Bøker av David Richo

How to let love into our lives, and how to express that love to the world at large-the latest from a best-selling author.We were made to love and be loved. Loving ourselves and others is in our genetic code. It's nothing other than the purpose of our lives-but knowing that doesn't make it easy to do. We may find it a challenge to love ourselves. We may have a hard time letting love in from others. We're often afraid of getting hurt. It is also sometimes scary for us to share love with those around us-and love that isn't shared leaves us feeling flat and unfulfilled. David Richo provides the tools here for learning how to love in evolved adult ways-beginning with getting past the barriers that keep us from loving ourselves, then showing how we can learn to open to love others. The first challenge is that we have a hard time letting love in: recognizing it, accepting it from others. We're afraid of it, of getting hurt. The second, related problem is that we're unable to share love with those around us--and love that isn't shared isn't truly love. The first step to learning to love and be loved, according to Richo's model, is to identify the different levels of love so that you can hit each one separately. He breaks it down to three: • Level One: Positive Connection. As simple as being courteous, respectful, helpful, and honest, and decent in all our dealings. Pretty basic, but it makes the world a better place, and it's the essential foundation for growing in love. • Level Two: Caring and Personal Connection. Intimacy and commitment to friends, family, partners, lovers. Commitment to others. • Level Three: Unconditional and Universal. Transcending the love of individuals to the love of all beings; self-sacrificing. The love expressed in the Sermon on the Mount and the Bodhicharyavatara. This level of love isn't for a heroic few, it's everyone's calling. He then shows us how to incorporate these varieties of love into our lives. It's a relief to know that even just aspiring to incorporate them really changes things. He also provides exercises and guided meditations for identifying and getting through the things that keep you from getting and giving love at each of these three levels.Through the lens of these types of love, Richo covers topics such as: how to still be yourself while loving another; how to embrace your dark side; what to do when the one who loves you dies; need versus fear; clinging; healthy sexuality, including fantasies and how to experience pleasure without guilt; how to break distructive patterns in your relationships; and how to have safe conversations with your loved one.Richo provides wisdom from Buddhism, psychology, and a range of spiritual traditions, along with a wealth of practices both for avoiding the pitfalls that can occur in love relationships and for enhancing the way love shows up in our lives. He then leads us on to love's inevitable outcome: developing a heart that loves universally and indiscriminately. This transcendent and unconditional love isn't just for a heroic few, Richo shows, it's everyone's magnificent calling.

Work with your triggers to find peace in the painful moments and lasting emotional well-being.Psychotherapist David Richo examines the science of triggers and our reactions of fear, anger, and sadness. He helps us understand why our bodies respond before our minds have a chance to make sense of a situation. By looking deeply at the roots of what provokes us--the words, actions, and even sensory elements like smell--we find opportunities to understand the origins of our triggers and train our bodies to remain calm in the face of traumatic experiences. In-the-moment exercises on how to process difficult emotions and physical manifestations are offered throughout the book to cultivate the inner resources necessary to deal with recurring trauma. When we are triggered, Richo writes, "we are being bullied by our own unfinished business." Explore what your body''s knee-jerk reactions to trauma can teach you. Triggers: How We Can Stop Reacting and Start Healing acts as a guide to your body''s powerful responses, helping you to remain calm under pressure and discover the key to emotional healing.

In this book, psychotherapist David Richo explores how we replay the past in our present-day relationships—and how we can free ourselves from this destructive pattern. We all have a tendency to transfer potent feelings, needs, expectations, and beliefs from childhood or from former relationships onto the people in our daily lives, whether they are our intimate partners, friends, or acquaintances. When the Past Is Present  helps us to become more aware of the ways we slip into the past so that we can identify our emotional baggage and take steps to unpack it and put it where it belongs. Drawing on decades of experience as a psychotherapist, Richo helps readers to:    • Understand how the wounds of childhood become exposed in adult relationships—and why this is a gift    • Identify and heal the emotional wounds we carry over from the past so that they won''t sabotage present-day relationships    • Recognize how strong attractions and aversions to people in the present can be signals of own own unfinished business    • Use mindfulness to stay in the present moment and cultivate authentic intimacy

Take Heart: The Ways of Love Free of Fear and Ego Our thrilling human destiny is to display in our lifetime the timeless design of love and wholeness that has always been inside us. We can discover something of what it means to live in upright ways, show loving-kindness toward ourselves and others, and free ourselves from ego and fear. This book offers insights and practices that can help us live our lives at those psychologically healthy and spiritually conscious levels.Yes, we can take heart, that is, grow in hope and courage no matter how chaotic the world becomes or how disappointing people may be to us. Then we joyously see our self-esteem and our spirituality flourish. They are the true paths to contentment with ourselves as we are and can be and with the world as it is and may be. All it takes is heart.There will never be only love or only peacebut there can be more lovethan before we got hereand more peacebecause we stayed here in peace and with love.

