Fans pick 58 books like Hands of Light

By Barbara Ann Brennan,

Here are 58 books that Hands of Light fans have personally recommended if you like Hands of Light. Shepherd is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.

When you buy books, we may earn a commission that helps keep our lights on (or join the rebellion as a member).

Book cover of Man’s Search for Meaning

Cory Richards Author Of The Color of Everything: A Journey to Quiet the Chaos Within

From my list on mental health and what keeps us sick.

Why am I passionate about this?

My journey with mental health started young and has colored my life for as long as I can remember. So, I have a fascination with storytelling and time. Time is the container for stories. But for a long time, I didn’t understand the depth of what ‘story’ really is and how much it shapes everything. When I started to write my book and unravel how inseparable the story is from the mental health journey I’d been on, my appetite for writing that could help me understand that connection became and remains voracious. I hope these books are as impactful for you as they have been for me. Enjoy!

Cory's book list on mental health and what keeps us sick

Cory Richards Why did Cory love this book?

I’ve read this book over and over and highlighted something new every time. Somehow, through the lens of Nazi death camps, Frankl validates everyone’s suffering, including my own. I’ve always known that suffering is an inescapable part of the human experience, but this helped me understand that to the brain, it isn’t relative in the ways I always thought.

Furthermore, this book helped me understand that my coping mechanisms inform suffering’s hold on me. Stories are a coping mechanism, and I learned that redirecting my attention and creating my personal narratives around what is meaningful to me rather than the source of pain is key to the cage of suffering. This book changed how I understand the importance of purpose and the power of what I build my stories around. 

By Viktor Frankl,

Why should I read it?

46 authors picked Man’s Search for Meaning as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

One of the outstanding classics to emerge from the Holocaust, Man's Search for Meaning is Viktor Frankl's story of his struggle for survival in Auschwitz and other Nazi concentration camps. Today, this remarkable tribute to hope offers us an avenue to finding greater meaning and purpose in our own lives.


Book cover of Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway

Shirley O'Donoghue Author Of The Beginner's Guide to Crystal Healing

From my list on accelerate my spiritual & personal development.

Why am I passionate about this?

I have been teaching personal and spiritual development courses and workshops for over 30 years. I am passionate about balancing the notion of spiritual connection and grounding it to help people see this aspect of our awareness as normal rather than weird or unreal. The books I have chosen reflect the fact that connecting to spirit sometimes requires hard work and dedication, but also, there are so many different aspects to explore and learn about that it is truly a lifetime quest for everyone on a conscious spiritual path–although I believe everyone is on a spiritual path, it's just that some people aren’t aware of it! 

Shirley's book list on accelerate my spiritual & personal development

Shirley O'Donoghue Why did Shirley love this book?

It is an old book that was popular when I first started training in crystal healing. The course I was on brought up many issues that I needed to work on, especially a particular fear of being the center of attention and appreciating my talents. It came into my life at a time where I could put into practice the concepts in the book.

It has become a classic to support people who are in the process of spiritual and personal development, as the two usually go hand in hand, and it is a book I still recommend to students.

By Susan Jeffers,

Why should I read it?

4 authors picked Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Internationally renowned author, Susan Jeffers, has helped millions of people around the globe to overcome their fears and heal the pain in their lives. Such fears may include:

Public speaking; Asserting yourself; Making decisions; Intimacy; Changing jobs; Being alone; Ageing; Driving; Losing a loved one; Ending a relationship.

But whatever your anxieties, Feel The Fear And Do It Anyway will give you the insight and tools to vastly improve your ability to handle any given situation. You will learn to live your life the way you want - so you can move from a place of pain, paralysis and depression…


Book cover of Many Lives, Many Masters

Shirley O'Donoghue Author Of The Beginner's Guide to Crystal Healing

From my list on accelerate my spiritual & personal development.

Why am I passionate about this?

I have been teaching personal and spiritual development courses and workshops for over 30 years. I am passionate about balancing the notion of spiritual connection and grounding it to help people see this aspect of our awareness as normal rather than weird or unreal. The books I have chosen reflect the fact that connecting to spirit sometimes requires hard work and dedication, but also, there are so many different aspects to explore and learn about that it is truly a lifetime quest for everyone on a conscious spiritual path–although I believe everyone is on a spiritual path, it's just that some people aren’t aware of it! 

Shirley's book list on accelerate my spiritual & personal development

Shirley O'Donoghue Why did Shirley love this book?

This is the classic book on past lives. When you are following a spiritual journey, the concept of reincarnation is one of many aspects that inevitably open up to consider and explore. It’s a well-written book that inspires and clearly explains the perception and theory of past lives. 

