Dante's Path

Book excerpt: Two pioneers in holistic psychology reveal a rejuvenating approach to healing the mind and spirit, using Dante’s Divine Comedy as a metaphor to overcome suffering. Bringing a unique Western approach to the quest for emotional healing and spiritual discovery, Dante’s Pathaddresses the core human struggles—such as depression, anxiety, addiction, and other forms of suffering—and uses Dante’s Divine Comedyas a metaphor for personal transformation. Readers are taken on a journey of exploration down into the sources of our suffering (Dante’s Hell), then into a process of a growing self-awareness of our problems and how to rise above them (Dante’s Purgatory), and finally opening up to the direct benefits of our own “wisdom mind” (Dante’s Paradise). Along the way are effective, time-tested exercises and meditations for confronting life’s greatest worries, coping with episodes of trauma, and understanding feelings of unworthiness and emptiness. Drawing upon the traditional wisdom of poet-mystic Dante and the work of psychiatrist Roberto Assagioli, who created a school of self-development and practical spirituality called psychosynthesis, Bonney and Richard Schaub have used this holistic method to successfully treat hundreds of patients and have taught it to students and other health professionals internationally for more than thirty years.