ROBERT’S LATEST BOOK JUST OUT!
TRANSFORMATION THROUGH INTIMACY:
The Journey Toward Awakened Monogamy
(revised edition)
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I love this book! There is a depth, a magic, and sense of ultimate fulfillment that we find through learning to love one other person completely. Through that immense courage and commitment we find that our beloved is actually a window into everything. This is a hero's and a heroine's journey; it asks everything of us, but also gives us all we have ever longed for. You need a great guide on such a journey, and Robert Augustus Masters is such a one, walking by your side as you venture into deeper waters, finding an ever deeper healing and freedom through awakened monogamy.
— Arjuna Ardagh, author of The Translucent Revolution
Robert Augustus Masters offers a thought provoking, clear, passionate and powerful roadmap straight to the nectar of intimate love. In the crucible/sanctuary of committed monogamous partnership, Masters shows us how to realize our deepest potentials for mutual healing, integration and awakening, as well as how to come radically alive in what he calls the “ashram of the 21st century.”
— Katherine Woodward Thomas, author of Calling in "The One"
For anyone who wants to more deeply understand the seeming mystery of relationship — and transform their partnership to a sublime union of souls.
— Barry Vissell, MD & Joyce Vissell, RN, MS, authors of The Shared Heart
A couple of years ago, in his book Spiritual Bypassing, the brilliant teacher and wise therapist Robert Augustus Masters gave us all a splendid, pragmatic antidote to one of the great ills of our time: our pervasive attempts to achieve spiritual transcendence through misguided, subjective self-absorption. Now he's done it for us again, dissecting our equally pervasive ills and showing us ways to wholeness and sanity in the universally fascinating, troubling arena of intimate relationship.
Transformation through Intimacy: The Journey Toward Awakened Monogamy is so comprehensive, so down to earth, so vivid and raw, so unflinching and kind, so patient and persistent, it's hard to imagine that a more potent guidebook to healing the multiple dis-eases of today’s intimacies could possibly appear. There isn't a couple on Earth, nor a single seeking someone to love, nor anyone exploring multiple partnering or other unconventional arrangements, who can't benefit by looking into the numerous mirrors Robert holds up here as he traces our potential growth through four stages of maturity in intimacy.
And what a compassionate discipline he has engaged in the writing! Robert has distilled into simple, ordinary essences his highly sophisticated awareness of philosophical, developmental, and clinical theory and his vast years of experience in therapeutic and teaching practice. The result is a book that anyone with a feeling heart, a questing mind, and a dedicated willingness to deeply encounter self and other, can surely understand and grow from immensely—again and again.
— Saniel Bonder, founder, Waking Down in Mutuality, author, Ultimaya 1.0 and Healing the Spirit/Matter Split
This is an important and tremendously useful book, packed with wisdom and insight. Highly recommended!
— Ken Wilber, author of The Integral Vision
Transformation Through Intimacy: The Journey Toward Awakened Monogamy is a bold, refreshing guide for anyone craving a deeper, more authentic connection with their beloved — AND who is willing to dive into new depths of compassion, understanding, and honesty. The rewards are exponential, as I've experienced personally. Robert truly is a master.
— Mary Allen, author of The Power of Inner Choice
An illuminating and practical book about how intimate relationship can be a path for deep healing, transformation, and awakening. Masters writes with strength and precision — pay particular attention to his groundbreaking chapters on emotion and sexuality. The author has clearly lived the material presented.
— Gay Hendricks, Ph.D., author of Five Wishes and The Big Leap
Robert Masters grabs us like no other couples therapist because his ear for the normalized reactivity and interpersonal laziness we bring to our close relationships is alarmingly familiar. No one can read this book and mindlessly fall back on, "I'm doing the best I can" or "I'm only human." But, happily...you will no longer want to. Masters' no-nonsense recognition of our immaturity fuels a profound and hopeful understanding of couples development where a genuine trust in Beingness neither bypasses immaturity nor allows it to run the show. Through his own intense investigation of intimate relationship, Masters teaches us that if we are willing to roll up our sleeves, we can discover that what we have always wanted actually exists: The safety with our beloved to be raw and unfiltered....and the safety to truly live in our Bigness. At a time when many are questioning the viability of longterm monogamy, Transformation Through Intimacy: The Journey Toward Awakened Monogamy shows us that we ultimately have only two romantic choices: Boredom or Grace.
— Nancy Dreyfus, Psy.D., author of Talk To Me Like I'm Someone You Love
In this oh so brilliant book, Masters calls us out from behind our relational hiding places, reminding us that there is a sacred, expansive path lying in waiting for us beyond the bondage of our unconscious connections. With powerful and heartfelt language, he paints a new and wondrous portrait of possibility for intimate relationship, one that awakens us to the often unseen universe that lives between and within our hearts. It is right there, close at heart, just waiting to be uncovered, embraced, and explored. Transformation through Intimacy: The Journey Toward Awakened Monogamy is a magnificent map of awakening. I highly recommend it to anyone who is ready to plunge deeper in their relational life.
— Jeff Brown, author of Soulshaping
A profoundly illuminating book! Robert Augustus Masters' breadth of expertise and depth of heart reveals the way to become intimate with all of who you are. His guidance is compassionate, penetrating, and clear as a bell, calling you into the very heart of relational intimacy. When Transformation through Intimacy: The Journey Toward Awakened Monogamy becomes required reading for teenagers, our world will transform! Robert is truly a master of human transformation. If you are ready to deepen your emotional intelligence and experience wholehearted, wide-awake, relational intimacy, this book is for you.
