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by Rosalyn Rourke (Author), Adam Campbell (Illustrator)
If thoughts and feelings were truth, they would be called facts. In the pages of this fable and companion memoir, we learn about truth and the simple way we can transcend the lie of unworthiness. Imagined unworthiness shows up as a tyranny of thoughts and feelings that cause psychological suffering.
Eleven-year-old Gem struggles with looping thoughts and feelings of self-hate because of her body weight. She believes she is unworthy of love. A wise woman comes into young Gem's life and demonstrates that her looping, hurtful, repetitive thoughts are untrue. When Gem moves her attention away from her habitual looping patterns, she finds her true 'I, ' a deeper part of herself that is free. The true 'I' is not tied to thoughts and feelings, or the past or future. It is a presence that is available in each person.
Rosalyn Rourke has been all three characters in the fable and all three in the memoir companion: the judgmental mother, the hurt daughter and the wise woman. Even with a successful, decades-long psychotherapy practice and credentials as an eating disorder expert and trauma specialist, Rosalyn struggled with worry and judgment about her daughter, Melissa's, weight. The same protocol Gem discovers in the fable helped Rosalyn transcend compulsive worry and judgment about Melissa's weight and later helped her transmute grief after Melissa's unexpected death. When Wisdom Arrives in our lives, we discover how imagined unworthiness can transform into the knowledge of what we are in truth.
