From the New York Times bestselling author of Getting the Love You Want and Keeping the Love You Find comes illuminating and inspiring advice on one of the most complicated issues facing couples today: receiving love. Many people know how to give love, but many more undermine their relationships by never having learned how to accept it. We don't always realize the ways in which we reject appreciation, affection, help, and guidance from our romantic partners. According to Hendrix and Hunt, until we are able to understand the meaning behind our behavior, our relationships stand to suffer. Receiving Love prompts questions such as: -Are you reluctant to tell your partner what you really want or need? -When you do get what you've asked for, do you still feel dissatisfied? -Is it difficult for you to accept kind gestures, gifts, or compliments from your partner? With Receiving Love, you can learn how to break the shackles of self-rejection and embrace real intimacy. Drawing on their renowned expertise, the wide clinical experience of Imago therapists, and their own personal experience as a married couple, the authors offer detailed, sensitive advice on how to turn a relationship between two well-meaning yet misunderstood individuals into a true, everlasting partnership.

A companion workbook to the critically acclaimed relationship book Receiving Love: Transform Your Relationship by Letting Yourself Be Loved In 2004, Harville Hendrix and his wife, Helen LaKelly Hunt, co-creators of Imago Relationship Therapy, authored Receiving Love, a critically acclaimed guide to cultivating a loving, long-lasting relationship that Publishers Weekly called "intelligent and insightful . . . wise and sophisticated." Now, in the Receiving Love Workbook, Hendrix and Hunt have constructed a companion to that groundbreaking book in which they outline a simple, practical plan that will help you to apply the advice and exercises in Receiving Love to your own relationship. Receiving Love showed that while many men and women know how to give love, many more undermine their relationships by never having learned how to accept it. The Receiving Love Workbook will help you and your partner to explore the effect that this type of self-rejection has had in your individual lives and in your relationship as a couple. It contains a unique twelve-week course designed to help you work through the exercises in Receiving Love. It provides the same step-by-step instructions and examples that couples who participate in a couples' workshop or work with an Imago Relationship Therapist would experience. For those who are ready to take specific steps to surmount the self-rejection and heal its causes, the Receiving Love Workbook will help you to make the changes that will establish an easy, natural pattern of giving and receiving love and that will create the relationship of your dreams.

Marriage should be based on love, right? But does it seem as though you and your spouse are speaking two different languages? #1 New York Times bestselling author Dr. Gary Chapman guides couples in identifying, understanding, and speaking their spouse's primary love language-quality time, words of affirmation, gifts, acts of service, or physical touch. By learning the five love languages, you and your spouse will discover your unique love languages and learn practical steps in truly loving each other. Chapters are categorized by love language for easy reference, and each one ends with simple steps to express a specific language to your spouse and guide your marriage in the right direction. A newly designed love languages assessment will help you understand and strengthen your relationship. You can build a lasting, loving marriage together. Gary Chapman hosts a nationally syndicated daily radio program called A Love Language Minute that can be heard on more than 150 radio stations as well as the weekly syndicated program Building Relationships with Gary Chapman, which can both be heard on fivelovelanguages.com. The Five Love Languages is a consistent New York Times bestseller - with over 5 million copies sold and translated into 38 languages. This book is a sales phenomenon, with each year outselling the prior for 16 years running!

Prickly, defensive, nasty, volatile, withdrawn, miserable . . . aren't there days when you feel surrounded by difficult people? How do you cope? You can try avoiding them, gossiping about them, or giving them a piece of your mind. But wait! Don't your reactions make you hard to love too? William P. Smith explains that learning how to deal ...

Discover God's Gift for You: Unconditional Love! Every bit of God's power and love is available to you-today! And you aren't just one of the crowd. God loves you as if you were the only person on Earth. The problem is that, like most people, you may not understand it. . .or if you know it with your head, you may not feel it with your heart. Now you can. The powerful message in this inspiring book will show you: * How to Recognize God's Love Inside You * How to Stop Wondering If You're Good Enough for God * How You can Experience an Amazing Revelation of God's Love * How to Find God Even During Life's Painful Circumstances * How God's Love will Change You Forever. Sharing her insights and the revelation that transformed her own life, Joyce Meyer brings you Scripture and other words of wisdom that can open up the window to God's love. . .and let its light shine on you, personally!

Once in a blue moon an idea comes along that once heard seems so obvious that you wonder why somebody hasn't written about it before. Amanda Owen's The Power of Receiving: A Revolutionary Approach to Giving Yourself the Life You Want and Deserve presents a new paradigm for the 21st century-a philosophy that values receiving as much as giving and demonstrates that giving is enhanced when receiving is embraced. With the formula: Believe + Receive = Achieve, The Power of Receiving presents a wholly original yet easily accessible road map for people to follow, showing readers how to restore balance to their over-extended lives and attract the life they desire and deserve. Inspiring stories are featured about people who have experienced life-altering results after becoming skilled Receivers, including Ken who regained his hearing after a devastating hearing-loss, Julie who met the man she would later marry, and Don who received an extra $1,000 a month in his pay check. Based on over twenty years of research into the nature of receptivity and its link to manifestation, The Power of Receiving offers a unique vision for anyone seeking to create greater reciprocity in their relationships and more harmony and abundance in their lives.