— Terah Kathryn Collins, author of The Western Guide to Feng Shui
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SPIRITUAL BYPASSING:
When Spirituality Disconnects Us From What Really Matters
Purchase Spiritual Bypassing NOW at Amazon.com
“This is a wonderfully significant and important book, and is highly recommended. Its contents are truly mandatory for this day and age.”
— Ken Wilber, author of The Integral Vision
“This timely and penetrating analysis of spirituality’s shadow provides a much needed counterpoint for those who tend to get blinded by its light.”
— Stephen Batchelor, author of Buddhism without Beliefs
“There is much wisdom and good information in this book. Robert joins a growing number of wise teachers who understand that the personal and the universal must be combined to bring true and genuine spiritual awakening.”
— Jack Kornfield, author of A Path With Heart and After the Ecstasy, the Laundry
"The escape act and forms of denial and self-delusion that Robert Masters diagnoses as 'spiritual bypassing' have been with us for millennia — perhaps since our early ancestors first discovered psycho-spiritual experiences that seemed to relieve the pressures of living and dying. But the syndrome has become endemic in our frothy age of virtual everything — so we are all blessed by the appearance of this diamond of a book. Here a priest of our true wellness has distilled the blood, sweat, and tears of his decades of fervent triage work in the trenches of the bypassing into essences of truly healing wisdom. Every spiritual practitioner would do well to study Spiritual Bypassing again and again. So would every one of us who presume to teach any spirituality at all. Thankfully, it's as much compassionate antidote as prophetic critique. May it be put to grateful use as long as the illness it treats continues to ravage human bodies, souls, and lives."
— Saniel Bonder, founder, Waking Down in Mutuality, and author of Healing the Spirit/Matter Split and Waking Down
“Uncompromising and truth telling, this book is an antidote to spiritual obesity. What emerges is the call to psychological clarity as essential to the mature spiritual life. Here is soul fuel for those who would enter the road less traveled — the deeply examined life as part of spiritual practice.”
— Jean Houston, Ph.D., author of A Mythic Life
“Traversing the muddy waters of contemporary spirituality requires a willingness to meet its seen and unseen challenges with ruthless self-honesty and keen discernment. Robert addresses “the many faces of spiritual bypassing” with intellectual rigor, hard-earned insight, and emotional intelligence. It is a lucid, well-written, and practical guide for both new and seasoned practitioners on the spiritual path.”
— Mariana Caplan, Ph.D., author of Eyes Wide Open: Cultivating Discernment on the Spiritual Path and Halfway Up the Mountain: the Error of Premature Claims to Enlightenment
“Robert Masters has given us a great gift — a tremendously useful guide to examining our tendencies to spiritual bypassing, clearly the most comprehensive and accessible treatment available of this crucial topic. His work is a great contribution to the ongoing integration of psychotherapy and spiritual practice, and to our understanding of the meaning of spiritual maturity.”
— Donald Rothberg, Ph.D., author of The Engaged Spiritual Life
"In Spiritual Bypassing, Robert Masters eloquently reminds us of something we have unknowingly misplaced on our spiritual journeys: Mother Earth. In our efforts to bypass our earthly challenges, we have disconnected from the Ground of our very being, seeking our wholeness on a pogo stick to the stars. In poignant and clarifying language, Robert calls us back home, confronting us with our avoidance, inviting us to find our spirituality in the heart/depths of our humanness. In an era where detachment models for spirituality are becoming dangerously prevalent, his inclusive message is of profound importance. It may not appeal to the part of us that wants the path to be easy, but it will speak loudly to the part of us that longs for the truth. I recommend it wholeheartedly."
— Jeff Brown, author of Soulshaping
"In Spiritual Bypassing, Robert Augustus Masters offers a wake-up call — more of a shout — to those of us who have unwittingly fallen prey to all manner of promising and seductive antidotes to our pain and suffering in the form of detached spiritual teachings and New Age magical thinking. The book is a sobering and powerful reminder that our present embodiment, in all its flawed, messy humanness, cannot be conveniently sidestepped, and so invites us inward to a face-to-face encounter and embrace with the raw truth of who we really are. Masters' unique and at times disarming prose style blends a poetic sensibility with a surprising stark clarity that points us to "What-Really-Matters."
— Eliezer Sobel, author of The 99th Monkey: A Spiritual Journalist's Misadventures with Gurus, Messiahs, Sex, Psychedelics and Other Consciousness-Raising Experiments
“There is much hard-won wisdom in this work. Spiritual Bypassing is a detailed, point-by-point description of how so-called spirituality can be used by some to actually avoid individuation, adulthood, and the daimonic. When Carl Jung noted that "neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering," he hinted that, especially for the Western psyche, spiritual practice itself can be just such a sneaky neurosis. This insightful, firm, confrontive yet compassionate book promotes and encourages the complementary marriage of spiritual practice and psychotherapy, recognizing that they are—and, at best, have always been—basically two integrally related sides of the same existential coin: The most profound psychotherapy is essentially spiritual; and the deepest spiritual quest includes some depth psychology. Neither approach can be excluded on the unpredictable path toward selfhood. But even the powerful fusion of spirituality and psychotherapy cannot offer transcendent perfection. Selfhood or spiritual enlightenment is never about escaping or distorting inner or outer reality to serve our egos, but requires lovingly accepting and embracing reality as it is and on its own terms.”
— Stephen Diamond, Ph.D., author of Anger, Madness, and the Daimonic: The Psychological Genesis of Violence, Evil, and Creativity
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