From central ideas like the Eight Fold Path and the Four Noble Truths to the role of meditation, Buddhism offers an indispensible introduction to the wisdom tradition that has shaped the lives of millions of people across centuries and continents. Writing in an engaging, approachable style, author Joan Duncan Oliver outlines the key tenants of Buddhism for every reader, unpacking complex philosophies and revealing the beauty of the timeless faith.A practitioner of Buddhist meditation for over thirty years, Oliver has written extensively on the subject and is uniquely well versed in Buddhist practice. Her expert knowledge and understanding make Buddhism an essential modern guidebook to an ancient tradition.

    A renowned behavioral neurologist provides insights to some of the most curious spiritual questions we all face.Is there a God?It's a question billions of people have asked since the dawn of time. You would think by now we'd have a satisfactory, universal answer. No such luck...Or maybe we do and we just need to look in the right place. For Dr. Jay Lombard that place is the brain, and more importantly the mind, that center of awareness and consciousness that creates reality.In The Mind of God, Dr. Lombard employs case studies from his own behavioral neurology practice to explore the spiritual conundrums that we all ask ourselves: What is the nature of God? Does my life have purpose? What's the meaning of our existence? Are we free? What happens to us when we die?For Lombard, these metaphysical questions are a jumping-off point for exploring the brain in search of the seat of the soul. It is neuroscience, the author contends, and how we and our brains interpret what's going on around us that can lead us to a deeper and more fulfilling faith.Mixing his personal experiences in the medical field (including compelling cases such as the male patient who really thought he was pregnant and a woman who literally scared herself to death) along with his own visionary insight into spiritual experience, Lombard has much to tell us about the nature and power of belief--and what we can do to focus our beliefs in a positive direction. If you want to find more meaning in your life or are searching for a deeper understanding of why we believe what we believe, then this book can lead to an exciting transformation in the way you see and understand the world around you. With cutting-edge research and provocative case studies, renowned behavioral neurologist provides insights to some of the most curious spiritual questions of mortality.

    There, generations of Tibetan monks have passed down a series of exercises with mystical, age-reversing properties. Known as the Tibetan Rites of Rejuvenation or the Five Rites, these once-secret exercises are now available to Westerners in Ancient Secret of the Fountain Of Youth. Peter Kelder's book begins with an account of his own introduction to the rites by way of Colonel Bradford, a mysterious retired British army officer who learned of the rites while journeying high up in the Himalayas. Fountain of Youth then offers practical instructions for each of the five rites, which resemble yoga postures. Taking just minutes a day to perform, the benefits for practitioners have included increased energy, weight loss, better memory, new hair growth, pain relief, better digestion, and feeling overall more youthful.

    Author Dr. Bruce Lipton is a former medical school professor and research scientist. His experiments, and that of other leading-edge scientists, have examined in great detail the processes by which cells receive information. The implications of this research radically change our understanding of life. It shows that genes and DNA do not control our biology; that instead DNA is controlled by signals from outside the cell, including the energetic messages emanating from our positive and negative thoughts. Dr. Lipton's profoundly hopeful synthesis of the latest and best research in cell biology and quantum physics is being hailed as a major breakthrough showing that our bodies can be changed as we retrain our thinking.

    Nir Barzilai’s life’s work is tackling the challenges of aging to delay and prevent the onset of all age-related diseases including “the big four”: diabetes, cancer, heart disease, and Alzheimer’s.One of Dr. Barzilai’s most fascinating studies features volunteers that include 750 SuperAgers—individuals who maintain active lives well into their nineties and even beyond—and, more importantly, who reached that ripe old age never having experienced cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, or cognitive decline.In Age Later, Dr. Barzilai reveals the secrets his team has unlocked about SuperAgers and the scientific discoveries that show we can mimic some of their natural resistance to the aging process. This eye-opening and inspirational book will help you think of aging not as a certainty, but as a phenomenon—like many other diseases and misfortunes—that can be targeted, improved, and even cured.

    This concise guide offers a modern interpretation of the doctrine, distilling its teachings with seven compelling principles that can be applied to self-development in daily life.

    Many studies have supported this, proving that life expectancy is 75 to 90 percent due to habits and only 10 to 25 percent due to genetics. This means that someone who is genetically destined to die at age 100 may not live past age 60 because of poor habits and lifestyle choices that cause accelerated aging and premature death. Conversely, a person can live to 100 and be functionally healthy. In this highly anticipated follow-up, Diana Schwarzbein, M.D., goes beyond the diet she introduced in her first book—which literally helped thousands of people lose weight—and offers a personalized anti-aging program for readers to heal their metabolisms and stop advanced aging in its tracks. Weaving in groundbreaking research and provocative case studies—including her own regeneration and that of her clients—she leads readers through a series of eye-opening questionnaires, which identify where they are on their path to either accelerated or healthy aging. Based on readers’ answers, she leads them to the “how-to” sections, which explain, in easy-to-follow and personalized detail, the steps they need to take to restore healthy functioning. For each unique situation, she covers five areas: Nutrition , Hormone Replacement Therapy (if needed), Tapering Off Toxic Chemicals or Avoiding Them Completely , Cross-Training Exercises and Stress Management. The Schwarzbein Principle II is sure to follow the success of the first book and will help people live a more healthful lifestyle by embracing a regeneration process to prevent and reverse accelerated aging.