Your dreams of finding a loving and truly compatible partner spring from the healthiest and most fully human aspects of your nature--and the fulfillment of your dreams is completely achievable. Whatever your history, whatever your heartbreak, as a single person you are in an ideal position to learn what you need to know and what you can do to greatly improve your chances for finding, and keeping, love. Book jacket.

Prayer is at the heart of the Christian life. Given that we are weak and even sinful human beings, how can it be that God has anything to do with us? What does it mean to have a personal relationship with God? Why is God so silent and hidden? How do we grow in prayer? Personal Prayer: A Guide for Receiving the Father’s Love brings the depth of human experience together with the Catholic tradition of prayer to present the path to an intimate and vulnerable relationship with God. Experienced spiritual directors Fr. Thomas Acklin, OSB, and Fr. Boniface Hicks, OSB, explore the many forms of Catholic prayer and demonstrate that vulnerability is essential to growing in relationship with God. Rich with the wisdom of Scripture, Catholic teaching, and the writings of the saints, Personal Prayer is an exhaustive guide for priests, religious, and laity desiring to receive the Father’s love in a profoundly personal way.

Why would most people endure unwanted or unsatisfying touch, rather than speak up for their own boundaries and desires? It's a question with a myriad of answers - and one that Dr. Betty Martin has explored in her 40+ years as a hands-on practitioner, first as a chiropractor and later as a Somatic Sex Educator, Certified Surrogate Partner and Sacred Intimate. In her client sessions, she noticed a pattern wherein many clients would "allow" or go along with discomfort or unease rather than speak up for what they wanted or didn't want. Betty discovered there was a major component missing for people -- the confidence that we have a choice about what is happening to us. In her framework, "The Wheel of Consent(R)" Betty traces the fundamental roots of consent back to our childhood conditioning. As children, we are taught that to be "good" we must ignore our body's discomfort and be compliant: to finish our food even if we're full, to go to bed - even if we're not tired, to let relatives hug and kiss us even if we don't want to. We learn that our feelings don't matter more than what is happening, and that we don't have a choice but to go along, whether or not we want it. As adults, this conditioning remains with us until we have an opportunity to unlearn it, which is why consent violations are often only called out after the violation has occurred - because we have not been taught or empowered to notice our boundaries, much less value or express our internal signals as the unwanted action is happening. In this book, Betty guides the reader through the Wheel of Consent framework, and shares practices to help us recover the ability to notice what we want and set clear boundaries. While the practices are based on exchanges of touch, they can also be learned without touch. In these practices, we discover that the Art of Giving includes knowing our own limits so we can be more generous within those limits, and not give beyond our capacity - a common problem which creates feelings of resentment or martyrdom. We also discover that the Art of Receiving invites us to notice and ask for what we really want, and not just what we think we are supposed to want. This knowledge, and its embodied practice, is foundational for creating clear agreements and bringing more satisfaction into relationships. While much of consent education focuses on noticing what we don't want, or prevention of violation, Betty has developed a "pleasure-forward" approach to teaching consent. By first accessing and awakening (sometimes re-awakening) our bodies' relationship to pleasure and what we want, we can practice noticing and verbalizing what we don't want. Such an approach provides a more holistic frame in which to unlearn the childhood conditioning that taught us to be silent and compliant, and in which individuals can learn to ask for what they want and state what they don't, in a more empowered way. The implications of this approach to consent education extends beyond touch and intimate relationships. When we forget how to notice what we really want, we lose our inner compass. When we continue to go along with things we don't feel are right, we lose our ability to speak up against injustice. This has a profound effect on society. We allow all manner of inequality, corruption, theft of natural resources and our planet's future health - because "going along with it" feels normal. The Wheel of Consent offers a deeply nuanced way to practice consent as an agreement that brings integrity, responsibility, and empowerment into human interaction, starting with touch and relationships, and further expanding our understanding of consent to social issues of equality and justice.

So often we think of the Christian faith as an obligation or as a set of beliefs that we must hold. With this outlook, we can lose sight of what is most important: the invitation to experience a loving, personal relationship with God. It’s a relationship we can trust, where we can find refuge and solid ground upon which to stand. The Way of Love set forth by the Episcopal Church's Presiding Bishop Michael Bruce Curry is the journey of a lifetime. It’s a way of knowing God, receiving and sharing Jesus’ love, and being a blessing to the world. Mariann Edgar Budde shares her thoughts on how the reader can come to know--to receive--Jesus more deeply in practicing the Way of Love. Through the seven practices that have been put before us: to turn, to learn, to pray and to worship, to bless, to go, and to rest, she will share biblical stories, wisdom from the Christian tradition, and her own personal stories of spiritual growth.