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

We live in a world where nothing lasts. Everything we love--the relationships, places, and things we most count on, even our own bodies--will change or be lost. But, as psychologist Matthew McKay shows, the certainty of change and loss can actually support rather than diminish love. For at the heart of pain and loss is love.

Collaborating with his late son, Jordan, 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, cofounder of Haight Ashbury Psychological Services, 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 Luminous Landscape of the Afterlife. The publisher of New Harbinger Publications, he lives in Berkeley, California.

INTRODUCTION
Love Lives On

1 What Love Is
2 What Love Is Not
3 Impermanence and Love
4 Where Love Starts
5 How Loss and Pain Are Pathways to Love
6 Practices and Meditations to Strengthen Caring
7 Practices and Meditations to Strengthen Seeing
8 Practices and Meditations to Strengthen Compassion
9 Intention and the Moment of Choice
10 Loving What You Don’t Like
11 Love and Gratitude
12 Hope for Love and Wellness
13 The Navigation Principle
14 Love after Life
15 To Love Everything

Index