After coming of age and graduating in the tumultuous sixties, Ahad Cobb found himself wandering without direction. A chance road trip with a friend led him to Ram Dass, thus beginning an enthusiastic journey of spiritual awakening and deep involvement with three spiritual communities originating in the sixties and still thriving today: the Ram Dass satsang, Lama Foundation, and Dances of Universal Peace. Sharing his opening to the inner life, his poetry and dreams, his spiritual passions and astrological insights, Ahad Cobb's memoir begins with his summer with Ram Dass and his satsang, immersed in meditation, devotion, and guru's grace. His path takes him to New Mexico, to a newly established intentional spiritual community, Lama Foundation, where he lives on the land for thirteen years, experiencing the disciplines and rewards of communal living and spiritual practice. At Lama, he is initiated into universal Sufism in the tradition of Hazrat Inayat Khan and the Dances of Universal Peace. He travels overseas to spend time with Sufis in Chamonix, Istanbul, Konya, and Jerusalem. After the birth of his son, Ahad moves off the mountain and serves as sacred dance leader and musician for 35 years in Santa Fe and later Albuquerque. When Lama Foundation is nearly destroyed by a forest fire in 1996, Ahad serves as a trustee, guiding the rebuilding of the community. He imparts insights from his personal work with Jungian analysis and trauma release, shares his search for and discovery of his soul mate, and details his twelve years of study with Hart DeFouw in the wisdom stream of Vedic astrology. Offering a poignant reflection on life lived from the inside out, and the delicate balance between spirituality and psychology, this memoir leads readers on an outer and inner journey steeped in poetry, music, astrology, dreams, inner work, and spiritual practice in the context of community devoted to awakening.

Courtship, The Lost Art revivifies the concept of courtship, derived from the mystical tradition of the fraternities of love and explores a deeper understanding of the relationship phenomena one encounters in society today by bringing the psychological to the door of the spiritual. Dr. Bennett examines the challenges one meets in seeking love: the personal and cultural mythologies that mold our psyches, the archetypal figures one encounters, the biochemical surges that enrapture and confuse, and the inner work necessary to clear away obstacles to love. This leads to an exploration of alternative approaches to relationship, the interplay of love and security, of desire and romance, sacred sexuality, imagining realities together, soul-making in the world, dialogue with the beloved, alchemical marriage, and spousal mysticism, circling around the contemplation of courtship of the beloved in the modern world. Courtship, The Lost Art is a gentle and respectful inquiry into the nature of love, approaching the presence of love from many perspectives, engaging the reader in an exploratory conversation, a dialogue, which is based on clinical experience, scholarship, and reflection. The reader is encouraged to increase self-awareness rather than looking for answers outside oneself. It is a living text that initiates and ignites the reader to examine, reflect, locate, and expand his or her own experience.