May 16, 2024
Embracing the Art of Love
Healing Your Past, Regaining Your Power, Following Your Soul
Ayako Kondo
Aviva Publishing (2024)
ISBN: 978-1-63618-310-7
New Book Explores How Love Is the Answer to Everything We Want
Ayako Kondo’s new book Embracing the Art of Love: Healing Your Past, Regaining Your Power, Following Your Soul offers a simple but profound message: Love is the answer to whatever our question might be, whether it’s how to find happiness, how to heal the past, how to determine what we want for the future, or anything else we might seek. While that may seem like an easy answer, we all struggle with how to find, receive, and give love, and even with just understanding what love is and recognizing it when we see it. Early in the book, Kondo shares a quote from the thirteenth-century Sufi mystic Rumi. It clarifies what we need to know in a nutshell: “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”
Many of us look for love in all the wrong places. As Kondo reveals, rather than going out and trying to find love, we need to look inside to find what is blocking love from us. It might be limiting beliefs we inherited from parents or our culture. It might be a lack of self-love that makes us think we don’t deserve love from others. It might be pain in our past that leaves us unable to forgive others or ourselves so we can move forward. Whatever the case may be, in Embracing the Art of Love, Kondo shows us how we can achieve love that lasts. More importantly, we will come to recognize, as Kondo says, that our essential core is love.
The book is divided into fourteen chapters that walk us through coming to a deeper understanding of love. Chapter topics include Connecting to Your Soul, Cultivating Intuition Through Your Five Senses, Making Your Family a Priority, Coping with Grief, and Surviving Times of Chaos.
Early in the book, Kondo talks about how we need to learn to connect to our soul and find our “power spot.” She states that the power spot is where you gain confidence and direction. When we begin our journey in embracing the art of love, we need to recognize the path is within us, in our soul. We need to clear that path so we can maintain connection with our soul, our power spot. When we maintain that connection, we can always return home again, always attached to that inner confidence and inner peace we need to let us stand up and face the world.
From our power spot, all the knowledge we need exists and flows. That knowledge includes our intuition, which helps to guide us in what to do. Kondo shows us how we can stay more in tune with our intuition by learning how to cultivate our five senses. She walks us through different exercises for becoming more aware of our bodily sensations and how they can help us develop our intellectual ability to better understand what our mind is experiencing. Through cultivating the awareness of our senses and our intellect, we can access our intuition more easily and more accurately.
Kondo is also a firm believer in learning how to access the divine feminine side of ourselves. While she believes the divine masculine also has its place, we must learn to balance both sides so we and our society can function better. Through achieving balance, we will be better able to forgive and understand others. We all have divine feminine and masculine attributes, but they have often been repressed as a result of what our culture or experiences have taught us. Like with inner child work, we need to work on healing our inner motherhood and fatherhood to achieve greater balance and embrace the divine feminine within us. Kondo shows us how we can make such connections through meditation and other activities.
While all that may sound metaphysical and, consequently, perhaps difficult, Kondo makes it easier by sharing personal stories of how she learned to access and develop such abilities. One of my favorite aspects of the book is that Kondo highlights a lot of Japanese and Hawaiian traditions and beliefs. Raised in Japan, she spent years living in Maui, as well as other places around the world. Her experiences have taught her to find and appreciate the spiritual practices of other cultures. She reveals how this information can be meaningful to us no matter what our cultural or religious backgrounds.
Many of us falter when it comes to learning to love ourselves, but learning that lesson is necessary before we can learn to love others in a truly effective way. Throughout the book, Kondo provides lists of activities we can do to help us practice the techniques she offers. In discussing self-love, she offers five activities that will help us remember that the principle of loving begins within. As an example, the fourth item is:
“Make yourself feel good: Surround yourself with beautiful things that make you feel relaxed and nice. Wear comfortable clothes that make you feel beautiful and sensual. Do not feel guilty about acquiring things for yourself if they improve the quality of your life and your feelings. You may choose things purely for your pleasure, which is different from buying things to get approval or admiration from others.”
Think of this as spiritual retail therapy. We can learn to do simple things for ourselves to show we love others.
Kondo goes on to explain how learning to love ourselves is hugely important because “How you love others is a reflection of how you love yourself. Self-love is completely opposite to selfishness and narcissism, which comes from being unsatisfied. If you want to love fully, you must love yourself fully.”
We learn to love ourselves further when we love others. Kondo recommends loving wholeheartedly, stating, “You learn so much by trying to understand the person you love. Think of the person you love as your mirror reflection, and realize you look into your heart by looking into their heart. You understand yourself and your needs at the same time as you understand your loved one.”
Of course, it’s easier to love when your life is going well, but often, life is full of struggle, stress, and unforeseen disasters. Kondo offers us five strategies for when we face disaster. For many of us, trying to control things we cannot control is one of the things we find most difficult. One of Kondo’s five strategies for facing disaster is to “accept some things are beyond your control,” adding, “The earlier you accept that you can’t control everything, the sooner you can be free from burden.”
Embracing the Art of Love discusses much more, including the concept of reincarnation, how to overcome pain passed down to us by our ancestors or from our past lives, and how to turn our pain over to a Higher Power.
In the end, Kondo states that by embracing the art of love, we can change the world. We can stop history from repeating itself, and we can learn to let go of the idea that life is supposed to be about suffering. I loved when she stated, “you have been taught to believe in a life and future full of misery and hardship—in short, you learned humans are meant to suffer. This is a false belief that has been manipulating us for thousands of years. Suffering and struggle come into your life so you can conquer them and advance your quest to find your true self—life’s obstacles are your adventure. So, rather than being afraid, feel free to take your adventure of life’s ups and downs and enjoy lifelong excitement.”
I hope you will take this adventure. Reading Embracing the Art of Love has been a stimulating and freeing experience for me. I hope it will be the same for you.
For more information about Ayako Kondo and Embracing the Art of Love, visit www.EmbracingTheArtofLove.com.
— Tyler R. Tichelaar, PhD and award-winning author of Odin’s Eye and The Best Place
