Heartbreak: New Approaches to Healing - Recovering from lost love and mourning

Look at your broken heart with the curiosity of a naturalist, as you would pay close attention to your pet, to understand what is going on.

The pain of mourning and heartbreak is neurologically similar to being submitted to torture. There seems to be only one way to end that agony and to limit somatic damage; neurobiology calls it an evolutionary jump and psychologists call it an increase in consciousness.

Past theories of grief therapy considered recovery from the point of view of stages: a one-year cycle of mourning was supposed to heal the heart. Not so! A true Liberation of the Heart is a process of neurogenesis as well as a process of individuation, which means that the whole brain must re-configure its connections and its thinking about love and relationships. The good news is this: if you love, your heart should be broken at some point or other in your life.

If not, your love may remain the innocent love of a child. This book explains what you need to understand in order to avoid victimization from the traumatic aspects of heartbreak and mourning. A wider definition of love and a deeper understanding of its psychology will free you of the obsession for the missing partner and will teach your heart to love in a wiser manner.

The Wisdom of the Psyche

As a leading scholar and writer in the field of Depth Psychology, Ginette Paris's latest book investigates that aspect of the psyche that seeks to destroy or leave relationships, to go down and stay low for as long as it takes for the old identity to die.

Revisiting the basic ideas of psychology, Paris explores the ways in which the body manifests what the psyche refuses to see. In a language largely free of clinical jargon, the author shows how this turning inward and downward comes from the unconscious sense that if the exhausted old "me" does not die, the body will execute the death wish in a very literal fashion.

Contrary to most self-help books of popular psychology, the way out of those destructive states does not start with an upward, positive, willful effort of the ego. It begins with an opening of the imagination, producing dark twisted frightening images, because one has to imagine what needs to die in order to live.

Pagan Meditations

An appreciation of three Greek Goddesses as values of importance to our twentieth-century collective life: Aphrodite as civilized sexuality and beauty; Artemis as solitude, ecological significance, and a perspective on abortion; and Hestia as warm hearth, security, and stability. As the author's contribution to imaginative feminism, this book addresses both the meditative interior of each person and the community of culture.

Ginette Paris began her archetypal studies with this book. It has since become a foundation for the study of goddesses and how they imaginitively fit into our lives today.

Pagan Grace

The gift of grace, coming to us as beauty, cannot be ordered or owned, only acknowledged and served. When events take on a mythical dimension and reverberate in the soul, then we feel grace.

The three images of divinity amplified in this book express the often unconscious pagan grace present in our daily lives. Dionysos brings joy to celebrations and protects the sexual potency of man. Ginette Paris looks again at soul-making through the body, at the Eleusinian Mysteries in light of the culture's drug and alcohol problems, explores the God's twin faces of liberator and tyrant, and revisions role-playing under Dionysos's aegis. Lively as mercury, subtle as word play, and as indispensable as commerce or conversation, Hermes' grace is today called communication, involving the necessity of deceit and the seductiveness of rhetoric. His connections with the healing arts provide a sorely needed balance to contemporary medical practice. Mnemosyne's grace is the remembrance of things past, the details of recollected happiness. the author disentangles the different values of oral memory, literacy, and computer memory, all along allowing Memory's daughters, the Muses, to influence her writing, her feeling, and her thought.

A lively book that continues the work of Pagan Meditations in revivifying individual, cultural, and social life by reawakening their archetypal roots.