Here are 88 books that Purpose in Your Pain fans have personally recommended if you like
Purpose in Your Pain.
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I have had the pleasure of exploring many career paths and businesses as an attorney, CPA, minister, life coach, media company CEO, publisher, international motivational speaker, and author. Yet it was not until illness from stage 4 endometriosis almost took me out that I realized that life happiness and success were not synonymous. I took the time to 1) figure out the difference and 2) create a pathway to joy. Joy is the step beyond happiness, and it ensures life satisfaction and longevity. And this is the answer to my question – and the topic – what am I living for? I am living for joy, peace, and fulfillment.
Walking with the author on his journey from successful African American businessman in Montgomery, Alabama to empowered and enriched Nigerian and Ghana American now living in Accra, Ghana brings the echoes of Dr. King's "dream" to life in the halls of our hearts: we realize that to walk equally with others first requires that we know ourselves, proclaiming proudly who we are and whose we are. Found My People gives us the tools, encouragement, and benefits to do so.
This book will challenge your concept of heritage, delight you with the serendipities of destiny, and inspire you to find your people! I was inspired to extend my DNA search and dig deeper into my heritage because of it.
I have had the pleasure of exploring many career paths and businesses as an attorney, CPA, minister, life coach, media company CEO, publisher, international motivational speaker, and author. Yet it was not until illness from stage 4 endometriosis almost took me out that I realized that life happiness and success were not synonymous. I took the time to 1) figure out the difference and 2) create a pathway to joy. Joy is the step beyond happiness, and it ensures life satisfaction and longevity. And this is the answer to my question – and the topic – what am I living for? I am living for joy, peace, and fulfillment.
As a parent, I strive to create strong relationships with my daughter’s educational team, and this book is a wonderful tool to cultivate such relationships.
Transforming Lives has daily affirmations and scriptures that explore the challenges that your child and their teachers/administrators encounter in working to build students into strong leaders, responsible community members, and loving members of our families. The author also included a list of best practices and advice from experienced educators that can help you support your child through crises and everyday living.
It is a pocket-sized book, so it can go where ever you go, and there is ample room for journaling after every chapter. Also, it is a 14-day journal, but there is a bonus day included.
The COVID-19 pandemic brought us face to face with the challenges of parenting, teaching, and encouraging young people to be excellent human beings. Challenges that had previously been swept under a rug designed to silence the actions necessary to restore our future leaders' confidence, self-worth, and self-respect: faith. Coach Carol Rhoden, FCSAA Hall of Fame inductee, championship-winning basketball coach, and veteran educator has boldly dared to proclaim the truth in this devotional!
Transforming Lives Through God's Word is a 14 day guided journey of prayers, scriptures, and instruction from Coach Carol's 17+ years experience educating and coaching athletes from elementary…
I have had the pleasure of exploring many career paths and businesses as an attorney, CPA, minister, life coach, media company CEO, publisher, international motivational speaker, and author. Yet it was not until illness from stage 4 endometriosis almost took me out that I realized that life happiness and success were not synonymous. I took the time to 1) figure out the difference and 2) create a pathway to joy. Joy is the step beyond happiness, and it ensures life satisfaction and longevity. And this is the answer to my question – and the topic – what am I living for? I am living for joy, peace, and fulfillment.
I read this book on my way home from India about 9 years ago, after a women’s leadership conference in Bangalore at the Art of Living Foundation International Headquarters.
It was the perfect supplement to the theme of the conference – supporting leaders. Management Mantras had a list of strategies and tips that I still use today, and greatly credit to my success. One of the best pieces of advice was the vacation schedule: 3-day weekend every month; 1 week every quarter; 2 weeks every 6 months.
These breaks allow us to be rejuvenated and refreshed so we catch burnout before we burn up! It is an easy read, very well written, and a great resource no matter where you are in your professional journey or industry.
Organisations the world over today are paying more and more attention to how to prevent their workforce from getting burnt out due to an unrelenting pace of work. Views are radically changing on practices to ensure the employees perform consistently well over many years. In this book, Sri Sri offers valuable tips for managers and leaders to become more effective in their roles and also on how to delevop a conducive work environment so that both the employees and the organisation add value to each other.
H. H. Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, spiritual leader and humanitarian, was born in 1956…
I have had the pleasure of exploring many career paths and businesses as an attorney, CPA, minister, life coach, media company CEO, publisher, international motivational speaker, and author. Yet it was not until illness from stage 4 endometriosis almost took me out that I realized that life happiness and success were not synonymous. I took the time to 1) figure out the difference and 2) create a pathway to joy. Joy is the step beyond happiness, and it ensures life satisfaction and longevity. And this is the answer to my question – and the topic – what am I living for? I am living for joy, peace, and fulfillment.
