A Conversation On Love & Loss
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A Conversation On Love & Loss with Polly Young-Eisendrath, PHD

When All You Want Is Taken Away: A Personal Love Story of Discovery Through Loss

Sometimes change is deeply unwelcome, disrupting everything we have ever wanted. In Polly Young-Eisendrath’s case, her beloved husband and best friend gradually reversed his cognitive and emotional maturity as early onset Alzheimer’s disease swept through his neurons like a wild fire.

Polly and her husband were long-time practitioners of Buddhism and they came to embrace the inescapable without fanfare or self-pity as their love changed from a partnership, to him becoming profoundly dependent on her. She eventually placed him in end-of-life care.

Dr. Young-Eisendrath will share from her new book, The Present Heart: A Memoir of Love, Loss and Discovery, a provocative and daring memoir, in which she shows how our most intimate relationships, often the source of our greatest pain, can prove to be our path to enlightenment.

The book also offers a new perspective on how to maintain engaged, reciprocal relationships—with a partner, parent, child, or friend—under any and all circumstances. Polly will also share lessons learned about the nature of personal love as a spiritual practice of vulnerability and equanimity that requires being a whole self and accepting another as a whole self, as well.

"Polly Young-Eisendrath illuminates love as a path—not a goal—of self and mutual discovery that goes to the very heart of our nature." - Barry Magid

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Join us on this special evening as Polly takes us on an unsentimental meditation on the healing power of love in the face of early onset Alzheimer’s that attempts to answer the question “What is love, anyway?”

POLLY YOUNG-EISENDRATH, Ph.D., is the author of 14 books, including The Self-Esteem Trap, The Resilient Spirit, and Women and Desire, and is a Jungian analyst, psychologist, and clinical associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Vermont. A frequent speaker and facilitator at conferences and a teacher of mindfulness, she lives maintains a clinical and consulting practice in central Vermont.

Polly is dedicated to an interpersonally sustainable and ecologically sane world in which we recognize, moment-by-moment, that we are webbed in a network of relationships and conditions that require compassion and kindness for ourselves and others if we are to become confident about our lives.

“In this provocative and daring memoir, Polly Young-Eisendrath has mined her inner landscape more than most people will ever even dream. Her digging yields surprising gems that will be precious to anyone interested in transforming hardship into wisdom—and even joy.”—Jaimal Yogis

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There will be a book-signing following the conversation. Books will be available for purchase at the event. Should you want to purchase the book prior to the event simply click the book link below.

“Polly Young Eisendrath’s brilliant new book skillfully blends Buddhist sensibility with depth psychology to illumine the human heart’s deepest longing for love. Besides shining the bright light of these two wisdom traditions on love in all of its mystery, she also makes her own personal path toward love and its loss transparent. Her well-honed craft, self-awareness through love and loss, and profound understanding of human nature make this book useful to all of us engaged in seeking meaning and relationship.” – Grace Schireson

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