Platek: You tell a story in your book about a man whose fear actually informed him of an otherwise invisible and silent danger.

Greenspan: You’re thinking of Adam Trombly, director of the environmental organization Project Earth. Trombly was out walking through a cow pasture on a beautiful day in Rocky Flats, Colorado, when he was suddenly seized by a sense of dread. He regarded his fear as evidence that something was wrong, so he took some soil samples from the area and had them tested. It turned out that the level of plutonium oxide in that spot was thousands of times higher than the acceptable standard. A fire at a nearby nuclear installation had released plutonium oxide into the atmosphere. The accident had not been reported, but Trombly’s fear alerted him to the problem and the coverup. It carried information from the earth. Of course, most scientists would consider this ridiculous or, worse, certifiably psychotic. We don’t honor information brought to us by our feelings, and therefore we don’t learn how to develop our intuitive ways of knowing.

Platek: The alchemists had a saying about “finding gold in the dung heap” — literally in the shit. In many ways you are mining the dung heaps of our lives for spiritual and psychological gold.

Greenspan: Yes. “Shit happens,” as they say, and it will continue to happen! I think the hardest thing is to feel that the shit is purposeless. This is at the heart of the emotion we call “despair.” Despair is an existential emotion. It occurs when our meaning system gets shattered and we have to construct a new one. But our culture does not value this process. We don’t see any value in the shit. We want to flush it away. It takes courage to allow our faith and meaning to be dismantled. Despair can be a powerful path to the sacred and to a kind of illumination that doesn’t come when we bypass the darkness. As the poet Theodore Roethke put it, “The darkness has its own light.”

Platek: You went through a very difficult time with the death of your firstborn son. Did that experience bring about a process of emotional alchemy in your life?

Greenspan: Aaron was not just an ordeal; he was a blessing. His birth and death were my initiation into the ways of the dark goddess and the occasion of a radical spiritual awakening for me. He was born with a serious brain injury and was destined to live only sixty-six days. There was no apparent reason for this. I was healthy, and I’d had a healthy pregnancy. When he was born, I was an agnostic, a social activist, and a humanist, not a “spiritual” person. My life was centered on the women’s movement. I had no ideas about reincarnation or life after death. I could never have predicted what happened with Aaron.

I remember looking in the mirror on the morning of Aaron’s burial and thinking, I am going to bury my son today. There was an absolute clarity to this. So much of the time our consciousness is not grounded in reality, but at that moment I was able to accept reality. Then, at the cemetery, when we buried Aaron, I heard this clear voice that said, You are looking in the wrong place. I had been looking down at the casket, and when I heard the voice, I raised my eyes. And, looking up, I saw Aaron’s spirit, which I can only describe as a magnificent radiance — like the energy I’d seen in his eyes, only magnified. And the message was that he was ok. I was flooded with a sense of peace. It’s hard to describe because we have no language for these kinds of experiences of spirit. I wouldn’t wish this kind of grief on anyone, yet at the same time, experiencing a baby’s death in your arms and then seeing his spirit leaves you profoundly changed: I became a more grateful person. What I know about emotional alchemy grew from this ground.

Platek: I have a friend who recently underwent intensive treatment for cancer that involved a period of isolation — to protect his immune system — and massive chemotherapy. During that time he prayed, meditated, read spiritual writings, and generally stayed “positive.” He felt a great deal of gratitude for his life and for his family and friends, and he kept his mind focused on uplifting things. His approach was an inspiration to me. It was also in keeping with the latest research that suggests negative emotions can make us sick. How does this fit with your idea of healing?

Greenspan: The sacred path of the dark emotions is certainly not the only path there is. It is the path we are on when we are on it, which is usually when we can’t avoid it. But journeys through dark emotions aren’t incompatible with the ability to focus on the light. My daughter Esther went through two spinal-fusion surgeries within one month. If she hadn’t had the surgeries, she would not have lived, but there was no guarantee that she would survive the procedures either. While she was in the hospital, my husband and I tried to be a source of positive energy for her, because it was not the time or place for us to be communicating fear and sorrow. It wasn’t that we didn’t feel scared, but we needed to keep her spirits up. There are times when connecting with “positive” forces, whether through friendships, or reading, or prayer, or simply keeping your sense of humor, is essential. There really is no duality here.

The ability to journey through the dark emotions brings with it the benefit of being more open to the emotions we call “positive,” including joy, pleasure, wonder, awe, and love. When I teach workshops, participants cry, but they also laugh. There is a surprising amount of laughter and humor and just plain fun that comes out of this work.

Platek: Do you think negative emotions can make us sick?

Greenspan: Yes, I do, when they are unattended to. When we don’t know how to handle their intense energies, they can become stuck. Research shows that depression and anxiety have a connection to heart disease, immune disorders, cancer, and other ailments. This doesn’t mean that emotions cause cancer. Thinking so makes it easier to ignore research on how environmental contaminants, for instance, are linked to cancer. But stuck emotions do put stress on the body. That’s one reason why mindfulness and the metabolism of emotions are so important. If we don’t digest the emotion, it just sits in our bodies and contributes to ill health.

Platek: Is all depression a result of avoiding the dark emotions?

Greenspan: A lot of it is, I think, but certainly not all. Depression is a complex biochemical, psychological, social, and spiritual condition. We call it an “illness” because our culture favors the medical model of explanation. Though it’s perfectly true that depression is correlated with a drop in serotonin levels, this doesn’t mean that serotonin deficiency causes depression. This kind of scientistic reductionism is one of the main drawbacks of our culture’s way of thinking about human problems. Depression is correlated to a lot of things — including gender and a poor economy. It’s also important to make a distinction between despair and depression. Despair is a discrete emotion that, like all emotions, comes and goes; depression is an overall mental and physical state that we might say is chronic, stuck despair.

Platek: I think we all want to believe that if we do things “right” — eat the right diet, follow the right spiritual practice, choose the right mode of living — we will be protected somehow from the calamities of life. I have a number of clients in my own therapy practice, for example, who were shocked and hurt to find themselves in the midst of a breakdown even after having done everything right. It was as if life had betrayed them somehow.

Greenspan: I think this is a particularly American mindset, this notion that if we get it all right, we won’t suffer at all. We have even assimilated some Eastern practices through this lens, using them as a strategy for avoiding suffering. We have a hard time tolerating uncertainty. And there is so much uncertainty in this age of terror and environmental crisis. We want to believe there is something we can do that will guarantee a positive outcome and keep us safe. This is an illusion, of course, but sometimes we need our illusions to get us through the day. The illusion I’d had before my son was born was that if I had a healthy pregnancy, exercised, did yoga, and ate well, then everything would turn out fine. I’d even lived with the illusion that because my family history of genocide had involved so much suffering, somehow I would be spared any extreme suffering myself. But my child died, and nobody knew why. I wondered why for a long time. But at some point I realized that “Why?” was the wrong question. There was never going to be an answer. Instead the question was “How?” — how was I going to live now? Illusions are a false way to feel safe. But there is no guaranteed safety. Life is inherently risky, and all we can really do is live well.

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