Find inspiration for change and personal growth in each story within its pages as people in this dynamic community share their experiences of transformation, of lives reclaimed, of relationships renewed and futures full of promise.Today, the recovering lifestyle has been embraced and celebrated by millions. The silence which once enveloped dysfunctional families or victims of trauma has been broken, and the shame felt by those suffering with behavioral disorders or depression has turned into a sense of accomplishment and pride. More than 700,000 Americans receive treatment for alcoholism or substance abuse on any given day in over 11,000 addiction treatment programs offering residential, outpatient and hospital inpatient options.Support groups meet daily in every corner of the world and the Internet hums with recovering chat rooms and bulletin boards. The traditional 12 Step model of Alcoholic's Anonymous has been joined by programs offering more secular approaches to recovery, while others support faith-based models. Diversity and inclusion in treatment have become the hallmark of recovery today.Whether you are just embracing a commitment to recovery, or have already experienced deep healing, hope and renewed love in recovery, Chicken Soup for the Recovering Soul will be a source of inspiration and renewal every step of the way. Remember, you are not alone.

    Should they follow cautionary guidelines to return to a major city or take a chance by continuing north through the back country?Thru-hiking from Georgia to Maine on any given year has its own enormous obstacles. What do you eat? Where do you sleep and can you reach your family? In 2020, during a worldwide shutdown these challenges became nearly impossible to overcome. See how rural trail town communities were affected by the pandemic and understand an untold perspective of pursuing your dreams at all costs.Avoiding law enforcement, entering into "closed" federal land and even overcoming death - all while attempting the impossible. With a wife and two daughters at home, the outside world against him and seemingly unreliable information, this epic tale follows Ryan Michael Beck's journey 2,193 miles in pursuit of a dream to thru-hike the entire Appalachian Trail against all odds.

    Taking a radical departure from traditional views of God, Western or Eastern, author Kevin Griffin neither accepts Christian beliefs in a Supreme Being nor Buddhist non-theism, but rather forges a refreshing, sensible, and accessible Middle Way. Griffin shows how the Dharma, the teachings of the Buddha, can be understood as a Higher Power. Karma, mindfulness, impermanence, and the Eightfold Path itself are revealed as powerful forces that can be accessed through meditation and inquiry.Drawing from his own experiences with substance abuse, rehabilitation, and recovery, Griffin looks at the various ways that meditation and spiritual practices helped deepen his experience of sobriety. His personal story of addiction is not only raw, honest and engrossing, but guides readers to an inquiry of their own spirituality. In doing so, he poses profound questions, including:·         How can I understand God from a Buddhist perspective?·         How can I “turn my will and my life over” as a Buddhist?·         How can this idea of God “remove my shortcomings”?·         How do I learn this God’s “will”?

    Authors and widely respected therapists and ACOA workshop leaders Herbert Gravitz and Julie Bowden detail in a clear question-and-answer format the challenges of control and inadequacy that ACOAs face as they struggle for recovery and understanding, stage-by-stage: Survival * Emergent Awareness * Core Issues * Transformations * Integration * Genesis. If you feel troubled by your post, Recovery will start you on the path of self-awareness, as it explores the searching questions adult children of alcoholics seek to hove answered: * How con I overcome my need for control? * Do all ACOAs ploy the some kind of roles in the family? * How do I overcome my fear of intimacy? * What is all-or-none functioning? * How can ACOAs maintain self-confidence and awareness after recovery? * How do ACOAs handle the family after understanding its influence? * And many other important questions about your post, family and feelings. Written with warmth, joy and real understanding, Recovery will inspire you to meet the challenges of the post and overcome the obstacles to your happiness.

