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A Different Beautiful: Discovering and Celebrating Beauty in Places You Never Expected

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Courtney Westlake

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“As a psychiatrist, I have learned to tell my patients who are dealing with significant life conflicts to simplify the decision-making process. We have only three options: change it, put up with it, or get out. In most cases one of those three options can be eliminated immediately. Since attraction to someone of the same sex is not going to change, a married man [or woman] is only left with suffering through it or getting out.”

SufferingGayMarriedDivorceAttractionLgbtLesbian
Book:Finally Out: Letting Go of Living Straight, a Psychiatrist's Own Story
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“In unfavorable circumstances, kashays (anger-pride-deceit-greed) occur, and in favorable circumstances, more kashays occur. However, the kashays of favorable circumstances are cold. Those are raag kashays (attachment kashays) and they include greed and deceit. Whereas, in unfavorable circumstances, there are dwesh kashays (abhorrence kashays) such as anger and pride.”

SpiritualSufferingPrideSpiritual QuotesAngerGreedAttachmentAbhorrenceBalance In Life
Book:Simple & Effective Science for Self Realization
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“The character of the disillusioned warrior soothed by the simplicity and silence of nature is an archetype of this war-driven, industrialized era. It is the story arc that traces the trail of the once-idealistic-now-misanthropic protagonist led astray by progressing culture who ultimately finds themselves and a long-sought truce with their demons in the honesty of the landscape, be it alone or among a native people with a more rightly-aligned set of values. …There is some element of hope for the hopeless found in these stories that speak to the profound depths of our weariness and sparks in even the most disillusioned soul the hope of peace and a quiet life of meaning.”

WarSufferingNatureHealingDepressionSuicideMental HealthTraumaPtsdTranscendent
Book:To Lose the Madness: Field Notes on Trauma, Loss and Radical Authenticity
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“There are many lessons and truths we may learn from the life of Stephen. The two most important ones probably are, in my estimation, the power of the gospel of Christ (being not ashamed to preach Jesus) and forgiveness, not just the forgiveness that God offers us but the forgiveness that Stephen was able to offer to his accusers and murderers and to even pray for them as he breathed his last. Jesus did the same. It is only when we are able to truly forgive that we are set free. That we are healed. That we are restored and made whole.”

SufferingPrayerHealingForgivePaddick Van ZylEight People Eight Life LessonsStephen The Martyr
Author:Paddick van Zyl
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“I hate and have always hated the word therapist. I detest the idea that my work, if it is work at all, is therapeutic work, that I am a member of what some of my colleagues call— without irony— the helping professions. My pride has sought always to refresh itself in the bracing chill of Freud’s most merciless formulations, his statement that a cure only is a renewed acquaintance with "everyday misery,” his designation of psychoanalytic work as a “school of suffering.” I reject the claim that psychotherapeutic treatment promises peace of mind, or comfort with oneself, however much these may be the happy by- products of the treatment— the accessory consolations, if you will. Rather than seeking to enhance self- esteem or contentment, the work strives for the opposite, to strip away all illusions of self- sufficiency or autonomy. At its most successful, this school of suffering is a curriculum in awe. The true object of this awe is the sheer, impossible fact of being here at all— to have precipitated like a sudden dew from lightless and dimensionless nothing. That is the horizon of the treatment, the recognition that we appear from nowhere under inscrutable stars, at a place and time we did not choose, driven by desires we do not choose, toward a death we do not choose, a death that chose us for its own even in our mother’s womb. Maybe this is only madness to you. Why shouldn’t it be?”

DeathSufferingExistencePsychologyComfortIllusionMiseryTherapyContentmentFreud
Book:The Waters & The Wild
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“I would return to my world, to my own city and my work. I would go back to being a doctor, an expensive New York doctor, the doctor into which I had been so expensively made. Wasn’t that what New York meant, expense? When I returned, everything would be expensive. Rent for my private office would be expensive. My hourly rate would be high. And however dizzying, the fee for my patients was only the beginning of the cost, the analytic undertaking promising neither comfort nor relief. It is instead a severe curriculum, Freud’s school of suffering: the universal conviction of shame, the pain of disclosure and of the resistance to disclosure, the awful vertigo of free association, the torment of encountering one’s hungers, hatreds, lusts, avowing them, claiming them as one’s own. I would become, anew, the minister of that suffering. In my costliness I would be a temple prostitute set apart and ceremonially dressed (in cardigan, gray flannels, polished cap- toe oxfords). My patients would pay me, not for something that they received from me, but instead for me to neutralize the account of whatever they had inserted or discharged into my person.”

SufferingPsychologyComfortHatredShameHungerLustFreud
Book:The Waters & The Wild
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“When a slave rebels, it is nothing much to the people who read about it later. Just thin words on thinner paper, worn finer by the friction of history. "So you were slaves? So what?" They whisper, like it's nothing. But to the people who live through a slave rebellion, both those who take their dominance for granted, until it comes for them in the dark, and those who would see the world burn before enduring one moment longer in their place. That is not a metaphor, Essun. Not hyperbole. I did watch the world burn. Say nothing to me of innocent bystanders, unearned suffering, heartless vengeance. When a comm builds atop a fault line, do you blame its walls when they inevitably crush the people inside? No; you blame whoever was stupid enough to think they could defy the laws of nature forever. Well, some worlds are built on a fault line of pain, held up by nightmares. Don’t lament when those worlds fall. Rage that they were built doomed in the first place.”

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Author:N.K. Jemisin
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