Audio Book- What is Love: Why Love Is Not a Feeling-and Why It Cannot Be Lost
What if love is not something you feel, but something you are?
Most of us learned to treat love as a feeling that arrives, fades, and has to be managed. We spend years chasing it, or grieving it. What Is Love? takes a different road. It follows the oldest traditions of the world to ask what love is when the feeling is gone.
Across thirty-seven chapters, the book travels from the Hebrew commandment to love and the Buddha's four boundless states, to the Greek ladder of love, the desert fathers, the Sufi lovers of God, the bhakti poets, the sages of the Upanishads, and the mystics of every age, alongside what modern research can and cannot tell us.
Inside you will find:
- Why love is not a feeling, and why it does not depend on being returned
- The four boundless states of loving-kindness, compassion, appreciative joy, and equanimity, and how each can be trained
- Stories of the ancients: Maitreyi's question, Rābiʿa and her bucket and torch, the Good Samaritan, the soldier who carried water to his enemies
- Love in ordinary life: the kitchen sink, the hospital room, the person you have to say no to
- The Ten-Second Love Shift, a simple practice for the moment between a provocation and a reply
- A forty-day practice, a glossary, and an anthology of love poems and stories from the world's traditions
The traditions disagree about what ultimately explains love. They agree remarkably often about the direction: from getting love to giving it, from possessing to releasing, from the few to the many, from love as an event that happens to us to love as a way of being.
For anyone who has loved, lost love, or wondered what remains when the feeling goes.
Part of the REAL Shift series by Mark Powers.
Includes the audio book in 13 languages.
Languages in every audio book: English, Spanish, German, French, Portuguese, Hindi, Japanese, Korean, Tamil, Arabic, Mandarin Chinese, Bengali, Italian.
