FOREWORD xiii
PREFACE xxi
INTRODUCTION 1(202)
Love is wonderful?xcept when we are searching for it, trying to hold on to it, or missing it.
Hours of every day are taken up with difficult, painful thoughts about our relationships.
This book introduces a way of relating that is much easier than our usual approach, and more effective.
Through its guidance and exercises, you will learn how to have a fulfilling love life, and you will find out how you can be in charge of your own happiness.
1. DO YOU BELIEVE WHAT YOU THINK? 5(11)
Your most intimate relationship is the one you have with your thoughts.
The way you relate to your thoughts determines everything else in your life, and in particular how you relate to other people.
If you believe your stressful thoughts, your life is filled with stress.
But if you question your thoughts, you come to love your life and everyone in it.
2. QUESTIONING YOUR THOUGHTS ABOUT LOVE 16(11)
Until you understand your thoughts, you aren't relating to people or to yourself; you're relating to concepts that you haven't questioned.
This is painful and isolating.
Chapter 2 gives you instructions for getting started in The Work, the process of inquiry that allows you to find out for yourself whether your thoughts are true for you and exactly how they affect your life.
The Work also gives you an experience of who you are without these thoughts.
Throughout the book we'll be inquiring into some painful and universally held thoughts about relationships, and we'll be finding out if they are really true.
3. SEEKING APPROVAL 27(34)
This chapter deals with one of the most painful thoughts about relationships?he thought that you have to win the love and approval of other people.
We inquire into this thought first by investigating how you live when you seek love and approval.
Several exercises are provided that allow you to make an amazing dscovery: that the most universally held beliefs about what you need to do to be liked, loved, or appreciated are untrue, and that they lead to a false and stressful life.
The chapter also includes exercises that show you the relief and intimacy of being with other people without seeking their approval.
4. FALLING IN LOVE 61(10)
Why does it feel so good to fall in love?
Why do you think your experience of love is caused by your partner?
Why do you fall out of love?
This chapter includes an exercise that allows you to discover what your experience of love really is?n experience that doesn't disappear and doesn't depend on anything or anyone outside you.
5. PERSONALITIES DON'T LOVE?HEY WANT SOMETHING 71(16)
This chapter points out what happens when you form a romantic relationship based on a fictitious identity and a false concept of love.
It exposes the widely held myth that love is about getting what you want and having your needs met.
It also includes exercises that allow you to clearly see the difference between wanting and loving.
6. THE RELATIONSHIP WORKSHOP 87(65)
Chapter 6 gives you many examples of how relationship troubles disappear when you're willing to judge your partner mercilessly and then question your judgments.
7. WHAT IF MY PARTNER IS FLAWED? 152(24)
Apparent flaws in your partner are opportunities for self-realization.
What you see as a fact may be just another unquestioned thought.
The chapter ends with a conversation in Amsterdam that transforms a divorce into a love story.
8. FIVE KEYS TO FREEDOM IN LOVE 176(19)
If you believe that you absolutely need someone, that you couldn't make it without that person, that the people around you or life in general is failing to give you what you want, this chapter offers powerful ways to come to your own aid.
9. THE TRANSFORMATION OF A MARRIAGE 195(8)
The real-life story of a couple who saved their marriage though inquiry.
10. WHAT'S NOT TO LOVE? COULD IT BE YOU? 203(17)
There's nothing left now between you and love except what you haven't resolved inside yourself.
This chapter facilitates the process of discovering what that is.
It shows you how to free yourself from what you're most ashamed of, what you can't forgive, what you still resent, what you want to hide, and any criticism you can't welcome with open arms.
11. LIVING IN LOVE 220(25)
What does love look like when it's not about seeking, wanting, and needing?
Excerpts from the accounts of hundreds of people who are living the discoveries that make up this book.
12. LOVE ITSELF 245(2)
A description of the experience of love when it is so firmly established in you that there is nothing outside it.
FURTHER TOOLS FOR INQUIRY 247(8)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 255