Everyone wants to be happy. But what does that really mean? Increasingly, scientific evidence shows us that true satisfaction and well-being come only from within.
Dr. Andrew Weil has proven that the best way to maintain optimum physical health is to draw on both conventional and alternative medicine. Now, in Spontaneous Happiness, he gives us the foundation for attaining and sustaining optimum emotional health. Rooted in Dr. Weil's pioneering work in integrative medicine, the book suggests a reinterpretation of the notion of happiness, discusses the limitations of the biomedical model in treating depression, and elaborates on the inseparability of body and mind.
Dr. Weil offers an array of scientifically proven strategies from Eastern and Western psychology to counteract low mood and enhance contentment, comfort, resilience, serenity, and emotional balance. Drawn from psychotherapy, mindfulness training, Buddhist psychology, nutritional science, and more, these strategies include body-oriented therapies to support emotional wellness, techniques for managing stress and anxiety and changing mental habits that keep us stuck in negative patterns, and advice on developing a spiritual dimension in our lives. Lastly, Dr. Weil presents an eight-week program that can be customized according to specific needs, with short- and long-term advice on nutrition, exercise, supplements, environment, lifestyle, and much more.
Whether you are struggling with depression or simply want to feel happier, Dr. Weil's revolutionary approach will shift the paradigm of emotional health and help you achieve greater contentment in your life.
A dynamic new creative-renewal program from the woman who has inspired millions to discover and recover their creative souls
In The Prosperous Heart, Julia Cameron presents a ten-week program for using your creative heart and soul to lead you to prosperity in all the areas of your life. With inspiring new daily tools and strategies that follow in the footsteps of Cameron's groundbreaking The Artist's Way, this book guides readers in developing a life that is as full and as satisfying as they ever thought possible.
Drawing on her decades of experience working with artists as an expert on the creative process, Cameron shines a clear light on the path to forging a direct relationship between the passion that ignites our creative work and the more practical aspects of living our lives (for example, how one can keep a roof over their head without losing track of their soul!) In this wise volume, Cameron gives readers the courage and permission to live their lives as they create their art: purposely and fully.
Most of us are unsure when to try harder to bring about change in our lives and when it is best to stop trying so hard. For example, if you have been trying to lose weight and get in shape for years, should you hire a trainer to push yourself to try harder, or will you keep failing until you understand more about your own internal resistance? Trying harder is the "All-American" approach. Whether it's dating, dieting, or dealing with a job crisis, we like to believe that we can change just about anything if we are only willing to work hard enough. Not trying so hard is counter-intuitive; it may even seem like laziness or a lack of will power to stop trying so hard. Nonetheless, there are times when trying harder is the definition of insanity; doing the same thing over and over again and expecting something different to happen. So how does one know when it is better to try harder or when to stop trying so hard? Extensive psychological research makes it clear that neither of these approaches used alone is as effective as learning how to integrate the two together. Action without insight frequently leads to disappointment. Change Happens successfully articulates common experiences that we rarely put into words, shows how the process of change looks in the lives of real people, and gives examples and illustrations of different kinds of situations to help readers identify and apply the insight to their own lives. Weiss brings together some of the most compelling contemporary psychological thinking on the process of change and shows how these insights play out and help transform the lives of real people.
A Step-By-Step Course in Embodied Spiritual Awakening
It is possible to live more deeply, more intimately in touch with yourself and with the world around you. It is possible to experience your interconnection with everything, even as you express your own utter uniqueness. All it takes is a subtle inner attunement to your own body and mind. With The Realization Process, Dr. Judith Blackstone shares for the first time a complete audio training course in her original method for embodied spiritual awakening, through a series of transformational exercises taught here step by step.
Highlights
Undoing the “holding patterns” that impede spiritual realization
The subtle core—your entryway into fundamental consciousness
The maturation of the ego
How to stabilize and expand your spiritual awakening
Following your body’s energetic “circuitry” as a path to deeper embodiment
Six hours of insights and guided exercises for transforming your experience of yourself, your relationships, and the world
If you want to find inner peace and wisdom, you don't need to move to an ashram or monastery. Your life, just as it is, is the perfect place to be. Jack Kornfield, one of America's most respected Buddhist teachers, shares this and other key lessons gleaned from more than forty years of committed study and practice.
Topics include:
How to cultivate loving-kindness, compassion, joy, and equanimity
Conscious parenting
Spirituality and sexuality
The way of forgiveness
Committing ourselves to healing the suffering in the world
Bringing Home the Dharma includes simple meditation practices for awakening our buddha nature—our wise and understanding heart—amid the ups and downs of our ordinary daily lives.
Different people process their feelings in different ways--your emotional style is a fundamental aspect of who you are. It affects more than just your outlook on life; it can affect your well-being as well. Many chronic ailments are not the result of germs or genes but are rooted in our emotional biology. The link between emotional type and health explains why modern medicine--which views treatment as “one size fits all”--often fails to successfully treat chronic pain and illness.
