We Can Learn to Love with Our Crooked Heart

We Can Learn to Love with Our Crooked Heart
Wake Up to Live with Desiree Leigh

By working with the repressed emotion in the body - anger, for example - we realize that we are human, and that there is no such thing as a perfect human being. In fact, the better we think we are and the more we imagine we are, the darker our shadow is, and the darker the material that we have to release. When we know how much rage and grief and jealousy and greed and lust are in us, we have to forgive ourselves for being human.

To forgive is to transform what we otherwise reject. Some people find that very hard because they've been brought up to be perfect. But once we know that we can love ourselves with all our human warts then we can love others from that same place. Or, as W. H. Auden said, "We can learn to love each other with our own 'crooked heart'."

~Marion Woodman, in The Forsaken Garden

Wake Up to Live with Desiree Leigh