If you examine the lives of the most influential people who have ever walked among us, you will discover one thread that winds through them all. They have been aligned first with their spiritual nature and only then with their physical selves.

—Albert Einstein

We live in an impersonal world that is disconnected, overloaded with information, and colored by values and realities often in conflict with real love and personal freedom. Our youth live in a culture of screens-images that keep them plugged in to surface values and unplugged from themselves. We are bombarded by advertising about what possessions we must have, what medications we must take, and what we should look like to feel good about ourselves; but the core values are not so celebrated. The same "culture of screens" affects the individual who feels isolated despite the proliferation of "things" to do, who has failed in the great work of every life-to discover one's true self.

Love and Freedom: Pathways to Personal Transformation leads the reader toward self-development and self-actualization by identifying pathways and choices that bring the individual into connection with the personal realities of love, friendship, moral character, and virtue within a dynamic three-stage process: Dependency, Independence and Interdependence. Only by living as a real person while seeing others as persons in their own right, can we attain anything close to personal freedom-freedom from an overactive mind, false identities, negative emotions, and the isolating loneliness of modern living.

Philip and Dakota

Within the chapters of Love and Freedom, readers will find tools via stories, examples, and questionnaires to assess their lives, character, and virtues, and that will highlight the choices and challenges inherent in each of the three stages of self-development. Chapters include The Context of Personal Development, Freedom from Dependency, Independence and Personal Freedom, Interdependence, The Process of Personalization, and The Spirituality of Personalism.

If we fail as individuals to create a consistent, empowering and conscious relationship with ourselves, in our intimate relationships we will always feel wanting for affirmation, acceptance, love, and validation, and will look to our partners to fulfill our needs. Life proceeds in people-pleasing modes of behavior…an attempt to gain acceptance from and control over the other person in order not to risk losing our perceived source of wellbeing.

When we become an authentic person in our relationships, instead of using, manipulating, or engaging others in a functional rather than personal way, we effectively and positively change ourselves, others, and our community, and we live life at a deeper level of passion and service.

Love and Freedom offers strategies and challenges that fulfill and give meaning to one's personal independence and freedom. These strategies actualize/unify the whole person rather than seeking to fix various problems pertaining to feelings, mind, or body. Within this holistic approach, spirituality and religion are seen as part of the psychological process of self-development and personal growth, and these aspects support and fulfill each other.

Of him who has chosen his destiny, who has started upon his quest for the source of his being. The more faithfully you listen to the voice within you, the better you will hear what is sounding outside. And only he who listens can speak. Is this the starting point of the road towards the union of your two dreams—to be allowed in clarity of mind to mirror life and in purity of heart to mold it?

—Dag Hammarskjold, Markings

The embracing messages of Love and Freedom are seeing and accepting others as persons in their own right, and in the concept that true love and freedom lies in being our authentic selves. In this vital, new, and empowering book, the power of Personalism is offered-living in relationship with your self, founded on the empowerment of self-love that has incorporated a true and personalized spirituality. For to be truly spiritual is to be oneself and remain true to that person we have chosen to be.

About the author

Philip Ferranti, M.Ed., is the founder of Transformation Seminars and The Ferranti Foundation and has made presentations to more than ten thousand people and many professional organizations and businesses. Philip Ferranti is the author of eight other books including Hiking! The Ultimate Natural Prescription for Health and Wellness and his regional bestseller, 120 Great Hikes in and near Palm Springs.

Love and Freedom: Pathways to Personal Transformation
ISBN 0-595-39486-8, $18.95
Available through iUniverse: 800-288-4677 ext.501
e-mail: book..orders@iuniverse.com
www.iuniverse.com/bookstore/index.asp

For more information, review copies and/or interview requests, please contact:
Karen Villanueva 505) 764-8323 e-mail: authorcare@aol.com

Man wishes to be confirmed in his being, by man, and wishes to have a presence in the being of the other . . . secretly and bashfully he watches for a Yes which allows him to be and which can come to him only from one human person to another.

—Martin Buber, I and Thou