A Joyful Pause is about coming home to yourself. Have you noticed that everything is changing? Work has shifting demands, home life is busy, and the world around us is changing at an unparalleled speed. Now is the time to find the place in each of us that is steady in the midst of change. Learning how to pause is a helpful practice. We can build the habit of taking a few moments out of each day to turn our awareness inward. The practices that restore body, mind, and connection to spirit take time, and they ask us to create a bit of quiet and some internalization. A Joyful Pause is structured to make this easy for you to do. The connection we seek is in the pause, and through that connection, we come to know that we are home. A Joyful Pause helps you fill your life with more connection. These practices are here to help you bring more of your whole self into your life every day and to feel the love that is always there, just under the surface of our experiences.

Gold Nautilus Book Award Winner Restoring your body, mind, and spirit amid change is an act of courage, empowerment, and hope. This warm, powerful guide will help you honor the changes and spaces in your life with purposeful rest and reflection. If you're trying to push your way through endings, beginnings, and places of uncertainty, only to find yourself more confused, disconnected, tired, and uncertain, this book will hold and fortify you. Yoga teacher and activist Octavia Raheem offers us the motivation and guidance we need to restore ourselves in the midst of all sorts of change. Change in our lives—whether it be welcome, joyful, challenging, or more subtle—presents us with the opportunity to pause and gather our energy to work with whatever lies ahead. Drawing wisdom from yoga philosophy and her many years of teaching experience, Raheem offers us the motivation and guidance we need to restore ourselves in the midst of all types of change. She gives us three simple restorative yoga poses (savasana, side lying pose, and child’s pose), and offers short teachings, reflections, and practices to see us through times of ending, beginning, and liminal/transitional space. She shows us how slowing down, stillness, and deeper connection to our own transitions empower us to move through collective shifts with more grace—and what it means to navigate shifts and change with presence and courage.

Our lives are full of words. We rarely pause to attend to them, much less take time for personal retreat. This book encourages you to stop and revel in the sights, sounds, and meanings of what we say about God. Rachel Hackenberg offers the word-weary, the word-lover, and the spiritually hungry to explore the words of faith anew and thereby meet The Word afresh. Through twelve deceptively light-hearted chapters on letters and definitions, grammar and poetry, this book spa rks spiritual inspiration even as it provides practical exercises for an enlivening personal retreat experience! Rachel G. Hackenberg is an ordained United Church of Christ minister and author of Writing to God and Writing to God: Kids’ Edition. She facilitates workshops on prayer & worship, clergy renewal, and congregational vitality. She blogs at faithandwater.com. "Rachel Hackenberg invites us to reconsider and re-engage with the words we typically use to describe, rather than to fully express, our faith. Sacred Pause is a book to savor. It's as much a devotional as it is a guide for a creative retreat that will change the way you'll encounter Scripture and live the Gospel." —Meredith Gould, PHD, author of Service as a Spiritual Practice "This book will awaken you to a sensational faith, encompassing all your senses and enabling you to experience the holiness of God in the quotidian adventures of life. An antidote to spiritual stagnation, this text will get you out of your chair and onto your feet, dancing with God, singing with the Spirit, and jumping for joy with Jesus." —Bruce Epperly, author of Holy Adventure

This handbook in practical spirituality proposes that the level of stress, violence, fear and disconnect from Nature in the global society has risen in direct proportion to a fall in the collective level of conscious awareness. In order to reverse this trend a conscious impulse is required. Human beings need to rediscover the mystical underpinning of all religions and the engine of spiritual transformation: the art of presence. Only by learning to be present and stay present is it possible to dissolve harmful energy - in the form of false opinions and negative feelings - and create positive energy that imbues actions with intelligence, compassion and respect for the sacredness of all life. To this end, a practice in sensory awareness is offered. It is called 'the Pause'. Pausing affirms the body-mind continuum by empowering the senses as conduits of conscious awareness. When pausing is then applied to ordinary activities such as speaking, working, thinking and relating to others, spiritual evolution accelerates. The fruit of a re-awakened life is healing — for ourselves, for society, and for the entire Earth community.

15 Minute Pause is an inspirational playbook that explores where you are now, where you want to be and how to get there. It's for those who are ready to make a small change and a big difference to their happiness and well-being at home, work or community. Do you need a reboot, if not now, then when?

Our culture is self-obsessed – in our schedules, relationships, and especially online. (Can you say selfie?) But in this near-narcissism, people are less content than in decades past. Why? Because we forgot the joy that comes from putting others first. Doing so requires us to live alert, listening for “heart drops,” hints from those in our lives who need a helping hand or a generous dose of encouragement. Living alert lifts our own spirits, showing us that blessing others blesses us even more. Listen, Love, Repeat offers biblical teaching and suggests doable actions that are simple, heart-tugging, sentimental, even sneaky and hilarious. This message: • Presents scriptural examples of those who lived alert, including Jesus, who noticed those who least expected to be seen. • Explains the role of good works for followers of Christ. They aren’t our ticket to heaven but they are our marching orders on earth. • Gives creative ideas for showing love to friends and family, and suggests practical ways to reach out to the lonely, the marginalized, the outcast, and the odd duck. Additionally, it helps you comfort the grieving, showing what you can do when you don’t know what to say. • Provides inspiration for blessing the “necessary people” in your life, those often-overlooked souls who help you get life done every day, and teaches you how to hug a porcupine by genuinely loving the hard-to-love. As we scatter love, we create a safe space where we can openly share the gospel. We get to see lives changed right before our eyes. Most importantly, Listen, Love, Repeat will enable you to live a life that is full of kind deeds, not to selfishly shout, “Hey! Look at me!” but to humbly implore, “Will you look at Him?”

Sometimes we just need to take a pause -- to stop, breathe, and take a moment for ourselves. To be mindful. Told in rhyming verse and beautifully illustrated, A World of Pausabilities is an inviting introduction to mindfulness. Following a neighborhood on a summer day, readers will learn how to apply mindfulness to simple, everyday moments, and how days are filled with endless possibilities to take a pause. Includes a Note to Parents and Caregivers that further discusses mindfulness and ways to introduce pauses into your child's life. Age range 4-8.