A no-excuses, cut-to-the-chase program for defining, training for, and achieving your goals
As life gets busier and more complicated we crave something larger and more meaningful than just ticking another item off our to-do list. In the past, we’ve looked to religion or outside guidance for that sense of purpose, but today fewer people are fulfilled by traditional approaches to meaning. Bestselling author, psychotherapist, and creativity coach Eric Maisel offers an alternative: an eight-week intensive that breaks through barriers and offers insights for living each day with purpose. Once you understand how meaning operates, how meaning and life purpose are related, and what concrete steps you can take toward fulfilling your purpose, you will never run out of meaning again. This program will develop self-awareness and self-confidence and give you what you need to fully live the best possible life.
In Love Cycles, veteran couples therapist Linda Carroll presents a groundbreaking model of the five natural stages of romantic relationships – the Merge, Doubt and Denial, Disillusionment, Decision, and Wholehearted Love – and a guide for navigating through them toward lasting love. Love Cycles helps readers understand where they are in the cycle of their relationship and provides a clear strategy for how to stay happy and committed, even in difficult times.
Practical Ways to Tap into and Use Your Highest Wisdom
Each day, we are bombarded with data and opinions, and each day we must make choices that steer us toward our own best approach to life. And, according to Simone Wright, we often forget or don’t understand how to use the best tool available: our intuition, which is our “first intelligence” that can cut through the chatter to inherent wisdom. She explains that intuition is an innate and universal biological and energetic function that can be used like a human GPS system to guide us toward effective action and peak performance. Riveting examples and powerful exercises demonstrate how we can use this “sixth sense” as naturally as any, in all areas of our lives.
Come See the Garden That Is Your Life
When Zen teacher Karen Maezen Miller and her family land in a house with a hundred-year-old Japanese garden, she uses the paradise in her backyard to glean the living wisdom of our natural world. Through her eyes, rocks convey faith, ponds preach stillness, flowers give love, and leaves express the effortless ease of letting go. The book welcomes readers into the garden for Zen lessons in fearlessness, forgiveness, presence, acceptance, and contentment. Miller gathers inspiration from the ground beneath her feet to remind us that paradise is always here and now.
Most couples – because they watch so many of their peers divorce and are themselves the products of failed marriages – don't have many successful long-term-relationship role models. Parenting and communication issues are perennial, while some challenges, like increasingly 24-7 work lives and economic hardships, mark the current decade. Despite all this, psychotherapist and clinical social worker Marcia Naomi Berger asserts that most couples can make love last – they just need to learn how. Berger answers this need with a deceptively simple prescription: have an interruption-free thirty-minute (or even shorter) meeting each week and follow an agenda that includes the kind of appreciation and planning for fun that foster intimacy and pave the way for collaborative conflict resolution. Berger has refined these techniques while working with hundreds of couples – with results that are both practical and profound.
Many teachers stress the importance of living in the present moment. Few give the actual practices to make it attainable. This book teaches you how to return to the incredible navigational system of the body and more fully inhabit each moment.
For over twenty-five years, Suzanne Scurlock-Durana has masterfully taught her step-by-step practice of present moment awareness through her own combination of bodywork and CranioSacral therapy. The practices of Full Body Presence help you find a deeper awareness in the moment, even in the midst of chaos, family and work demands, or the pressure to perform. This deeper awareness also brings a fuller sense of trust and confidence in yourself and in the world. Full Body Presence is filled with concrete, life-friendly explorations and instruction clearly presented in both the book and the free accompanying downloadable audio files.
We all yearn to have time for personal needs and creative dreams – after all, this is our life to make the most of. And we all know how hard it is to remember what really matters. With distractions from jobs, aging parents, and children – not to mention women’s perennial fear of being labeled “selfish” – following our own desires and dreams can become ever more elusive. The Life Organizer aims to help you shift your focus, augmenting traditional goal setting with the ease that comes from steady inner listening and mindfulness. It will become your trusted companion – and maybe the most important book you’ll ever own.
In 1979, Dr. Bernie S. Siegel, a successful surgeon, took a class from Elisabeth Kübler-Ross that focused on crayon drawing for healing, especially with patients facing life-threatening disease. Siegel incorporated into his practice these techniques – many of which were laughed at by others in the medical community. But his Exceptional Cancer Patients “carefrontation” protocol facilitated healings, often deemed miraculous, and attracted attention. “Dr. Bernie” discovered and shared the fact that while patients might need antibiotics, surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy, their bodies also want to heal. He found that this innate propensity could be aided by unconventional practices, including drawing. Why? Drawing produces symbols often representing the subconscious. Siegel shows how to interpret drawings to help with everything from understanding why we are sick to making treatment decisions and communicating with loved ones. All those facing ill health, and those caring for them, personally and professionally, will welcome the hands-on, patient-proven practices offered here.
In the depths of grief, some find solace in their faith, while others feel that God has deserted them. In this gentle and wise guide, a beloved spiritual teacher counsels that prayer works – but not always in the ways we expect. Welshons, who has worked closely with Ram Dass and Stephen Levine and trained with Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, confronts life’s most challenging experiences directly, acknowledging both the reality and inevitability of unexpected, unwanted change. Then, with insights gathered from the world’s great spiritual traditions, he shows how to use painful circumstances as fuel for enlightenment. In short, step-by-step chapters, Welshons shares stories of transformation from his own life and the lives of those he has counseled. With deep empathy, he lights a path toward the communion, peace, and joy that are possible when we open our hearts to life in its totality.
When in doubt, make belief. For author and news anchor Jeff Bell, these are words to live by. Literally. As someone who has spent much of his life battling severe obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), Bell has had to overcome crippling uncertainty few people can imagine. In this powerful follow-up to his critically acclaimed memoir, Rewind, Replay, Repeat, Bell expounds on the principles of applied belief that allowed him to make such a remarkable recovery from this “doubting disease” and the lessons he’s learned while traveling the country talking about doubt. With the help of more than a dozen leading experts, Bell offers readers practical techniques for pushing through the discomfort of uncertainty – whether it stems from OCD or just everyday worries – and demonstrates how a shift from decisions based on fear and doubt to ones based on purpose and service can transform any life.
Featuring interviews with Sylvia Boorstein, Patty Duke, Dan Millman, Leon Panetta, Tom Sullivan, and others