'Shame: Theory, therapy, theology' by Stephen Pattison 2000, Cambridge University Press

Orange moon has risen, a photo by slworking2 on Flickr.

'Some of the pure gold of our personality is relegated to the shadow because it can find no place in that great levelling process that is culture.'

'Curiously, people resist the noble aspect of their shadow more strenuously than they hide the dark sides. To draw the skeletons out of the closet is relatively easy, but to own the gold in the shadow is terrifying. It is more disrupting to find that you have a profound nobility of character than to find out you are a bum. Of course you are both; but one does not discover these two elements at the same time. The gold is related to our higher calling, and this can be hard to accept at certain stages of life, and some people may suffer a severe shock or illness before they learn how to let the gold out.'

https://books.google.com.au/books/about/Shame.html?id=CIhEhpLR6qEC&redir_esc=y

Les Murray, 2009, 'Killing the Black Dog', Black Inc

https://flic.kr/p/fZLR5e 

'I derived great benefit from talking with him, as we often do when the pain and its terms are shared and there can be no more nonsense about Getting a Grip on Yourself. We gave each other permission to be ill, a necessary precondition of being cured. I'm convinced that stoicism is never the answer to anything, being nothing more than a cruel, callous encouragement to people to devour each other, a powerful ally of sadists and tyrants keen to get people to endure things which should be firmly refused as unendurabale. Courage, indeed! Desensitisation and bully-training, rather.'
p. 14

https://www.blackincbooks.com.au/books/killing-black-dog

https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/archived/bookshow/les-murray-and-the-black-dog/3083662 

universal compassion

https://flic.kr/p/8Vrhpe

  ' ... a compassion which carries a sense of responsibility ... 
This sense of responsibility will only arise if you have generated a spontaneous, genuine compassion which extends to all sentient beings without exception ...
You recognise your state as being one of suffering, then you will also feel a genuine empathy and connection with others ...
Shantideva in The Guide to the Bodhisattva's Way of Life ... explains a way of cultivating genuine empathy by considering others as equal to oneself. For example, just as you personally wish to be happy and overcome suffering, others too have a similar desire, and just as you have the right to achieve this, so do they. With that sense of equality you reverse your self-centred perspective, putting yourself in others' shoes and relating to them as if they were dearer to you than you are to yourself.'

p. 119
The Four Noble Truths
The Dalai Lama
Thorsons, London, 1997