100 books like Take Back the Magic

This book delivers such an important and deeply needed message at this time of accelerated change on our planet when so many people feel lost, fearful, alienated, and disconnected.

Many patients who consult me in my practice of psychiatry have a longing to feel clearer about their life purpose and what they are meant to do with their lives. They long for a connection to a more soulful aspect of themselves. This book provides many stories of individuals who were courageously able to respond to their heart’s calling and to change their lives dramatically in ways that resulted in their existence feeling more meaningful and aligned with their soul’s purpose.

This book inspires the reader to dare to make big changes, to get out of their comfort zone, and to find a way of living that feels more authentic and satisfying. 

This is one of the first books I recommend to Lyme patients who email me for advice about getting better. It’s a sad fact that most people with chronic Lyme disease don’t have “just” Lyme disease. Their condition is complicated by toxic mold exposure, environmental chemicals, other infectious bacteria and viruses, and/or a highly sensitized nervous system.

Whether they’ve been diagnosed with Lyme disease or not, I think anyone with complex health problems that they just can’t resolve could benefit from reading this book.

Dr. Terry Wahls is an absolutely brilliant physician whose accessible book describes a treatment approach that is enormously effective for treating the inflammation that is at the heart of so many conditions. She reversed her own illness with it. She had rapidly progressive degeneration of her nervous system due to multiple sclerosis, which resulted in her needing to use a wheelchair. Through implementing her own protocol, she is now back to riding her bike.

I recommend this book to 95% of the patients in my practice because the dietary approach that she clearly describes makes such a difference in their health and well-being. I like the fact that she outlines three stages of implementing her protocol so that a person can begin with the least restrictive and, if desired, can take it to the next level.

This approach offers flexibility and allows a person to ease into making lifestyle changes.… show more.

This is a highly accessible book that names and explains one of the most fundamental realities of our time, i.e., that we are all traumatized by the relentless cycle of frightening news, the breathtaking rate of change, and the existential threat due to climate collapse, which predisposes us to live in a perpetual state of fight, flight, and freeze, which is very destructive to our health and well-being physically, emotionally and spiritually.

I loved their clear description of the complexity of the function of the vagus nerve, which is the best I ever read. This book provides guidance and wisdom that can help us return our nervous systems to a sense of safety and highlights the importance of human connection and interpersonal exchange in self-regulation.

I found both the insight about what ails us compelling, but also the remedy described is congruent with my own personal and professional experience about… show more.

As part of my spiritual journey, I desperately wanted to connect with my spirit guides.

I wanted to be guided as to my next best step.  Our next best step may lead to another “growth opportunity”, which mine did. The information in this book helped me to make that connection, to clearly receive messages from my spirit guides.

To this day, I am able to ask and receive guidance. I am grateful that I came across this book.

This book is chock full of more advanced lessons for improving your gifts of psychic abilities.

It was my crew's second "textbook." The Sanders program guide laid a good foundation to build upon, and this book expanded on those lessons. Vanden Eynden calls it a down-to-earth guide, and it is. It has a different slant, more into meditation to get in touch with your spirit guides. But she has a wealth of other information.

The SRT crew enjoyed her lessons and found their gifts growing even more. We use these abilities in our investigations, which are becoming geared to helping homeowners with problematic or malevolent ghosts.

I have had many “visitations” from passed-on loved ones, including cherished pets, so am always interested in a professional's take on connecting with those on the other side. This detailed guide by a nationally recognized medium covers effective strategies and fascinating stories of relating across the divide. It is also a well-explained basic orientation to the concept of meditation and an intriguing portrait of what the afterlife may be like for us all.

I’ve been enamored with the history of spiritualism and supernatural flimflam for years, but this book was the first account I read by an insider. Keene’s explanations of how phony mediums operate are fascinating, as are his incisive musings on the nature of belief.

But I found Keene himself the most intriguing aspect of the book. I got the impression of a bright, insightful, and deeply conflicted man—in some ways, as much of an elusive trickster as ever. His descriptions of his antics as a spiritualist charlatan are bombastic and glib, but there’s an underlying poignancy.

I was left with a clearer picture of how the spiritualist con game worked but more questions than answers about Keene and his motives for leaving it behind. 

Alan Gauld has set a new standard in the historical study of psychical research with this new in-depth examination of the history of mediumship.

Impeccably researched and with extensive use of unpublished sources, it’s also written with an engaging combination of erudition and subtle wit. Gauld brings his subjects to life in a way that gives readers a more immediate, personal glimpse of the mediums, the researchers, and their world.

He is always critical but objective when weighing the debate for and against genuine communication from souls of the dead, without flinching from considering either evidence of fraud or apparently veridical phenomena.

What I find especially satisfying is the way the book deals not only with the question of survival, but also the social history of mediumship and associated attitudes towards death and the afterlife.

I was deeply moved by Poor Your Soul, Mira Ptacin’s beautifully-wrought memoir about the grief of losing first her brother, and then her unborn child. So I knew I was in good hands when I opened her engaging, compassionate portrait of the denizens of Camp Etna, the once-famous epicenter of the American Spiritualist movement. Shifting seamlessly between the settlement’s grand history in the late 1800s and its more modest 21st-century existence, Ptacin profiles psychics and mediums of all stripes, and reports on her own experiences of the paranormal with humor, intelligence, and grace.