Photo of sun rising over a wheat field. — From mystics and poets to memoirists, fiction writers, and scientists, these quotes about emotional healing invite you to remember that you’re never alone on your healing journey.

Emotional healing quotes

We’ll all be in need of emotional healing at multiple points in our lives. Despite the commonality of this experience, sometimes the healing journey can feel lonely and isolating. These quotes about emotional healing are here to light your way and remind you that you’re not alone in your emotional healing journey. Let’s explore the shared human experience of emotional healing with these quotes about emotional healing from scientists, novels, poets, mystics, and memoirists.

#1 Quote about emotional healing

“If you relax when the pain comes up inside your heart, and actually dare to face it, it will pass. Every single time you relax and release, a piece of the pain leaves forever.” ― Michael A. Singer, The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself

I love this quote about emotional healing because it rings so true to my own experience. Learning how to feel and allow the physical sensations associated with emotions - and the emotions themselves - has been an absolute game-changer for me. As this quote about emotional healing acknowledges, sometimes it’s really scary to face the emotions that come up, but learning how to work through this fear and stay with my emotions has been the single most important thing I’ve learned on my own healing journey.

#2 Quote about emotional healing

“Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.” ― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet translated by Stephen Mitchell

Rilke is one of my favorite all-time writers. If you haven’t read Letters to a Young Poet, you should. It’s a quick read and it’s both calming and insightful at the same time. When I first read Letters to A Young Poet as a high schooler, this quote stood out to me. Now, as an adult who has been through a long and difficult journey of emotional healing it resonates with me in a new way. To me, this quote about emotional healing speaks of the importance of trusting your body’s intuitive sense of timing when it comes to emotional healing. There were many years that I “lived the questions,” trying to figure out what wrong and what I could do about it (a particularly confusing experience because I had very little memory of my own childhood). And then, eventually, the time was right and I saw that my body was capable of leading me on a journey of emotional healing to the answers I had been looking for.

#3 Quote about emotional healing

“Life is full of diving boards and other precipices, but, as we’ve seen throughout this discussion of emotional agility, making the leap is not about ignoring, fixing, fighting, or controlling fear—or anything else you might be experiencing. Rather, it’s about accepting and noticing all your emotions and thoughts, viewing even the most powerful of them with compassion and curiosity, and then choosing courage over comfort in order to do whatever you’ve determined is most important to you. Courage, once again, is not the absence of fear. Courage is fear walking...”― Susan David, Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life

This is one of the most concise descriptions of the process of emotional healing that I’ve read. It describes my own emotional healing experience in a nutshell. It’s also deceptively simple sounding; there were a lot of skills I had to learn before I could get to the point that carrying this process out was possible. Somatic therapy helped me learn to notice and allow my emotions. Meditation helped me hear my self-talk so that I could learn to talk to myself with care instead of criticism. In turn, this allowed me to accept my emotions, memories, and thoughts as they arose. And, wow was this scary! Over and over again I felt fear rise up from my stomach and I responded by telling myself silently, “Fear. This is fear,” as I allowed the emotion to run through me. The process succinctly described in this quote about emotional healing carried out over and over again is the essence of emotional healing.

#4 Quote about emotional healing

“Sorrow prepares you for joy. It violently sweeps everything out of your house, so that new joy can find space to enter. It shakes the yellow leaves from the bough of your heart, so that fresh, green leaves can grow in their place. It pulls up the rotten roots, so that new roots hidden beneath have room to grow. Whatever sorrow shakes from your heart, far better things will take their place.” ― Rumi, The Essential Rumi, New Expanded Edition translated by Coleman Barks and John Moyne

This quote about emotional healing paints a beautiful metaphor that can help us to accept that both joy and sorrow are inextricably bound together in nature and our lives. The process of emotional healing itself is both a deep sorrow and an incredible joy; it’s the oh-so-hard-thing that we search for. And this really is the process of emotional healing, allowing ourselves to fully experience the sorrows, and then finding joy on the other side.

#5 Quote about emotional healing

“I have come to the conclusion that human beings are born with an innate capacity to triumph over trauma. I believe not only that trauma is curable, but that the healing process can be a catalyst for profound awakening—a portal opening to emotional and genuine spiritual transformation. I have little doubt that as individuals, families, communities, and even nations, we have the capacity to learn how to heal and prevent much of the damage done by trauma. In so doing, we will significantly increase our ability to achieve both our individual and collective dreams.” ― Peter A. Levine, Healing Trauma: A Pioneering Program for Restoring the Wisdom of Your Body

Peter Levine is a psychologist and the creator of Somatic Experiencing, a type of therapy that helps clients learn to pay attention to the physical sensations in their body and heal their nervous system by releasing painful experiences that got stuck in the body.

