Book picks similar to
Drama of Cosmic Enlightenment: Parables, Myths, and Symbols of the White Lotus Sutra by Bhikshu Sangharakshita
non-fiction
spiritual-reads
audio-books
buddhism
Lost Daughter: A Daughter's Suffering, a Mother's Unconditional Love, an Extraordinary Story of Hope and Survival.
Nola Wunderle - 2013
I hadn't slept properly for weeks. All of us had been waiting for this moment for months. Our fourth child was soon to arrive ...This is the story of 18-year-old Kartya Wunderle, one of 64 babies flown out of Taiwan in the early 80s. Babies stolen from their mothers or sold by their families and adopted out to unsuspecting overseas parents. At 15, Kartya began to use heroin in an attempt to take away the pain of not knowing who she was and where she came from. Her distraught parents watched their beautiful daughter slowly slip away from them, spiralling towards a tragic and almost inevitable conclusion. Out of desperation and fired by an unconditional love for her daughter, Nola Wunderle resolved to find Kartya's birth mother and change the ending to Kartya's story. An amazing search for one woman in a country of 22 million began. The result was nothing short of miraculous, and made Kartya a national hero in her homeland. Lost Daughter is a moving testament to the power of love and the strength of the human spirit, one that will humble and inspire all who read it.
Freefall
Tom Read - 1998
This autobiography is the story of his descent into madness and his attempts to find his way out again.
My Year of Dirt and Water: Journal of a Zen Monk's Wife in Japan
Tracy Franz - 2018
An Alaskan alone—and lonely—in Japan, she begins to pay attention.My Year of Dirt and Water is a record of that journey. Allowed only occasional and formal visits to see her cloistered husband, Tracy teaches English, studies Japanese, and devotes herself to making pottery. Her teacher instructs her to turn cup after cup—creating one failure after another. Past and present, East and West intertwine as Tracy is twice compelled to return home to Alaska to confront her mother’s newly diagnosed cancer and the ghosts of a devastating childhood. Revolving through the days, My Year of Dirt and Water circles hard questions: What is love? What is art? What is practice? What do we do with the burden of suffering? The answers are formed and then unformed—a ceramic bowl born on the wheel and then returned again and again to dirt and water.
Manna: When You're Out of Options, God Will Provide
Steve Farrar - 2016
In those moments, we are utterly dependent on God for well-timed help. If he doesn't come through, we're finished. For forty years, two million Israelites were in the wilderness, and God fed them supernaturally every morning with manna, teaching people who doubted him he can be trusted with everything they needed to survive. This is a lesson we need to learn too. In personal stories and applications of biblical lessons, Manna reveals how God specializes in making a way where there is no way. He proved it every day to the nation of Israel, never missing a day of being faithful. He was never late, and he was never early. He was always just in time. And he will be for you.
Daily Habits: How To Win Your Day: Your Days Define Your Destiny
Prashanth Savanur - 2015
But why not gain all these in your life? And, how would you go about balancing them all out? One book can give you all the answers : How To Win Your Day. Inside the pages of How To Win Your Day,details on how to conquer each day in your life with more peacefully, embrace your victories and challenges with gratitude,use your will power to overcome those challenges and accomplish all of this with the right attitude. How To Win Your Day can help you take actionable steps to living a better, more fulfilling and successful life. You will also learn: How to create more peaceful and productive days, simply by establishing a proper sleep pattern; How to kill the very foes that impede you from your success with sheer will power; How changing your daily habits can improve your health and your life. How our Attitude plays a very important role in our journey towards success. The power of Just One Step. The most important thing how our Family plays an important role in our professional success. By learning how to manage all the activities we will indirectly learn how to manage our time and give the extra time to the one we love. It might be our family or our passion. And finally what are the problems author faced, while implementing the things told in the book and how he overcame those problems. Along with well thought out advice, tried and true techniques, keen insight into what makes up a day in our lives, as well as dozens of positive affirmations, How To Win Your Day touches all the areas of our life helping to maintain balance in every area of our life. It also includes a FREE Guided Meditation which helps you to have right connection between your body and mind. How To Win Your Day aspires to guide you through trials and tribulations, help see you to your personal best self and get you to the next level of achievement. But, you must be willing to learn these ways and steps, in order to gain the strength you need to claim your success. And, this inspiring book can and will show you how. How To Win Your Day is an answer to your many problems, a guide to your success and a blueprint for a life well lived. Download now and live each day with more confidence and happiness. Scroll to the top of the page and select the buy button.
