Book picks similar to
Close to the Bone: Life-Threatening Illness As a Soul Journey by Jean Shinoda Bolen
psychology
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healing
non-fiction
Shamanic Reiki: Expanded Ways of Working with Universal Life Force Energy
Robert Levy - 2007
Shamanism and Reiki are, by themselves, powerful ways to heal. Together, their power multiplies, and healing methods become available that aren't accessible if they're used separately. The purpose of "Shamanic Reiki" is to introduce you to concepts in both and provide you with detailed proven methods to enhance your own healing practices, or to work on yourselves. "Shamanic Reiki" empowers the healer / Reiki practitioner to trust their instincts, recognizing that healing is an evolving and dynamic art; to facilitate change requires the healer to trust in spirit and work creatively with the universal life force energy. Now it's your turn to discover the combined power of Reiki and shamanism.
A Deep Breath of Life
Alan Cohen - 1996
Alan Cohen has touched the hearts and lives of thousands of people seeking more authenticity and creative self-expression in their lives.
The Sage's Tao Te Ching: Ancient Advice for the Second Half of Life
William Martin - 2000
As Martin writes, sages are the "primary keepers and transmitters of wisdom, culture, values, and spirituality." Martin's free-verse interpretation captures the ancient spirit of Lao Tzu's text, yet speaks directly to modern readers. The text is accompanied by a visual interpretation of the Tao in more than 50 original ink-brush drawings. Like the Parent's Tao and Couple's Tao before it, the Sage's Tao has the hallmarks of a classic. "You have ceased trying /To tie up all loose ends./You have discovered/That life does not need to be neat/You have more questions than answers,/And this is a great delight to you./You trust the mystery of life/Without having to possess it." - from the book
Visions, Trips, and Crowded Rooms: Who and What You See Before You Die
David Kessler - 2010
The first is “visions.” As the dying lose sight of this world, some people appear to be looking into the world to come. The second shared experience is getting ready for a “trip.” The phenomenon of preparing oneself for a journey isn’t new or unusual. In fact, during our loved ones’ last hours, they may often think of their impending death as a transition or journey. These trips may seem to us to be all about leaving, but for the dying, they may be more about arriving. Finally, the third phenomenon is “crowded rooms.” The dying often talk about seeing a room full of people, as they constantly repeat the word crowded. In truth, we never die alone. Just as loving hands greeted us when we were born, so will loving arms embrace us when we die. In the tapestry of life and death, we may begin to see connections to the past that we missed in life. While death may look like a loss to the living, the last hours of a dying person may be filled with fullness rather than emptiness. In this fascinating book, which includes a new Afterword, Kessler brings us stunning stories from the bedsides of the dying that will educate, enlighten, and comfort us all.
That Good Night: Life and Medicine in the Eleventh Hour
Sunita Puri - 2019
Sunita Puri knew from a young age that the gulf between her parents' experiences and her own was impossible to bridge, save for two elements: medicine and spirituality. Between days spent waiting for her mother, an anesthesiologist, to exit the OR, and evenings spent in conversation with her parents about their faith, Puri witnessed the tension between medicine's impulse to preserve life at all costs and a spiritual embrace of life's temporality. And it was that tension that eventually drew Puri, a passionate but unsatisfied medical student, to palliative medicine--a new specialty attempting to translate the border between medical intervention and quality-of-life care.Interweaving evocative stories of Puri's family and the patients she cares for, That Good Night is a stunning meditation on impermanence and the role of medicine in helping us to live and die well, arming readers with information that will transform how we communicate with our doctors about what matters most to us.
