The Tao of Fully Feeling by Pete Walker
$7.99
The Tao of Fully Feeling
- Harvesting Forgiveness out of Blame
- By: Pete Walker
- Narrated by: Christopher Grove
- Length: 13 hrs and 3 mins
- Categories: Health & Wellness
Publisher’s Summary
The price of emotional renunciation is a constant, wasteful expenditure of energy that leaves us depressed and taciturn, imprisoned in the apathy and ennui of the “seen that, been there, done that” syndrome. When we surrender and soften to our feelings, we reconnect with our inborn vitality and with the invaluable instinct and intuition that our feelings naturally carry.
The Tao of Fully Feeling describes the middle ground of emotional aliveness that lies between emotional deadness and emotional explosiveness. It helps us to soften and relax into our feelings without exiling them or enshrining them. It guides us to be emotionally expressive in benign, intimacy-enhancing ways.
The Tao of Fully Feeling teaches us to respond to our painful and potentially disruptive feelings in healthy ways. It illustrates the enriching aspects of the so-called negative emotions and helps us achieve the emotional flexibility whereby sadness easily mellows into solace, anger unfolds into laughter, fear evolves into excitement, jealousy opens up into appreciation, and blame gives way to forgiveness.
The Tao of Fully Feeling refutes the black-and-white notion that blame is never justifiable. It describes safe, nondestructive ways of feeling and expressing blame – ways that ironically enhance our capacity to feel genuine forgiveness.
When we authentically forgive our parents, we know what we are forgiving them for and what specifically was blameworthy about their behavior in the first place. When we forgive before we blame, we risk dragging the full weight of our childhood hurt and anger around forever, like an exhausted backpacker who is too dulled and over-trusting to notice that someone has put a boulder in his/her pack.
©1995 Pete Walker (P)2019 Tantor
Anonymous User
Feeling Sad & Happy About It
Having grown up in a very “English polite” household, where emotions were shunned, I’d never learned how to experience them and process them. This, coupled with ongoing threats to my safety in childhood, some obvious and some not so obvious – left me in a constant state of hyper-vigilance and profound vague dissociation. Pete Walker goes on to detail the processes of naming and working through the pain I’ve carried for so very long. I’ve cried for 6 weeks, daily. It has been really hard but also immeasurably worth it. For anyone looking to get closer to their feelings and ultimately feel amazing for it, I can’t recommend this book enough.
1 person found this helpful
Z X
It’s changing my life, I think
I came to this book after the author’s 2013 book about cPTSD. For me this book is harder to work through because it’s much more thought-provoking. It truly brings me on a journey to facing the pain I didn’t realise I had all these years and it encourages me to internalise strategies to battle the intrusive thinking that has been bothering me.
I’m half way through the book when writing this review. Although my gp and psychiatrist are very helpful in identifying some of the issues causing me troubles (major depression, addiction, adult ADD, childhood trauma, bpd-like thinking), this book allows me to take time to address the problems on a deeper level medications can’t reach. My goal is to one day become medication independent and build a stronger/flexible mind. I’m very optimistic that this book is going to help me achieve it.
1 person found this helpful