Felt shallow and not quite on-topic

I was interested in checking out Meggan Watterson based on another of her books that I'd heard about, and thoughtI would try out this one as the topic sounded great. I'm about to return it after having attempted listening to about half of it over a period of time and just not being able to stay interested. Meggan is enthusiastic and sounds really genuinely invested in the topic, so have a feeling that if she had written this book by herself and taken more time to go deeper, it might've been good. But Lodro. Sheesh. I'm sure he's a great person irl, but *to me* he sounds like he's trying to be some kind of coolhip Buddhist-light new agey guru for millennials etc. I admit I'm usually a bit biased against these white Americans who go to Tibet or India to become enlightened [:find themselves] and come back with a faux Tibetan or Sanskrit name and think it's cool to go by that or think it's legit to even change their name because some lama or yogi kindly gave them one. It reeks of cultural appropriation and a type of spirituality that just weirds me out. So whether or not you hate that I just admitted my bias may help you figure out whether or not you'll connect with Lodro. I found all his sections incredibly shallow and uninteresting. I did try to be open-minded as the whole premise is that Meggan and him decided to write the book together because they're such great friends, but frankly, I feel he's given this topic only cursory thought, and has had a somewhat limited life experience (I find so many young dude spiritual 'leaders' feel they can teach with authority on any spiritual topic without any experience of any depth, so he's not alone). I also got the feeling that he thinks he's supremely dateable and has so much relationship experience, but I could be wrong. His sections just rubbed me the wrong way. Update: Oh DANG. Just googleed him and read the sordid details of how he abused his teacher relationship and forced a young woman to have sex with him without her consent. Seeing his response in the process seems to indicate that my hunches about him were correct, sadly. Of course he's still making money being a guru even though his publisher and organization dropped him. :( ALTERNATIVE RECOMMENDATIONS: If you're interested in an American Buddhist perspective on meditation or inner work that is deeper yet down-to-earth, I would recommend a few of Jack Kornfield's titles (his voice takes some getting used to, but you can speed it up) but who has been teaching a long time and seems really legit. Try titles such as A Lamp in the Darkness, The Wise Heart, or his audio "Guided meditations for self-healing", which is excellent whether or not one is Buddhist. For the topic of "loving yourself", I would recommend Caroline Myss' audio talk, Self-Esteem: your fundamental power, which is deep yet really simple to understand. Other relevant titles: Defy Gravity, as well as her workshops with Andrew Harvey: The Soulmate Contract and Divine Rebels. For the topic of love, relationships and spirituality, I would highly recommend to the deeply practical Conscious Loving by Gay Hendricks & Kathryn Hendricks, which is relevant at all points of love relationship to yourself, a partner, and beyond. Marianne Williamson's audio workshop on relationships called Enchanted Love (not the book) may look/sound cheesy in title/cover, but goes pretty deep too on these topics and also does a ton of trouble-shooting. Hope this helps you on your journey!

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Didn't want it to end!

I literally replayed the book immediately after it was over just to really soak everything in. I'm currently in the process of deciding whether or not to stay in a marriage I know isn't healthy for me and this gave me such a healthy outlook on it. Must read! Definitely will be listening to this book over and over again.

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Love yourself! 💚

beautiful, necessary, inspiring book about the soul, the importance of how to love yourself and how one might take on that journey. such a lovely book. thank you.

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Very good

This book was good discussion of how to love yourself before, during,and after relationships with other people. I learned a lot and will listen again.

It's an interesting book which reminds us of basic

Honestly I'm not sure how I feel about this book. It's not a bad thing and it's not a stellar book. What I get most from this book is basic truce we've heard a billion times and yet we ignore them. Why do we ignore them? Advertisers tell us we need to ignore them. They all have a steak to play in our relationships, but not for our highest and greatest good. The day teach us to look without instead of looking within. Years ago I was sitting in a cracker barrel and I was listening to a guy interviewing another guy to join his church. He made a simple comment which became a simple truth which is also present in this book. The guy doing the interview had divorced his first wife and then took time to re-examine that relationship. He's remarried and is quite happy after 10 years. Jis wife remarried three times and is still living the same relationship. Here the two authors talk about their relationships and how they examined each one after they were done. If you listen to their stories as they go through the relationships and they re-examine them while talking to us we see where we do the exact same things they do. How many times have we not stopped to listen to our partners. how many times have we told our partners they complete us? Here the authors give you simple easy tips and steps to go through to help you learn to love yourself. here's where I would like to have gone far more in depth. We're given meditations and we're giving real-life examples. However, there's no in-depth guidance. This is what I believe was missing from the book. I believe the real word examples did they gave us are the lessons. Yet I still think some of them need to be more clearly defined as steps on how to love yourself. I did learn a lot from the book and I enjoyed it. I will still recommend it to people and probably read other books about these authors.

Good information but confusing who was speaking

I enjoyed the book and all the content. However switching from male to female narrators was very confusing. I never knew if it was a male perspective speaking because they talked about female experiences. Then the female would speak about things sounding like she was speaking from a male perspective.

Phenomenal and Resonant

I came to this book immediately on the heals often two books by author Shannon Kaiser, THE SELF LOVE EXPERIMENT and JOY SEEKER. And reading this was like a very natural continuation of that journey which resonated very deeply for me. I loved how they approached the topic from multiple angles, including from a Christian and a Buddhist tradition which reveals just how foundational and universal the concept of self love is regardless if you are single or in a relationship. I’ll be revisiting this book again, and have already quoted from it a lot when talking about my self love journey. I recommend this book a lot.