Tears to Triumph: Spiritual Healing for the Modern Plagues of Anxiety and Depression

In her newest book, Tears to Triumph: The Spiritual Journey from Suffering to Enlightenment, renowned spiritual teacher and bestselling author Marianne Williamson offers an impassioned spiritual perspective on the epidemic of depression now sweeping our society. Williamson claims there is a “spectrum of normal human suffering”—deep sadness over such things as divorce, job loss, financial ruin, and the death of loved ones—that can be powerfully transformed through spiritual understanding.

Based on a career of over three decades working with people struggling with depression and anxiety, many in life-challenging situations, Williamson challenges “the medicalization of despair,” which is the broad appropriation of deep sadness as exclusively a medical issue. Instead, she points to the relevance of great ancient spiritual themes such as faith, forgiveness, and atonement in the healing of a damaged psyche. Combining her customary references to A Course in Miracles with an in-depth inquiry into the spiritual responses to suffering within the stories of the Buddha, Moses, and Jesus, Williamson opens a much-needed conversation about the fundamental sources of human suffering, as well as its healing and transcendence.

Tears to Triumph: The Spiritual Journey from Suffering to Enlightenment boldly states that “modern civilization has itself become a depressing phenomenon, predicated on principles that dissociate human beings from the feelings of connectedness and wholeness without which happiness cannot be found.” Williamson argues that psychic pain, like physical pain, exists for a reason; it should be listened to for the messages it conveys and addressed on a causal level. “The mind,” says Williamson, “is imbued with an immune system no less than is the body, giving it extraordinary abilities to heal itself.”

This groundbreaking book also explores the collective dimensions of our current epidemic of emotional suffering, suggesting that “overconcentration on an individual’s pain can obscure the larger social issues that breed depression among the larger population.” Some of the issues addressed in this book include:

• Emotional torment—why is such suffering a part of our experience? What does it mean? And how can we survive it and even transcend it?
• What can we learn about how to heal from suffering from the great religious teachings?
• Why is it important to be fully available to our suffering, as opposed to suppressing it or numbing it?
• Why has our suffering become a profit center for the pharmaceutical industry?
• What is the relationship between individual and collective suffering?
• What are the spiritual principles that deliver us from our pain, and how do we apply them?

TEARS TO TRIUMPH is a clarion call not only to the reader, but also to society, to heed the deeper spiritual message of depression. Most importantly, it illuminates the path by which spiritual principles deliver us beyond deep sadness and emotional pain.

Get your copy of Tears to Triumph: The Spiritual Journey from Suffering to Enlightenment here.