I’ve long admired the way picture
books tap into our universal experiences, the skillful marriage of words and illustrations
having the power to immerse us in memories, hopes, and dreams.
In Every Life,
beautifully illustrated by Marla
Frazee, does just this. Inspired by a call-and-response, baby-naming blessing,
Frazee’s exquisite text is a stunning meditation of the various moments in life,
from the ordinary to the extraordinary.
Opening the book, my heart quiets, and a
gentle peace settles in. I find myself slowing down to pore over the pages,
savoring each image. In Every Life is about birth
and wonder, smiles and light, hope, and mystery.
A simple and profound meditation on the many wonders of life from two-time Caldecott Honor recipient Marla Frazee.
In every life, there is love and loss, hope and joy, wonder and mystery. With glowing art and spare, powerful text, Caldecott Honor-winning creator Marla Frazee celebrates the moments, feelings, and experiences, both big and small, that make up a life.
In my journey, I've sought to blend my interest in ancient wisdoms into a coherent, accessible philosophy I call "Nowism." My aim has been to simplify and share complex teachings in a way that resonates and helps. Through my writing, performing, and speaking, I try to bring these concepts to life, hoping to ignite a spark of understanding and self-discovery in others. More than anything, before I leave this world, I want to contribute something (no matter how small) to the legacy of personal empowerment. I aspire to help people see the world more clearly, to understand themselves more deeply, and to find joy in the present moment.
Be Here Now transcends the typical book format with its unique blend of illustrations and diagrams, creating an immersive experience.
It inspired me to practice a life-changing exercise: sitting, conjuring the feeling of being enough, without striving for more. This practice, sparked by the book's wisdom, led to a profound shift in how I perceive the world. While watering a garden, I experienced a moment of heightened awareness, where everything felt more electric and alive.
This transformative journey even inspired my TEDx talk 'Using the Present to Create the Future.' I highly recommend this book to anyone on a path of mindfulness and self-discovery.
Beloved guru Ram Dass tells the story of his spiritual awakening and gives you the tools to take control of your life in this “counterculture bible” (The New York Times) featuring powerful guidance on yoga, meditation, and finding your true self.
When Be Here Now was first published in 1971, it filled a deep spiritual emptiness, launched the ongoing mindfulness revolution, and established Ram Dass as perhaps the preeminent seeker of the twentieth century.
Just ten years earlier, he was known as Professor Richard Alpert. He held appointments in four departments at Harvard University. He published books, drove a Mercedes…
I've always been fascinated by yoga and the wonderful stories about yogis. When I was in the fourth grade, studying the subject of 'India', I taught myself to stand on my head and fold my legs in the lotus position. I love practicing yoga – every morning, I thank the Gurus and teachers from whom I learned! I've taught yoga for almost 40 years now and strongly believe that the practice and teaching of yoga, done with devotion and love can transform one's life for the good. I wrote 7 books about yoga (the last, Yoga in Nature is forthcoming) I regularly write articles on yoga and have translated two of B.K.S. Iyengar's books into Hebrew.
This book inspires me so much that I translated it to Hebrew (my own native tongue) to make it available for Hebrew readers. Iyengar uses the metaphor of a tree to explain the eight-limbed (ashtanga) yoga of Patanjali. I like this book so much because Iyengar uses simple words to explain the deep concepts of yoga philosophy. He brings many examples and stories that illustrate his ideas in a very lively manner. The main theme of the book is that all of the 8 limbs of yoga (ethics, self-restraint, postures, breath control, control of the senses, concentration, meditation & Samadhi) can be achieved by the dedicated and zealous practice of the 3rd and 4th limbs, namely asanas (postures) and pranayama (breath control).
Iyengar developed a form of yoga that focuses on developing strength, endurance, correct body alignment, as well as flexibility and relaxation. The Iyengar method integrates philosophy, spirituality, and the practice of yoga into everyday living. In The Tree of Yoga, Iyengar offers his thoughts on many practical and philosophical subjects including family life, love and sexuality, health and the healing arts, meditation, death, and Patañjali's Yoga Sutras. This new edition features a foreword by Patricia Walden, a leading American teacher of the Iyengar style.
I have always been interested in cultural history. In my early 30s, I realized that Greek mythology was a late, patriarchal revision of the earlier Goddess-centric myths. After much research, I reconstructed several pre-Olympian myths in my book Lost Goddesses of Early Greece. This was one of the first books of the Women’s Spirituality movement, which began in the 1970s and is still going strong. A few years later, I edited an anthology of 50 voices, The Politics of Women’s Spirituality. Thus I am a foremother of that movement, which is a bountiful exploration of authentic spiritual experience in women’s lives.