It’s also a reassuring read for people dealing with bereavement as well as helping the reader to see that perhaps we are not victims in a particular lifetime but merely experiencing different perspectives and aspects of 3D incarnation. 

By Brian L. Weiss,

Why should I read it?

8 authors picked Many Lives, Many Masters as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

From author and psychotherapist Dr. Brian Weiss comes the classic New York Times bestseller on the true case of the past-life therapy that changed the lives of both the prominent psychiatrist and young patient involved-now featuring a new afterword by the author.

As a traditional psychotherapist, Dr. Brian Weiss was astonished and skeptical when one of his patients began recalling past-life traumas that seemed to hold the key to her recurring nightmares and anxiety attacks. His skepticism was eroded, however, when she began to channel messages from the "space between lives," which contained remarkable revelations about Dr. Weiss' family and…


Book cover of Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation

Ricardo Sunderland Author Of The Energy Advantage: How to Go from Managing Your Time to Mastering Your Energy

From my list on non fiction mastering your energy.

Why am I passionate about this?

My purpose is to help leaders connect to and manage their energy. I help them bring coherence to how they lead and reach their full societal impact. For more than a  decade, I have coached 300 of the most senior leaders at some of the largest and most recognizable companies in the world. My recommended to-read book list represents crucible moments in my life and my calling to learn about human energy. Representing different lenses, which are key to adding to a mix of ingredients, allows the reader to drink a potion that will exalt all your buckets (physical, mental, emotional & spiritual) of energy holistically. 

Ricardo's book list on non fiction mastering your energy

Ricardo Sunderland Why did Ricardo love this book?

This book is the best book to get leaders to own the fact that unleashing an organization's creative power requires shifting its energy and culture and ripples from there. It all starts at the Top of The House. Through storytelling, it gave me two compelling insights.

First, it helped me see with clarity that we moved from living in a complicated world into a complex one; setting direction no longer works for leaders within organizations to thrive; now, it is required to shape context, and in return, your teams will feel safe to co-create.

Second, the authors very clearly define innovation in simple terms: Anything that is new and useful is innovative; it doesn’t have to be rocket science.

These insights gave me the courage to explore innovative ways to unleash energy within a system or organization. 

By Linda A. Hill, Greg Brandeau, Emily Truelove , Kent Lineback

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Collective Genius as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Why can some organizations innovate time and again, while most cannot? You might think the key to innovation is attracting exceptional creative talent. Or making the right investments. Or breaking down organizational silos. All of these things may help--but there's only one way to ensure sustained innovation: you need to lead it--and with a special kind of leadership. Collective Genius shows you how. Preeminent leadership scholar Linda Hill, along with former Pixar tech wizard Greg Brandeau, MIT researcher Emily Truelove, and Being the Boss coauthor Kent Lineback, found among leaders a widely shared, and mistaken, assumption: that a "good" leader…


Book cover of Winning from Within: A Breakthrough Method for Leading, Living, and Lasting Change

Ricardo Sunderland Author Of The Energy Advantage: How to Go from Managing Your Time to Mastering Your Energy

From my list on non fiction mastering your energy.

Why am I passionate about this?

My purpose is to help leaders connect to and manage their energy. I help them bring coherence to how they lead and reach their full societal impact. For more than a  decade, I have coached 300 of the most senior leaders at some of the largest and most recognizable companies in the world. My recommended to-read book list represents crucible moments in my life and my calling to learn about human energy. Representing different lenses, which are key to adding to a mix of ingredients, allows the reader to drink a potion that will exalt all your buckets (physical, mental, emotional & spiritual) of energy holistically. 

Ricardo's book list on non fiction mastering your energy

Ricardo Sunderland Why did Ricardo love this book?

This book masterfully uses six archetypes to show that we are not just the Thinker and the Warrior at work and the Dreamer and the Lover at Home; we have these big four personalities within all of us, and it shows us a way to integrate them simply and sustainably.  

This book changed my life. The philosophy behind it helped me accept a holistic mindset and, with it, update my belief system. By integrating my Emotional and Spiritual  Energy with my physical and mental, I gained stronger access to my intuition and creative power. I started to become the writer of my own story, rather than others writing it for me. There is no such thing as emotional compartmentalization. When it comes to emotions, 

there is one switch: On & Off. When you turn off the “Lover” at work for a long and sustained period, you end up numbing all…

By Erica Ariel Fox,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Winning from Within as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Life is a series of negotiations, whether or not you think of yourself as a negotiator. From seemingly insignificant daily decisions to major life choices, you negotiate every time you aim to persuade, argue over a decision, or resolve a conflict. But as negotiations and leadership expert Erica Ariel Fox reveals, the most important negotiations - the ones that determine the impact of our actions and the quality of our lives - are those we have with ourselves. Most of us recognize the difference between our knowledge - what we know we should do and say - and our know-how-what…


Book cover of The 5 Personality Patterns: Your Guide to Understanding Yourself and Others and Developing Emotional Maturity

Ricardo Sunderland Author Of The Energy Advantage: How to Go from Managing Your Time to Mastering Your Energy

From my list on non fiction mastering your energy.

