Living Love: 12 Heart-Centered Practices to Transform Your Life

By Victoria Price

"Living Love helps aspiring practitioners discover simple ways to create daily heart-centered practices that can help anyone experience the real, the good, the true, and the beautiful — which is, of course, what we were created for. This book reminds us that we were all made by Love to love.” — Father Richard Rohr, author of the New York Times bestseller The Universal Christ

With Living Love: 12 Heart-Centered Practices to Transform Your Life, Victoria Price, the author of Vincent Prince: A Daughter’s Biography and The Way of Being Lost: A Road Trip to My Truest Self, shows how you can be the person you long to be — someone who overflows with immense joy, experiences deep connection, expresses their creativity, and feels profound peace.
 A spiritual self-help book, Living Love demonstrates how to turn aside the fears that stand between you and self-fulfillment and to embrace the healing power of love, permitting it to transform every aspect of your life. From creating a daily routine of joy and gratitude to developing a practice of presence and forgiveness, Victoria provides the tools for taking delight in being alive, countering fear, and developing compassion and openness.

"Living Love is as elementary and accessible a Life Guide as it is a profound examination of the inner psyche. Victoria Price has dedicated her sharp and probing mind to the deepest corridors of her emotions, and then expanded out to reach every one of us, hungry to live our days in the most meaningful, joyous ways possible. You will do more than read this book. You will work it into your inner soul, page by page." — Diana Nyad, author of Find a Way

"Victoria Price throws a marvelous light on the notion of what it is to PRACTICE. It's not about running scales on the piano or hitting endless tennis balls. This is a gentle, deeply insightful guide to the practice of the art of Joy. I use this book whenever my mind goes dark and I need a good old reset of the spirit." — Jane Anderson, Emmy-award winning screenwriter
 
"Victoria Price is a master of spiritual inspiration. In Living Love, she takes a big idea (what it's like to live from a place of love) and breaks it down into a dozen steps, showing the reader how to accomplish each one with the help of simple but effective exercises that have helped her in her own journey. Victoria acts as a guide, a cheerleader, a trusted friend, and a professional coach with a wicked sense of humor who is patient enough to walk every bit of the journey with you. Part of the brilliance of this book is that Victoria won't push you to change the way many self-help books try to do. Instead, she'll teach you to heal — and then spiritual growth is inevitable. Be forewarned: You'll put this book down a different person than you were when you picked it up." — Katy Koontz, editor-in-chief, Unity Magazine

“For anyone who is letting fear stop them, this book will teach you how to take the driver’s seat of your mind. You will finish the last page a changed person, understanding that Living Love is not optional but the only truth there is.” — Carly Pollack, author of Feed Your Soul
 
“Victoria Price has written an open-hearted, very personal guide for taking the journey back ‘home’ to our True Self, and widening the universal circle of Love. Using her own experiences and incorporating numerous wisdom traditions, we are taken on a journey into the daily discipline of practicing Love — and come out the other end of this trip inward with a greater sense of joy and compassion.” — Jane S. Galloway, author of The Gateways

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ixia Press
• Release date: Apr 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9780486846798

Victoria Price

Victoria Price is the author of the critically acclaimed Vincent Price: A Daughter's Biography and the narrator of her father's memoir, The Book of Joe. A popular inspirational speaker on topics ranging from art collecting to the life of her father, she has appeared on Good Morning America, A&E's Biography, and NPR's Fresh Air and Morning Edition. Her work has been featured in publications such as USA Today, Art & Auction, and The New York Times.

Book preview

1

Out with the Old, In with the New

MOVING FROM PROBLEM TO PRACTICE

At the end of every year, most of us make a list of New Year’s resolutions.

Coming out of the holiday season, having overeaten at parties and overspent on gifts, can feel like the perfect time to think about what we want to do better as we face the beautiful blank slate of a brand-new year.

According to Inc. magazine, not only do we make resolutions, but we also make the same resolutions: dieting or eating healthier, exercising, losing weight, saving more and spending less, quitting smoking, reading more, drinking less, and finding a new job.

When you look at that list, what do you see? Probably a few things you’ve wanted to do yourself. I certainly do! But what I also see is precisely what makes New Year’s resolutions notoriously unreliable. So unreliable, in fact, that studies have shown that although 60 percent of us make resolutions every year, less than 8 percent of us achieve them! (That doesn’t stop us though. Next year we’ll start all over again, determined to believe that this time it will be different.)

What I see when I look at that list is mostly fear.

Every single choice we make every single day comes down to fear or Love. Which one we choose determines our experience and our outcome in every area of our lives. Too often when we make resolutions, we are making them from a place of fear, even though it may not feel that way. Fear is the reason why resolutions usually fail.

I’m going to repeat what I just wrote because understanding this is the key to pretty much everything: Every day we choose between fear and Love in all that we do or say or feel. When we were little, choosing Love came naturally. You can see it in the laughing, smiling faces of kids. Even children who are challenged by illness, poverty, or abuse find their way back to joy far more easily than adults who seem to have everything. As we get older, however, our choices become more fear-based—even choices to be or do better. This is because we are bombarded by fear-based messages everywhere we go. We’ve been hearing them our whole lives, from our parents and our peers, our teachers and the media. Fear-based stories were implanted in all of us, passed down from generation to generation often in unconscious