I’m afraid…As death approaches, both patient and family must cope with grief, pain, and seemingly unanswerable questions. It’s a time of challenge, of concerns. But, as hospice nurse Karen Whitley Bell reminds us, it also offers an opportunity to explore and rediscover the fuller, richer meaning of life.Drawing on her years of experience, Bell has created a comprehensive, insightful guide to every aspect of hospice care and the final stages of life. She discusses the physical, emotional, and spiritual journey a dying person goes through; care-giving during this difficult period; closure, and loss and the lessons it teaches us. In addition to her warm, yet knowledgeable voice, readers get firsthand accounts of experiences in hospice care, making Living at the End of Life accessible, reassuring, and indispensable.

    Many people have been helped by this valuable book, first published five years ago, which addresses those of us who desperately want to change but can’t stop behaving in ways that hurt us and those we love. The authors assure us that we can change these hurtful patterns. Drs. Stoop and Masteller believe you can move beyond failure to forgiveness, cancelling the indebtedness of those who have hurt you. But before you can begin the process of forgiveness, you need to understand the roots of your pain, through exploring the family patterns that perpetuate dysfunction. When you understand your family of origin, you will be able to take the essential step of forgiveness.

    If we’re honest, we’ve been overfunctioning for so long, we can’t even imagine another way. How else will things get done? How else will we survive?It doesn’t have to be this way.Aundi Kolber believes that we don’t have to white-knuckle our way through life. In her debut book, Try Softer, she’ll show us how God specifically designed our bodies and minds to work together to process our stories and work through obstacles. Through the latest psychology, practical clinical exercises, and her own personal story, Aundi equips and empowers us to connect us to our truest self and truly live. This is the “try softer” life.In Try Softer, you’ll learn how to: Know and set emotional and relational boundaries Make sense of the difficult experiences you’ve had Identify your attachment style—and how that affects your relationships today Move through emotions rather than get stuck by them Grow in self-compassion and talk back to your inner critic Trying softer is sacred work. And while it won’t be perfect or easy, it will be worth it. Because this is what we were made for: a living, breathing, moving, feeling, connected, beautifully incarnational life.

    Drawing from their own histories as well as from others', the authors illustrate how it is possible to recover from grief and regain energy and spontaneity.Based on a proven program, The Grief Recovery Handbook offers grievers the specific actions needed to move beyond loss. New material in this edition includes guidance for dealing with:·  Loss of faith·  Loss of career and financial issues·  Loss of health·  Growing up in an alcoholic or dysfunctional homeThe Grief Recovery Handbook is a groundbreaking, classic handbook that everyone should have in their library.“This book is required for all my classes. The more I use this book, the more I believe that unresolved grief is the major underlying issue in most people’s lives. It is the only work of its kind that I know of that outlines the problem and provides the solution.”—Bernard McGrane, Ph.D., Professor of Sociology, Chapman University

    More than 1.5 million Americans a year die in hospice care—nearly 44 percent of all deaths—and a vast industry has sprung up to meet the growing demand. Once viewed as a New Age indulgence, hospice is now a $14 billion business and one of the most successful segments in health care. Changing the Way We Die, by award-winning journalists Fran Smith and Sheila Himmel, is the first book to take a broad, penetrating look at the hospice landscape.Changing the Way We Die is a vital resource for anyone who wants to be prepared to face life’s most challenging and universal event. You will learn:— Hospice use is soaring, yet most people come too late to get the full benefits.— With the age tsunami, it becomes even more critical for families and patients to choose end-of-life care wisely.— Hospice at its best is much more than a way to relieve the suffering of dying. It is a way to live.

    But in the inevitable condition of aging and death, the goals of medicine seem too frequently to run counter to the interest of the human spirit. Nursing homes, preoccupied with safety, pin patients into railed beds and wheelchairs. Hospitals isolate the dying, checking for vital signs long after the goals of cure have become moot. Doctors, committed to extending life, continue to carry out devastating procedures that in the end extend suffering.Gawande, a practicing surgeon, addresses his profession's ultimate limitation, arguing that quality of life is the desired goal for patients and families. Gawande offers examples of freer, more socially fulfilling models for assisting the infirm and dependent elderly, and he explores the varieties of hospice care to demonstrate that a person's last weeks or months may be rich and dignified.