This book had me hooked in the introduction when the author discussed her personal experience realizing that the pursuit of happiness hamster wheel (my words) never ends unless we end it.
I took it everywhere, and everywhere people saw me reading it, they stopped so we could talk about it – even in Wendy’s over hamburgers during lunch one day! My dog-eared copy was happily gifted to my college-freshman niece, who saw it in my car, and I am delighted that she is implementing some of the advice in the book to get off the hamster wheel and enjoy her life.
While success is important, living a satisfying life trumps all, and this book does a great job illustrating how to do that.
'This book is brilliant - read it and be prepared to reset your mood to happy. Your life won't be the same again' Daily Express Everyone wants to be happy and successful and yet the pursuit of both has never been more elusive. We are urged to craft careers that matter, to achieve more and waste no time on the small stuff, to be actively engaged in our communities and, while we are at it, to relish every second. Rather than thriving, all this pressure leads to declining wellbeing, relationships and, paradoxically, productivity. In The Happiness Track Emma Seppala explains…
As bedtime stories, I told our children my personal stories of life on a Pennsylvania farm with a city-slicker father who yearned to be a successful farmer. Growing up in a Jewish orphanage in the early 1900s, he dreamed of someday owning a farm and breathing the fresh air of the country. So many funny stories from the farm encouraged our children to say “Tell me a story when you were little, Mommy,” every night. I decided to write these down and they became my first memoir The Road Home. I love memoir and through my YouTube channel, I encourage others to “Write Your Story for Your Generations to Come.”
I love this book’s honest look at questioning the goodness of God. When Delia, at 28 years old, finds she has only a short time to live, she considers her options. Her husband, Remon, never once doubts his options; Delia has to fight this incurable cancer ravaging her body. The life lessons she learns and shares with her readers put pain, life, and faith, in a new perspective for me. I especially love memoirs that teach life lessons, since my own book does the same thing. When we learn from others’ experiences, our world widens to us. Delia and Remon’s story has been a testimony of God’s goodness to countless people throughout the world.
D.N. Grace tells her story as a cancer survivor. Still in her twenties, Grace sees her life goals unfolding just as she planned. With a passion to serve God, her dream school within reach, and the love of her life at her side, she suddenly finds her life out of control and turned upside down taking a very different path. In Your Pain Is Not A Waste, Grace tells her story of being diagnosed with stage 3 soft tissue sarcoma and given two years to live, only if the chemotherapy drugs work.
Though religious violence is an odd obsession for a nice guy like me, the topic was forced on me. Having lived for years in the Indian Punjab, I was struck by the uprising of Sikhs in the 1980s. I wanted to know why, and what religion had to do with it. These could have been my own students. It is easy to understand why bad people do bad things, but why do good people—often with religious visions of peace—employ such savage acts of violence? This is the question that has propelled me through a half-dozen books, including the recent When God Stops Fighting: How Religious Violence Ends.
This modern classic by a Harvard anthropologist is about torture and inflicted body pain in general, though it has abundant examples from the bible and religion-related conflicts. Her main thesis is that acts of torture are attempts to destroy the worlds of the victim and remake them in the mold of the torturer. It helps us understand that acts of religious violence are always so some extent a clash of worldviews and the attempt to forcibly destroy one view of reality with another.
Part philosophical meditation, part cultural critique, this profoundly original work explores the nature of physical suffering. Elaine Scarry bases her study on a wide range of sources: literature and art, medical case histories, documents on torture compiled by Amnesty International, legal transcripts of personal injury trials, and military and strategic writings by such figures as Clausewitz, Churchill, Liddell Hart, and Henry Kissinger. Scarry begins with the fact of pain's inexpressibility. Not only is physical pain difficult to describe in words, it also actively destroys language, reducing sufferers in the most extreme cases to an inarticulate state of cries and moans.…
I am an anthropologist and cognitive scientist who studies some of the things that make us human—but not the obvious ones. I am mostly interested in those things that may appear puzzling or pointless, but fill our lives with meaning and purpose. Growing up in Greece, I read National Geographic Magazine and reveled in the documentaries of Jane Goodall, David Attenborough, and Jacques Cousteau, which sparked in me a passion for exploration through the combined lenses of personal experience and scientific scrutiny. In my own research, I have spent two decades studying ritual by conducting several years of ethnographic research and bringing scientific measurements into real-life settings.
This book relates to a lot of what I’ve learned in my own research about rituals. Contrary to conventional wisdom, it argues that we humans are not hedonists by nature. Yes, we desire comfort and we pursue all kinds of pleasures. But we also often embrace struggle, effort, and even fear and pain, and those are in fact the things that make our lives truly meaningful. From watching horror films and climbing mountains to raising children and performing painful rituals, Paul Bloom argues that, in the right context, suffering can be part of a life well-lived.
