One of the great rewards of working in a bookstore is the new writers you learn about from customers. My reading has always been enhanced by loyal Lemuria readers caring enough to share meaningful suggestions with me. Thanks to Eliza, a Boston pal, I embarked on a David Richo reading path.
Accepting the difficult realities of life and dropping our resistance to them is the key to liberation and discovery. Richo, a psychotherapist, states that there are five unavoidable facts, five unchanging facts that come to visit us many times over.
1. Everything changes and ends.
2. Things do not always go according to plan.
3. Life is not always fair.
4. Pain is part of life.
5. People are not loving and loyal all the time.
Richo believes our fear and struggle against these givens are the real sources of our troubles. Exploring these facts in separate chapters, Richo provides many helpful ideas on how to break down our automatic neurotic ego controls.
In part two, Richo combines Buddhist insight to give us tools for our daily work of establishing an unconditional yes to our conditional existence. Lessons for using lovingkindness and meditation to understand our feelings. As our awareness and mindfulness improve, we are able to move toward yes to who we are psychologically and spiritually.
Using Richo’s insight of shadow-work psychology, Five Things shows how we can open our lives and decrease the automatic ego controls that narrow our lives.
Readers of James Hollis should enjoy reading David Richo as well.
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