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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Designations of innocence and guilt too often get in the way of repair. What if, in resolving conflicts, we could move out of binaries and into a culture of accountability?

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

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.

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.

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

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.