    Alongside this lifestyle, depression rates have skyrocketed: approximately 1 in 4 Americans will suffer from major depression at some point in their lives. Where have we gone wrong? Dr. Stephen Ilardi sheds light on our current predicament and reminds us: our bodies were never designed for the sleep-deprived, poorly nourished, frenzied pace of twenty-first century life. In fact, our genes have changed very little since the days of our hunter-gatherer ancestors and are still building, in effect, Stone Age bodies. Herein lies the key to breaking the cycle of depression.Inspired by the extraordinary resilience of aboriginal groups like the Kaluli of Papua New Guinea (who rarely suffer from depression), Dr. Ilardi prescribes an easy-to-follow, clinically proven program that harks back to what our bodies were originally made for-and need. Here you can find the road back to lasting health by integrating the following 6 elements into your life: an omega-3 rich diet; exercise; plenty of natural sunlight; ample sleep; social connections; and participation in meaningful tasks that leave little time for negative thoughts-all things that our ancestors had in abundance.Already, The Depression Cure program has delivered dramatic results, helping even those who have failed to respond to traditional medications. Interweaving the stories of many who have fought-and won-the battle against this debilitating illness, this groundbreaking book can illuminate the path to lifting the fog once and for all for you or a loved one.

    How are our personalities formed? How do our early struggles with our parents reappear in the way we relate to others as adults?In Becoming Attached, Robert Karen offers fresh insight into some of the most fundamental issues of emotional life. He explores such questions as: * What do children need to feel that the world is a positive place and that they have value? * What are the risks of day care for children under one year of age, and what can parents do to manage those risks? * What experiences in infancy will enable a person to develop healthy relationships as an adult?Becoming Attached is not just a voyage of discovery in child emotional development and its pertinence to adult life but a voyage of personal discovery as well, for it is impossible to read this book without reflecting on one's own life as a child, a parent, and an intimate partner in love or marriage.

    I have loved and been loved. I have been given much and I have given something in return. Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.” —Oliver SacksNo writer has succeeded in capturing the medical and human drama of illness as honestly and as eloquently as Oliver Sacks. During the last few months of his life, he wrote a set of essays in which he movingly explored his feelings about completing a life and coming to terms with his own death. “It is the fate of every human being,” Sacks writes, “to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death.”Together, these four essays form an ode to the uniqueness of each human being and to gratitude for the gift of life.

    Simply put, the children of narcissist -- offspring of parents whose interest always towered above the most basic needs of their sons and daughters -- share a common belief: They believe they do not have the right to exist. The difficulties experienced by adult children of narcissists can manifest themselves in many ways: for examples, physical self-loathing that takes form of overeating, anorexia, or bulimia; a self-destructive streak that causes poor job performance and rocky personal relationships; or a struggle with the self that is perpetuated in the adult's interaction with his or her own children. These dilemmas are both common and correctable, Dr. Golomb tells us. With an empathic blend of scholarship and case studies, along with her own personal narrative of her fight for self, Dr. Golomb plumbs the depths of this problem, revealing its mysterious hold on the affairs of otherwise bright, aware, motivated, and worthy people. Trapped in the Mirror explores:-the nature of the paralysis and lack of motivation so many adults feel-stress and its role in exacerbating childhood wrongs-why do many of our relationships seem to be "reruns" of the past -how one's body image can be formed by faulty parenting -how anger must be acknowledge to be overcome-and, most important, how even the most traumatized self can be healed.Rooted in a profoundly humanist traditional approach, and suffused with the benefit of the latest knowledge about intrafamily relationships, Trapped in the Mirror offers more than the average self-help book; it is truly the first self-heal book for millions.

