God Never Blinks: 50 Lessons for Life's Little Detours


Regina Brett - 2009
    When Regina Brett turned 50, she wrote a column on the 50 lessons life had taught her. She reflected on all she had learned through becoming a single parent, looking for love in all the wrong places, working on her relationship with God, battling cancer and making peace with a difficult childhood. It became one of the most popular columns ever published in the newspaper, and since then the 50 lessons have been emailed to hundreds of thousands of people. Brett now takes the 50 lessons and expounds on them in essays that are deeply personal. From "Don't take yourself too seriously-Nobody else does" to "Life isn't tied with a bow, but it's still a gift," these lessons will strike a chord with anyone who has ever gone through tough times--and haven't we all?

Breathing Underwater: Spirituality and the 12 Steps


Richard Rohr - 1989
    In this powerul two-tape audiocassette program, Christians are told they must learn to breathe underwater to survive the tidal wave of compulsive behavior and addiction.

A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life


Donald Miller - 2009
    One story had ended, and Don was unsure how to start another.But he gets rescued by two movie producers who want to make a movie based on his memoir. When they start fictionalizing Don's life for film--changing a meandering memoir into a structured narrative--the real-life Don starts a journey to edit his actual life into a better story. A Million Miles in a Thousand Years details that journey and challenges readers to reconsider what they strive for in life. It shows how to get a second chance at life the first time around.

Care of the Soul: A Guide for Cultivating Depth and Sacredness in Everyday Life


Thomas Moore - 1988
    Promising to deepen and broaden the reader's perspective on his or her own life experiences, Moore draws on his own life as a therapist practicing "care of the soul," as well as his studies of the world's religions and his work in music and art, to create this inspirational guide that examines the connections between spirituality and the problems of individuals and society.

How to Practice: The Way to a Meaningful Life


Dalai Lama XIV - 2002
    According to His Holiness the Dalai Lama, the ability to find true fulfillment lies within each of us. In this very special book, the spiritual and temporal leader of Tibet, Nobel Prize winner, and bestselling author helps readers embark upon the path to enlightenment with a stunning illumination of the timeless wisdom and an easy-access reference for daily practice. Divided into a series of distinct steps that will lead spiritual seekers toward enlightenment, How to Practice is a constant companion in the quest to practice morality, meditation, and wisdom. This accessible book will guide you toward opening your heart, refraining from doing harm, and maintiaining mentaltranquility as the Dalai Lama shows you how to overcome everyday obstacles, from feelings of anger and mistrust to jealousy, insecurity, and counterproductive thinking. Imbued with His Holiness' vivacious spirit and sense of playfulness, How to Practice offers sage and practical insight into the human psyche and into the deepest aspirations that bind us all together.

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.

Resisting Happiness


Matthew Kelly - 2016
    and how to start choosing happiness again!Are you happy? It may be the wrong question. Most of us think we are relatively happy, while at the same time knowing that we could be happier—maybe even a lot happier. Ordinary people and the finest philosophers have been exploring the question of happiness for thousands of years, and theories abound. But this is not a book of theory. Resisting Happiness is a deeply personal, disarmingly transparent look at why we sabotage our own happiness and what to do about it.Are you overwhelmed? Do you procrastinate? Do you sometimes feel like you are your own worst enemy? Are you ignoring your dreams? Have you lost the courage to truly be yourself? Do you feel that your life lacks meaning and purpose? Do you find yourself avoiding the real issues in your life and focusing on the superficial?We all experience these feelings and doubts from time to time. But do you know what to do when you experience them? In this fascinating book, Matthew Kelly, uses his signature combination of the profound and the practical, to help us understand why we feel these things and how to rise above them.Breaking through resistance, Kelly tells us, is essential to becoming the-best-version-of-ourselves and living with passion and purpose.What is resistance? It's that sluggish feeling of not wanting to do something that you know is good for you. It's the inclination to do something that you unabashedly know is not good for you. It's the desire and tendency to delay something you should be doing right now.It is resistance that stands between you and happiness. In these pages you will learn not only what it is, but how to recognize and conquer it in your own life.

Learning to Walk in the Dark


Barbara Brown Taylor - 2014
    Doesn’t God work in the nighttime as well? In Learning to Walk in the Dark, Taylor asks us to put aside our fears and anxieties and to explore all that God has to teach us “in the dark.” She argues that we need to move away from our “solar spirituality” and ease our way into appreciating “lunar spirituality” (since, like the moon, our experience of the light waxes and wanes). Through darkness we find courage, we understand the world in new ways, and we feel God’s presence around us, guiding us through things seen and unseen. Often, it is while we are in the dark that we grow the most.With her characteristic charm and literary wisdom, Taylor is our guide through a spirituality of the nighttime, teaching us how to find our footing in times of uncertainty and giving us strength and hope to face all of life’s challenging moments.

