The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton


Thomas Merton - 1973
    We left the ground—I with Christian mantras and a great sense of destiny, of being at last on my true way after years of waiting and wondering..." With these words, dated October 15. 1968, the late Father Thomas Merton recorded the beginning of his fateful journey to the Orient. His travels led him from Bangkok, through India to Ceylon, and back again to Bangkok for his scheduled talk at a conference of Asian monastic orders. There he unequivocally reaffirmed his Christian vocation. His last journal entry was made on December 8, 1968, two days before his untimely, accidental death. Amply illustrated with photographs he himself took along the way and fully indexed, the book also contains a glossary of Asian religious terms, a preface by the Indian scholar Amiya Chakravarty, a foreword and postscript by Brother Patrick Hart of the Abbey of Gethsemani, as well as several appendices, among them the text of Merton's final address.

Buddhism Plain and Simple


Steve Hagen - 1997
    It is about being awake and in touch with what is going on here and now. When the Buddha was asked to sum up his teaching in a single word, he said, "Awareness." The Buddha taught how to see directly into the nature of experience. His observations and insights are plain, practical, and down-to-earth, and they deal exclusively with the present. In Buddhism Plain and Simple, Steve Hagen presents these uncluttered, original teachings in everyday, accessible language unencumbered by religious ritual, tradition, or belief.

The Structure of Magic I: A Book about Language and Therapy


Richard Bandler - 1975
    Volume I describes the Meta Model, a framework for comprehending the structure of language; Volume II applies NLP theory to nonverbal communication.

God Never Blinks: 50 Lessons for Life's Little Detours


Regina Brett - 2009
    When Regina Brett turned 50, she wrote a column on the 50 lessons life had taught her. She reflected on all she had learned through becoming a single parent, looking for love in all the wrong places, working on her relationship with God, battling cancer and making peace with a difficult childhood. It became one of the most popular columns ever published in the newspaper, and since then the 50 lessons have been emailed to hundreds of thousands of people. Brett now takes the 50 lessons and expounds on them in essays that are deeply personal. From "Don't take yourself too seriously-Nobody else does" to "Life isn't tied with a bow, but it's still a gift," these lessons will strike a chord with anyone who has ever gone through tough times--and haven't we all?

Untamed


Glennon Doyle - 2020
    It is the story of how one woman learned that a responsible mother is not one who slowly dies for her children, but one who shows them how to fully live. It is the story of navigating divorce, forming a new blended family, and discovering that the brokenness or wholeness of a family depends not on its structure but on each member’s ability to bring her full self to the table. And it is the story of how each of us can begin to trust ourselves enough to set boundaries, make peace with our bodies, honor our anger and heartbreak, and unleash our truest, wildest instincts so that we become women who can finally look at ourselves and say: There She Is.

Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays


Camille Paglia - 1992
    A collection of twenty of Paglia's out-spoken essays on contemporary issues in America's ongoing cultural debate such as Anita Hill, Robert Mapplethorpe, the beauty myth, and the decline of education in America.

Radical Candor: Be a Kickass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity


Kim Malone Scott - 2017
    While this advice may work for everyday life, it is, as Kim Scott has seen, a disaster when adopted by managers.Scott earned her stripes as a highly successful manager at Google and then decamped to Apple, where she developed a class on optimal management. She has earned growing fame in recent years with her vital new approach to effective management, the “radical candor” method.Radical candor is the sweet spot between managers who are obnoxiously aggressive on one side and ruinously empathetic on the other. It’s about providing guidance, which involves a mix of praise as well as criticism—delivered to produce better results and help employees achieve.Great bosses have strong relationships with their employees, and Scott has identified three simple principles for building better relationships with your employees: make it personal, get (sh)it done, and understand why it matters.Radical Candor offers a guide to those bewildered or exhausted by management, written for bosses and those who manage bosses. Taken from years of the author’s experience, and distilled clearly giving actionable lessons to the reader; it shows managers how to be successful while retaining their humanity, finding meaning in their job, and creating an environment where people both love their work and their colleagues.

Balancing Heaven and Earth: A Memoir of Visions, Dreams, and Realizations


Robert A. Johnson - 1998
    His masterful works--including the best selling He, She, Inner Work, and Owning Your Own Shadow-are known and loved as much for their beautiful retellings of timeless myths and folktales as for their deep wisdom and profound insight.Balancing Heaven and Earth reveals, for the first time, Johnson's own fascinating and mystical life-from his near-death experience at the age of eleven to the lifelong soul journey that has informed his writing and taught him how to live a spiritual life in the endlessly challenging modern world. Full of compelling, humorous, and surprising stories of encounters with an assortment of "sages, saints, and sinners," it lays bare Johnson's own inner world and its dazzeling landscape of powerful dreams, mystical visions, and synchronistic events.Beginnning with a vivid retelling of the childhood accident that claimed the lower part of his right leg, Johnson describes the life-defining moment when he was transported by a mystical vision to a realm that exists just beyond ordinary consciousness-a realm he calls the "Golden World." With this experience, described as "both my curse and my blessing," Johnson is launched on a spiritual quest that leads him in search of Eastern wisdom, to encounters with such wise men as J. Krishnamurti and D.T. Suzuki, and finally to Carl Jung, who shows him his destiny revealed in a dream. Johnson's experiences lead him to a unique understanding and acceptance of the slender connecting threads at work in all our lives, guiding us and shaping who we are-"call it fate, destiny, or the hand of God."As much a personal guide as a memoir, Balancing Heaven and Earth teaches us to follow , as Johnson has, the subtle influences of dreams, visions, and even our deepest sufferings in order to live attuned to our spiritual selves. A pure delight for Johnson's many fans and a splendid example of his trademark blend of illustrative myth and psychological insight, this is a work of incomparable beauty and inspiration showcasing the wisdom of a lifetime.

