Owning it: Your Bullsh*t-Free Guide to Living with Anxiety


Caroline Foran - 2017
    Here, in Owning It, she chronicles her journey from the kind of all-consuming fear where leaving the house for milk was too petrifying a prospect, and holding down a high-octane Editor job was no longer possible, to spending every day crying under her duvet, wondering how the hell she was going to pull herself through. But then she did; she owned it. For those facing the same struggle, Caroline explores exactly what anxiety is, its triggers and the various treatments. From CBT, acupuncture, diet and the often debated role of medication - she examines with honesty, humour and a bullsh*t free perspective what worked for her and gives us a no-frills account of anxiety from the front line.'The hardest lesson and most important I learned was that embracing your anxiety is the key to recovering from it and living a life where it doesn't define you. Don't get me wrong; I still have shitty, stressful days at work, or days when I feel a little below par (one time I was particularly exhausted, ratty and hormonal and I cried because my boyfriend ate my last chicken nugget. I'm 28, I know) - but that, dear friend, is the human experience. What I have now, however, is confidence in myself to pull through whatever life throws at me, thanks to the invisible arsenal of effective tools I keep tucked under my arm.'

Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness


Jon Kabat-Zinn - 1990
    (The somewhat confusing title is from a line in Zorba the Greek in which the title character refers to the ups and downs of family life as "the full catastrophe.") But this book is also a terrific introduction for anyone who has considered meditating but was afraid it would be too difficult or would include religious practices they found foreign. Kabat-Zinn focuses on "mindfulness," a concept that involves living in the moment, paying attention, and simply "being" rather than "doing." While you can practice anything "mindfully," from taking a walk to cleaning your house, Kabat-Zinn presents several meditation techniques that focus the attention most clearly, whether it's on a simple phrase, your breathing, or various parts of your body. The book goes into detail about how hospital patients have either improved their health or simply come to feel better despite their illness by using these techniques, but these meditations can help anyone deal with stress and gain a calmer outlook on life. "When we use the word healing to describe the experiences of people in the stress clinic, what we mean above all is that they are undergoing a profound transformation of view," Kabat-Zinn writes. "Out of this shift in perspective comes an ability to act with greater balance and inner security in the world." --Ben Kallenreissue 2005

Search Inside Yourself: The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness (And World Peace)


Chade-Meng Tan - 2012
    With Search Inside Yourself, Chade-Meng Tan, one of Google’s earliest engineers and personal growth pioneer, offers a proven method for enhancing mindfulness and emotional intelligence in life and work.Meng’s job is to teach Google’s best and brightest how to apply mindfulness techniques in the office and beyond; now, readers everywhere can get insider access to one of the most sought after classes in the country, a course in health, happiness and creativity that is improving the livelihood and productivity of those responsible for one of the most successful businesses in the world.With forewords by Daniel Goleman, author of the international bestseller Emotional Intelligence, and Jon Kabat-Zinn, renowned mindfulness expert and author of Coming To Our Senses, Meng’s Search Inside Yourself is an invaluable guide to achieving your own best potential.

The Art of Happiness


Dalai Lama XIV - 1998
    And he makes everyone else around him feel like smiling. He's the Dalai Lama, the spiritual and temporal leader of Tibet, a Nobel Prize winner, and an increasingly popular speaker and statesman. What's more, he'll tell you that happiness is the purpose of life, and that "the very motion of our life is towards happiness." How to get there has always been the question. He's tried to answer it before, but he's never had the help of a psychiatrist to get the message across in a context we can easily understand. Through conversations, stories, and meditations, the Dalai Lama shows us how to defeat day-to-day anxiety, insecurity, anger, and discouragement. Together with Dr. Cutler, he explores many facets of everyday life, including relationships, loss, and the pursuit of wealth, to illustrate how to ride through life's obstacles on a deep and abiding source of inner peace.

Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience


Brené Brown - 2021
    As she maps the necessary skills and an actionable framework for meaningful connection, she gives us the language and tools to access a universe of new choices and second chances—a universe where we can share and steward the stories of our bravest and most heartbreaking moments with one another in a way that builds connection. Over the past two decades, Brown’s extensive research into the experiences that make us who we are has shaped the cultural conversation and helped define what it means to be courageous with our lives. Atlas of the Heart draws on this research, as well as on Brown’s singular skills as a storyteller, to show us how accurately naming an experience doesn’t give the experience more power, it gives us the power of understanding, meaning, and choice. Brown shares, “I want this book to be an atlas for all of us, because I believe that, with an adventurous heart and the right maps, we can travel anywhere and never fear losing ourselves.”

