About the Book

The Art of Emotional Wisdom demystifies emotion’s central role in personal growth and human potential, outlining the transcendent journey to emotional maturity and emotional enlightenment available to all. Despite the fact that unconditional love is the unifying principle among the world’s religions and wisdom traditions, emotion as a spiritual path of truth has been neglected, and often dismissed. The Art of Emotional Wisdom maintains that emotional experience is our guide to unlocking and realizing our potentials for love and creativity. Filled with inspirational insights and practical exercises, this book serves as a faithful guide to personal fulfillment and greater joy.

Introduction to The Art of Emotional Wisdom

The fundamental assumption of this book is that we are all more than good enough to really be ourselves. We are smart enough, rich enough, and talented enough to be the best version of ourselves that we could ever imagine.

Where we fall short is that we don’t really see ourselves. We don’t see and experience the beauty of our being for who we are now, in this and every moment. One reason for this undersight is that for the most part we don’t grasp the truth that all of our experiences have relentlessly shaped us and guided us to our greatest potentials for love and creativity—and continue to do so. We also generally don’t fully understand that we are evolutionarily destined to be happy, and that our ignorance, especially our emotional ignorance, keeps us locked inside the seeds of our becoming.

What we would be wise to learn is that each of us carries within ourselves a gift, and this gift is the truth of our absolute worthiness, our most sacred divinity. Accepting this gift means that we will first of all have to unpack and transform the emotional woundedness it comes wrapped in. And we should know that this truth of our unconditional worthiness is a gift worth claiming, for there is a direct link between the emotional foundation of self-acceptance and the ability to create a life that satisfies our deepest yearnings for creative expression, true intimacy and authentic community.

Other Excerpts

"It’s no great mystery that our greatest happiness comes from a life full of love and creative expression. Life, after all, is itself all about love and the love of creating new forms to be loved. What seems to be less understood, however, is that the full flowering of love can only happen in our lives once we have claimed and experienced our own divinity. This is true because we can only recognize the absolute worthiness and goodness of others to the degree that we have discovered ourselves to be unconditionally worthy of all that will make our lives truly wonderful."

"Transcendence is the true way of self. This is because each matrix of self, as an ego or point of reference for self-aware consciousness, is a representation, a reflection, that continually moves, shifts and maps the path of our journey. But the water, as they say, is not the river. We are not our ideas of who we are any more than our reflection in the mirror feels the warmth of our bodies. In fact, it is when we believe that our ideas of ourselves are the whole picture that we run into trouble."

"The unspoken truth of myths like The Wizard of Oz is that our black-and-white everyday world is one veil of perception away from a vibrantly colorful wonderland. Mystery and magic are the underpinnings of our existence, and if that is not our experience, the reason lies in the perceptive lens through which we view and create our lives. And until we can recognize that it is our own distorted sense of who we are that keeps us from living each moment for the gift it is, we will search in vain for something outside of ourselves to set us free."

"As diverse and unique as we all are, in our heart of hearts we are all yearning for the same things: above all, to be approved of and loved for who we are; and then to use our creative talents to serve others and for our own pleasure. This, of course, is the way of universal love. Such love only wants for all to experience and enjoy love. We can therefore say that in a very real sense our deepest desire is a kind of universal truth. In essence, we each want what everyone wants. With love, in other words, the personal is revealed to be universal."