David Richo - Coming Home to Who You Are: Discovering Your Natural Capacity for Love, Integrity, and Compassion

Easy to digest and will undoubtedly assist readers in achieving positive change.

Library Journal

ABOUT THE BOOK

We already possess everything we need to have satisfying relationships and a happy, fulfilling life; all we need to do is learn how to bring forth our natural wisdomwhich includes our innate kindness, understanding, and courage. Psychotherapist David Richo draws on four decades of his counseling experience to create this manual on how to nurture the best in ourselves and our relationships. He teaches how to access our natural abilities to:

• Care for ourselves as the basis of caring for others
• Find freedom from fear
• Maintain healthy boundaries in relationships
• Develop greater honesty with ourselves and others
• Let go of regret

The book also includes practical exercisesincluding journaling, contemplation, and guided meditationsto foster inward growth and lasting positive change.

This book is a completely revised and updated edition of Everyday Commitments.

DAVID RICHO, PhD, is a psychotherapist, teacher, writer, and workshop leader whose work emphasizes the benefits of mindfulness and loving-kindness in personal growth and emotional well-being. He is the author of numerous books, including How to Be an Adult in Relationships and The Five Things We Cannot Change. He lives in Santa Barbara and San Francisco, California.

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Coming Home to Who You Are

Discovering Your Natural Capacity

for Love, Integrity, and Compassion

DAVID RICHO

SHAMBHALA

Boston & London

2011

Shambhala Publications, Inc.

Horticultural Hall

300 Massachusetts Avenue

Boston, Massachusetts 02115

www.shambhala.com

2008, 2012 David Richo

Cover design by Jim Zaccaria

Completely revised and expanded edition of Everyday Commitments: Choosing a Life of Love, Realism, and Acceptance (Shambhala, 2008).

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Richo, David, 1940

Coming home to who you are: discovering your natural capacity for love, integrity, and compassion / David Richo.

p. cm.

Rev. ed. of: Everyday commitments. 2008.

eISBN 978-0-8348-2774-5

ISBN 978-1-59030-684-0 (pbk.: alk. paper)

1. Life. 2. Attitude (Psychology) 3. Success. 4. Spirituality.

I. Richo, David, 1940 Everyday commitments. II. Title.

BD431.R525 2012

170.44dc23

2011024986

To each

of my students and clients over the years,

with love, respect, and thanks.

So much of what I know

I learned from you.

We all have let the light

Come in and through.

Contents

To turn all that we possess into the channel of universal love becomes the business of our lives.

JOHN WOOLMAN, The Journal of John Woolman, Quaker

WHAT DOES IT TAKE to be a really good person? This question has intrigued and challenged me for many years. The answers that began to emerge for me became, in 1998, a list of specific commitments we can all make to a life of integrity and loving-kindness.

Over the years, I continually asked clients, students, and participants in twelve-step programs for feedback that would help me revise my list of commitments. Did they make sense? Did they seem appropriate? Were any of them too much or too little to ask? I made changes in accordance with their suggestions, adding new commitments and revising others. I also became more aware of what I most admired in other people, and added their qualities to my list. I did not include anything that I myself was not willing to put into practice.

These commitments appeared in my books here and there, but they were the central focus of my book Everyday Commitments, published in 2008. This new edition is a thoroughly revised and expanded presentation of these essential commitments, including many new realizations that I feel fortunate to have gained over these recent years.

None of the topics I have written about have been so compelling, captivating, and vital to me as these commitments to integrity and loving-kindness. Sharing and living them has become a major purposeand joyin my recent life as a therapist, teacher, writer, and practitioner.

What I personally noticed when I chose to live in accord with principles of integrity and loving-kindness was that I liked myself more. That positive feeling about myself encouraged me to persevere in this way of living. But my original motivation was simply a sense of rightness, not entirely in the moral sense, but rather in the sense of what seems best for a human to be and what so many admirable teachers throughout the ages have recommended.

I am hoping that this book will offer effective technologies that can usher us all into a new way of being aliveas cheerful agents of the goodness that is intrinsically in us all. Every choice we make for integrity and loving-kindness reflects that goodness. Every commitment we keep helps us cocreate a world of justice, peace, and love.

Indeed, the you in the title of this book does not refer only to you the reader as an individual. It is you in the collective of humanity. This book is about coming home to who we all are and can be; we are bringing everyone home to who we all are and can be. All these commitments have one resplendent focus: choosing a life no longer driven by ego, the primacy of me, but by love, the celebration of we. Here is our chance for exodus, for a passover from bondage in ego to liberty in love.

Finally, I knew I had progressed in my own practice when it began to make sense to me that these commitments could someday become the style not only of individuals but of institutions and nations. It will require a massive shift away from domination, greed, and exploitation but it can happen. That is the outcome I hope that you, reader-practitioners, will join me in moving toward. It need not be considered a pipe dream for, as Alfred, Lord Tennyson, said in his poem Ulysses, Tis not too late to seek a newer world.

May we keep coming home to the light of love and wisdom and may we never cease reaching out to those who are still lost in the darkness of fear and craving.

To be human is to be born into the world with something to achieve, namely, the fullness of ones human nature.

PAUL J. WADELL, CP

WHAT A DESTINY IS OURS: our own life story can be a unique depiction of the inherent goodness in all of us. This is a handbook on how we can let that happen whole-heartedly. Here is an owners guide to being an upright and loving human by committing ourselves to a life of integrity and love. Our motivation is simply the desire to live our lives at the level of the heart.