    There has never been a more important time to rediscover your pause button. Calm is the book that will show you how to take back a little bit of peace, space and all-important calm. This book contains the simple tools, tricks and habits that will change the rest your life. It is a practical and pleasurable guide to twenty-first century mindfulness. Regular meditation is medically proven to be good for you - it increases focus and creativity, productivity and job satisfaction, mental and even physical health. But in reality most of us don't have time to sit on a cushion with our eyes closed for half an hour every day. And many people associate meditation with hard work and huge lifestyle shifts- you might be imagining Buddhist monks locked in a mountain retreat and living off gruel... This is where Calm comes in. Calm is about simple, achievable habits that work with the demands of your busy life instead of pretending those demands don't exist. Calm does not require specialist training- it uses abilities that every single one of us is born with, like creativity, spontaneity and simply noticing the world around you. Calm is not a set of rules that you need to worry about following or breaking. It is inspirational, practical and non-prescriptive. Onerous, time-consuming meditation might seem out of reach but everyone can achieve calm - including you.

    Death and illness touch us all, but even the everyday sufferings of loneliness and fear are traumatic. In The Trauma of Everyday Life renowned psychiatrist and author of Thoughts Without a Thinker Mark Epstein uncovers the transformational potential of trauma, revealing how it can be used for the mind’s own development.Western psychology teaches that if we understand the cause of trauma, we might move past it while many drawn to Eastern practices see meditation as a means of rising above, or distancing themselves from, their most difficult emotions. Both, Epstein argues, fail to recognize that trauma is an indivisible part of life and can be used as a lever for growth and an ever deeper understanding of change. When we regard trauma with this perspective, understanding that suffering is universal and without logic, our pain connects us to the world on a more fundamental level. The way out of pain is through it. Epstein’s discovery begins in his analysis of the life of Buddha, looking to how the death of his mother informed his path and teachings. The Buddha’s spiritual journey can be read as an expression of primitive agony grounded in childhood trauma. Yet the Buddha’s story is only one of many in The Trauma of Everyday Life. Here, Epstein looks to his own experience, that of his patients, and of the many fellow sojourners and teachers he encounters as a psychiatrist and Buddhist. They are alike only in that they share in trauma, large and small, as all of us do. Epstein finds throughout that trauma, if it doesn’t destroy us, wakes us up to both our minds’ own capacity and to the suffering of others. It makes us more human, caring, and wise. It can be our greatest teacher, our freedom itself, and it is available to all of us.

    . . but you don’t know how to change?     The Tapping Solution offers a new technique to deal with seemingly impossible situations.     Tapping, also known as EFT, is a powerful tool for improving your life on multiple levels: mental, emotional, and physical. It has been proven to effectively address a range of issues—from anxiety, chronic pain, addiction, and fear, to weight control, financial abundance, stress relief, and so much more. It’s also one of the easiest and fastest practices to learn. You can learn it in minutes, do it anywhere and on virtually any issue, and oftentimes experience immediate results.      How does it work? Based on the principles of both ancient acupressure and modern psychology, tapping concentrates on specific meridian endpoints while focusing on negative emotions or physical sensations. Combined with spoken word, tapping helps calm the nervous system to restore the balance of energy in the body and rewire the brain to respond in healthy ways.     In this book, you’ll not only learn how to start tapping, you’ll also get the history and cutting-edge science behind it. Featuring step-by-step instructions, exercises, and diagrams, The Tapping Solution shows you how to tap on a variety of issues and identify practical applications. Plus, throughout the book, you’ll find unbelievable, real-life stories of healing, ranging from easing the pain of fibromyalgia to overcoming a fear of flying.     Find out how to release your fears and clear the limiting beliefs that hold you back from creating the life you want.It’s time for . . . The Tapping Solution!

    A collection of talks she gave between 1987 and 1994, the book is a treasury of wisdom for going on living when we are overcome by pain and difficulties. Chödrön discusses:    •  Using painful emotions to cultivate wisdom, compassion, and courage    •  Communicating so as to encourage others to open up rather than shut down    •  Practices for reversing habitual patterns    •  Methods for working with chaotic situations    •  Ways for creating effective social action

    Harris' eloquence is exceeded only by the compassion and insight she brings to this perplexing and formative experience.--Vamik D. Volkan, Univ. of Virginia.