Why am I passionate about this?

My purpose is to help leaders connect to and manage their energy. I help them bring coherence to how they lead and reach their full societal impact. For more than a  decade, I have coached 300 of the most senior leaders at some of the largest and most recognizable companies in the world. My recommended to-read book list represents crucible moments in my life and my calling to learn about human energy. Representing different lenses, which are key to adding to a mix of ingredients, allows the reader to drink a potion that will exalt all your buckets (physical, mental, emotional & spiritual) of energy holistically. 

Ricardo's book list on non fiction mastering your energy

Ricardo Sunderland Why did Ricardo love this book?

Reading this book will help you achieve emotional freedom. I came across Steven’s book in my pursuit of finding the best way to help my clients learn how to make the right choices when looking to find what gives them energy and what can take energy away. His book is a guide that masterfully helps you understand how you are likely to behave when overwhelmed and gives you a breakthrough approach to solving your behavior hijack.

I loved how something that can be so abstract and complex, like human behavioral patterns, can be simplified in a five-pattern model and be shared as a guide that shows you how our self-defense mechanism gets created, how it can high-jack us, and most importantly how we can get out of the trap. It helped me figure out, from an emotional perspective, what behavioral patterns I run whenever I am overwhelmed and which…

By Steven Kessler, Christine Chrisman (illustrator),

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The 5 Personality Patterns as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Understanding people this way is like having x-ray vision!
This bestselling book marks a major advance in the psychology of personality. Suddenly, you can see what's going on inside people: you can see what motivates and matters to them and how to influence and communicate with them successfully. Finally, you have a simple, clear, true-to-life map of personality that gives you the key to understanding people and interacting with them successfully. The 5 Personality Patterns is a book that can change your life.

"This is one of the most useful popular psychology books I have ever seen. . . .…


Book cover of Steps on the Stone Path: Working with Crystals and Minerals as a Spiritual Practice

Shirley O'Donoghue Author Of The Beginner's Guide to Crystal Healing

From my list on accelerate my spiritual & personal development.

Why am I passionate about this?

I have been teaching personal and spiritual development courses and workshops for over 30 years. I am passionate about balancing the notion of spiritual connection and grounding it to help people see this aspect of our awareness as normal rather than weird or unreal. The books I have chosen reflect the fact that connecting to spirit sometimes requires hard work and dedication, but also, there are so many different aspects to explore and learn about that it is truly a lifetime quest for everyone on a conscious spiritual path–although I believe everyone is on a spiritual path, it's just that some people aren’t aware of it! 

Shirley's book list on accelerate my spiritual & personal development

Shirley O'Donoghue Why did Shirley love this book?

Robert Sardello is a founding member of the School of Spiritual Psychology. He champions the concept that you can work on a much deeper level with crystals  by engaging with them intuitively and acknowledging that they have a consciousness 

I was recommended to read this book when I first started working with one of my publishers. It was lovely to read a book that didn’t “dumb down” crystal healing and encouraged the reader to delve more deeply into the energies that crystals hold for us to use. 

I loved this book because it gave me other perspectives that I hadn't heard before, such as how Rudolf Steiner and Carl Jung acknowledged crystals for their qualities, albeit in different ways. Sardello coined the term Earth Angels to describe what crystals do for us, and I love that. 

By Robert Sardello,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Steps on the Stone Path as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Through myths and legends, the knowledge of the power of certain gems and crystals has been preserved over generations. However, the practical aspects of how to use these precious stones to promote spiritual development have been lost to all but a few initiates. In Steps on the Stone Path, Robert Sardello offers strategies and rituals for recapturing that lost power.

Sardello starts with guided meditations and rituals for developing awareness of, and the ability to experience, stone qualities such as deep silence, form, transparency, and color as modes of spiritual consciousness. Entering these modes of silent, creative consciousness requires befriending…


Book cover of Bringers of the Dawn: Teachings from the Pleiadians

Shirley O'Donoghue Author Of The Beginner's Guide to Crystal Healing

From my list on accelerate my spiritual & personal development.

Why am I passionate about this?

