Deida - Dear lover: a womans guide to enjoying loves deepest bliss

Like many women I know, romantic love is either all I want to talk about, or the last thing I want to talk about, depending on the hour. When Im in the mood to discuss it, it seems huge and important. When Im not in the mood, it seems almost neurotic. One thing remains constant, however, regardless of how I view it: romantic love is a mystery.

While its many things to many people, rarely is romance the caricature we see portrayed in consumer advertising. It is grittier and more potentially painful than a picture of lovers walking the beach would indicate. Romance is more than a melodramatic container for alternating energies of bliss and despair, but to say what it is not is not the same thing as saying what it is. And that, perhaps, is because what it is, is changing. Like everything else, it is finding its spiritual element. It is rising up to meet us at the level of who we really are.

Viewed spiritually, romance is, in its divine essence, a temple space. It is one of Gods laboratories, a mode of spiritual transformation. It is, when held this way, a sacred opportunity for souls to jump past the confines of the narrow self, to take quantum leaps forward into new and uncharted emotional possibilities. There love corners us, putting a mirror up to our faces and demanding that we surrender: surrender the hurt, surrender the past, surrender the walls, surrender the blame, surrender the defenses, surrender the limits, surrender the fear...

Love is not a game for sissies.

Most women I know are convinced by now, that spiritual surrender is the portal to love. Yet knowing that only goes so far. Surrender? we say. I get the conceptbut show me how! For its not so easy to surrender to love, when Daddy wasnt really there. Its not so easy to surrender to love, when someone we trusted abandoned or betrayed us. And its not so easy to surrender to love when the last relationship left us psychically bleeding for months or even years.

It can take a lot of emotional effort to learn how to open the heart when the experience of life has shut it down. What we had thought were merely temporary protective mechanisms can become hardened over the years into entrenched defensive patterns. And we so grieve the ease and freedom of love.

We remember what we lost when we are reading Shakespeares sonnets. We remember what we long for, reading Elizabeth Barrett Brownings poems to her beloved Robert. We remember the miracle we most want in our lives, listening to our favorite music late at night, the heart yearning purely and exquisitely for what it most deeply wants.

That yearning itself is a prayer for the kind of wisdom that David Deida imparts. He is one of our new romantic shamans. Deida is outrageous and blunt and sometimes over the top. He howls as well as whispers; he confronts as well as comforts. The fire he carries can either burn or enlighten, depending on our use of it. But if his fiery gift is a gift for you, then I think that you will know it. You will feel the parts of you that need his message, and you will feel yourself eager to receive it. Your mind and heart will respond to the idea that we can learn how to love in a more meaningful way, delivering us from the patterns of pain that have plagued our journey so far.

The journey to the heart of God is always the key to our deliverance, regardless of the source of our pain. But seeing how to apply that under-standing is not always so easy when the pain strikes, the phone does not ring, the agreement is broken, or the hope is shattered. I am a little bit closer to my own love because I have listened to Deida and read this book. My heart is freer; may yours be too.

Now sit back on a comfortable pillow. Dim the lights, except around this book. Say a prayer perhaps, and ask for the truth that lies beyond the veil. Pray to learn about men what you need to learn, that you might learn to love them as you most long to do.

And then listen with me to the wizard of romance. He speaks to us of a long lost promise. He speaks of truth. He speaks of love.