"A necessary and needed character on our human journey is the ally, the reliable companion, the assisting force. In every heroic journey story the hero or heroine requires a trustworthy companion to fulfill his/her/their destiny. The assisting force is often depicted as a sidekick, an aide, a wise advisor, a spirit guide. In stories an assisting force can also be an elixir, a magic form of help, an animal, a wish-fulfilling gem. Some of the assisting forces in our lives are visible and some are invisible. Some are with us for life; some come and go. Examples of spiritual assisting forces are bodhisattvas and saints. Partners in a relationship that works are allies to one another. Carl Jung said that we cannot individuate on Everest, that is, alone. The archetype of the ally is necessary if we are ever to be fully who we are. Martin Buber beautifully describes this: "A person wishes to be confirmed in his being by another person. . . . It is from one human being to another that the heavenly bread of self-being is passed." This book shows us how assisting forces are in and around us, how we can be assisting forces to one another, and presents spiritual practices that can help all this happen"--

Discover how to embrace the dark side of your personality, the unconscious and repressed aspects—or the shadow self, as introduced by Carl Jung—to live a fuller, more authentic life. 25th Anniversary Edition Our “shadow” is the collection of negative or undesirable traits we keep hidden—the things we don’t like about ourselves or are ashamed of, but it also includes our positive, untapped potential. The shadow is often a source of creative inspiration and greater self-acceptance. Befriending the shadow makes fear an ally and enables us to live more authentically. It also automatically improves our interpersonal relationships, because we are freed from the need to project our own negativity onto others, and we become more acutely aware when theirs is projected onto us.  David Richo looks for where the shadow manifests in our personal life, family interactions, religion, relationships, and the world around us. He shows how to use the gentle practice of mindfulness to work with our shadow side, and he provides numerous exercises for going deeper. He is remarkably skillful at making the shadow concept not only easy to understand but supremely practical for enhancing the quality of our lives.

Richo has chosen twenty-three components of humanness, each a topic of a chapter. He begins each chapter with a short section about the topic as it is described in psychology or spirituality. Then he presents quotations from Shakespeare on that theme. Every passage walks us into who we are and can be, both psychologically and spiritually. The quotations are wonderfully imaginative kick-offs into it. After each Shakespeare quotation is a short re-phrase in modern English. After each set of quotations, he presents a paragraph or two, based on the points made in them, meant to show how they can be springboards into becoming more sensitive to the topic. The book is divided into three parts. In Part One, the author explores who we are. In Part Two, he looks at what happens to us during a lifetime. In Part Three, he presents specific suggestions found in Shakespeare about how to put these themes into practice.

Bestselling author David Richo gets straight to the heart of how to find courage and contentment when life doesn't go according to plan. Rather than fighting against them, we all must accept these five true things: (1) everything changes and ends, (2) things do not always go according to plan, (3) life is not always fair, (4) pain is part of life, and (5) people are not loving and loyal all the time. Drawing on both psychology and spirituality, Richo offers time-tested insights on finding meaning and joy in life as it really is and relationships as they are.Five True Things distills the essential wisdom of Richo's popular book The Five Things We Cannot Change. By changing our approach to our struggles, we can find deep happiness.

Identifying the things you long for can reveal deep truths about yourself. The Five Longings can show you how to work with these desires to live in a happier, more satisfying way. If you've ever had a vague sense that something's missing from your life, congratulations: That longing for something better is a sign of being fully human, fully alive. But what's even more wonderful, according to Dave Richo, is that when you identify and carefully examine the things you long for-like love, meaning, freedom, happiness, and growth-you not only discover deep truths about yourself, but you also find that the things you long for were never really "missing" at all. He provides enlightening advice and practices for accessing just this kind of profound self-discovery , illustrated by a wealth of examples from depth psychology, religion, and literature. Our longings in fact point to the presence of something transcendent in us, he shows. In seeking something better, we are seeking that which we already are.

Psychotherapist David Richo offers a fresh and inspiring approach to personal growth: we can use the process of writing and reading poetry to move toward greater self-understanding and emotional healing. Even if you've never written a poem before, you can learn to use poetry to explore your feelings, your relationships, your childhood, your dreams, and more. Richo explains how the creative, intuitive process of making poetry can help us gain access to our deepest truths, leading us to make connections and explore experiences in a new way, beyond the constraints of everyday language. This book offers a range of practical exercises for getting started, as well as guidance on how to read poetry in a way that can be personally transformative. Being True to Life shows us that poetry is not reserved for a few specially talented individuals but is a deeply human activity that anyone can tap into for greater clarity and insight into life's struggles, beauty, and mysteries.

The best-selling author of How to Be an Adult in Relationships explains how to build trust-the essential ingredient in successful relationships-in spite of fear or past betrayals Most relationship problems are essentially trust issues, explains psychotherapist David Richo. Whether it's fear of commitment, insecurity, jealousy, or a tendency to be controlling, the real obstacle is a fundamental lack of trust-both in ourselves and in our partner.Daring to Trust explores the importance of trust throughout our emotional lives: how it develops in childhood and how it becomes an essential ingredient in healthy adult relationships. It offers key insights and practical exercises for exploring and addressing our trust issues in relationships. Topics include:• How we learn early in life to trust others (or not to trust them)• Why we fear trusting• Developing greater trust in ourselves as the basis for trusting others• How to know if someone is trustworthy• Naïve trust vs. healthy, adult trust• What to do when trust is brokenUltimately, Richo explains, we must develop trust in four directions: toward ourselves, toward others, toward life as it is, and toward a higher power or spiritual path. These four types of trust are not only the basis of healthy relationships, they are also the foundation of emotional well-being and freedom from fear.

You and your ego: how to develop a healthy sense of self without becoming an egotist-and how to see through that sense of self for the happiness of yourself and others. How can you build the healthy ego necessary to be effective in life-yet avoid the kind of egotism that makes people dislike you? Don't worry; Dave Richo has the answers. His new book shows you how to navigate the tricky waters between egotism and selflessness in a way that avoids both extremes and makes you much more effective and loving. The key is to acknowledge your ego and to be kind to it, before you ultimately learn to let it go. As with all Dave's books, this one is full of examples from myth and religion, with plenty of exercises and practical advice.