Inner Engineering: A Yogi's Guide to Joy


Sadhguru - 2016
    In fact, yoga is a sophisticated system of self-empowerment that is capable of harnessing and activating inner energies in such a way that your body and mind function at their optimal capacity. It is a means to create inner situations exactly the way you want them, turning you into the architect of your own joy.             A yogi lives life in this expansive state, and in this transformative book Sadhguru tells the story of his own awakening, from a boy with an unusual affinity for the natural world to a young daredevil who crossed the Indian continent on his motorcycle. He relates the moment of his enlightenment on a mountaintop in southern India, where time stood still and he emerged radically changed. Today, as the founder of Isha, an organization devoted to humanitarian causes, he lights the path for millions. The term guru, he notes, means “dispeller of darkness, someone who opens the door for you. . . . As a guru, I have no doctrine to teach, no philosophy to impart, no belief to propagate. And that is because the only solution for all the ills that plague humanity is self-transformation. Self-transformation means that nothing of the old remains. It is a dimensional shift in the way you perceive and experience life.” The wisdom distilled in this accessible, profound, and engaging book offers readers time-tested tools that are fresh, alive, and radiantly new. Inner Engineering presents a revolutionary way of thinking about our agency and our humanity and the opportunity to achieve nothing less than a life of joy. Praise for Sadhguru and Inner Engineering “Contrarian and consistent, ancient and contemporary, Inner Engineering is a loving invitation to live our best lives and a profound reassurance of why and how we can.”—Sir Ken Robinson, author of The Element, Finding Your Element, and Out of Our Minds: Learning to Be Creative “I am inspired by Sadhguru’s capacity for joy, his exuberance for life, and the depth and breadth of his curiosity and knowledge. His book is filled with moments of wonder, awe, and intellectual challenge. I highly recommend it for anyone interested in self-transformation.”—Mark Hyman, M.D., director, Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine, and New York Times bestselling author “Inner Engineering is a fascinating read of Sadhguru’s insights and his teachings. If you are ready, it is a tool to help awaken your own inner intelligence, the ultimate and supreme genius that mirrors the wisdom of the cosmos.”—Deepak ChopraFrom the Hardcover edition.

No Excuses!: The Power of Self-Discipline


Brian Tracy - 2010
    Unfortunately, most people give in to the two worst enemies of success: they take the path of least resistance (in other words, they’re lazy) and/or they want immediate gratification: they don’t consider the long-term consequences of the actions they take today.No Excuses! shows you how you can achieve success in all three major areas of your life:1. Your personal goals.2. Your business and money goals.3. Your overall happiness.Each of the 21 chapters in this book shows you how to be more disciplined in one aspect of your life, with end-of-chapter exercises to help you apply the “no excuses” approach to your own life. With these guidelines, you can learn how to be more successful in everything you do—instead of wistfully envying others who you think are just “luckier” than you. A little self-discipline goes a long way...so stop making excuses and read this book!

Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving


Pete Walker - 2013
    I also wrote it from the viewpoint of someone who has discovered many silver linings in the long, windy, bumpy road of recovering from Cptsd. I felt encouraged to write this book because of thousands of e-mail responses to the articles on my website that repeatedly expressed gratitude for the helpfulness of my work. An often echoed comment sounded like this: At last someone gets it. I can see now that I am not bad, defective or crazy…or alone! The causes of Cptsd range from severe neglect to monstrous abuse. Many survivors grow up in houses that are not homes – in families that are as loveless as orphanages and sometimes as dangerous. If you felt unwanted, unliked, rejected, hated and/or despised for a lengthy portion of your childhood, trauma may be deeply engrained in your mind, soul and body. This book is a practical, user-friendly self-help guide to recovering from the lingering effects of childhood trauma, and to achieving a rich and fulfilling life. It is copiously illustrated with examples of my own and my clients’ journeys of recovering. This book is also for those who do not have Cptsd but want to understand and help a loved one who does. This book also contains an overview of the tasks of recovering and a great many practical tools and techniques for recovering from childhood trauma. It extensively elaborates on all the recovery concepts explained on my website, and many more. However, unlike the articles on my website, it is oriented toward the layperson. As such, much of the psychological jargon and dense concentration of concepts in the website articles has been replaced with expanded and easier to follow explanations. Moreover, many principles that were only sketched out in the articles are explained in much greater detail. A great deal of new material is also explored. Key concepts of the book include managing emotional flashbacks, understanding the four different types of trauma survivors, differentiating the outer critic from the inner critic, healing the abandonment depression that come from emotional abandonment and self-abandonment, self-reparenting and reparenting by committee, and deconstructing the hierarchy of self-injuring responses that childhood trauma forces survivors to adopt. The book also functions as a map to help you understand the somewhat linear progression of recovery, to help you identify what you have already accomplished, and to help you figure out what is best to work on and prioritize now. This in turn also serves to help you identify the signs of your recovery and to develop reasonable expectations about the rate of your recovery. I hope this map will guide you to heal in a way that helps you to become an unflinching source of kindness and self-compassion for yourself, and that out of that journey you will find at least one other human being who will reciprocally love you well enough in that way.