Bioenergetics
Alexander Lowen - 1975
This exciting body-mind approach to personality has a liberating and positive effect on emotional, physical, and psychic distress. Dr. Alexander Lowen, founder and prime mover of this fast-growing therapy, writes that increased joy and pleasure are possible in every day life through an understanding of how your body functions energetically: how it determines what you feel, think, and do. Dr. Lowen points out that lack of energy is the result of chronic muscular tensions, a condition caused by the suppression of feelings. These tensions can be dissolved through the direct body work in bioenergetic exercise, which restores the potential for living a rich, full life. Dr. Lowen analyzes common physical ailments like headaches and lower back pain and shows how they too can be overcome by releasing the muscular tenstion that create them. Generously illustrated with line drawings of bioenergetic exercises, this book is sure to bring freedom, confidence, and pleasure to thousands of men and women.In this highly interesting and valuable attempt to restore the body to the mind, Dr. Alexander Lowen sets out in a practically useful way the principles of his new form of psychotherapy. Bioenergetics is destined to become widely influential. --Ashley Montagu
On Living
Kerry Egan - 2016
Instead, she discovered she’d been granted an invaluable chance to witness firsthand what she calls the “spiritual work of dying”—the work of finding or making meaning of one’s life, the experiences it’s contained and the people who have touched it, the betrayals, wounds, unfinished business, and unrealized dreams. Instead of talking, she mainly listened: to stories of hope and regret, shame and pride, mystery and revelation and secrets held too long. Most of all, though, she listened as her patients talked about love—love for their children and partners and friends; love they didn’t know how to offer; love they gave unconditionally; love they, sometimes belatedly, learned to grant themselves. This isn’t a book about dying—it’s a book about living. And Egan isn’t just passively bearing witness to these stories. An emergency procedure during the birth of her first child left her physically whole but emotionally and spiritually adrift. Her work as a hospice chaplain healed her, from a brokenness she came to see we all share. Each of her patients taught her something—how to find courage in the face of fear or the strength to make amends; how to be profoundly compassionate and fiercely empathetic; how to see the world in grays instead of black and white. In this poignant, moving, and beautiful book, she passes along all their precious and necessary gifts.
The Little Book of Mindfulness: 10 Minutes a Day to Less Stress, More Peace
Patrizia Collard - 2014
It has fast become the slow way to manage the modern world - without chanting mantras or finding hours of special time to meditate.Bring these simple 5- and 10-minute practices into your day to find freedom from stress and ultimately, more peace in your life.
The Stormy Search for the Self
Christina Grof - 1990
Under favorable circumstances, this process results in emotional healing, a radical shift in values, and a profound awareness of the mystical dimension of existence. For some, these changes are gradual and relatively smooth, but for others they can be so rapid and dramatic that they interfere with effective everyday functioning, creating tremendous inner turmoil. Unfortunately, many traditional health-care professionals do not recognize the positive potential of these crises; they often see them as manifestations of mental disease and repsond with stigmatizing labels, suppressive drugs, and even institutionalization.In The Stormy Search for the Self, Christina and Stanislav Grof, the world's foremost authorities on the subject of spiritual emergence, draw on years of dramatic personal and professional experience with transformative states to explore these "spiritual emergencies," altered states so powerful they threaten to overwhelm the individual's oridinary reality. This book will provide insights, assurances, and practical suggestions for those who are experiencing or have experienced such a crisis, for their families and friends, and for mental-health professionals. It is also a valuable guide for anyone involved in personal transformation whose experiences, though generally untraumatic, may still at times be bewildering or disorienting.
If the Buddha Dated: A Handbook for Finding Love on a Spiritual Path
Charlotte Kasl - 1999
Kasl brings a compassionate understanding to the anxiety and uneasiness of new love, and helps readers discover their potential for vibrant human connection based on awareness, kindness, and honesty. She approaches the dating process as a means for awakening, reminding us that when we live by spiritual rules, we bring curiosity and a light heart to the romantic journey. Filled with quotations from Zen, Sufi, and other wisdom traditions, and informed by the experiences of people from all walks of life, here is a relationship book that will appeal to readers looking for more than a Venus-meets-Mars solution to the complex affairs of the heart.
Past Lives, Future Healing
Sylvia Browne - 2001
She has proven herself, in her fifty years of working as a medium, to be the reigning queen of psychic phenomena. Here is an insightful look at how much of one's present life is informed by one's past lives, and how many health and relationship problems have their roots in unresolved past lives. From unexplained illnesses to bizarre phobias, from irrational anxieties and fears to the choice of partners, each can be traced back to past lives. Even birthmarks and recurring dreams are signs of issues from past lives. Sylvia helps readers recognize where their deep-rooted problems, fears, and hang-ups all began-and how to ultimately resolve them.