    What's not to love?David “Yeah Dave” Romanelli is kinda hip, kinda goofy, and occasionally really outrageous, an unlikely guru who is reinventing the quest for enlightenment. For Yeah Dave, the path to ecstasy doesn't require any previous experience with yoga, meditation, or wellness. He shows us how to find transcendence through everyday pleasures, like admiring the sunset or rocking out to your favorite band. “There is a place where the chocolate tastes sweeter, the music sounds better, the inspiration feels richer, and the visions look clearer,” writes Dave. “That place is the Moment.”Yeah Dave’s Guide to Livin’ the Moment offers an alternative to the crazy, over-stimulating, distracted world we live in today, a world in which we watch the news while eating, eye our email while conversing, and forget to notice the full moon while texting. On our mission for speed, movement, and stimulation, we risk missing our life. Yeah Dave’s book gives us our life back, one beautiful, delicious, and funny moment at a time.Yeah Dave’s Guide will make you laugh out loud while taking you someplace totally unexpected. Through hilarious vignettes about his dorky moves on the dance floor, his Crackberry addiction, and his tryst with Hot Horny Married Woman, he shares fresh and unforgettable wisdom. Without dogma or anything too “out there,” Dave makes you want to slow down the blur of modern life and find the full flavor, power, and passion that can only be found in the Moment.

    What was once a way she escaped her insecurity and negativity as a teenager became a means of coping with the anxiety and stress of an impossible workload.Girl Walks Out of a Bar explores Smith’s formative years, her decade of alcohol and drug abuse, divorce, and her road to recovery. In this darkly comic and wrenchingly honest story, Smith describes how her circumstances conspire with her predisposition to depression and self-medication in an environment ripe for addiction to flourish. When her close-knit group of high-achieving friends celebrate the end of their grueling workdays with alcohol-fueled nights at the city’s clubs and summer weekends partying at the beach the feel-good times can spiral wildly out of control.Girl Walks Out of a Bar is a candid portrait of alcoholism through the lens of gritty New York realism. Beneath the façade of success lies the reality of addiction.

    Tao is a Chinese word meaning way or path. The Tao of Mom, then, is literally The Way of Mothers. Many of the women celebrated in The Tao of Mom are well-known, while some are not; many hail from the West, yet all impart distinctly Eastern sensibilities. To further enrich our journey into the thoughts of each motherly figure, background details are included about each woman, such as Rosa Parks, mother of the modern civil rights movement; Aung San Suu Kyi, leader of the democratic movement in Myanmar; Maria Montessori, Italian educational reformer; and Abhirupa-Nanda, Indian poet-to name only a few.Lavishly illustrated, this gem of a book is for you to give to the moms in your life, for moms to give to you, for everyone to give to dads (as a loving reminder of how wise moms can be), and of course for you to give to yourself. The Tao of Mom is for everyone in need of a daily dose of motherly wisdom, inspiration, and comfort.

    It became an immediate bestseller, and Life magazine called it "a profound lesson for the living." This companion volume consists of the questions that are most frequently asked of Dr. Kübler-Ross and her compassionate answers. She discusses accepting the end of life, suicide, terminal illness, euthanasia, how to tell a patient he or she is critically ill, and how to deal with all the special difficulties surrounding death. Questions and Answers on Death and Dying is a vital resource for doctors, nurses, members of the clergy, social workers, and lay people dealing with death and dying.

    Caroline Knapp describes how the distorted world of her well-to-do parents pushed her toward anorexia and alcoholism. Fittingly, it was literature that saved her: she found inspiration in Pete Hamill's 'A Drinking Life' and sobered up. Her tale is spiced up with the characters she has known along the way. A journalist describes her twenty years as a functioning alcoholic, explaining how she used alcohol to escape personal relationships and the realities of life until a series of personal crises forced her to confront her problem.

    Diligently treating the drug addicts of Vancouver's notorious Downtown Eastside with sympathy in his heart and legislative reform in mind can't be easy. But Maté never judges. His book is a powerful call-to-arms, both for the decriminalization of drugs and for a more sympathetic and informed view of addiction. As Maté observes, "Those whom we dismiss as 'junkies' are not creatures from a different world, only men and women mired at the extreme end of a continuum on which, here or there, all of us might well locate ourselves." In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts begins by introducing us to many of Dr. Maté's most dire patients who steal, cheat, sell sex, and otherwise harm themselves for their next hit. Maté looks to the root causes of addiction, applying a clinical and psychological view to the physical manifestation and offering some enlightening answers for why people inflict such catastrophe on themselves.Finally, he takes aim at the hugely ineffectual, largely U.S.-led War on Drugs (and its worldwide followers), challenging the wisdom of fighting drugs instead of aiding the addicts, and showing how controversial measures such as safe injection sites are measurably more successful at reducing drug-related crime and the spread of disease than anything most major governments have going. It's not easy reading, but we ignore his arguments at our peril. When it comes to combating the drug trade and the ravages of addiction, society can use all the help it can get. --Kim Hughes