    But Tao cannot fully be explained in words; it can only felt and experienced. Tao is something you live, day by day, moment by moment. It s the omnipresent oneness beyond ephemeral phenomena that expresses itself in everything. New York Times bestselling author Ilchi Lee, an enlightened Tao master from South Korea, has laid out a path to living Tao everyday. Along this path, he guides you to an understanding of the meaning of birth, death, and everything in between, building a foundation for living a complete and whole life. The universal principles contained in "Living Tao: Timeless Principles for Everyday Enlightenment" stem from the Korean practice of Sundo, an ancient tradition of mind-body training, as well as Lee s own life experience. With these tangible principles, Ilchi Lee makes this profound topic simple and accessible. "Living Tao" has an unparalleled depth in its simplicity that anyone can absorb and immediately apply. * 2015 INDIEFAB Book of the Year Award Winner, Bronze, Body, Mind & Spirit"

    A lifelong nonbeliever, he found himself on a bizarre adventure, involving a disgraced pastor, a mysterious self-help guru, and a gaggle of brain scientists. Eventually, Harris realized that the source of his problems was the very thing he always thought was his greatest asset: the incessant, insatiable voice in his head, which had both propelled him through the ranks of a hyper-competitive business and also led him to make the profoundly stupid decisions that provoked his on-air freak-out.We all have a voice in our head. It’s what has us losing our temper unnecessarily, checking our email compulsively, eating when we’re not hungry, and fixating on the past and the future at the expense of the present. Most of us would assume we’re stuck with this voice – that there’s nothing we can do to rein it in – but Harris stumbled upon an effective way to do just that. It’s a far cry from the miracle cures peddled by the self-help swamis he met; instead, it’s something he always assumed to be either impossible or useless: meditation. After learning about research that suggests meditation can do everything from lower your blood pressure to essentially rewire your brain, Harris took a deep dive into the underreported world of CEOs, scientists, and even marines who are now using it for increased calm, focus, and happiness.10% Happier takes readers on a ride from the outer reaches of neuroscience to the inner sanctum of network news to the bizarre fringes of America’s spiritual scene, and leaves them with a takeaway that could actually change their lives.

    The book features over 40 step-by-step photographic instruction guides to each step of the process, including: sterilizing the equipment to produce mushrooms; how to build the containers used during home mushroom cultivation; safety measures for preventing contamination of the mushroom cultures; and a guide to consuming magic mushrooms safely and enjoyably.Dr. Mandrake uses his doctoral studies in mycology to detail the history and botany of psilocybin mushrooms to give readers an idea of their prevalence throughout human history. The book is highly detailed and comprehensive, allowing readers to learn the entire process required to produce perfect magic mushrooms every time.

    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

    

    David A. Kessler explains why Americans suffer in unprecedented numbers from obesity, heart disease, diabetes, and other debilitating illnesses, and offers concrete solutions for reducing cardiovascular problems, keeping weight off, and curtailing chronic disease.The American body is in trouble. Heart disease is the number one cause of death in the United States today, and millions are plagued by conditions like obesity and diabetes. But we have the answer to improving health and longevity: 1) cut out fast carbs (processed foods); 2) reduce saturated fats; 3) exercise regularly.Though the solution is simple, the difficulty lies in the food we eat. Multi-billion-dollar processing plants and food manufacturers dot the heartland and work to increase the profits of the industrialized farming business—Big Agriculture—that produces excess corn and wheat. Today, we are being fed highly palatable, ultra-processed carbohydrates as food products—fast carbs—that are often marketed as “healthy.” Fast carbs are primarily starches and sugars produced during food processing and are present in much of what we eat. By destroying the healthy structure of whole food and increasing the amount of rapidly digestible starch it contains, these products bypass our body’s metabolic pathways. When combined with the ill-effects of saturated fats, we are putting ourselves on a collision course with weight gain, insulin resistance, digestive issues, heart disease, and more.The problem is, most of us don’t know where these fast carbs and saturated fats lurk in our daily diets. Accessible and eye-opening, Fast Carbs, Slow Carbs provides the information we need to understand exactly what we are eating—and to learn the truth about what it being sold to us as “healthy” food. Rising above the confusing range of specific popular diets—Keto, Paleo, Mediterranean, Vegan, Vegetarian—Dr. Kessler gives us an achievable baseline that can set us on the path to better health.

    But what if a respected scientist challenged them to make contact with the beyond under controlled laboratory conditions? What if the results not only stunned a skeptical scientist but also offered astonishing answers to a timeless question: Is there life after death? THE AFTERLIFE EXPERIMENTS Risking his academic reputation, Dr. Gary E. Schwartz asked well-known mediums to become part of a series of experiments to prove, or disprove, the existence of an afterlife. This riveting narrative, with electrifying transcripts, documents stringently monitored experiments in which mediums attempted to contact dead friends and relatives of "sitters" who were masked from view and never spoke, depriving the mediums of any cues. Here are the results that awed sitters and researchers alike: a revelation about a son's suicide, what a deceased father wanted to say about his last days in a coma, the transformation of a man's lifelong doubts about the afterlife, and, most amazing of all, a forecast of a beloved spouse's death. Forced by data to abandon skepticism, Schwartz presents this amazing account of his groundbreaking work, compelling from first page to last.

    Chronic disease is shortening our lifespan, destroying our quality of life, bankrupting governments, and threatening the health of future generations. Sadly, conventional medicine, with its focus on managing symptoms, has failed to address this challenge. The result is burned-out physicians, a sicker population, and a broken healthcare system. In Unconventional Medicine, Chris Kresser presents a plan to reverse this dangerous trend. He shows how the combination of a genetically aligned diet and lifestyle, functional medicine, and a lean, collaborative practice model can create a system that better serves the needs of both patients and practitioners. The epidemic of chronic illness can be stopped, if patients and practitioners can adapt.