Fire in the Soul: A New Psychology of Spiritual Optimism

• Understand the dark night of the soul as a genuine spiritual passage — distinguished from clinical depression by specific characteristics — and what its emergence signals about the soul's readiness for a deeper level of openness
• Grasp the cross-traditional teaching on suffering as initiation: how Theresa of Avila, St. John of the Cross, Meister Eckhart, and Buddhist teachers converge on the recognition that genuine spiritual depth requires the dissolution of the ego's protective structures
• Recognise Borysenko's psychological model of how crisis functions: why the collapse of meaning, identity, and previously reliable coping strategies often precedes a genuine expansion of consciousness rather than simply representing a breakdown
• Learn the practical tools Borysenko offers for navigating periods of profound difficulty: mindfulness, surrender, community, ritual, and the specific attitudinal shifts that convert suffering from meaningless pain into meaningful passage
• Appreciate the 'spiritual optimism' that emerges not from believing that bad things won't happen but from the direct experiential knowledge that the self is larger than any circumstance it will ever face