Customer Reviews

Sacred Sorrows: Embracing and Transforming Depression (New Consciousness Reader)

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I bought this book for a friend in the hospital who never returned it -- he loved it so much. With excerpts on the experience, nature, degrees, causes, and alternative treatments for depression, this anthology really CAN make a sick person well. I found the chapters on grief extremely helpful. This book revitalized my confidence in the workings of psychotherapy.

Most books on depression focus on the author's pet approach to depression, naturally enough, but that can be frustrating for those of us who figure that there's probably more than one factor contributing to our depression and more than one way to understand and deal with our depression.

"Sacred Sorrows" is a collection of 27 essays by different authors, representing a wide variety of approaches to healing depression (including cognitive therapy, medication, Jungian analysis, nutrition, bodywork) and also a variety of approaches to "embracing" depression--that is, to understanding depression as a meaningful part of one's life and spiritual journey.

I especially appreciated Mark Epstein's contribution, "The Medicine Buddha," arguing that medication and Buddhist practice can be combined with integrity. (For those interested in Zen and depression, two other books I'd recommend are Cheri Huber's "The Depression Book" and Philip Martin's "The Zen Path Through Depression.")

This is the definitive, readable book on depression that runs the gamut from personal experience of it, to listing medical symptoms, categories and conservative to alternative cures, to embracing the process of it as the spiritual initiation and psychological rebirth that it can be. Each of the many authors who shared either personal experience, knowledge, medical or alternative healing techniques or understanding of the process of depression offer the reader a rich tapestry of information to include concentration camp experience, mid-life depression, substance abuse and depression, treatments of depression from shock to antidepressant medication, medical causes that may bring it on and varied approaches to transforming it as well as understanding its regenerative value. The book has three segments: Living with Depression, Transforming it and Embracing it filled with twenty-seven insightful and often compelling essays by a wide variety of authors. This book will grow your understanding by leaps and bounds of this ailment that not only touches all of us at some point in our lives but is also the USA's third most prevalent medical problem. The book is suberbly informative.

Hi there,

This book can be helpful if you are or someone you care is dealing with depression.

It is a book that is written by different people that have dealt with depression.

I found it comforting and insightful. This book gives hope to others and insight to people that might be suffering from depression.