Angie Seminaro

“Experience, not information, is the key to emotional development.”
― Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness

“Not only are we drawn to beauty, we are the only creatures who engage in certain behaviors purely for the sake of encountering beauty. We use vacation days to drive to places where we can see the sun come up over the ocean. We visit art museums, theaters, and symphonies. We look at the moon and the stars. We climb to high mountain lakes to put our feet in the frigid water to feel the rush and see the reflection of the summit in the ripples we have made. No other creature stops to behold something beautiful for no other reason than that it has stirred something in their souls. When we do these things, are we not like Moses and David, hungering to see the glory of God?”
― Russ Ramsey, Rembrandt Is in the Wind: Learning to Love Art through the Eyes of Faith

“Story is a trojan horse for truth. It can sneak truth past the gates of our defenses and prepare our hearts to hear things we might have resisted if they had come as mere declaration. Jesus relied on storytelling as his primary method of teaching for just this reason--to persuade Jews to empathize with Samaritans, wealthy people to care for the poor, and religious people to have compassion on society's fringe.”
― Russ Ramsey, Rembrandt Is in the Wind: Learning to Love Art through the Eyes of Faith

“Forgiveness is giving up the hope that the past could have been any different, but we cannot move forward if we're still holding onto the pain of that past and wishing it was something else. All of us who have been broken and scarred by trauma have the chance to turn those experiences into what Dr Perry and I have been talking about: Post Traumatic Wisdom.

Forgive yourself. Forgive them. Step out of your history and into the path of your future. My friend, the poet Mark Nepo says that the pain was necessary in order to know the truth. But we don't have to keep the pain alive in order to keep the truth alive. I made peace with my mother when I stopped comparing her to the mother I wished I had, when I stopped clinging to what should or could have been and turned to what was and what could be.

Because what I know for sure, is that everything that has happened to you, was also happening for you, and all that time, in all of those moments, you were building strength. Strength times strength times strength equals power. What happened to you can be your power.”
― Oprah Winfrey, What Happened To You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing