How to Expand Love
Widening the Circle of Loving Relationships
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
In our quest for true happiness and fulfillment during the course of our lives, nothing is more essential than giving and receiving love. But how well do we understand love's extraordinarily transformative powers? Can we really cultivate and appreciate its priceless gifts?
In How to Expand Love, His Holiness the Dalai Lama, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, offers a simple yet illuminating program for transforming self-centered energy into outwardly directed compassion. Drawing on exercises and techniques established in Tibetan monasteries more than a thousand years ago, the Dalai Lama guides us through seven key stages.
First, we learn ways to move beyond our self-defeating tendency to put others into rigid categories. We discover how to create and maintain a positive attitude toward those around us, in ever-widening circles. By reflecting on the kindnesses that close friends have shown us, particularly in childhood, we learn to reciprocate and help other people achieve their own long-term goals. And in seeking the well-being of others, we foster compassion, the all-encompassing face of love.
In this accessible and insightful book, His Holiness the Dalai Lama helps us to open our hearts and minds to the experience of unlimited love, transforming every relationship in our lives and guiding us ever closer to wisdom and enlightenment.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this simple primer on compassion and kindness, the Dalai Lama teaches that "if we really want happiness, we must widen the sphere of love." The book draws on many of the same principles found in His Holiness's other works, most notably The Art of Happiness, but it presents them in a seven-step process that is both practical and wise. Readers are encouraged to use the warm feeling they have for their best friends as a model of how they can regard all people and extend their circle of loving relationships to include others, even enemies. Then they can proceed to the next steps: developing a "heroic intention" to further their personal enlightenment, having compassion for the suffering of others and committing to a life of altruism. Although the last few stages of this plan can be blurry and indistinct, the overall effect is valuable. This is a generous and sensible road map to not-so-random acts of kindness.
