When it comes to healing mental or emotional pain, the first step to freeing oneself is in seeing the following facts: resistance to anything (including psychological pain) is a secret form of fascination with it; and to be fascinated with anything — regardless of its nature — is to be identified with it. Add to these insights the fact that to be identified with something is to be attached to the same, and then one can see how an unseen dependency on dark states gets formed.

It is the light of this understanding that alone shatters not just the walls of one’s psychological prison, but the level of “self” that has built and maintained them. Therefore it is an axiom: before one can be healed, one must stop hurting oneself. There is no other way.