If You're Curious About These Questions...
You should listen to this audiobook
- Have you ever wondered why our cultural conditioning and everyday habits often act as invisible barriers to the deep connections we crave?
- What if you could turn your most challenging relationship conflicts into a source of profound joy and lasting intimacy?
- Are you curious about the secret to practicing a form of love that goes beyond romance and starts with transforming your relationship with yourself?
Listen to Real Love — Free Audiobook
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Key Takeaways from Real Love
- Discover how to expand your definition of love beyond close family and romance to weave joyful, meaningful connections into every aspect of your daily life.
- Recognize why you are often an unreliable narrator of your own life, and learn how to reframe the faulty, self-limiting stories your brain creates about the past.
- Understand why repressing difficult emotions like grief or shame only prolongs suffering, and discover how fully engaging with your pain paves the way for true forgiveness.
- Learn how to stop filling the ambiguous gaps in your relationships with damaging assumptions by practicing supportive communication rather than acting out of hurt.
- Master the practice of kindness during moments of conflict, which relationship researchers identify as the single most accurate predictor of a successful marriage.
Real Love — Full Chapter Overview
Chapter 1: Recommendation
Chapter 2: Stories we tell about our lives have truly profound effects on how we view ourselves, for both better and worse.
Chapter 3: To find lasting happiness, we must first honestly confront and engage with difficult emotions.
Chapter 4: An open, even playing field is the ideal ground for cultivating genuine, true love.
Chapter 5: What we cultivate in the space between ourselves and our loved ones profoundly determines our happiness.
Chapter 6: To forge a deep connection with someone, we must truly release our rigid expectations.
Chapter 7: We can turn jealousy into joy by sifting through its causes.
Chapter 8: The key to building loving connections is to actively notice the people you encounter and the world that truly surrounds you.
Chapter 9: Taking time to embrace the world around us, even briefly, helps happiness to truly thrive.
Real Love Summary & Overview
Real Love (2017) draws our attention to the habits and cultural conditioning that stop us from forming deep connections with others. By inviting us to expand our notions of love and the ways in which we practice it in our day-to-day lives, Sharon Salzberg provides practical advice on how we can strengthen our relationships and experience more joy.
Who Should Listen to Real Love?
- Couples who want to learn how to handle conflict constructively
- Sufferers of low self-esteem hoping to develop self-love
- People seeking deeper connections with others
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