Leaders Eat Last


Simon Sinek - 2013
    His second book is the natural extension of Start with Why, expanding his ideas at the organizational level. Determining a company’s WHY is crucial, but only the beginning. The next step is how do you get people on board with your WHY? How do you inspire deep trust and commitment to the company and one another? He cites the Marine Corps for having found a way to build a culture in which men and women are willing to risk their lives, because they know others would do the same for them. It’s not brainwashing; it’s actually based on the biology of how and when people are naturally at their best. If businesses could adopt this supportive mentality, employees would be more motivated to take bigger risks, because they’d know their colleagues and company would back them up, no matter what. Drawing on powerful and inspiring stories, Sinek shows how to sustain an organization’s WHY while continually adding people to the mix.

Lights Out for the Territory: 9 Excursions in the Secret History of London


Iain Sinclair - 1997
    This is a record of long journeys on foot, from Hackney to Chingford and down to the river, around the City in its ring of steel, and through the heart of Westminster, Lambeth and Millbank.

Soul to Soul: Communications from the Heart


Gary Zukav - 2007
    with dustjacket, clean bright copy

The Seventeen Traditions


Ralph Nader - 2007
    At once eye-opening, thought-provoking, and surprisingly fresh and moving, Nader’s The Seventeen Traditions is a celebration of uniquely American ethics certain to appeal to fans of Mitch Albom, Tim Russert, and Anna Quindlen—an unexpected and most welcome gift from this fearlessly committed reformer and outspoken critic of corruption in government and society. In a time of widespread national dissatisfaction and disillusionment that has given rise to new dissent characterized by the Occupy Wall Street movement, the liberal icon shows us how every American can learn from The Seventeen Traditions and, by embracing them, help bring about meaningful and necessary change.

What Really Matters: Searching for Wisdom in America


Tony Schwartz - 1995
    At the height of his career as a journalist, Tony Schwartz hit an unexpected wall.  Why did success suddenly feel so empty?  How could he add richer meaning to his everyday life?  What guides could he trust on the road to wisdom?During the next five years his search for answers took him from a meditation retreat in the mountains of Utah to a biofeedback laboratory in Kansas, from a peak-performance workshop at a tennis academy in Florida to a right-brain drawing course in Boston.  Blending the hunger of a seeker with a journalist's hard-headed inquiry, he discovered the best teachers and techniques for inner development--and identified the potential pitfalls and false gurus he met along the way.  What he found dramatically changed his life.  It may change yours as well.

This One Wild and Precious Life: A Hopeful Path Forward in a Fractured World


Sarah Wilson - 2020
    The climate crisis, political polarisation, racial injustice and coronavirus have left many of us in a state of spiritual PTSD. We have retreated, morally and psychologically; we are experiencing a crisis of disconnection - from one another, from our true values, from joy, and from life as we feel we are meant to be living it.Sarah Wilson argues that this sense of despair and disconnection is ironically what unites us - that deep down, we are all feeling that same itch for a new way of living. this one wild and precious life opens our eyes to how we got here and offers a radically hopeful path forward. Drawing on science, literature, philosophy, the wisdom of some of the world's leading experts, and her personal journey, Wilson weaves a one-of-a-kind narrative that lights the way back to the life we love. En route, she leads us through a series of 'wildly awake' and joyful practices for reconnecting again that include:- Go to your edge. Do what scares you and embrace discomfort daily. Use it to grow into your Big Life.- #buylesslivemore. Break the cycle of mindless consumption and get light with your life.- Become a soul nerd. Embrace poetry, deep reading, art, and classical music to light up your intellect.- Get 'full-fat spiritual'. How to have an active practice - beyond the 'lite' 'rainbows and unicorns' - and use it to change the world.- Hike. Just hike. Walking in nature reconnects us with ourselves, and with our true purpose.- Practise wild activism. If you can get 3.5 per cent of a population to participate in sustained, non-violent protest, change happens. We create our better world.The time has come to boldly, wildly, imagine better. We are being called upon, individually and as a society, to forge a new path and to find a new way of living. Will you join the journey?

The Type-Z Guide to Success: A Lazy Person’s Manifesto to Wealth and Fulfillment


Marc Allen - 2006
    Not only that, but he considers it a key to his success. Here, he shows how anyone who is disorganized, inexperienced, overwhelmed, financially challenged, or just flat-out lazy can still create the life of their dreams. In the book’s short, inspiring introduction, Allen describes the system he devised on his 30th birthday that completely changed his life — a four-step system so simple to understand and easy to implement that it could be called revolutionary. In the following chapters, he details the importance of each of the four steps — dream, imagine, believe, create — and shows how to forge them into a blueprint for success. A final section includes tips for staying on — or getting back on — course. A quick, breezy read, the book uses centered bold type scattered throughout to ensure that even the laziest readers can grasp its essence in just a few minutes.