Symptoms Of A Heartbreak Book Quotes

Modern technological society has forgotten what it feels like to be embedded in a living culture, one rich with stories and traditions, rituals and patterns of instruction that help us become true human beings. We live in a society with little regard for matters of soul. As a consequence, we need books and workshops on grief, on relationships and sexuality, on play and creativity. These are symptoms of a great loss. We have forgotten the commons of the soul – the primary satisfactions that sustained and nourished and community and the individual for tens of thousands of years. We have substituted a strange, frenzied obsession with ‘earning a living’ – one of the most obscene phrases in our world – for the vital and fragrant life of the soul. We have sadly turned the ritual of life into the routine of existence. This forgetting has reduced the arc of our experience down to its tiniest hub. The wider reach of our beings has faded, and the subtle and nuanced gravity of contact with the world has been diminished. This is heartbreaking!

Modern technological society has forgotten what it feels like to be embedded in a living culture, one rich with stories and traditions, rituals and patterns of instruction that help us become true human beings. We live in a society with little regard for matters of soul. As a consequence, we need books and workshops on grief, on relationships and sexuality, on play and creativity. These are symptoms of a great loss. We have forgotten the commons of the soul – the primary satisfactions that sustained and nourished the community and the individual for tens of thousands of years. We have substituted a strange, frenzied obsession with “earning a living” – one of the most obscene phrases in our world – for the vital and fragrant life of the soul. We have sadly turned the ritual of life into the routine of existence. This forgetting has reduced the arc of our experience down to its tiniest hub. The wider reach of our beings has faded, and the subtle and nuanced gravity of contact with the world has been diminished. This is heartbreaking!

During my first year at Cambridge, I began preparing notes for this book. I had plenty of time to think about what a weird childhood I had--the flashbulb memories of living in a car with my birth mother and seeing her arrested in our cramped apartment, getting dragged away to foster homes, the drama and heartbreak after being adopted, and all the rest. In his bestselling book The Body Keeps the Score, psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk wrote, "Sooner or later most [trauma] survivors...come up with what many of them call their 'cover story' that offers some explanation for their symptoms and behavior for public consumption. These stories, however, rarely capture the inner truth of the experience. It is enormously difficult to organize one's traumatic experiences into a coherent account--a narrative with a beginning, middle, and an end." With this book, I have attempted to accomplish such as a task as honestly as I can.