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