With The Goddess Path the late Patricia Monaghan, author of The New Book of Goddesses and Heroines, bequeathed a well-designed and deeply wise pathway into spiritual engagement. She begins in “Basics of Goddess Spirituality” by answering commonly heard questions, then presents “Frameworks for Goddess Imagery” and “The Goddess Year” of rituals. The rest of the book is “The Goddess Revealed”: a chapter on each of twenty Goddesses, presenting her historical or traditional invocation, her myth and meaning, her symbols, and her feasts. At that point, Patricia Monaghan presents suggestions for invoking each Goddess through the reader’s personal ritual. Here she wisely speaks of the dynamics of women’s lives in modern culture and the power of this spiritual practice, flowing from extremely ancient roots into the presence of 21st-century women.
In this text, Patricia Monaghan, offers a creative approach to worship, one in which the reader can develop and ritualize their own connection to the goddess' manifestations around the world.
As a thirty-year meditator, certified meditation leader, and award-winning author, it’s my job to keep up on the latest books about mindfulness and Zen practice. Despite seeing new volumes being published regularly, I return to these books as great sources of solid practice information. Each of these authors explains meditation in accessible terms, easy for readers to follow and understand. I can’t remember who said that a confused reader is an antagonistic reader, but they are right. The books I’ve suggested offer clarity. They help readers begin or continue their practice and understand how and why meditation is worth their time.
I found Brad Stulberg’s latest book when I was researching my book and immediately toned down my prose to meet the challenge of distilling practices nearly impossible to explain in simple terms anyone can understand. Sound impossible? Brad makes it look effortless. There’s just enough science balanced by personal experience and other anecdotes that what could have been a PhD dissertation (was it?) reads with ease. The power and simplicity make it elegant and ever so useful.
Join thousands of readers and learn about the foundations of sustainable excellence and concrete habits for peak performance and a more genuine kind of success.
"A thoughtful, actionable book for pursuing more excellence with less angst." --Adam Grant, author of Think Again and host of the TED podcast WorkLife
"Ambitious, far-reaching, and impactful" -- David Epstein, author of Range
"This book taps into something that so many of us feel but can't articulate." --Arianna Huffington, Founder & CEO, Thrive Global
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From the bestselling author of Peak Performance comes a powerful antidote to heroic individualism and the ensuing epidemic of…
I think of myself as a listener and life in progress. As a poet and author, I’m always listening to the words that move through my heart. I’m also a spiritual seeker, always looking for the Divine in the world around me and almost always surprised by the ways it shows up when I’m paying attention. Yet, there’s another part of me that is a Jersey girl through and through, looking for humor or irreverence in the face of life’s challenges. All these aspects come together in an unusual harmony, creating an openness to being changed by the things that come into my life. Hence, a list of life-changing books.
Reading this book helped me change my life for the better. Putting Thich Nhat Hanh’s teachings into practice in my daily life helped me live a more mindful, more peaceful life at a time of great transition in my personal life.
One of the things I love the most about this book is how simple it is to incorporate its practices into daily life. There are sections on how to be mindful about washing dishes or answering the phone! There are also sections that went much deeper, which dealt with how to be mindful of my emotions, which I have found so valuable in dealing with anxiety, difficult situations, and fear.
One of my favorite experiences related to this book was guiding a group of middle school-age kids through a discussion inspired by the “Tangerine Meditation.” Instead of a tangerine, we considered a piece of paper and talked about the…
'This is a very worthwhile book. It can change individual lives and the life of our society.' The Dalai Lama
Lucidly and beautifully written, Peace is Every Step contains commentaries and meditations, personal anecdotes and stories from Nhat Hanh's experiences as a peace activist, teacher, and community leader. It begins where the reader already is - in the kitchen, office, driving a car, walking in a park - and shows how deep meditative presence is available now. Nhat Hanh provides exercises to increase our awareness of our own body and mind through conscious breathing, which can bring immediate joy and…
I’m a long-time meditator and student of Buddhism, and a retired but still active academic. I am a cognitive scientist specialising in the learnable aspects of real-world intelligence. My meditation ‘career’ started when I was an undergraduate studying psychology at Cambridge in the late 1960s, and has since taken me to America, India, and Japan, as well as to many retreats in the UK with visiting teachers from all the main branches of Buddhism. In my academic life, I have a doctorate in psycholinguistics from Oxford and have been Professor of the Learning Sciences at the University of Bristol and the Research Director of the Centre for Real-World Learning in Winchester. My books on the crossover between Eastern and Western Psychology include The Psychology of Awakening, Wholly Human, Noises from the Darkroom, and The Heart of Buddhism.
