Leaning into Curves, a memoir, is about our potential to transcend suffering and reinvent life by following the intuitive intelligence of the heart.
It is a tale of forbidden love, shattering loss, and mystical encounters that guide a psychologist to awaken spiritually and to find more effective ways to help her therapy clients.
Imagine a 24-year-old woman who falls in love and marries a Catholic priest, a missionary. An avid motorcyclist, he teaches her to lean deep into curves with him for over 200,000 miles of sweet, wild rides.
A fall from a ladder plummets her into pain and despair, and she is widowed when her first love meets an untimely death on Christmas Eve.
While grieving, she encounters a kahuna on the Hawaiian Island of Molokai. He tells her she will soon meet a teacher who possesses the mystical keys to Love.
Imagine synchronicities that fulfill the kahuna’s prophecy, leading her to new love, and a transcendent secret for bringing healing to a fractured world.
The premise of this book is that intuition -- moments when the spiritual eyes of love fly wide open and we see possibility with crystal clarity – is a life-raft available to all.
Leaning into Curves, a memoir, is about our potential to transcend suffering and reinvent life by following the intuitive intelligence of the heart.
It is a tale of forbidden love, shattering loss, and mystical encounters that guide a psychologist to awaken spiritually and to find more effective ways to help her therapy clients.
Imagine a 24-year-old woman who falls in love and marries a Catholic priest, a missionary. An avid motorcyclist, he teaches her to lean deep into curves with him for over 200,000 miles of sweet, wild rides.
A fall from a ladder plummets her into pain and despair, and she is widowed when her first love meets an untimely death on Christmas Eve.
While grieving, she encounters a kahuna on the Hawaiian Island of Molokai. He tells her she will soon meet a teacher who possesses the mystical keys to Love.
Imagine synchronicities that fulfill the kahuna’s prophecy, leading her to new love, and a transcendent secret for bringing healing to a fractured world.
The premise of this book is that intuition -- moments when the spiritual eyes of love fly wide open and we see possibility with crystal clarity – is a life-raft available to all.
I held my dead husband’s Christmas gifts to my chest and sobbed. Unmoored at the age of forty-six in a sea of bereavement, waves of sorrow swamped me.
My last glimpse of Jim in his gifts—a brown plaid flannel shirt and gold suspenders—is paired with the click of the lid of a bronze casket as it closed our human life together. It was a twist of fate that I found the right clothes to bury him in just days before his sudden death.
The violent winds of change that Jim’s death ushered in cracked the shutters over my heart wider. There was a treasure carried on those winds—the mystical keys to seeing a little bit more about the mystery of life, to seeing more about love, and to seeing with certainty that love is who I am, who we are, at our shared core.
This is a therapist’s tale of finding love—at home and in my work—by listening to the intuitive wisdom of my heart. It is a tale of losing the beat in the noise of mistrust, exhaustion, resentment, and grief. It is a tale of how love, a brilliant force, uses life as medicine. It is a tale of forgiveness. It is a tale of how intuitive wisdom pointed the way around blindsiding curves and dark mountains.
We are given everything we need on our wild rides through life. Our safety is guaranteed when we lean into curves and flow with love through life’s mysteries. Trust is the path. Beauty is the destination.
Leaning Into the Curves is a humble and reflexive spiritual journey through marriage, the practice of psychotherapy, and a spiritual awakening. It tells the story of Lin’s marriage to Jim, her first love, who taught her to lean into the curves while driving and who would move tortoises out of the road. It’s also a story about Linda’s love for her daughter Laura, her days learning to become a psychologist, her eventual practice, a tragic loss, and her return to love.
Each step of the way, Linda takes a humble approach to her life, her marriage, and motherhood. She shows the reader the insights she gains along the way, her love of beauty and wild spaces, and a spiritual journey that helps her understand areas of her marriage and how she could have understood her world differently.
As a reader, I felt as though I was leaning into the curves with Linda, seeing the beauty she saw, watching the views from her home windows, feeling the snowy mountains, and experiencing the pains and losses alongside her. The imagery and emotion feel very alive, and there are moments when I feel as though I could touch a sleeping child or feel the warmth of a fire in a freezing farm house.
Although this journey of awakening is Linda’s, she is able to take her readers along with her, giving humble insights into areas of learning so that we can learn too. I too was thinking back to moments where exhaustion got the better of me, where we got stuck in a moment and thought it was symbolic of my life as a whole instead of a frustrating experience, or where I would relive past pains instead of the gifts that came before them.
This is a book to laugh with, cry with, and to feel your soul resonate to. It’s beautiful, sad, healing and extraordinary. It makes a perfect choice for readers who feel stuck or frustrated with life. If you are looking for an empathetic guide through a challenging time, Linda offers a balm to the soul.