The Message of a Master: Classic Tale of Wealth, Wisdon, and the Secret of Success


John McDonald - 1929
    Originally published in 1929 by California Press.

The Purpose Driven Life: What on Earth Am I Here for?


Rick Warren - 2002
    Rick Warren will guide you through a personal forty-day spiritual journey that will transform your answer to life's most important question: What on earth am I here for? Knowing God's purpose for creating you will reduce your stress, focus your energy, simplify your decisions, give meaning to your life, and most important, prepare you for eternity. Movie stars and political leaders aren't the only ones turning to Rick Warren for spiritual guidance. Millions of people from NBA and LPGA players to corporate executives to high school students to prison inmates meet regularly to discuss The Purpose Driven Life.

Do Hard Things: A Teenage Rebellion Against Low Expectations


Alex Harris - 2008
    And Alex and Brett Harris are leading the charge.Do Hard Things is the Harris twins' revolutionary message in its purest and most compelling form, giving readers a tangible glimpse of what is possible for teens who actively resist cultural lies that limit their potential.Combating the idea of adolescence as a vacation from responsibility, the authors weave together biblical insights, history, and modern examples to redefine the teen years as the launching pad of life. Then they map out five powerful ways teens can respond for personal and social change.Written by teens for teens, Do Hard Things is packed with humorous personal anecdotes, practical examples, and stories of real-life rebelutionaries in action. This rallying cry from the heart of an already-happening teen revolution challenges a generation to lay claim to a brighter future, starting today.

The Noticer: Sometimes, All a Person Needs Is a Little Perspective


Andy Andrews - 2009
    Consider even the simplest action you take, for your lives matter beyond measure…and they matter forever.”Jones speaks to that part in everyone that is yearning to understand why things happen and what we can do about it.Like The Traveler’s Gift, The Noticer is a unique narrative is a blend of fiction, allegory, and inspiration.  Gifted storyteller Andy Andrews helps us see how becoming a “noticer” just might change a person’s life forever.

The Greatest Miracle in the World


Og Mandino - 1975
    A great inspirational writer tells his story - a narrative that will hold you spellbound as it reveals exciting new secrets for your personal happiness and success.

Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind: Informal Talks on Zen Meditation and Practice


Shunryu Suzuki - 1970
    Seldom has such a small handful of words provided a teaching as rich as has this famous opening line. In a single stroke, the simple sentence cuts through the pervasive tendency students have of getting so close to Zen as to completely miss what it’s all about. An instant teaching on the first page. And that’s just the beginning.In the forty years since its original publication, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind has become one of the great modern Zen classics, much beloved, much reread, and much recommended as the best first book to read on Zen. Suzuki Roshi presents the basics—from the details of posture and breathing in zazen to the perception of nonduality—in a way that is not only remarkably clear, but that also resonates with the joy of insight from the first to the last page. It’s a book to come back to time and time again as an inspiration to practice, and it is now available to a new generation of seekers in this fortieth anniversary edition, with a new afterword by Shunryu Suzuki’s biographer, David Chadwick.

Acedia & Me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer's Life


Kathleen Norris - 2008
    Even as she struggled, Norris recognized her familiar battle with acedia. She had discovered the word in an early Church text when she was in her thirties. Having endured times of deep soul-weariness since she was a teenager, she immediately recognized that this passage described her affliction: sinking into a state of being unable to care. Fascinated by this “noonday demon,” so familiar to those in the early and medieval Church, Norris read intensively and knew she must restore this forgotten but utterly relevant and important concept to the modern world’s vernacular. Like Norris’s The Cloister Walk, Acedia & me is part memoir and part meditation. As in her Amazing Grace, here Norris explicates and demystifies a spiritual concept, exploring acedia through the geography of her life as a writer; her marriage and the challenges of commitment in the midst of grave illness; and her keen interest in the monastic tradition. Unlike her earlier books, this one features a poignant narrative throughout of Norris’s and her husband’s bouts with acedia and its clinical cousin, depression. Moreover, her analysis of acedia reveals its burden not just on individuals but on whole societies— and that the “restless boredom, frantic escapism, commitment phobia, and enervating despair that we struggle with today are the ancient demon of acedia in modern dress.”