Terms such as spirit, soul, wisdom, vision, potential, creativity, healing and transformation have been at the heart of my work with patients since I completed my training. In my book, The Bruised Heart, I demonstrate various correspondences of these mythic, philosophical and poetic dimensions of human experience dovetail with scientific and clinical maps. I’ve been fortunate to witness how an informed appreciation of both science and spirit evokes real and lasting transformation - over and over. Often ‘the only way out is through’, and healing entails a return to the shadow - territory seemingly without value. With only pain. As mystics and sages assert in different ways, we discover we hold the keys to our own emancipation. Through free will, and no other way, we finally dicover the actual potential to let go. To transcend, to set ourselves free.