Wounds are the means through which we enter the hearts of other people. They are meant to teach us to become compassionate and wise.
Interpretation
Our struggles and sufferings help us connect with others and develop empathy.
This quote by Caroline Myss emphasizes the idea that our personal wounds and challenges are not just obstacles, but also gateways to deeper connections with others. They teach us about compassion and wisdom, enabling us to understand and empathize with the pain of others, ultimately fostering more meaningful relationships.
In practice
In a talk about overcoming personal challenges and using them to help others.
When we harbor negative emotions toward others or toward ourselves, or when we intentionally create pain for others, we poison our own physical and spiritual systems. By far the strongest poison to the human spirit is the inability to forgive oneself or another person. It disables a person's emotional resources. The challenge...is to refine our capacity to love others as well as ourselves and to develop the power of forgiveness.
I am convinced that the deepest desire within each of us is to be liberated from the controlling influences of our own psychic madness or patterns of fear. All other things—the disdain of ordinary life, the need to control others rather than be controlled, the craving for material goods as a means of security and protection against the winds of chaos—are external props that serve as substitutes for the real battle, which is the one waged within the individual soul.
Healing is a different type of pain. It’s the pain of becoming aware of the power of one’s strength and weakness, of one’s capacity to love or do damage to oneself and to others, and of how the most challenging person to control in life is ultimately yourself.
Being of service is not an option, it is a biological necessity. Every kind of action we do for someone is a reanimation of our own life force - and of the other person's.
Everybody wants to be good, but not many are prepared to make the sacrifices it takes to be great. To many people, being nice in order to be liked is more important. There's equal merit in that, but you must not confuse being good with being liked.
I had a quick grasp of the secret to sanity, it had become the ability to hold the maximum of impossible combinations in one's mind.
He is armed without who is innocent within, be this thy screen, and this thy wall of brass.
Many men are contemptuous of riches; few can give them away.
I have an ambition to write a great book, but that's really a competition with myself. I've noticed that a lot of young writers, people in all media, want to be famous but they don't really want to do anything. I can't think of anything less worth striving for than fame.
For solving a surprisingly large and varied number of problems, crowds are smarter than individuals.
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