Love in the Time of Impermanence

Description

How to continue to love in the face of pain and loss * Shows how the certainty of change and loss can support rather than diminish love * Shares practices and meditations to help love endure in the face of loss, disappointment, change, or any of the ways relationships and circumstances are altered by time * Explores how to cultivate gratitude for every expression of love we encounter, strengthen compassion for others, and recognize the power of love after life Collaborating with his late son, Jordan, psychologist Matthew McKay offers five ways to keep love alive in a world of impermanence. He explores how to see and know what we love, how to actively care for what we love, how to have compassion for the suffering of others, how to set the daily intention to act with love, and how to turn toward rather than away from the pain of impermanence. McKay shares practices and meditations to help love endure in the face of loss, disappointment, change, or any of the ways relationships and circumstances are altered by time. He examines what love is and is not, including how not to mistake yearning and neediness for love, sex for love, and attraction to beauty for love. He shows how to cultivate gratitude for every expression of love we encounter, learn to care for things we don't like, and recognize the power of love after life--a love that reaches beyond death. He also provides concrete exercises for communicating with and channeling messages from loved ones who have crossed over. Ultimately, McKay shows that, by running from pain, we run from love. By avoiding pain, we lose the pathway to connection. Yet, by recognizing love in the heart of pain and loss, by knowing that change and impermanence are inevitable, we can navigate life with a compass pointing to love as true north, learning to love more deeply and making what we love more cherished.

Matthew McKay, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist, professor of psychology at the Wright Institute, founder of the Berkeley CBT Clinic, and cofounder of the Bay Area Trauma Recovery Clinic, which serves low-income clients. He has authored and coauthored more than 40 books, including The Relaxation and Stress Reduction Workbook, Seeking Jordan, and The Luminous Landscape of the Afterlife. The publisher of New Harbinger Publications, he lives in Berkeley, California.

"This is a beautiful and thought-provoking exposition of the fleeting nature of love and the necessary work on ourselves and in our connections with others that we must maintain for love to thrive and endure." * Dr. L. Eduardo Cardona-Sanclemente, author of Ayurveda for Depression * "This is a delicious book. If you don't know what true love is, you will by the time you finish this book. If you're blessed to know love, you will savor every familiar morsel. In either case, the practical meditations will give you the tangible experience of the deep wisdom shared here." * Suzanne Giesemann, author of Messages of Hope * "Matt McKay has devoted his life to being a healer of the hurting in his thoughts, words, and deeds. He has walked the talk in his compassionate counseling as a clinical psychologist; and he has talked the walk as a lecturer and prodigious writer. When his son, Jordan, died tragically, Matt had the courage to step through the veil and enter into a cosmological dialogue with his son. In his latest work, Love in the Time of Impermanence, he offers the distillation of their joint wisdom in an articulate and comprehensive examination of the origin and motivating force behind all life, namely love. Jordan is proud of you, Matt." * Sean OLaoire, Ph.D., cofounder and spiritual director of Companions of the Journey *