Eating in the Light of the Moon: How Women Can Transform Their Relationship with Food Through Myths, Metaphors, and Storytelling
Anita Johnston - 1999
By weaving practical insights and exercises through a rich tapestry of multicultural myths, ancient legends, and folktales, Anita Johnston helps the millions of women preoccupied with their weight discover and address the issues behind their negative attitudes toward food.
The Anatomy of Hope: How People Prevail in the Face of Illness
Jerome Groopman - 2003
Now, in this groundbreaking book, Harvard Medical School professor and New Yorker staff writer Jerome Groopman shows us why.The search for hope is most urgent at the patient’s bedside. The Anatomy of Hope takes us there, bringing us into the lives of people at pivotal moments when they reach for and find hope--or when it eludes their grasp. Through these intimate portraits, we learn how to distinguish true hope from false, why some people feel they are undeserving of it, and whether we should ever abandon our search.Can hope contribute to recovery by changing physical well-being? To answer this hotly debated question, Groopman embarked on an investigative journey to cutting-edge laboratories where researchers are unraveling an authentic biology of hope. There he finds a scientific basis for understanding the role of this vital emotion in the outcome of illness.Here is a book that offers a new way of thinking about hope, with a message for all readers, not only patients and their families. "We are just beginning to appreciate hope’s reach," Groopman writes, "and have not defined its limits. I see hope as the very heart of healing."
The Calm Center: Reflections and Meditations for Spiritual Awakening (An Eckhart Tolle Edition)
Steve Taylor - 2015
The simple, stirring, and poetic reflections here comfort, inspire, and gently bring readers out of the harried, hectic day-to-day and back to the bedrock of peace, and even joy, of our true, essential, and authentic selves. He shows how this is possible when we direct our awareness out of chaos and into calm. In so doing we learn to access the present moment of any day, as Taylor writes at the books beginning The Only Place When the future is full of dreadand the past full of regret, where can you take refuge except the present When maelstroms of tormenting thoughtspush back the barricades of your sanity, the present is the calm center where you can rest. And slowly, as you rest therethe niggling thoughts and fears dissolvelike shadows shrinking under the midday sununtil you dont need refuge any more. The present is the only placewhere there is no thought-created pain. The present is the only place.
Mind Over Medicine: Scientific Proof That You Can Heal Yourself
Lissa Rankin - 2013
Or it’s just bad luck—and doctors alone hold the keys to optimal health. For years, Lissa Rankin, M.D., believed the same. But when her own health started to suffer, and she turned to Western medical treatments, she found that they not only failed to help; they made her worse. So she decided to take matters into her own hands. Through her research, Dr. Rankin discovered that the health care she had been taught to practice was missing something crucial: a recognition of the body’s innate ability to self-repair and an appreciation for how we can control these self-healing mechanisms with the power of the mind. In an attempt to better understand this phenomenon, she explored peer-reviewed medical literature and found evidence that the medical establishment had been proving that the body can heal itself for over 50 years. Using extraordinary cases of spontaneous healing, Dr. Rankin shows how thoughts, feelings, and beliefs can alter the body’s physiology. She lays out the scientific data proving that loneliness, pessimism, depression, fear, and anxiety damage the body, while intimate relationships, gratitude, meditation, sex, and authentic self-expression flip on the body’s self-healing processes. In the final section of the book, you’ll be introduced to a radical new wellness model based on Dr. Rankin’s scientific findings. Her unique six-step program will help you uncover where things might be out of whack in your life—spiritually, creatively, environmentally, nutritionally, and in your professional and personal relationships—so that you can create a customized treatment plan aimed at bolstering these health-promoting pieces of your life. You’ll learn how to listen to your body’s “whispers” before they turn to life-threatening “screams” that can be prevented with proper self-care, and you’ll learn how to trust your inner guidance when making decisions about your health and your life.