Parenting & Family Quote by Sarah Ban Breathnach

"To find this greater truth about God, Spirit, and the sacred, we must often set aside the limiting impressions from our childhood. In many instances, these images of fear only serve to hold us back in our search for authentic spirituality...Open up your mind and heart to a concept of Spirit who looks out for us, loves us, sheds light on our path, and wants nothing less for us than unconditional happiness"

Sarah Ban Breathnach, Author

About this Quote

Breathnach writes like someone trying to de-program a reader without announcing the word de-programming. The target isn’t doctrine so much as the residue of doctrine: the childhood God who polices, shames, and keeps score. By naming those early impressions as “limiting” and “images of fear,” she reframes them as psychological artifacts, not eternal truths. That move is the engine of the passage. It gives readers permission to doubt without calling it doubt, and to revise without admitting they’re rebelling.

The intent is pastoral but also strategic. Breathnach is speaking to a late-20th/early-21st-century spiritual audience shaped by self-help language, therapeutic sensibilities, and a suspicion of institutional religion. Her vocabulary borrows from both worlds: “authentic spirituality” promises sincerity over obedience; “mind and heart” signals wholeness; “unconditional happiness” imports the consumer-era expectation that inner life should feel like liberation, not penance.

Subtext: you are not broken for wanting comfort from the sacred. She quietly relocates authority from inherited images to personal experience, making spirituality less about submitting to a received portrait of God and more about choosing one that heals. The God she proposes “looks out for us” and “sheds light” - protective, guiding, almost parental, but without the volatility that made childhood religion terrifying.

It works because it offers a clean emotional trade: release fear, gain love. That’s persuasive not as theology, but as a rewrite of the reader’s inner narrative - and it’s calibrated for people who still want “Spirit,” just not the old dread that came with it.