Denise

“Of course! the path to heaven
doesn't lie down in flat miles.
It's in the imagination
with which you perceive
this world,
and the gestures
with which you honor it.
-from The Swan”
― Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems, Volume One

“If I could sum up all my years of clinical training and research in one statement, it would be this: We heal when we can be with what we feel.”
― Hillary L. McBride, The Wisdom of Your Body: Finding Healing, Wholeness, and Connection through Embodied Living

“our ability to feel our feelings as they move as energy through our body with our ability to talk about what we feel. We can sit in therapy, tell sad stories, and talk about feeling sad without ever having the bodily experience of sadness. Psychology has historically focused too much on cognition and behavior while neglecting the process that underlies them both: emotion. But current neuroscientific research reveals emotion (also called affect in the scientific literature) as the central driver behind why we are the way we are, and how we develop and heal.2 We now know that most psychopathology, or mental illness, is the result of the inability to effectively regulate emotion.”
― Hillary L. McBride, The Wisdom of Your Body: Finding Healing, Wholeness, and Connection through Embodied Living

“The prophet engages in futuring fantasy. The prophet does not ask if the vision can be implemented, for questions of implementation are of no consequence until the vision can be imagined. The imagination must come before the implementation. Our culture is competent to implement almost anything and to imagine almost nothing. The same royal consciousness that make it possible to implement anything and everything is the one that shrinks imagination because imagination is a danger. Thus every totalitarian regime is frightened of the artist. It is the vocation of the prophet to keep alive the ministry of imagination, to keep on conjuring and proposing futures alternative to the single one the king wants to urge as the only thinkable one.”
― Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination