What It Takes to Heal: How Transforming Ourselves Can Change the World

it’s through an orientation toward healing and repair for ourselves and others that we recover our capacity for feeling, for relationship, and, with that, the ability to strengthen our bonds and work together.

There is a difference between visions that come out of the most individualistic tendencies and those that arise when we are able to admit that we need other people.

When we are courageous, we can do the unexpected and start to mold the world around a vision bigger than one produced by fear. Every inch of progress, every ounce of love, every truly meaningful action from here on out will happen through courage, not comfort.

To what and to whom are you committed? What do you long for? And what is worth traveling through the unknown to reach?

To deny the life of our emotions and the process of feeling is to deny how alive we are and how inseparably bound up we are with one another.

To belong is to rest into the collective, to be woven into the all. It’s the feeling that the group has found meaning and usefulness in your presence.

...the people who came to see me each week needed the world to change , and not just how they felt about it. It's hard to heal when you're still being hurt.

Designations of innocence and guilt too often get in the way of repair.

I had learned to seek connection at the expense of my bodily safety, to lose my own limits in order to belong. Eventually, transgression became familiar, a fact of relationship.

Reactivity is the mechanism of time travel that I discussed in the last chapter, taking us, though not consciously, out of this time. The more we are jolted into reactivity, the more we lose our grounding in the present moment as we respond to the vestiges of the past.

We commit to our own healing in part because the realization of what we are dreaming of rests on it. It is our responsibility to one another to do our internal work, not so that we feel good alone but to stay an active part of the whole and to refuse to pass down to the next generation what pain we've accrued.

Malcolm X is this: “We need more light about each other. Light creates understanding, understanding creates love, love creates patience, and patience creates unity.

One night, I caught myself in the rearview mirror and for the first time in forever I saw someone who was not flawed or broken, someone with an awkward beauty, someone who tried. I could see there was nothing to be ashamed about in my mistakes except perhaps how I denied them and tried to cover them up. I was no less or more lovable than my favorite people or anyone else in the world.

Our ability to dream of something different, to name longing, to articulate a vision and commit to it, directly correlates to the likelihood that we will experience it, that it will be realized. It’s the way we bring about change for ourselves, and for the world.

We need visions within us that make our stomach quiver and cause us to come alive. Then we can show up more authentically, reshape the contours of our community, rework the structures of our world.

In the time Saul and I spent together, we thawed some of what was frozen in him, finding layers of rage, regret, grief, and, at his core, a very small boy who needed to feel protected. Before we got there, we named the longing for what his life could be, something that might be a powerful enough conjuring to allow him to feel what had felt too painful or unsafe in the past. “I want to be a vulnerable leader and a present father to my kids,” he said. “I want to know that I am worthy and that I can inspire the people I work with to believe in their own worthiness.” How would he have known before that this could be true? This statement became the basis for our work together, for every session, and for his future. It guided him from then on, shaping his relationships, his time with his kids, and moved him toward a place he had never before dreamed was possible.

Boundaries require us to rework and restructure our relationships for the sake of connection, for deep mutuality.

Ruptures should inform the shape of relationships going forward. we should relate differently based on what's happened, now that we've learned something about who the other actually is and who we are. if not, we risk falling into the same patterns that didn't work before.