For a long time, everything I heard and saw about trauma made me think that no one ever really heals, that instead they just learn to survive and carry on somehow. I no longer believe that. While it wasn’t possible for me to heal by trying hard to think the “right thoughts” or forcing myself through a checklist, it was very possible for me to heal by listening to my body. So, I wholeheartedly agree with this quote about emotional healing, our bodies know how to heal emotional pain the same way they know how to heal a broken bone, we just need to learn how to listen and allow our bodies to carry out this healing process.

#6 Quote about emotional healing

“You don't have to place your hand on Mary's heart to get strength and consolation and rescue, and all the other things we need to get through life. You can place it right here on your own heart. Your own heart.” ― Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees

The Secret Life of Bees tells the story of how a young girl with a painful history experiences emotional healing by facing her past and finding love and connection in the present. This quote about emotional healing highlights the importance of learning to hear, trust, and rely upon your own heart in the healing process. It reminds us that while love and support from outside is valuable, healing requires self-compassion and a deep connection to the inner wisdom that lives within your own heart.

#7 Quote about emotional healing

“Here’s a theory: Maybe I had not really been broken this whole time. Maybe I had been a human—flawed and still growing but full of light nonetheless” -― Stephanie Foo, What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma

In her memoir, journalist Stephanie Foo talks about her own personal emotional healing experience and the science of complex trauma. This quote about emotional healing from Foo’s memoir speaks to the healing power of self-acceptance, the value we each have by simply being who we are, and how inherently human it is to have wounds we carry with us. It reminds us that healing begins not with fixing ourselves, but with learning to love ourselves just as we are.

#8 Quote about emotional healing

“The challenge of recovery is to reestablish ownership of your body and your mind — of your self. This means feeling free to know what you know and to feel what you feel without becoming overwhelmed, enraged, ashamed, or collapsed. For most people this involves (1) finding a way to become calm and focused, (2) learning to maintain that calm in response to images, thoughts, sounds, or physical sensations that remind you of the past, (3) finding a way to be fully alive in the present and engaged with the people around you, (4) not having to keep secrets from yourself, including secrets about the ways that you have managed to survive.” ― Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma

This quote about emotional healing is particularly relevant to anyone healing from trauma and it’s one of my favorites from The Body Keeps the Score because it resonates with my own emotional healing experience. Part of what made my childhood traumatic was feeling that most emotions and certain thoughts were off-limits in my home. This forced me to wall off almost all of my emotions, many things I thought about my parents and childhood experiences, and most of my childhood memories. As an adult, learning to access these feelings, memories, and thoughts required reconnecting with my body in a way that allowed me to stay calm and to provide comfort myself when encountering this previously walled-off information. Over time, I was able to stay in the present moment more often and I was better able to emotionally connect with certain safe people. This entire process also led me to understand the survival mechanisms I developed, including how I carried forward the pain by treating myself as I was treated growing up. Healing has been difficult and lengthy, but this quote captures the essence of the emotional healing journey I’ve been through.

#9 Quote about emotional healing

“She closes her eyes. He probably won’t come back, she thinks. Or he will, differently. What they have now they can never have back again. But for her the pain of loneliness will be nothing to the pain that she used to feel, of being unworthy. He brought her goodness like a gift and now it belongs to her. Meanwhile his life opens out before him in all directions at once. They’ve done a lot of good for each other. Really, she thinks, really. People can really change one another." ― Sally Rooney, Normal People

This quote about emotional healing touches on the transformative impact another human soul can have in your life. Whether the relationship lasts a lifetime or just a season, and whether it’s calm or complex, love can have a profound effect. Loving and being loved can shake you up enough to help you see yourself and the world around you differently. And, sometimes, that new way of seeing is just what you need to take the next step towards emotional healing.

#10 Quote about emotional healing

[…] Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

― From “Kindness” by Naomi Shihab Nye in Words Under the Words: Selected Poems

This quote about emotional healing from the poem “Kindness,” speaks to how our emotional pain, once processed, can become a point of deep connection with others. In healing our own emotional pain, we learn to empathize inward and meet ourselves with compassion. When we turn that empathy outward, we discover that pain can make us kind, caring, and connected.

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