The Choice for Love

This book is the inspiring follow-up to Soul Shifts, which I reviewed in these pages last year. It is about entering a new, enlightened relationship with yourself, others and the world by experiencing love from the inside as a vibrational state of being. It is a dense book full of insight and useful exercises and reflections, as well as drawing on the author's own experiences and those of her students. One extraordinary story concerns woman called Tanya who phoned into her radio programme explaining that she was about to jump off a cliff and commit suicide, when a red book cover caught her eye on a nearby bench. It was the previous book Soul Shifts, and was literally a lifesaver. The three parts of the book address a new relationship with love, essential healing for the heart, and living in love. Barbara uses some good metaphors such as untangling the heartstrings, defrosting the heart and clearing the sacred circuitry so that more energy can flow through us. Frequently, our experiences of intensity are a form of resistance that we need to move through. We are in fact prewired with sacred circuitry but it is up to us to clear the short-circuits and disconnections, so that more voltage can come through. Healing the heart involves courageous compassion as well as what she calls necessary relinquishments - unlearning, releasing and forgiving, especially in relation to our inescapable experience of loss. However, as she argues, it is always possible to choose more love in any given situation, without forgetting compassion for oneself as well as others. This can inform our everyday experience, even in terms of gratitude and serving those closest to us. By embodying love, we are also embodying universal oneness, a spiritual practice which could not be more important at this time.