Love Is A Spiritual Path: From Personal Love to True Love with Polly Young-Eisendrath

Personal Love is based on equality, reciprocity and mutuality. The challenges of this new kind of intimate love in the 21st Century are great and the obstacles are many - but at the same time we are being given an incredible opportunity to evolve spiritually and psychologically as human beings.

The formula for love and marriage in the 21st Century has evolved from Romantic Love to Personal Love - love has been taken out of the demands of tradition, arranged marriages, family and tribal affiliations - we can now get married based on personal love, choosing anyone we want. Polly Young Eisendrath describes this new intimate relationship as one with no hierarchy, based on mutual respect and reciprocity, with each partner becoming a life-long friend and witness to the other. But as she explains, this shift has made love and marriage so much more difficult. There is good news though - we are now being given an opportunity to evolve spiritually and psychologically, and we must rise to this challenge if we want to be okay in our relationships, if we want to experience True Love.  “Love is a spiritual path,” she says, “It requires skill and sacrifice.”

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Meet This Episode's Guest

Photo credit: https://www.facebook.com/pg/YoungEisendrath/

Find out more from Polly's website

 https://young-eisendrath.com/

Polly Young-Eisendrath

POLLY YOUNG-EISENDRATH, Ph.D., is a Jungian Psychoanalyst, Psychologist, author, and speaker. She is Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Vermont, founding faculty at the Vermont Institute for the Psychotherapies, and past president of the Vermont Association for Psychoanalytic Studies. She is in independent practice with individuals and couples in central Vermont. Polly is the originator of Dialogue Therapy, a time-limited couple therapy that integrates psychoanalysis and mindfulness and helps couples move from disillusionment to intimacy.

Polly is the author of fifteen books, as well as many chapters and articles. Her books have been translated into more than twenty languages.  Her most recent works are The Present Heart: A Memoir of Love, Loss and Discovery (Rodale, 2014); The Self-Esteem Trap: Raising Confident and Compassionate Kids in an Age of Self-Importance (Little, Brown, 2008); and The Cambridge Companion to Jung: New and Revised, of which she is co-editor with Terence Dawson (Cambridge University Press, 2008). In 2018, Shambhala Publications will publish True Love Ways: Relationship as Psycho-Spiritual Development, Polly’s new book which sets out the principles of Dialogue Therapy for a general audience.