Opening Love

Love, sex, and relationship wisdom from the polyamory movement are offered in this practical guide to spiritual enlightenment. Contrary to popular belief, monogamy and celibacy are not the only two options for exploring a spiritual path. In Opening Love, Dr. Anya translates the lessons learned by the pioneers of the polyamory (many loves) movement for readers who actively pursue personal growth through spiritual practice. Drawing on both personal experience and philosophical reflection, this nonfiction guide explains how to cultivate intentional, creative, non-conventional relationships that center on principles of honesty and consent. Instead of committing solely to a single person, spiritual seekers can instead commit to pursuing openness and courage in all their interactions. As polyamorists understand: love, sex, and relationships are not scarce commodities, rather they are an abundant resource for healing and evolving one's consciousness. With eloquence and precision, Dr. Anya describes how to cultivate compersion (the opposite of jealousy), find an intentional community based on common core values, and build advanced emotional and communication skills. Meditation and reflection practices are offered throughout, to create an interactive, truly transformative learning experience.

Can an onstage love story lead to a real-life romance? Jeremy Steele is a veteran Broadway performer. For his latest role, he's dancing alongside a man he's fantasized about for years, TV star Ty Beaumont. Jeremy knows better than to get involved with a castmate, but when Ty has trouble learning the complicated choreography, Jeremy offers to lend a hand. When a rehearsal kiss turns into something more, Jeremy can't help but wonder what a celebrity like Ty could ever see in a Broadway chorus boy like him. Will a relationship with his crush make it past previews, or can it become a long-running hit? This second edition has no changes from the original, other than some additional copy editing. There is, however, new backmatter with additional details on the story's inspiration.

A beautifully unconventional debut novel about a girl, a boy, and a satellite—and a bittersweet meditation on loneliness, alienation, and what it means to be human. Longlisted for Canada Reads, shortlisted for the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize for Literary Fiction and for Speculative Fiction. Named CBC Radio's Q Book Pick of the Month, a CBC Books Spring Reading List Title, a Shelf Life Books Book of the Month, a Toronto Life and Nikkei Voice summer read recommendation, one of Daily Hive's 10 Essential Reads to Celebrate Asian Canadian Writers, and one of Quill & Quire booksellers' Books of the Year. On the eve of the new millennium, in a city in southern Japan that progress has forgotten, sixteen-year-old Anna Obata looks to the stars for solace. An outcast at school, and left to fend for herself and care for her increasingly senile grandfather at home, Anna copes with her loneliness by searching the night sky for answers. But everything changes the evening the Low Earth Orbit satellite (LEO for short) returns her gaze and sees her as no one else has before. After Leo is called down to Earth, he embarks on an extraordinary journey to understand his own humanity as well as the fragile mind of the young woman who called him into being. As Anna withdraws further into her own mysterious plans, he will be forced to question the limits of his devotion and the lengths he will go to protect her. Full of surprising imaginative leaps and yet grounded by a profound understanding of the human heart, Satellite Love is a brilliant and deeply moving meditation on loneliness, faith, and the yearning for meaning and connection. It is an unforgettable story about the indomitable power of the imagination and the mind's ability to heal itself, no matter the cost, no matter the odds.

The themes that shape these prayer services include self-identity and uniqueness, friendship, community, and outreach. They encourage young people to pray by offering them aesthetically beautiful experiences of prayer. Opening Doors of Truth and Love invites teenagers to pray in reverent yet contemporary ways based on sound theological principles.

This book is a history of love and the challenge love offers to the laws and customs of its times and places, as told through poetry from the Song of Songs to John Milton’s Paradise Lost. It is also an account of the critical reception afforded to such literature, and the ways in which criticism has attempted to stifle this challenge. Bryson and Movsesian argue that the poetry they explore celebrates and reinvents the love the troubadour poets of the eleventh and twelfth centuries called fin’amor: love as an end in itself, mutual and freely chosen even in the face of social, religious, or political retribution. Neither eros nor agape, neither exclusively of the body, nor solely of the spirit, this love is a middle path. Alongside this tradition has grown a critical movement that employs a 'hermeneutics of suspicion', in Paul Ricoeur’s phrase, to claim that passionate love poetry is not what it seems, and should be properly understood as worship of God, subordination to Empire, or an entanglement with the structures of language itself – in short, the very things it resists. The book engages with some of the seminal literature of the Western canon, including the Bible, the poetry of Ovid, and works by English authors such as William Shakespeare and John Donne, and with criticism that stretches from the earliest readings of the Song of Songs to contemporary academic literature. Lively and enjoyable in its style, it attempts to restore a sense of pleasure to the reading of poetry, and to puncture critical insistence that literature must be outwitted. It will be of value to professional, graduate, and advanced undergraduate scholars of literature, and to the educated general reader interested in treatments of love in poetry throughout history.

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 broken Ultimately, 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.

Conducting your own special spiritual attunements helps you connect directly with your divine essence. It is not only simple and fun, it can be utterly life-transforming too. By following a few basic steps, you can quickly harness the power of your higher love to bring positive change and innumerable blessings into your life. Here are over twenty ceremonies for you to try out and enjoy, either with a group of friends or on your own. They have been designed to assist you in expanding your healing gifts and accelerating your personal growth, as well as to give you a deeper understanding of consciousness and the nature of your vast, multifaceted self. You will find innovative ways of using crystals and working with an ancient sacred technique for accessing energetic blockages, together with a wealth of other thought-provoking ideas, personal stories and anecdotes from which to glean inspiration.