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ISBN 978-1590306840

Daring to Trust offers key insights and practical exercises for exploring and addressing our trust issues. Most relationship problems are essentially about trusting. Whether it’s fear of commitment, insecurity, jealousy, or a tendency to be controlling, the real obstacle is a fundamental lack of trust—both in ourselves and in our partner.

Some people are trustworthy and some fail or betray us. Our path of mindfulness and loving-kindness is then to receive loyalty with appreciation and to handle betrayal by expressing our feelings but not by retaliating. We ourselves, in any case, can make a personal commitment to be trustworthy in all our dealings no matter how others treat us. We can't trust everyone but everyone can trust us.

This book is mainly about trust in relationships. However, there are chapters on the three other directions trust can take. We can learn to trust ourselves, to trust reality (that is, trust whatever happens to us as a path), and to trust a higher power than ourselves. These four types of trust not only contribute to having healthy relationships, they are also the foundation of emotional wellbeing and freedom from fear.

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ISBN 978-1590308240

This book provides a detailed and straightforward vision of what faith and spirituality can look like in adult consciousness. We explore our inherited and often child-like understanding of God, religion, and life’s plaguing questions. We then offer adult alternatives in the light of mysticism, depth psychology, and our new appreciation of evolutionary cosmology.

We look at the differences between religion and spirituality in the light of their similar components: beliefs, a moral code, rituals, and devotion. The emphasis is on self-help so the chapters outline exactly how human maturation in faith thrives best with religious views that are open-ended rather that parochial, metaphorical rather than literal, and respectful of our potential rather than rigidly demanding obedience.

This book is written for the average person and is not biased for or against any religious tradition. It can be of assistance to us in designing an expansive and adult spiritual path. This book is a gentle reply to the atheism of our post-modern world though it does not recommend a return to the “God in the sky” but rather an opening to the transcendent, the More within and around us everywhere, where adult faith abounds.

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ISBN: 978-0809146918

Becoming healthy, both psychologically and spiritually, includes releasing the full range of our imagination about who we are and can be. Writing poetry can be a surprising tool in that exciting venture. What it takes to express ourselves poetically is exactly what can open us to our inner world and connect us to others and to nature. Using Buddhist and Jungian perspectives, this book offers a fresh and inspiring approach to personal growth, one that taps into our inherent creativity and the versatility of poetry. When we write a poem about some life event we may notice that we are naming needs that we never guessed were in us or longings we were afraid to acknowledge. This is the power of poetry to grant us access to the lost or disavowed territories in ourselves. Poetry, of course, is totally legitimate when it is written or read just for fun or for an appreciation of language or images. But we would miss out on its many-splendored possibilities if we did not also reach into poetry to explore our buried treasures. Poetry may have seemed daunting in school but here is a chance for it to become quite charming and wonderfully personal. This book offers an opportunity to use our hearts and pens to explore who we abundantly are.

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ISBN 978-1590307427

A touching fact about us is that we seem hard-wired to replay the past, especially when it includes emotional pain or disappointment. We tend to go through life simply casting new people in the roles of key people, such as our parents or past partners with whom there is still unfinished business. This phenomenon, called transference, is unconscious. What we transfer are feelings, needs, expectations, defenses, fantasies, beliefs, and attitudes. Transference can be our way of telling the untold story inside us. We can learn to notice clues about how our past is still very much alive in our present relationships. In this book, we also find practices to help us clear up our old business and form healthy relationships that no longer have to replicate the past. Then authentic intimacy can bloom.

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ISBN 978-1590305713

This is a book of quotations gathered from a variety of sources in psychology and spirituality, especially Buddhist, Christian, Jungian, and transpersonal. The quotations are brief and can be used as springboards for contemplation. They are divided into three sections:
     Psychological insight into the work we can do
     on ourselves to build a healthy personality.
     Spiritual awareness of our calling to act in
     the world with integrity and loving-kindness.
     Mystical realization exploring the manifold
     pathways to the divine heart of the universe that
     was always our own heart.
As we meditate daily on one or more of these quotations, we come upon our own unique path and our common human destiny: to love unconditionally, to access wisdom, and to bring compassionate healing to the world around us.

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ISBN 978-0966990829

In Mary Within Us, the Jungian archetype of the feminine aspect of God as personified by Mary is shown to be built into the design of every human psyche. This book is about the archetypal and mystical meanings in the titles of Mary in the universal Church since medieval times. My book shows how we have always venerated not the literal Mary but the feminine dimension of the divine that she represents and enriches. The book explores the threefold image of Mary as virgin, mother, and queen and shows how these are motifs in the human psyche. (This is the revised new edition: 2007)

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“What a brilliant confluence of images and energies! David Richo has made a very useful set of connections between Mary and the deepest archetypes of the human psyche. This is how theology and psychology should come together. Good scholarship that could lead to good prayer.”   
– FR. RICHARD ROHR, O.F.M. Center for Action and Contemplation, Albuquerque, New Mexico. 

ISBN 978-0-9669908-5-0

This book presents a spirituality of heart based on the metaphor of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. We explore the symbolism of the heart in world religious traditions. We then trace the historical thread of Christian devotion into modern times with a focus on the theology of Teilhard de Chardin and Karl Rahner to design a devotion that respects the new cosmology. This book may appeal both to Catholics and to people from other religious traditions.

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Everyday Commitments
Choosing a Life of Love, Realism, and Acceptance

Shambhala, 2007
 

To set our lives on a positive course, many spiritual traditions encourage us to live in upright ways and to show loving-kindness toward ourselves and others. In this book, we consider fifty-two commitments we can make to ourselves in order to set our lives on a new and healthier course, one characterized by greater kindness, compassion, joy, and composure. We begin by taking small steps that lead to the expression of wholesomeness and loving-kindness. Interior shifts follow and soon we find that we are acting with greater love and virtue without having to put so much effort into it. We are living our lives at the heart level. Our destiny is to display in our lifetime the timeless design of love and wholeness that has always been inside us. Choices and attitudes that show integrity and loving-kindness help us do that.

Available used or as an ebook.  Now revised and in paperback as
Coming Home to Who You Are.

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The Power of Coincidence
How Life Shows Us What We Need to Know

Shambhala, 2007
 

Synchronicity, "meaningful coincidence," happens so that we can find our unique personal destiny. We learn how to remember dreams and we see how they figure into our life purpose. Synchronicity is one way the universe/Higher Power grants hospitality to us on our human pilgrimage and makes everything work for the best. Just the right people and events have come along so that we can be all we were meant to be.

In Italian: Quando le Cose Non Accadono Per Caso (Armenia, Milano)

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When Love Meets Fear
How to Become Defense-Less and Resource-Full

Paulist Press, 1997

We all construct walls so that people will not get too close or love us too much. We can learn ways to let love through or in, and to approach someone who fears our love. There are techniques that can release the scared ego’s hold-outs and hide-outs. We enter gently into the jungle of fear about love, loss, aloneness, abandonment, engulfment, etc. We become heroically defenseless enough to find inner resources so fear can no longer stop us. 

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How To Be An Adult
A Handbook on Psychological and Spiritual Integration

Paulist Press, 1991
 

This is a handbook on how to become an adult who is actualizing a strong, healthy ego and going beyond it to release the spiritual powers of the Self. It is the heroic journey of exploring our personal issues and finding ways to deal with our childhood wounds, our need to be more assertive, our fear, anger, and guilt. We then explore relationships and how to be happier in them: what intimacy is and how to increase it, the setting of boundaries, and our fears of closeness. Finally we look at our spirituality, unconditional love, and affirmations of wholeness.

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