The Tao of Fully Feeling: Harvesting Forgiveness out of Blame

Pete Walker

Jan 2019 · Tantor Media Inc · Narrated by Christopher Grove

About this audiobook

The price of emotional renunciation is a constant, wasteful expenditure of energy that leaves us depressed and taciturn, imprisoned in the apathy and ennui of the "Seen-that-Been-there-Done-that" syndrome. When we surrender and soften to our feelings, we reconnect with our inborn vitality, and with the invaluable instinct and intuition that our feelings naturally carry. The Tao of Fully Feeling describes the middle ground of emotional aliveness that lies between emotional deadness and emotional explosiveness. It helps us to soften and relax into our feelings without exiling them or enshrining them. It guides us to be emotionally expressive in benign, intimacy-enhancing ways. The Tao of Fully Feeling teaches us to respond to our painful and potentially disruptive feelings in healthy ways. It illustrates the enriching aspects of the so-called negative emotions, and helps us achieve the emotional flexibility whereby sadness easily mellows into solace, anger unfolds into laughter, fear evolves into excitement, jealousy opens up into appreciation, and blame gives way to forgiveness. The Tao of Fully Feeling refutes the black-and-white notion that blame is never justifiable. It describes safe, non-destructive ways of feeling and expressing blame-ways that ironically enhance our capacity to feel genuine forgiveness. When we authentically forgive our parents, we know what we are forgiving them for, and what specifically was blameworthy about their behavior in the first place. When we forgive before we blame, we risk dragging the full weight of our childhood hurt and anger around forever, like an exhausted backpacker who is too dulled and over-trusting to notice that someone has put a boulder in his/her pack.

Ratings and reviews

I'm leaving this review here for the print book because it doesn't have a page on the play store. This book is a mess. The author lives in a horrifying, dystopian version of America in which Western parents universally beat and verbally abuse their children. He uses clumsy framing to wallpaper over the inconsistencies and inaccuracies that pervade the work. I think he has an important message hidden in this text, I just believe that few readers are masochistic enough to descend deeply enough into it's murky pages to salvage some fouled, oxidized scrap thereof.

Wonderful book. A must read for everyone healing from toxic parents. Love to everyone doing the work.

About the author

Pete Walker is a licensed marriage and family psychotherapist with degrees in social work and counseling psychology. He has been working as a counselor, lecturer, writer, and group leader for thirty-five years; and as a trainer, supervisor and consultant of other therapists for twenty years.

Christopher Grove is an award-winning, veteran actor and narrator based in Los Angeles. He guest-stars on top network TV shows and has performed at major theaters around the country, including the Mark Taper Forum and the Public Theater.