Love Interrupted: Navigating Grief One Day at a Time
Simon Thomas - 2019
Gemma died from acute myeloid leukaemia, just three days after being diagnosed.In Love, Interrupted, Simon is brutally honest about his journey through grief, and opens up about how close he came to ending his own life. Simon didn’t know how to carry on without Gemma; he just knew that, for the sake of his eight-year old son, he had to find a way …Love, Interrupted is a moving story of love, loss, faith, and family.
Alaska Sourdough: The Story of Slim Williams
Richard Morenus - 2011
Spirituality for Badasses: How To Find Inner Peace and Happiness Without Losing Your Cool
J. Stewart Dixon - 2021
Fly Into the Wind: How to Harness Faith and Fearlessness on Your Ascent to Greatness
Lt Colonel Dan Rooney - 2020
Breakfast, School Run, Chemo: The Sometimes Funny, Definitely Not Depressing, True Story of a Mum With Cancer
Julia Watson - 2015
But with humour and courage, Julia faces the greatest challenge of her life – and in the process becomes the person she'd always wanted to be.A survivor of child abuse, brought up by a mother with mental illness, Julia was no stranger to adversity. After her daughter Georgie was born with Down syndrome, she thought she'd faced it all. But when doctors offer her the chance of risky but potentially life-saving surgery, Julia faces her toughest situation yet.Follow Julia and her family, as she writes her way through the crisis, chases her dreams, gets her dancing shoes on and discovers the lighter side of life with a colostomy bag.This is a candid, entertaining look at life with cancer and living each day with humour and hope.
Almost Heaven: Coming of Age in West Virginia
Jerry S. Horton - 2014
A very well written book that will be hard for anyone to put down!This is a must read.Jerry's interesting and riveting account of his childhood years and transition to a young adult and Infantry NCO are truly endearing! His honest and impelling novel reminds one of why we serve, fight, and are willing to lay down our lives for God, Country, and our fellow man. God Bless the Infantryman!!Thank the Lord for Soldiers and West Virginia !This book is a great read. This honest account of growing up in West Virginia and becoming a Sergeant in Vietnam is sometimes thrilling and sometimes heart wrenching. Through a lot of true grit, thank goodness Jerry Horton survived to tell this story. I highly recommend this book. It is a Winner.This is an inspiring memoir written about a young man coming of age in West Virginia in the 1960's. It is a memoir but also a real thriller story as we follow Jerry from the streets surrounding Lincoln playground to Chicago Steel mills to the French Quarter in New Orleans and to San Francisco in the Summer of Love 1967. The book then moves you to the Central Highlands in Vietnam where Jerry is an infantry platoon sergeant. Jerry's interesting and truthful account of his childhood years and transition to an adult and Infantry Sergeant are truly endearing. It is an honest and compelling story. It gives a first person narrative of hand-to-hand combat in the trenches of Vietnam that can leave you scared, glad to be alive and eternally grateful to those who died for our freedom. Jerry joined the army to simply be able to afford to go to college. Forty years later he has a PhD and multiple degrees but they were earned at a heavy price for this patriot. Jerry shares his experiences in Vietnam in an articulate, honest and direct assessment of his time in Vietnam, the men he served with and the horrors of war. It is an incredible story of leadership and survival.We see Jerry develop as a young boy who is very independent and then see him being schooled on the streets of Charleston, West Virginia learning how to come to grips with the breakup and divorce in his family. He takes refuge in becoming the best he could be as a basketball player on the courts of Lincoln playground. Later we see him leaving home for the mean streets of the Chicago Steel mills and then on to Louisiana where he completes one year of college and then goes flat broke. Then the book shifts to New Orleans Louisiana and the excitement of the French Quarter. Jerry's life is rocked by the turbulent waters in New Orleans; he had no money no plan and is drifting. He seeks out another lifestyle in California hitching to and then living in San Francisco during the Summer of Love 1967. He describes how it was, the music and time and place and he takes you there through his vivid descriptions. Once again, his life spins into turmoil and as he tries to get back on the path to achieve his life's dream of going to college he is drafted in the Army. He finds himself becoming a leader, an infantry sergeant. His goal is to bring himself and his men back home alive, the reader gets the sense that all his life Jerry has been prepared for this moment. The reader is taken through and sees through Jerry's eyes what combat is really like.This story covers much ground and has something for everyone. You live through Jerry 's experiences of what it's like to conquer your own demons, you read about his mother's courage having Jerry in the Salvation Army by herself, the excitement and freedom of the 1960's and you learn what it is like to want something so bad you lay your life down for it. It is a book you truly won't lay down once you start reading.
