It shows how to access and trust the wisdom your body has to offer.

    Anxiety. Chronic Pain. Phobias. Obsessive thoughts. The evidence is compelling: the roots of these difficulties may not reside in our immediate life experience or in chemical imbalances in our brains—but in the lives of our parents, grandparents, and even great-grandparents. The latest scientific research, now making headlines, supports what many have long intuited—that traumatic experience can be passed down through generations. It Didn’t Start with You builds on the work of leading experts in post-traumatic stress, including Mount Sinai School of Medicine neuroscientist Rachel Yehuda and psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk, author of The Body Keeps the Score. Even if the person who suffered the original trauma has died, or the story has been forgotten or silenced, memory and feelings can live on. These emotional legacies are often hidden, encoded in everything from gene expression to everyday language, and they play a far greater role in our emotional and physical health than has ever before been understood.   As a pioneer in the field of inherited family trauma, Mark Wolynn has worked with individuals and groups on a therapeutic level for over twenty years. It Didn’t Start with You offers a pragmatic and prescriptive guide to his method, the Core Language Approach. Diagnostic self-inventories provide a way to uncover the fears and anxieties conveyed through everyday words, behaviors, and physical symptoms. Techniques for developing a genogram or extended family tree create a map of experiences going back through the generations. And visualization, active imagination, and direct dialogue create pathways to reconnection, integration, and reclaiming life and health. It Didn’t Start With You is a transformative approach to resolving longstanding difficulties that in many cases, traditional therapy, drugs, or other interventions have not had the capacity to touch.

    It provides examples of some of the forms self-hate takes, including taking blame but not credit, holding grudges, and trying to be perfect, and explores the many facets of self-hate, including its role in addiction, the battering cycle, and the illusion of control. After addressing these factors, it illustrates how a meditation practice can be developed and practiced in efforts to free oneself from self-hating beliefs.

    Though these old, conditioned attempts to control our life may offer fleeting relief, ultimately they leave us feeling isolated and mired in pain.   There is another way. Beneath the turbulence of our thoughts and emotions exists a profound stillness, a silent awareness capable of limitless love. Tara Brach, author of the award-winning Radical Acceptance, calls this awareness our true refuge, because it is available to every one of us, at any moment, no exceptions. In this book, Brach offers a practical guide to finding our inner sanctuary of peace and wisdom in the midst of difficulty.   Based on a fresh interpretation of the three classic Buddhist gateways to freedom—truth, love, and awareness—True Refuge shows us the way not just to heal our suffering, but also to cultivate our capacity for genuine happiness. Through spiritual teachings, guided meditations, and inspirational stories of people who discovered loving presence during times of great struggle, Brach invites us to connect more deeply with our own inner life, one another, and the world around us. True Refuge is essential reading for anyone encountering hardship or crisis, anyone dedicated to a path of spiritual awakening. The book reminds us of our own innate intelligence and goodness, making possible an enduring trust in ourselves and our lives. We realize that what we seek is within us, and regardless of circumstances, “there is always a way to take refuge in a healing and liberating presence.”Advance praise for True Refuge   “Tara Brach writes from the heart to the heart. With candor and calmness, she shares her own and others’ struggles to overcome our deep and constant human dilemmas. Whenever I read Brach, I feel more peaceful and hopeful. I trust myself and the universe more. I feel more connected and grounded in what the Lakota Sioux call Wakan Tanka, The Great Mystery. True Refuge is itself a refuge and I thank the author for it.”—Mary Pipher, Ph.D., New York Times bestselling author of The Green Boat and Reviving Ophelia   “There is something very special about this exquisitely written book—its clarity, beauty, simplicity, and humanity practically sing to you. Inspiring and uplifting to read, it also has eminently practical, implementable, step-by-step guidance to practice and live by. And the fifteen brief, powerful guided meditations offer an easy, gentle entry toward inner peace and wisdom. While turning the pages, I thought of a half dozen people who could really use this book as a friendly, loving reference point—myself included!”—Belleruth Naparstek, author of Invisible Heroes and creator of the Health Journeys guided imagery audio series

    The trauma and grief of childhood losses affect every aspect of the life of an adult child of an alcoholic (ACoA). Now the authors of the bestselling After the Tears offer further insight into the origin and cost of childhood pain for those who grew up in alcoholic families. In this revised and expanded edition, Jane Middelton-Moz and Lorie Dwinell combine their years of experience in working with ACoAs, tackling issues such as intimacy, sibling relationships, codependency, breaking the alcoholic pattern, building a relationship with the inner child, forgiveness, and opening a window to spirituality.

    . . again.Getting angry is easy. Daily irritations, frustrations, and pain poke at us. Feelings of disappointment, hurt, rejection, and embarrassment prod in us. And once the unwieldy cluster of emotions of anger are aroused, our thoughts and actions can feel out of control and impossible to manage.Dr. Gary Chapman, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The 5 Love Languages®, offers helpful-and sometimes surprising-insights into why you get angry and what you can do about it. Using real-life stories and practical principles, Chapman explains how you can channel anger in ways that are healthy and productive. You'll also be equipped to help those you love (including your children) deal with their own anger, as well as effectively deal with those long-simmering feelings of anger toward people in your past.Includes an assessment that will help you discover your personal propensity toward handling anger and how to effectively tame it when it arises.

