Real Love unveils the many layers of love. Through the Buddhist lens of mindfulness and loving-kindness, the chapters build upon each other with meditations, exercises, and reflections on our relationships to others, the world, and with ourselves. I’ll cut to the chase. You have to love everybody. Yep. Everybody. It will not always be easy.
About Real Love
In Real Love, Salzberg suggests mindfulness as a way to develop an objective view of ourselves – the stories we tell ourselves, and the stories others tell about us. She acknowledges cultural and historical influences on these narratives including the archetype of the soulmate who will fix our lives, the entertainment industry’s failure to promote non-violent heroic action, and common negative associations with “loving everybody.”
“We live in a world punctuated by horrifying acts of violence, in which entire groups of people are marginalized by virtue of race, class, religion, nationality, and sexual preference. How is it even possible to be loving it all?” Salzberg asks.
The work of healing and personal growth through the practice of real love expands our ability to experience the depth of the present moment – a spectacular tool in your mindfulness toolkit. To become masterful, one must use the tool, again and again, increasing in understanding and refining in technique.
Salzberg says, “I’d be the first to acknowledge that this work is never done…Inspiration points us to a bigger world than the one we may have been inhabiting, where we suddenly can see that human beings can go through so much and still be kind.” Salzberg suggests that “loving everybody” might just be the only “real love” there is.
Declared by Conscious Lifestyle Magazine as “one of the world’s leading meditation teachers,” Ben hosts popular classes, trainings, and events on meditation, social justice, and related studies at The Den Meditation, Wanderlust Hollywood, Divine Meditation, and Unplug Meditation.
Once praised by Forbes as a “legendary PR maven,” and “a shining example of the talent the philanthropic community needs to attract,” Benjamin W. Decker left a prolific career in Hollywood to dedicate his professional life to conscious activism.
He has worked closely with humanitarian organizations including anti-human trafficking organizations Unlikely Heroes & Saving Innocence, as well as Generosity.org, Children of the Night, the American Red Cross, and many others.
Decker is the Founding Executive Director of The Providence Project, President of the Board of The inerHEALTH Foundation, and Founding Spiritual Director of Full Circle Venice.