Love from HeavenPracticing Compassion for Yourself and Others
Review posted October 22, 2017.
Atria Books (Simon and Schuster), 2014. 214 pages.
Starred Review
2017 Sonderbooks Standout: #6 Christian Nonfiction
This is the third book I’ve read by Lorna Byrne, a woman who says she has seen angels all her life. This book was even more inspiring than the previous two.
Lorna says that the angels have taught her to see the force of love coming from people. They have also taught her what it looks like when people lock away their love (which most people do). She has seen love in many different forms. This book is about the different forms love can take, and how we can release the love we’ve locked away.
Here’s how she finishes the first chapter:
The angel with no name has told me that love is love, but that we can love in so many different ways. We all have pure love inside us. We were full of love as newborns and, no matter what has happened to us since then, it is still there. Regardless of what life has thrown at us or what we have done to others, the love within does not diminish. But we all lock much, or all, of this love away deep within us. We need to learn again how to let it out.
Feeling love for anything helps us to stir up that love within us, and allows us to release more of it. Love is stirred up through personal experience of love: feeling it, thinking loving thoughts, or seeing it. We learn to love from each other.
The angels have told me we can all learn to love more frequently, and with a greater intensity. This is why I have written this book.
I especially like the section at the end – a “Seven-day path to love yourself more.” Lorna Byrne does take the view that you can love others better if you love yourself more, and the exercises she gives you will help you do that.
The week after I finished reading this book, our pastor preached on Connection, which set off more thinking - and a blog post on my Sonderjourneys blog. I felt like this book brought a lot of thoughts about love together.
Learning to love more – isn’t that a worthy goal?