“This book will challenge you to rethink your vision of a good life. With sharp insights and lucid prose, Paul Bloom makes a captivating case that pain and suffering are essential to happiness. It’s an exhilarating antidote to toxic positivity.” —Adam Grant, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Think Again and host of the TED podcast WorkLife
One of BehavioralScientist's"Notable Books of 2021"
From the author of Against Empathy, a different kind of happiness book, one that shows us how suffering is an essential source of both pleasure and meaning in our lives
I'm an American author of thirteen books (so far). Some are on vegan living (Main Street Vegan, The Love-Powered Diet); others (Creating a Charmed Life, Shelter for the Spirit, Younger by the Day) are about wellbeing and crafting an inner life. My passions are spirituality -- yoga primarily, but all the ways people find meaning; compassionate living: extending loving-kindness to ourselves and all beings; and creating vibrant health through yoga, Ayurveda, plant-based eating, and a grateful outlook. (Here's a little preview: I'm in the early stages of a book about aging like a yogi.)
Yoga, like any discipline designed to integrate us humans with ourselves, works for those who work it. Some, however, have a more challenging path, and this includes survivors of trauma. In this beautifully written work -- part memoir, part self-help -- the author details how finding yoga, and practicing it as if her life and sanity depended on it, brought her out of intense grief and PTSD. She shows us how it can work for us, too, if our life saga includes great sorrow, or if we'd simply like to deal better with the generic ups-and-down.
Orphaned in her early teens and shuttled between abusive foster homes, Tatiana Forero Puerta found herself in her early twenties in New York City, haunted by the memories of her tumultuous youth and suicidal. Following emergency hospitalization, she was advised by her doctor to take up yoga. Over days, weeks, months, and then years, she embraced yoga’s honesty and discipline―delving more deeply into its wisdom, literature, and, vitally, its practice. In so doing, yoga healed her scars, opened her soul to forgiveness, and allowed her to reconcile herself with a past that had threatened to snuff out her life. Yoga…
My parents survived the Killing Fields of Cambodia and the aftermath of the Vietnam War, so their love for us was always tinged with anxiety, fear, and a large deal of paranoia and control. All of my books are about the complex relationship between parents and their children, and the things we knowingly or unknowingly pass down. I’ve also worked a number of years as a university student counsellor, where the same enduring themes play out in my students’ experiences. So naturally, I am drawn to stories that explore difficult but loving family dynamics.
Renee’s father was in jail for murder, and her mother never got over the shame. This book is about family secrets and how corrosive they can be, and also how a child survives a manipulative mother. I was floored by the wild level of pain a parent could inadvertently bestow on their child, but there is also much grace and love in this memoir.
A gripping memoir that reads like a psychological thriller... When Anne wakes in hospital, she is unable to recognise anyone or anything, mistaking herself for a young girl at first. She can talk but cannot remember much, including, as it turns out, the birth of her daughter, her rocky relationship with a man who is said to be her husband, and a mysterious man she feels a deep longing for but is warned against. As Anne tries to recover and piece together what has happened, fragments of memory come back but do little to help and sometimes confuse her further.…
I'm a mathematician but an unusual one because I am interested in how mathematics is created and how it is learned. From an early age, I loved mathematics because of the beauty of its concepts and the precision of its organization and reasoning. When I started to do research I realized that things were not so simple. To create something new you had to suspend or go beyond your rational mind for a while. I realized that the learning and creating of math have non-logical features. This was my eureka moment. It turned the conventional wisdom (about what math is and how it is done) on its head.
It’s a little weird that this book should find a place on my list. It’s a book about how society has become resistant to anything that is difficult and painful and the kinds of people that we have become as a result. But mathematics is difficult! To understand mathematics you have to think hard, sometimes for a long time. Moreover understanding something hard is discontinuous, it requires a leap to a new way of thinking. You have to start with a problem and this problem might be an ambiguity or a contradiction. A is true and Bis true but A and B seem to contradict one another. When you sort out this problem you will have learned something.
The moral here is to embrace things that are difficult if you want to learn significant new things. “No pain, no gain.” You don’t have to worry about some super AI…
Our societies today are characterized by a universal algophobia: a generalized fear of pain. We strive to avoid all painful conditions - even the pain of love is treated as suspect. This algophobia extends into society: less and less space is given to conflicts and controversies that might prompt painful discussions. It takes hold of politics too: politics becomes a palliative politics that is incapable of implementing radical reforms that might be painful, so all we get is more of the same.
Faced with the coronavirus pandemic, the palliative society is transformed into a society of survival. The virus enters…
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