Pillow Thoughts


Courtney Peppernell - 2016
    It is divided into sections to read when you feel you need them most. Make a cup of tea and let yourself feel.

The One Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results


Gary Keller - 2013
    The One Thing explains the success habit to overcome the six lies that block our success, beat the seven thieves that steal time, and leverage the laws of purpose, priority, and productivity.

Zen: The Art of Simple Living


Shunmyō Masuno - 2009
    . . In clear, practical and easy to follow lessons - one a day for 100 days - renowned Buddhist monk Shunmyo Masuno draws on centuries of wisdom to show you how to apply the essence of Zen to modern life.You will learn how to exhale deeply to eliminate negative emotions, to arrange your house simply to clear your thinking, to line up your shoes at night to bring order to your mind, to plant a single flower and watch it grow, to worry less about what you cannot control, and so much more . . .You will even make time to think about nothing at all.Simplify your life with the art of Zen, and learn how to feel more relaxed, fulfilled, and with a renewed sense of peace.

Finding Your Element: How to Discover Your Talents and Passions and Transform Your Life


Ken Robinson - 2013
    When people find their Element, they tune in to their highest levels, and live their best lives. Now, in his new book, Robinson answers the fundamental question: How do I find my Element? With his signature wry wit, Robinson offers a series of practical exercises to help you discover your own talents and passions. Along the way, he tells the stories of many "ordinary" people in all walks of life who have overcome obstacles of every sort to find their Element. And he explores fundamental principles and vital questions to help you find yours: What are you good at? What do you love? What makes you happy? Where are you now? Your answers to these and many others will provide you with invaluable keys to discovering your Element. As concerns about the economy, education, and the environment continue to grow, the need for individuals to find their own Element has never been greater. No matter how old you are, where you are, or what you do now, if you're searching for your Element, this book is for you. It will launch you on the most important quest you've ever undertaken: the quest to discover your true self and the life you really want to lead.

Lessons in Stoicism: What Ancient Philosophers Teach Us about How to Live


John Sellars - 2019
    But what exactly did the Stoics believe? In Lessons in Stoicism, philosopher John Sellars weaves together the key ideas of the three great Roman Stoics -- Seneca, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius -- with snapshots of their fascinating lives, to show us how their ideas can help us today. In vivid prose, Sellars shows how the works of these three Stoics have inspired readers ever since, speaking as they do to some of the perennial issues that face anyone trying to navigate their way through life. Their works, fundamentally, are about how to live -- how to understand one's place in the world, how to cope when things don't go well, how to manage one's emotions and how to behave towards others. Consoling and inspiring, Lessons in Stoicism is a deeply thoughtful guide to the philosophy of a good life.

The Healing Self: A Revolutionary Plan for Wholeness in Mind, Body, and Spirit


Deepak Chopra - 2018
    Only by getting past the artificial division between mind and body can personal, holistic healing become real. In our fast-paced and ever-changing world, the burden of healing rests on the individual making the right lifestyle choices every day. Chopra and Tanzi want to guide us to make the best decisions possible and they offer a cutting-edge, Seven-Day Action Plan which allows the reader free choice to develop a personalized path to self-healing.Besides this unique feature, The Healing Self prioritizes two factors--stress and inflammation--that are emerging as crucial to lifelong health and well-being. A host of chronic disorders like hypertension, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and much more, are known to takes years and sometimes decades to develop before the first symptoms appear. The medical system isn't set up to attend to chronic low-grade inflammation or the everyday stresses that take their toll over a lifetime. Therefore, learning the secrets of self-healing is mandatory; otherwise, each of us is gambling with our very future.Chopra's inspiring prose and Tanzi's experience as the world's leading researcher in brain health and Alzheimer's disease make for a unique combination of knowledge and wisdom. The Healing Self is a high point in a partnership that has benefitted millions of people to date. It is destined to be a landmark book in the growing movement of self-care and lifelong wellness.

With the End in Mind: Dying, Death, and Wisdom in an Age of Denial


Kathryn Mannix - 2017
    Kathryn Mannix has studied and practiced palliative care for thirty years. In With the End in Mind , she shares beautifully crafted stories from a lifetime of caring for the dying, and makes a case for the therapeutic power of approaching death not with trepidation, but with openness, clarity, and understanding. Weaving the details of her own experiences as a caregiver through stories of her patients, their families, and their distinctive lives, Dr. Mannix discusses the universal, but deeply personal, process of dying. With meditations on life, death, and the space between them, With the End in Mind describes the possibility of meeting death gently, with forethought and preparation, and shows the unexpected beauty, dignity, and profound humanity of life coming to an end.