Examining the interplay of emotions, chronic illness and pain, and treatment success, Michael Jawer and Dr. Marc Micozzi reveal how chronic conditions are intrinsically linked to certain emotional types and how these ailments are best treated by choosing a healing therapy in line with your type. Explaining the emotional ties behind the 12 most common chronic illnesses--asthma, allergies, chronic fatigue, depression, fibromyalgia, hypertension, irritable bowel syndrome, migraines, post-traumatic stress disorder, psoriasis, rheumatoid arthritis, and ulcers--the authors provide an easy assessment survey that allows you to identify your emotional type as well as the ailments you are susceptible to. Extending this connection between mind and body, they assess 7 alternative healing therapies--acupuncture, hypnosis, biofeedback, meditation, yoga, guided imagery, and relaxation techniques--and indicate which methods work best for each emotional type. Empowering you as a patient to seek out the therapies that will work best for you, this book offers a welcome path to effective pain relief and sustainable health.
Adyashanti asks us to let go of our struggles with life and open to the full promise of spiritual awakening: the end of delusion and the discovery and expression of our essential being. After 15 years as a spiritual teacher, Adyashanti has found that the simpler the teaching, the greater its power to initiate this awakening.
On Falling into Grace, he shares what he considers fundamental insights to "open ourselves to that mysterious element that enters in the hidden and quiet moments and sparks a revolution in the way that we perceive life." Wherever you may be on your own spiritual path, you will find in these sessions down-to-earth guidance on breaking the trance of ego, experiencing the raw energy of emotion, cultivating inner stability, transcending the world of opposites, and more.
Highlights:
The human dilemma–the concept of a separate self and the choice to stop believing the thoughts that perpetuate suffering
“Taking the backward step” into the pure potential of the present moment
Why spiritual awakening can be a disturbing process
Intimacy and availability–feeling absolute union with every part of our experience
True autonomy–the unique expression of our own sense of freedom
In Finding Your Moral Compass, Craig Nakken, author of the best-selling book The Addictive Personality, gives readers in recovery the model and tools needed to make life decisions in the pursuit of good. He offers 41 universally accepted principles, paired as positive and negative counterparts that guide behavior. He then inspires us with one fundamental challenge: To take responsibility for being a force for good by applying these principles to our daily lives. He encourages us to show empathy, be of service to others, and make the choice to stop being an agent of harm.
When Nakken, a former addict, became clean and sober, he faced the 'evil' inside of himself. It was then that he found his moral compass and made the decision to take responsibility for his actions using the Twelve Steps as his guide. He has taught hundreds in recovery to live by the principles of good, one day at a time.
A personal and inspirational memoir from Grammy and Oscar winner Jennifer Hudson, focused on her amazing transformation as she embraced a healthy lifestyle and lost over eighty pounds.
Soulful and sultry, Jennifer Hudson wowed the world with her powerful voice in American Idol's third season, and then took Hollywood by storm with a star turn in Dreamgirls that won her an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. But before we knew her as an American Idol standout, Jennifer was singing in her church choir in the Southside of Chicago. This uplifting memoir tells the story of Jennifer's meteoric rise from American Idol to Dreamgirls to her amazing weight loss on the megablockbuster Weight Watchers diet plan. With the Weight Watchers brand endorsing her, Jennifer gives her fans tips for embracing a healthy lifestyle in order to lose weight and reclaim their bodies. Full of stories from her American Idol days, her experience acting in Dreamgirls, and how her son inspired her to want to live healthfully, this book is a gift for her millions of fans and an inspiration for anyone struggling with weight issues.
Most of us are no strangers to health problems, illness, or pain, but what if there’s a solution to restore our well-being that doesn’t involve drugs, surgery, or other medical procedures?
Well, there is, and you’ll find it within your own body. That’s right! Your body has a built-in capacity to heal itself—a remarkable system of self-repair that works day in and day out—and improving its ability to heal is within your control.
Yet most people don’t fully grasp the body’s incredible power to heal itself, largely because traditional medicine has led us to believe that health comes from the outside in and not from the inside out. Did you know, for example, that approximately 50 percent of all illnesses, when left alone, will eventually heal themselves?
A stirring call to move beyond religion for the guidance to improve human life on individual, community, and global levels—including a guided meditation practice for cultivating key human value
Ten years ago, in his best-selling Ethics for a New Millennium, His Holiness the Dalai Lama first proposed an approach to ethics based on universal rather than religious principles. Now, in Beyond Religion, the Dalai Lama, at his most compassionate and outspoken, elaborates and deepens his vision for the nonreligious way. Transcending the mere "religion wars," he outlines a system of secular ethics that gives tolerant respect to religion—those that ground ethics in a belief in God and an afterlife, and those that understand good actions as leading to better states of existence in future lives. And yet, with the highest level of spiritual and intellectual authority, the Dalai Lama makes a claim for what he calls a third way. This is a system of secular ethics that transcends religion as a way to recognize our common humanity and so contributes to a global human community based on understanding and mutual respect.
Beyond Religion is an essential statement from the Dalai Lama, a blueprint for all those who yearn for a life of spiritual fulfillment as they work for a better world.
