the spiral staircase my climb out of darkness

Armstrong shows us why spiritual wisdom is often a seasoned gift-no matter how much we strive for understanding, we can't force profound insights to occur simply because our publisher is waiting for them. All readers can glean inspiration from her insights into the nature of surrender and the possibilities of finding solace in the absence of hope.

The details of this narrative may be specific to Armstrong's life, but the meanin! g she makes of her spiral ascent makes this a universally relevant story. On top of this angst, Armstrong spent years suffering from undiagnosed temporal lobe epilepsy, causing her to have frequent blackout lapses in memory and disturbing hallucinations-crippling symptoms that her psychiatrist adamantly attributed to Armstrong's denial of her femininity and sexuality. Upon leaving the convent, Armstrong grapples with the grief of her abandoned path and the uncertainty of her place in the world. In revisiting her spiral climb out of her dark night of the soul, Armstrong gives readers a stunningly poignant account about the nature of spiritual growth. Eliot metaphorically climbs a spiral staircase in these poems-turning again and again to what he does not want to see as he slowly makes progress toward the light.

Eliot's Ash Wednesday, a series of six poems that speak to the process of spiritual recovery. The inspiration for this new approach comes from T. As a result, she agreed to portray herself only in as 'positive and lively a light as possible'-a mandate that gave her permission to deny the truth of her pain and falsify her inner experience. It was too soon for her to understand how these dark, struggling years influenced her spiritual development, and she was too immature to protect herself from being be bullied by the publishing world. What makes this memoir especially fascinating is that Armstrong already wrote about this era once-only it was a disastrous book. Karen Armstrong speaks to the troubling years following her decision to leave the life of a Roman Catholic nun and join the secular world in 1969.

The spiral staircase my climb out of darkness