    Dodes’s approach runs directly counter to the paralyzing, but standard, message of ‘powerlessness’—a mes­sage that reinforces the sense of helplessness that is at the root of addicts’ life predicaments! Many psychiatrists recognize that this is where we must head, but Dr. Dodes is one with the guts to shine a beacon in the right direction.”—Stanton Peele, PhD, author of 7 Tools to Beat Addiction and The Life Process Program of Treatment The follow-up to his groundbreaking volume The Heart of Addiction, Dr. Lance Dodes’s Breaking Addiction is a step-by-step guide to beating addiction of any kind—from drugs and gambling to alcoholism, overeating, and sex addiction. By recognizing and understanding the emotional forces underlying addictive behaviors, Dr. Dodes says any dangerous, life-destroying obsession can be overcome. Including special bonus sections for both families and health-care professionals, Breaking Addiction is the new handbook for those suffering from addiction—a valuable resource that addresses addiction’s root causes and serves as an alternative to Alcoholics Anonymous and similar recovery programs.

    Robert Lustig’s message that the increased sugar in our diets has led to the pandemic of chronic disease over the last thirty years captured our national attention.Now, in The Fat Chance Cookbook, Lustig helps us put this information into action for ourselves. With more than 100 recipes as well as meal plans, nutritional analyses, shopping lists, and food swaps, he shows us easy ways to drastically reduce sugar and increase fiber to lose weight and regain health – both for ourselves and for our families. Lustig also shows us how to navigate the grocery store with handy lists for stocking the pantry as well as how to read a food label in order to find hidden sugars and evaluate fiber content.Accessible, affordable, and geared toward lasting results, The Fat Chance Cookbook will be a fun and easy roadmap to better health for the whole family.

    In this beautifully illustrated guide, Buddhist teacher Haemin Sunim (whose name means "spontaneous wisdom") draws on examples from his own life and on his years of helping others to introduce us to the art of self-care. When we treat ourselves with compassion, empathy, and forgiveness, we learn to treat others the same way, allowing us to connect with people on a deeper level, bounce back from failure, deal with feeling hurt or depressed, listen more attentively, express ourselves more clearly, and have the courage to pursue what really makes us happy so we can feel complete in ourselves. With more than thirty-five full-color illustrations, Love for Imperfect Things will appeal to both your eyes and your heart, offering you comfort, encouragement, and wisdom so that you can learn to love yourself, your life, and everyone in it.

    Beck, Ph.D., has inspired thousands of dieters to lose excess weight and keep it off using the power of Cognitive Therapy to prepare the mind and alter habits before starting any diet. Now, for the first time, Dr. Beck outlines the next step: a specific, balanced diet plan that teaches you how to EAT THIN and keep excess weight off for life. Based on the eating choices of Dr. Becks most successful dieters and maintainers, The Complete Beck Diet for Life includes comprehensive suggestions for breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks, and bonus foods including 150- or 200-calorie treats such as sweets, alcohol, bread, and fries--and a Think Thin menu formula that allows you to easily adapt to any situation. Everything you need to stay on track is provided, including a sample strength-training plan and interactive elements such as Response Cards, daily eating logs, and charts and graphs to track your progress. The Complete Beck Diet for Life also features Dr. Becks signature Cognitive Therapy tools, organized in a 5-stage program designed to teach you how to EAT THIN. The program details precisely what to do to stay motivated, overcome emotional eating, eliminate bingeing, and immediately get back on track when youve made a mistake. If youve struggled with dieting in the past, its only because you never acquired these essential skills. Once you learn to master these skills, you will be able to successfully maintain your new weight for life.

    Research has shown that integrating little daily practices into your life can actually change the way your brain works.This guide offers simple things you can do routinely, mainly inside your mind, that will support and increase your sense of security and worth, resilience, effectiveness, well-being, insight, and inner peace. For example, they include: taking in the good, protecting your brain, feeling safer, relaxing anxiety about imperfection, not knowing, enjoying your hands, taking refuge, and filling the hole in your heart.  At first glance, you may be tempted to underestimate the power of these seemingly simple practices. But they will gradually change your brain through what’s called experience-dependent neuroplasticity.Moment to moment, whatever you're aware of—sounds, sensations, thoughts, or your most heartfelt longings—is based on underlying neural activities. This book offers simple brain training practices you can do every day to protect against stress, lift your mood, and find greater emotional resilience.Just one practice each day can help you to:Be good to yourself Enjoy life as it is Build on your strengths Be more effective at home and work Make peace with your emotions With over fifty daily practices you can use anytime, anywhere, Just One Thing is a groundbreaking combination of mindfulness meditation and neuroscience that can help you deepen your sense of well-being and unconditional happiness.