I have been teaching personal and spiritual development courses and workshops for over 30 years. I am passionate about balancing the notion of spiritual connection and grounding it to help people see this aspect of our awareness as normal rather than weird or unreal. The books I have chosen reflect the fact that connecting to spirit sometimes requires hard work and dedication, but also, there are so many different aspects to explore and learn about that it is truly a lifetime quest for everyone on a conscious spiritual path–although I believe everyone is on a spiritual path, it's just that some people aren’t aware of it! 

Shirley's book list on accelerate my spiritual & personal development

Shirley O'Donoghue Why did Shirley love this book?

I love this book because I resonate so much with the message she is conveying. I remember being given this book to read, and it was a powerful wake-up call about our purpose here and why things are as they are. 

The messages in the book are still as relevant today as they were when I first read them. I have bought so many copies that I find myself giving them away to students and friends.  

By Barbara Marciniak,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Bringers of the Dawn as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Compiled from more than four hundred hours of channeling by Barbara Marciniak, Bringers of the Dawnimparts to us the wisdom of the Pleiadians, a group of enlightened beings who have come to Earth to help us discover how to reach a new stage of evolution. Master storytellers and humorists, they advise us to become media free, to work in teams, and to eliminate the words ""should"" and ""try"" from our vocabularies. We learn how to go beyond fear, how the original human was a magnificent being with twelve strands of DNA and twelve chakra centers, and who our ""gods"" are.…


Book cover of Some Science Adventures with Real Magic

Livia Kohn Author Of Taming Time: Daoist Ways of Working with Multiple Temporalities

From my list on the nature of time.

Why am I passionate about this?

Livia Kohn, Ph.D., is Professor Emerita of Religion and East Asian Studies at Boston University. The author, or editor, of close to sixty books (including the annual Journal of Daoist Studies), she spent ten years in Kyoto doing research. She now serves as the executive editor of Three Pines Press, runs international conferences and workshops, and guides study tours to Japan.

Livia's book list on the nature of time

Livia Kohn Why did Livia love this book?

This reports on a physics experiment that shows how people in a state of deep concentration can focus their intention and create changes in their environment. In a special unitary symmetry state energy is exchanged via both photons (light) and phonons (sound), moving faster than light. Fine, information-wave generated patterns then activate all sorts of particles and modulate substances in a measurable and meaningful way. Any moment we are concentrating our intention, we therefore have tremendous power not only over ourselves but also over our environment and our future.

By J. Gregory Fandel, William A. Tiller, Walter Dibble

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Some Science Adventures with Real Magic as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

This book provides the reader with an encapsulation of all the key experimental psychoenergetics observations made by Professor Tiller ande his group over the past 35 years. It reveals the true nature of the human acupuncture meridian/chakra system and how "sacred" spaces are created. It shows that the physical vacuum is not really empty and that, under the proper conditions, our digital measurement instruments can reveal a sum of contributions from two unique levels of physical reality. The book describes a new energy in nature that produces a very long range information entanglement and appears to be related to movement…


Book cover of Llama Destroys the World

Simon Philip Author Of You Must Bring a Hat!

From my list on unexpected endings & terrific twists.

Why am I passionate about this?

Simon is obsessed with picture books: reading them, writing them, buying them, smelling them. His own have been published in more than 20 languages. You Must Bring a Hat won the Sainsbury’s Children’s Book of the Year, and I Really Wany the Cake was shortlisted for the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize. He particularly enjoys funny, deadpan picture books. After gaining a 1st class degree in History, he put his skills to use as a barman at a local pub, grew tired of the owner calling him Andy, left to fail a teaching degree, then turned to writing. He lives in England, although occasionally leaves to buy milk.

Simon's book list on unexpected endings & terrific twists

Simon Philip Why did Simon love this book?

Another excellent title, as far as I’m concerned.

Possibly one of the most bonkers picture books I’ve ever read – incorporating cake, cosmic vibrations, black holes, and cheese-salad sandwiches – it’s an absolute riot, and I loved the twist, which happens a bit before the end but is hilariously satisfying after all the madness leading up to it.

By Jonathan Stutzman, Heather Fox (illustrator),

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked Llama Destroys the World as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Meet Llama, a true hero for the ages, who has most definitely driven a bus and who loves cake way more than you.

On Monday, Llama discovers a pile of cake, which he promptly eats.
On Tuesday, Llama squeezes into his dancing trousers, which he promptly rips.
The force of the rip creates a black hole (naturally).
By Friday, Llama will (indirectly) destroy the world.

In their debut picture book, author/illustrator team Jonathan Stutzman and Heather Fox introduce young readers to the hilarious, the oblivious, the apocalyptically adorable Llama.
So grab some cake and prepare to dance . . .…


Book cover of Man’s Search for Meaning
Book cover of Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway
Book cover of Many Lives, Many Masters

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