Caroline

“Solitude, I reflected, is the one deep necessity of the human spirit to which adequate recognition is never given in our codes. It is looked upon as a discipline or a penance, but hardly ever as the indispensable, pleasant ingredient it is to ordinary life, and from this want of recognition come half our domestic troubles...Modern education ignores the need for solitude: hence a decline in religion, in poetry, in all the deeper affections of the spirit: a disease to be doing something always, as if one could never sit quietly and let the puppet show unroll itself before one: an inability to lose oneself in mystery and wonder while, like a wave lifting us into new seas, the history of the world develops around us.”
― Freya Stark, The Valleys of the Assassins: and Other Persian Travels

“MOYERS: So if my private dreams are in accord with the public mythology, I'm more likely to live healthily in that society. But if my private dreams are out of step with the public –
CAMPBELL: -- you'll be in trouble. If you're forced to live in that system, you'll be a neurotic.
MOYERS: But aren't many visionaries and even leaders and heroes close to the edge of neuroticism?
CAMPBELL: Yes, they are.
MOYERS: How do you explain that?
CAMPBELL: They've moved out of the society that would have protected them, and into the dark forest, into the world of fire, of original experience. Original experience has not been interpreted for you, and so you've got to work out your life for yourself. Either you can take it or you can't. You don't have to go far off the interpreted path to find yourself in very difficult situations. The courage to face the trials and to bring a whole new body of possibilities into the field of interpreted experience for other people to experience -- that is the hero's deed.”
― Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

“If a person deals with anger or despair when they first appear, illness need not occur. When we don’t deal with our emotional needs, we set ourselves up for physical illness.”
― Bernie S. Siegel, Love, Medicine and Miracles: Lessons Learned about Self-Healing from a Surgeon's Experience with Exceptional Patients

“long-term survivors had poor relationships with their physicians—as judged by the physicians. They asked a lot of questions and expressed their emotions freely.”
― Bernie S. Siegel, Love, Medicine and Miracles: Lessons Learned about Self-Healing from a Surgeon's Experience with Exceptional Patients