    Michiko Kakutani calls it “a book that lassos you, hogties your emotions and won’t let you go” in her New York Times review. And Susan Cheever states, simply, that Lit is “the best book about being a woman in America I have read in years."In addition to the New York Times, Lit was named a Best Book of 2009 by the New Yorker (Reviewer Favorite), Entertainment Weekly (Top 10), Time (Top 10), the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Chicago Tribune, the Christian Science Monitor, Slate, the St. Louis Post Dispatch, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, and the Seattle Times.

    For it to work, the widower will have to put his feelings for his late wife to the side and focus on you. But how do you know if he’s ready to take this step?Drawing on his own experience as a widower who’s remarried, Abel Keogh gives you unique insight into the hearts and minds of widowers, including:* How to tell if a widower’s ready to make room in his heart for you * Red flags that may indicate he’s not ready for commitment* How to handle family and friends who aren’t supportive of the widower’s new relationship* Tips for dealing with holidays and other special occasionsDating a Widower is your 101 guide to having a relationship with a man who’s starting over. It also contains over a dozen real life stories from women who have gone down the same road you’re traveling. It’s the perfect book to help you decide if the man you’re seeing is ready for a new relationship—and whether or not dating a widower is right for you.

    In the U.S. alone, the rates of alcohol abuse among women have skyrocketed in the past decade. DUIs, "drunkorexia" (choosing to limit eating to consume greater quantities of alcohol), and health problems connected to drinking are all on the rise, especially among younger women-a problem exacerbated by the alcohol industry itself. Battling for women's dollars and leisure time, corporations have developed marketing strategies and products targeted exclusively to women. Equally alarming is a recent CDC report showing a sharp rise in binge-drinking, putting women and girls at further risk.Anne Dowsett Johnston illuminates this startling epidemic, dissects the psychological, social, and industry factors that have contributed to its rise, and explores its long-lasting impact on our society and individual lives, including her own. In Drink, she brilliantly weaves in-depth research, interviews with leading researchers, and the moving story of her own struggle with alcohol abuse. The result is an unprecedented and bold inquiry that is both informative and shocking.

    But It Doesn’t Have To Be.■ get Rid Of Past And Future Worries■ love Yourself Unconditionally■ accept What You Can’t Control■ live Authentically■ use The “f”word (forgivness)In Let That Sh*t Go, the authors share the wisdom they’ve gained though decades of practising and teaching others to find peace of mind. Learn to put your life in perspective, take each day one step at a time and steal moments of calm amid the chaos. And remember: it’s not worth holding onto that sh*t.NINA PUREWAL founded Pure Minds, a company that conducts mindfulness and meditation workshops for the public and corporate sector. KATE PETRIW is the founder of Mind Matters, an organization that holds mental health workshops focused on reducing stress and negative thinking patterns. “Stomach stress gurgles are no match for this spinning Rolodex of chill pills.”NEIL PASRICHA, #1 Bestselling Author

    She spent her evenings at cocktail parties and dark bars where she proudly stayed till last call. Drinking felt like freedom, part of her birthright as a strong, enlightened twenty-first-century woman. But there was a price. She often blacked out, waking up with a blank space where four hours should have been. Mornings became detective work on her own life. What did I say last night? How did I meet that guy? She apologized for things she couldn't remember doing, as though she were cleaning up after an evil twin. Publicly, she covered her shame with self-deprecating jokes, and her career flourished, but as the blackouts accumulated, she could no longer avoid a sinking truth. The fuel she thought she needed was draining her spirit instead.A memoir of unblinking honesty and poignant, laugh-out-loud humor, Blackout is the story of a woman stumbling into a new kind of adventure—the sober life she never wanted. Shining a light into her blackouts, she discovers the person she buried, as well as the confidence, intimacy, and creativity she once believed came only from a bottle. Her tale will resonate with anyone who has been forced to reinvent or struggled in the face of necessary change. It's about giving up the thing you cherish most—but getting yourself back in return.