A shaman is someone who has a wound that will not heal. He sits by the side of the road with his open wound exposed.

Healing may not be so much about getting better, as about letting go of everything that isn’t you - all of the expectations, all of the beliefs - and becoming who you are.

Just Listen an excerpt

Wounding and healing are not opposites. They're part of the same thing. It is our wounds that enable us to be compassionate with the wounds of others. It is our limitations that make us kind to the limitations of other people. It is our loneliness that helps us to to find other people or to even know they're alone with an illness. I think I have served people perfectly with parts of myself I used to be ashamed of.

I spent the first forty years of my life making major interventions into other people's lives, and I have an idea of the limitations of that method. I see a major event as rather like major surgery. It is a moment, but whether people use it, whether people go with it, needs to be seen.

My sense is that you can never teach anybody anything, or change anybody in ways that they don't already have in mind.

Everybody is a story.