Learning to Love

An insightful guide for consciously bringing compassion and love into your life

• Explores feelings, attitudes, beliefs, and past experiences that block us from loving and receiving love

• Includes deceptively simple yet profound exercises, meditations, and visualizations to support the exploration of your inner world

• Explains how these principles and techniques originated in Roberto Assagioli’s system of psychosynthesis, enriched by the Findhorn experience of living in community

Every person is born with the capacity to love. Over time, however, many of us have built barriers within ourselves as a reaction to painful experiences, and following these, we often develop fears, beliefs, and behaviors that keep these barriers firmly in place.

The primary lesson in life is to learn to love, and this starts right on our doorstep. Often it is self-doubt and feelings of unworthiness that hold us back from experiencing all the love around us. Only when we start to love and accept ourselves with all that we are can we love others freely and fully. Learning to love requires an intention to change and a willingness to take action. Once we understand how to work with our doubts and fears and learn how to change our beliefs and behavior, our barriers will melt away and we spontaneously open up to connect deeply and harmoniously with the full flow of the river of life.

In this simple yet insightful guide, Eileen Caddy and David Earl Platts detail the down-to-earth practicalities of exploring feelings, attitudes, beliefs, and past experiences that block us from loving and from receiving love. They show how bringing more love into our lives is not a mystery but often a journey back to ourselves and our core values. The authors examine the feelings of acceptance, trust, forgiveness, respect, opening up, and taking risks, among others, within a framework of compassionate understanding and non-judgment. Deceptively simple yet profound exercises, meditations, and visualizations support the reader in examining their inner world and implementing these vital concepts into their lives.

The teachings in the book are based on popular workshops that Eileen, co-founder of the Findhorn Foundation Community, and David facilitated for years in and outside Findhorn. Many of the underlying principles and techniques originate in the system of psychosynthesis, devised by Roberto Assagioli. Learning to Love invites you to make a free and informed choice to bring more love into your life, and then helps you implement this choice step-by-step with confidence and joy.

Eileen Caddy, MBE (1917-2006), was the co-founder of the Findhorn Foundation, a thriving spiritual community in the North of Scotland. For more than 50 years, Eileen listened to and shared her inner guidance, inspiring millions around the world. David Earl Platts, Ph.D., a former consultant, trainer, writer, and psychosynthesis counsellor, lived at Findhorn for many years where he worked extensively with Eileen.