Prentis Hemphill Quotes

Boundaries are the distance at which I can love you and me simultaneously.

Boundaries give us the space to do the work of loving ourselves. They might be, actually, the first and fundamental expression of self-love. They also give us the space to love and witness others as they are, even those that have hurt us.

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.

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.

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.

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.

We must first be able to feel grief, our own, before we can truly become an ally to anyone else.

...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.

Rituals are the churches without walls, the antidote to our denial. Feeling together can both bring us together and free us.

Feeling is revolutionary, a disruption of the status quo. Though it feels personal and happens in our bodies, it doesn't need to be a solitary action. Feeling and connection bring us into the world and into relationship with one another. Some things seem too big to be felt alone because they are. They require the collective to hold the space for big feeling, for it to move through, and to remind us that we’re not alone. It’s not practical to imagine that we can feel the weight of historical trauma as one person. This is why we meet in the streets. As much as mass protests and direct action are about putting strategic pressure on opposition, they are often a gathering space for grief and pain because they are too big to feel alone. Protests don’t get reported on this way, as an eruption of collective grief; on the news they are riots, and we begin the cycle of minimizing the feelings that bring people to the streets, and ultimately miss the message. We need those spaces and others, too, where our grief can swell, where feeling for feeling’s sake can reconstitute us, where our empathy for one another can build. A community, a society, becomes one, remains one, I think, through shared feeling.