo largo de esa semana comprendió que los libros podían ser una tabla de salvación en un océano de silencio y pena. Y cuando se acostaba, con la espalda dolorida de tanto leer, sentía la mano de Rana en la oscuridad y viajaba con ella por el mundo de las historias leídas.

for laughter is the perfect medicine for the tortured heart, the balm for misery

In the healing ways of women that remained mysterious to [him] even as he watched them do their work, tears were followed by reminiscences that brought a smile and soothed, and hope was always found to be the flower that bloomed from every seed of hopelessness.

she ran for the only medicine that reliably cured any bout of unpleasant feelings: a book.

Maybe from now on the bittersweet memory of a child lost would be only the sweet memory of a child loved. And maybe, henceforth, it would not be a memory so heavy that it oppressed the heart.

The past cannot be redeamed. What has been and what might have been both bring us to what is. To know grief, we must be in the river of time, because grief thrives in the present and promises to be with us in the future until the end point. Only time conquers time and its burdens. There is no grief before or after time, which is all the consolation we should need.

Not all wounds are the bleeding kind

Some felt that perhaps in his past lay a tragedy with which he had never been able to make his peace, that the only companion with which he felt comfortable was sorrow.

Beneath the bleeding hands we feel / The sharp compassion of the healer's art.

Hatred and anger are only scars upon a beach, while love is the rolling surf that ceaselessly smooths the sand.

Dogs know we need to give affection as much as they need to receive it. They were the first therapists; they've been in practice for thousands of years.

The cataract of grief is a longer drop than Niagara, and I guess I've not reached the river of acceptance at the bottom.

Laughter is a balm for the afflicted, the best defense against despair, the only medicine for melancholy. -Groucho Marx