: Kenneth Porter
: Apollo's Lyre The Art of Spiritual Psychotherapy
: Wisdom House Books
: 9781734600810
: 1
: CHF 3.20
:
: Geisteswissenschaften, Kunst, Musik
: English
: 335
: kein Kopierschutz
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
'Apollo's Lyre' is a book of wisdom and heart, a must read for anyone considering bringing spirituality and psychotherapy together. Kenneth Porter uses his rich years of therapeutic and spiritual understanding to help us wed together the worlds of psychology and soul. Establishing that we are all spiritual beings at our core is a crucial step to self-discovery and transformation of our lives.
WHY THIS BOOK?
I did not come to solve anything.
I came here to sing and for you to sing with me.
—Pablo Neruda—
There comes a time in life for some of us when we have to write. It’s not a question of saying it right or selling books or becoming famous. All these are fine. But they are not why we write.
We write because we’re seized by a daemon that dictates to us. We stay up late instead of sleeping. When we have a free moment, we write. We write the book all day long in our heads. We’re possessed, driven, and it no longer matters whether we want to write or not, or whether it makes us happy or makes us miserable. All that is irrelevant. We only know that we have to write. We come to understand what Henry James meant when he wrote about the artist’s path: “We work in the dark, we do what we can—we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.”
I believe there must be moments like these for all artists. We have to sing, we have to act, we have to dance, we have to paint, we have to make music. We’re possessed and that is all. Such a moment happened to me when I had just turned seventy-one years old. There was no major event that tripped the wire. I suddenly knew, after considering it for fifteen years, that it was time to write. But, at the same time, it did represent a fruition.
When I was in college in the 1950s, I read a groundbreaking book by a European psychoanalyst. Written by Erik Erikson,Childhood and Society was the first book to explore the stages of life after childhood (Freud and the early psychoanalysts were primarily interested in the first six years of life). Erikson, with unprecedented insight, outlined eight stages of human life, each with its own developmental task. One of the last of these was adulthood, and its task was what Erikson termed “generativity.” Erikson’s insight was that, in the later stages of life, we hopefully have accumulated some wisdom. The challenge of these final stages is to return the favor, to give something back in order to help others to mature.