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Gina LaRoche has long distinguished Love the greatest Tool of Sufficiency of all tools. (Fear is the greatest Weapon, though Shame might tie for Most Painful.) Love to me has been an abstraction of sorts. Is it something you do, something you have, something you Be? I began to get some traction in the domain of Love by getting married and then becoming a parent. Living inside of family life is a lot of things, and confronting my capacity to love, has been the greatest gift, if not the greatest source of suffering.

A lot of activities and processes have helped me expand my understanding and my ability to give and receive love, to be loved, to be love, to be in love. Therapy, 12-Step, spiritual and somatic practice, leadership and communication skills development, caring for animals, and more. But this book I just read, that was strongly recommended to me by my spiritual teacher, has profoundly, deeply revolutionized what is possible, in modern life, in modern family life, in the domain of love.

Perhaps it’s the power of narrative, or Laura Munson’s spectacularly exquisite tracking of her experience through writing, but This is not the Story You Think It Is: A Season of Unlikely Happiness is what it says it is: not what you think. Because no one expects a woman to do what she did in the face of her husband declaring he doesn’t love her anymore and wants out of the marriage. Many, many reviews are online that offer the compelling highlights of this unique memoir of declaration, integration, and spiritual practice – the end of suffering as the author repeats to herself, and the reader, time and time again. And I hope more than perusing the commentary, you’ll read the story. It is undoubtedly worth it.

What is due to say here about the story, in the spoken words of my teacher, is a new paradigm of loving has arrived. And, it is born, wholly, in the context of sufficiency. Laura Munson declared the end of her suffering and refused to be responsible for her husband’s. She loved him instead. She offered him respect, trust and honor – space, in the face of his life’s darkest moment of scarcity, fear and shame. In our punitive, righteous culture, where there must always be a loser and the game is Zero Sum, her act of love is radical. Impossible for some of us who could not imagine having the clarity and sense of self – or the tools and knowing – to pull it off.

And what did she pull off? They stay together and the family of four moves forward, together. He gets to be gotten and known in the ugliest of times and loved anyway. (How healing is that?) The kids get to keep their childhoods intact. She gets her best friend and lover back, and a published book. We get to be inspired. The end of suffering is possible. Love is the way.