142: Exploring the Love Map with Carol Lynn Pearson

In this episode, LDF host Dan Wotherspoon is joined by the wonderful, gifted, powerful author Carol Lynn Pearson to talk about her most recent book and the ideas that underlie it. The book, The Love Map: Saving Your Love Relationship and Incidentally Saving the World, is the flowering of a more-than-forty-year interest that Carol Lynn has had in the deep energies of the soul and universe that are at play in both societies and individual human lives. In this book, she focuses on the chakra system, which outlines seven energy centers in our bodies, each with its own different but vital contribution to our well-being, both physically and spiritually.

Carol Lynn uses the metaphor of "kingdoms" in speaking about the contributions of (and potential dangers inherent in) each chakra, but focuses on the fourth kingdom, the "heart" chakra, as the most important for our love relationships. But learning to live and flourish in this kingdom only comes after all sorts of inner wrestles, especially with ego and the dangerous (and wonderful) energy of the third kingdom in which "power" is preeminent.

Through compelling narrative and first-person voice, The Love Map, traces the journey of human history as Carol Lynn describes the type of energy that is ascendent in different chronological epochs, as well as through developments in the life of Joanna, a young woman, the narrator, whose three-year marriage is nearing collapse. The book is a depiction of Joanna's hero's journey. The book's voice and prose allows us to understand ourselves and human development writ large through dramatic encounters with each energy in a way that isn't accessible through more academic approaches. We "experience" our lives in these kingdoms, and we are grateful to Carol Lynn for teaching us of these kingdoms through story, which includes humor, heartaches, and faced fears.

You don't want to miss this book! Nor this conversation!