This little book is the best introduction to the practice – and benefits – of mindfulness I know. It is easy to make meditation more complicated than it needs to be, and Vietnamese Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh keeps drawing you back to the simple essence of the practice, and to the peaceful aura of the present. Just above my computer screen I have one of his postcards pinned to the wall. “Here I am, sitting in this room, aware of the chair, aware of the sitting, aware of the breathing – aware of this precious moment.” What an effective stress-buster – bringing me back from the maelstroms of thoughts inside my head to the simple, pleasurable fact of just being alive, here, now, and enabling me to reset the emotional dashboard!
One of the best available introductions to the wisdom and beauty of meditation practice. --New Age Journal
In this beautiful and lucid guide, Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh offers gentle anecdotes and practical exercise as a means of learning the skills of mindfulness--being awake and fully aware. From washing the dishes to answering the phone to peeling an orange, he reminds us that each moment holds within it an opportunity to work toward greater self-understanding and peacefulness.
I'm Dr. Chloe Carmichael, clinical psychologist and USA Today bestselling author of Nervous Energy: Harness the Power of Your Anxiety(endorsed by Deepak Chopra). As a clinical psychologist, a lot of people ask me how to get rid of their anxiety. They're often surprised to learn that actually, we don't always want to get rid of anxiety—because the truth is that anxiety actually brings many benefits, if we know how to unlock them. Anxiety’s healthy function is actually to stimulate preparation behaviors. In this book, I share nine tried and tested tools with step-by-step instructions and real life examples to help readers harness the healthy power of anxiety.
Last but not least is Get Out of My Head, written by my friend and Pinterest’s Chief of Staff for TwentyTwo, Meredith Arthur. This book not only talks about overthinking and anxiety, it also delves into other important topics such as perfectionism, people-pleasing, and knowing and understanding oneself. The book has great content, plus it is visually beautiful—Meredith’s background at Pinterest definitely shows in the book’s amazing artwork and overall aesthetic.
Calm your thoughts, navigate your stress, and understand your anxiety with Get Out of My Head, a compact illustrated guide for overthinkers everywhere. Are you an overthinker? You're not alone! In a world full of deadlines, and technology, and constant stress, anxiety sometimes feels inevitable. But what if you learned to ride the wave of anxiety, instead of getting lost in it? Get Out of My Head is here to help, providing guidance and inspiration for anxious overthinkers of all sorts. This compact, illustrated book offers soothing techniques for understanding anxiety and moving through the traps of overthinking. Aimed at…
This book is a big-hearted meditation on family, on the ties
that bind—and sometimes constrict.
Bernard masterfully evokes the ambiguities
of life in the small Oregon town of Disappointment, where Lewis Yaw is
contending with some fierce private demons while raising an equally fierce
daughter, Gray. When their family’s happiness is shattered by tragedy, both Lewis
and Gray must reconceive their ideas of who they are and what, beyond
generational pain, actually makes up a family.
Bernard’s lushly evocative prose
brings their world into such sharp, sensual focus—I could practically taste the
whisky in the coffee and smell the sap running in the piney woods.
For readers of Kristin Hannah’s The Great Alone and David Vann’s Legend of a Suicide, C. B. Bernard’s debut novel shows a father and a daughter fighting toward hope through a traumatic past.
In the town of Disappointment, Oregon, washed-up boxer Lewis Yaw makes ends meet as a fishing guide. He’s lived a life of violence, but doesn’t understand real strength until he meets Janey, who can see good in even the most damaged things—including him. When she gives birth to their daughter, Grayling, Lewis worries that he’ll mess her up as badly as his father did him. But he…
Although I’ve written over 50 books, the ones that have had the greatest impact are the novels that have been turned into movies. Through my books and the films based on them, I’ve had the privilege of sharing thought-provoking, life-changing stories with millions of people around the world. As a blind person, myself, I realize the absurdity of writing books I can’t read that are turned into movies I can’t watch, but a powerful story delivers life-changing lessons and endures forever.
Acres of Diamonds is a timeless tale that has impacted generations of readers including me. It reminds us that before we begin searching throughout the world for the things we think we don’t have, we need to look inside of ourselves and explore what we really do have. As an African farmer leaves his home and everything he knows to begin a frantic search for diamonds, he discovers the eternal lesson that we get what we love when we learn to love what we have.
This stirring manifesto shows how to discover everything you need to succeed-where you least expect it.
So begins one of the most famous speeches of the twentieth century, a talk that educator and minister Russell H. Conwell delivered before literally thousands of audiences before his death in 1925. In its printed version Acres of Diamonds reached millions of readers around the world. Conwell's great manifesto imparts one extraordinary lesson: All the wealth you could ever dream of, search for, or yearn after-in whatever form you wish for-exists right beneath your own feet. It is a message of determination, unconventional thinking,…