Passionate Presence: Experiencing the Seven Qualities of Awakened Awareness
Catherine Ingram - 2003
"Usually people associate a sense of unbound presence with epiphanies in life-being present at a birth, or a death. People lose themselves in sexual union, in nature, or in the presence of a heart-wrenching beauty. In those moments they forget to keep up the story about the one having the experience, and all that is left is the actual experience." In Passionate Presence, internationally acclaimed spiritual teacher Catherine Ingram shares her insights and wisdom for connecting more intimately to the experience of our daily worlds. Through her popular interactive Dharma Dialogues (dharma meaning truth, or "the way"), she has helped thousands of spiritual seekers everywhere in their quest for awakening by encouraging them to give up the quest. Now she brings nearly thirty years of experience to a book that shows us how to recognize these everyday miracles, and become more cognizant of life's greatest gift: our own passionate presence. Based on "non-dual" teachings that rely on direct experience, with numerous stories illustrating her points, Ingram takes readers on an eye-opening journey that will help them to: o Know the seven traits of passionate presence: silence, tenderness, discernment, embodiment, genuineness, delight, and wonder o Relax in simple presence to dissolve barriers between people, foster better communication, and create inner peace and harmony o Discover why true aloneness can never be lonely o See how tender mercies can purge intense feelings of anger and much more. Filled with illuminating anecdotes and personal reflections, Passionate Presence reveals our true natures and opens the doorway to the divine in all of us. Inspiring and profound, it is certain to gain a wide and devoted readership.
Aces: The Last Season on the Mound with the Oakland A's Big Three -- Tim Hudson, Mark Mulder, and Barry Zito
Mychael Urban - 2005
Tim Hudson was determined to demonstrate his recovery from a recurring injury. Barry Zito had to show the world that after a ho-hum 2003, his 2002 Cy Young Award was not a fluke. Mark Mulder missed the 203 playoffs entirely with a stress fracture, but the way he saw it, he simply needed to be himself-the natural-born pitcher.Given unprecedented access to the Big Three , Mychael Urban recreates their tumultuous season through their eyes. he explores the nuts and bolts of major league pitching, examining each player's unique approach to this craft while revealing how three very different personalities cope with the demands, rewards, and challenges of sports stardom.Now with a new afterword on the 2005 seasonUrban traces the fortunes of the Big Three after Hudson was sent to Atlanta and Mulder to St. Louis, trades which held the dramatic promise of them being reunited again-as opponents-in the playoffs."Written with great color, style, humor, and grace, Aces takes readers on a captivating ride." - Mike Silver, Sports Illustrated"Mychael Urban's book is a fabulous read... This is hardly just a baseball book. It's about life, and he tremendous burden each pitcher carried while trying to lead the Oakland A's to the playoffs. I absolutely loved it." - Bob Nightengale, Senor Writer/Columnist, USA Today Sports Weekly"From the southern fried heat of Tim Hudson to Mark Mulder's cool aloofness to Barry Zito's cerebral wanderings, Urban captures the engine of Oakland's Little Engine That Could of a team with grace and aplomb." - Scott Miller, National Baseball Columnist, CBS.SportsLine.com
Next Time You Feel Lonely...
Osho - 2012
Osho looks at this in a very different way and sees these developments as great opportunity. Discovering of your ultimate 'aloneness' is the great chance to turn loneliness into a totally new experience.This small book in a new series of 'OSHO SOLUTIONS" consists of a single talk by Osho to deepen the readers understanding how to deal with loneliness in a completely different way.
The Blueprint: A Plan for Living Above Life's Storms
Kirk Franklin - 2010
His father abandoned his family; his mother constantly told Kirk that he was an unwanted child and left him to be adopted when he was four; his sister became a crack addict; he never saw a black man who was faithful in marriage. Despite his shaky foundation he found strength and success through his music and through God.In The Blueprint, Franklin will explain how, by communicating with life’s architect, God, he learned to see hardships as necessary life propellants and moved on to become the bestselling gospel musician in recent history, as well as a devoted husband and loving father.This is not a step program, it’s a lifelong journey. Franklin’s real world words of wisdom will help guide you to:• Pursue your dreams without losing yourself in the chase.• Do some lifescaping to eliminate the “weeds” that hold you back.• Declare your life to be drama-free.• Get past your fears so you can live and love fully.• Pass the baton to future generations by leading by example.