Dark Nights of the Soul: A Guide to Finding Your Way Through Life's Ordeals

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Penguin, Jun 16, 2005 - Self-Help - 352 pages
Every human life is made up of the light and the dark, the happy and the sad, the vital and the deadening. How you think about this rhythm of moods makes all the difference.

Our lives are filled with emotional tunnels: the loss of a loved one or end of a relationship, aging and illness, career disappointments or just an ongoing sense of dissatisfaction with life. Society tends to view these “dark nights” in clinical terms as obstacles to be overcome as quickly as possible. But Moore shows how honoring these periods of fragility as periods of incubation and positive opportunities to delve the soul’s deepest needs can provide healing and a new understanding of life’s meaning. Dark Nights of the Soul presents these metaphoric dark nights not as the enemy, but as times of transition, occasions to restore yourself, and transforming rites of passage, revealing an uplifting and inspiring new outlook on such topics as:


• The healing power of melancholy
• The sexual dark night and the mysteries of matrimony
• Finding solace during illness and in aging
• Anxiety, anger, and temporary Insanities
• Linking creativity, spirituality, and emotional struggles
• Finding meaning and beauty in the darkness

 

Contents

PASSAGES
1
Rites of Passage
23
Sorting Out and Starting Over
49
4
69
Lifes Ironies
99
DISTURBANCES
119
Wedding Nights
147
Night Eros
169
Dark Beauty
209
DEGRADATIONS
231
Temporary Insanities
249
The Island of Illness
267
The Twilight Years
289
Navigating a Dark Night
301
NOTES
316
Copyright

Creativity the Child
189

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About the author (2005)

Thomas Moore, Ph.D., wrote the phenomenal #1 bestsellers Care of the Soul and SoulMates as well as many other successful books. Moore was a Catholic monk for twelve years and later became a psychotherapist, earning degrees in theology, musicology, and religion. Moore now lectures extensively throughout North America.

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