How to Survive Your Childhood Now That You’re an Adult by Ira Israel is both scholarly and accessible. Ira Israel is a prolific and accomplished psychotherapist, meditation teacher, and author. He graduated from University of Pennsylvania and subsequently studied for 25 years in Paris, India, Los Angeles, Connecticut, and Santa Barbara. Israel earned graduate degrees in philosophy, psychology, and religious studies (Buddhism, Hinduism, and Kabbalah). He has also studied and sat with a long list of spiritual masters like Fred Luskin, Jack Kornfield, Rodney Yee, and Richard Rosen, to name just a few.
Authenticity and our Longing for Unconditional Love
Ira Israel has spent his adult life traveling freely between the worlds of academia and spirituality. This explains how he is able to deliver such comprehensive work. Driven by the breadth of his education and experience, Israel lays down a comprehensive and well-argued analysis of the suffering (resentment, addiction, neurosis, et cetera) around our inherent longing for unconditional love. He adeptly deconstructs the many layers of influence—from human nature to a system of complex structures and customs— that cause us to drift from authenticity.
Ira Israel on the Tenets of Authenticity
Leaning into his deep knowledge of Eastern spirituality, Ira Israel then offers a path to wholeness by redefining authenticity in terms of five tenets. The five tenets he describes are: attachment, at-onement, attunement, presence, and congruence. When we are able to incorporate these practices into our lives, we can cultivate happiness.
The uniqueness of Israel’s approach does not lie solely in his content, but also in the way in which he delivers it. You can add to his credentials a firm grasp of popular culture and idiom that make his style relevant, relatable, and irresistibly personal.
If you are looking for ways to live a life of authenticity, this is the book for you.