    In EAT TO LIVE, Dr. Fuhrman offers his healthy, effective, and scientifically proven plan for shedding radical amounts of weight quickly, and keeping it off.Losing weight under Dr. Fuhrman's plan is not about willpower, it is about knowledge. The key to this revolutionary diet is the idea of nutrient density, as expressed by the simple formula Health=Nutrients/Calories. When the ratio of nutrients to calories is high, fat melts away and health is restored. Losing 20 pounds in two to three weeks is just the beginning. The more high-nutrient food Dr. Fuhrman's patients consume, the more they are satisfied with fewer calories, and the less they crave fat and high-calorie foods. Designed for people who must lose 50 pounds or more in a hurry, EAT TO LIVE works for every dieter, even those who want to lose as little as 10 pounds quickly. No willpower required-just knowledge

    Pema shows how using a traditional Buddhist practice called the Three Vows or Three Commitments is a way to relax into profound sanity in the midst of whatever non-sanity is happening around us. Just making these simple aspirations can change the way we look at the world and can provide us with a lifetime of material for spiritual practice. The three commitments are three methods for embracing the chaotic, uncertain, dynamic, challenging nature of our situation as a path to awakening. The first of the commitments, traditionally called the Pratimoksha Vow, is the foundation for personal liberation. This is a commitment to doing our best to not cause harm with our actions or words or thoughts, a commitment to being good to each other. It provides a structure within which we learn to work with our thoughts and emotions, and to refrain from speaking or acting out of confusion. The next step toward being comfortable with groundlessness is a commitment to helping others, traditionally called the Bodhisattva Vow. It is a commitment to dedicate our lives to keeping our hearts and minds open, and nurturing our compassion with the longing to ease the suffering of the world. The last of the three commitments, traditionally known as the Samaya Vow, is a resolve to embrace the world just as it is, without bias; a resolve to see everything we encounter, good and bad, pleasant and painful, as a manifestation of awakened energy. It is a commitment to see everything and anything as a means by which we can awaken further.

    Kathleen DesMaisons now presents the first complete, in-depth dietary plan for living with–and healing–sugar sensitivity. She explains exactly how you can free your mind and body from the tyranny of sugar and shake off the exhaustion, mental fogginess, and mood swings that sugar dependence causes. Revealing the various ways sugar addiction affects both men and women, and the unique methods for healing it, Dr. DesMaisons encourages you to custom-tailor her simple program to fit your lifestyle and includes information on• How to integrate a “slow-carbs not low-carbs” strategy into your diet • Why regular protein is essential and how to get it with every meal• What to eat when a sugar craving strikes• How to get the nutrition you need on the run–even at fast-food restaurants • How to find an exercise program you’ll enjoy• Ten breakfasts you can prepare in a flash • Menus and recipes for every lifestyle and tastePractical, hands-on, and reader friendly, The Sugar Addict’s Total Recovery Program will transform your life by helping you eat right–starting today!

    One of the biggest fears of fasting is the fear hunger, the false hunger that most people are afraid of while depleting their glycogen stores (the body sugar storage). Fasting has often been associated with religious customs. It is time to define a line between the two. In Periodic Fasting, I embark on a timeless journey from the very beginning of life on Earth, through early human societies, through the middle Ages and into modern days to explore the concepts and practices of prolonged fasting and intermittent fasting (IF). Periodic Fasting is about: 1. My early life encounters with fasting in the small village of my grandparents (using a high-carb diet). 2. How primitive life-forms on Earth and fasting co-evolved; fasting in the animal kingdom. 3. Early hominid species, food restriction, and meal frequency. The first organized human societies and the switch between irregular feeding to regular dietary patterns. Circadian rhythmicity and meal timing. 4. The personal story of a man from the middle Ages who started consuming less food in his mid-thirties because of poor health and lived to 102 years (narrated by himself). 5. The dozens of prolonged fasting experiments in the beginning of the 20th century; fasting as a cure to many ailments. 6. How people can live without food for 139, 236 and even 382 days (medically supervised experiments). Details of 7-40 days fasts done by lean people for rejuvenation, detoxification and increased life span. 7. The emerging science and the studies of fasting from the mid-20th century (pathological implications - diabetes, obesity, CVD, cancer, and others). 8. How fasting and semi-starvation can be totally opposite: disturbing stories from the Second World War. 9. The molecular mechanisms of fasting: what happens when your body focuses on cell repair and tissue rejuvenation, instead of digesting food. 10. How the secretion of some hormones may be widely misunderstood: especially thyroid hormones and insulin. On muscle-loss phobia, mainstream media, and bro-science. 11. The modern-day science of prolonged fasting and intermittent fasting (AMPk, SIRT, FOXO, etc). 12. My personal prolonged water-only fasting experiment; insights into refeeding and realimentation after long-term fasting. 13. My 1 year and 3 months daily intermittent fasting protocol (still on-going). My ever-adapting exercising protocol (lifting), what I eat everyday, what supplements I use and what other cool strategies help me stay consistent and compliant with the protocol. 14. How I combine intermittent fasting (IF), a well formulated ketogenic diet, and calorie restriction to immensely increase the quality of my life, and paradoxically, never feel hungry; how energy levels and mood can increase if you correctly adopt a fasting protocol. Once armed with this knowledge, you will drastically alter your perspective about your body's limits.