The Book of Two Loves: Trauma and Awakening on the Journey to Love By Robert Glass

What if the wounds that make love difficult are also the doorway to a deeper dimension of love?

What is the connection between the intensely personal love we feel for another person and the boundless, luminous love described by saints, mystics, and bodhisattvas? What can experiences of spiritual awakening teach the rest of us about intimacy, healing, and how we love?

Shortly after entering a Zen Buddhist monastery, Robert Glass experiences a profound spiritual awakening: an encounter with an overwhelming love that seems limitless, radiant, and always present. Still living in the afterglow of that experience, he finds himself drawn to Jane, a fellow monk whose presence awakens an entirely different longing.

Suddenly, he is torn between two loves: one universal and seemingly boundless, the other deeply human, physical, and vulnerable.

But beneath both lies something Robert has not yet fully understood, a childhood trauma that left its mark not only on his body but also on his relationships and his capacity to give and receive love.

The Book of Two Loves follows Robert’s decades-long search to understand how these seemingly different forms of love might belong to the same spiritual journey. His path takes him through seven years of Zen monastic practice, six years of graduate study, relationships and loss, and years spent traveling with students through Japan, India, and Israel as he explores the world’s great religious traditions.

Along the way, an unexpected possibility begins to emerge: perhaps intimacy does more than comfort us. Perhaps the safety and vulnerability of loving another person allows our oldest wounds to surface, not to make us suffer again, but to give us an opportunity to meet them differently – and to discover a whole new dimension of love.

Part spiritual memoir, part exploration of trauma, intimacy, and the mystery of human connection, The Book of Two Loves asks what it might mean to stop seeing our deepest wounds solely as obstacles and to begin seeing the possibilities hidden within them.

For readers interested in Buddhism, spiritual awakening, mysticism, healing, relationships.