From poet, meditator, and speaker Yung Pueblo, comes the first in series, a collection of poetry and prose that explores the movement from self-love to unconditional love, the power of letting go, and the wisdom that comes when we truly try to know ourselves. It serves as a reminder to the reader that healing, transformation, and freedom are possible.

A Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Selection In the vein of The Noonday Demon and When Breath Becomes Air, a father's "remarkable and revelatory" account of navigating his own neurological decline while watching in wonder as his young daughter's brain activity blossoms, a stunning examination of neurology, loss, and the meaning of life. (The Sunday Times) Soon after his daughter Leontine is born, 36-year old Christian Donlan's world shifted an inch to the left. He started to miss door handles and light switches when reaching for them. He was suddenly unable to fasten the tiny buttons on his new daughter's clothes. These experiences were the early symptoms of multiple sclerosis, an incurable and degenerative neurological illness. As Leontine starts to investigate the world around her, Donlan too finds himself in a new environment, a "spook country" he calls the "Inward Empire," where reality starts to break down in bizarre, frightening, sometimes beautiful ways. Rather than turning away from this landscape, Donlan summons courage and curiosity and sets out to explore, a tourist in his own body. The result is this exquisitely observed, heartbreaking, and uplifting investigation into the history of neurology, the joys and anxieties of fatherhood, and what remains after everything we take for granted - including the functions that make us feel like ourselves - has been stripped away. Like Andrew Solomon, Paul Kalathini, and William Styron, Donlan brings meaning, grace, playfulness, and dignity to an experience that terrifies and confounds us all.

Western society has never been more interested in interiority. Indeed, it seems more and more people are deliberately looking inward—toward the mind, the body, or both. Michal Pagis’s Inward focuses on one increasingly popular channel for the introverted gaze: vipassana meditation, which has spread from Burma to more than forty countries and counting. Lacing her account with vivid anecdotes and personal stories, Pagis turns our attention not only to the practice of vipassana but to the communities that have sprung up around it. Inward is also a social history of the westward diffusion of Eastern religious practices spurred on by the lingering effects of the British colonial presence in India. At the same time Pagis asks knotty questions about what happens when we continually turn inward, as she investigates the complex relations between physical selves, emotional selves, and our larger social worlds. Her book sheds new light on evergreen topics such as globalization, social psychology, and the place of the human body in the enduring process of self-awareness.

If you have ever wished you could show children and teenagers how to enrich their lives with meditation and visualization, this book will delight you. It presents simple exercises in guided imagery designed to help young people ages three through eighteen to relax into learning, focus attention and increase concentration, stimulate creativity, and cultivate inner peace and group harmony. The use of guided imagery has been internationally recognized as an effective method of "whole brain" learning. The author's approach will have special appeal to parents and teachers who are frustrated by an educational system that seems to reward only those children who excel at verbal, linear learning. With the exercises in this book, young people can discover learning styles that are effective and enjoyable for them. These techniques of guided imagery offer adults as well as children a unique way to tap the wealth of creativity and wisdom within.

This book is about discovering together how to understand and live the Greatest Commandment. We’re not after the “art of thinking about God a little differently.” We’re here to uncover the needs God created within us—needs for meaning, intimacy, honesty, humility, justice, compassion, and more—and how he designed us to find those needs fulfilled in him. This is the art of living Jesus’ spirituality. God gives us the key in the Greatest Commandment, but we’ve got to do this stuff in the right order. Imagine I invite you to my sweet cabin by the lake. To start hanging out in that cabin, you need to get the key from me, pack your car, follow the GPS, and so on. There’s a natural order to it. It’s the same with the Greatest Commandment. We begin upward, with loving God. The God. God of the Old Testament, God of the New Testament. God the Trinity—Father, Son, Holy Spirit. We continue inward, with understanding our true identities in Jesus. And when we get those things right, God’s Spirit sends us outward, on mission into the world. These three movements—upward, inward, and outward—mirror the Greatest Commandment and help us learn the art of living harmoniously together in a chaotic world.

Daily spiritual practice takes dedication and discipline, and we often wonder where to start and how to keep it from feeling like yet another task on our to-do list. In this grounded, practical book, author Derek Olsen uses The Book of Common Prayer for a template to a deeper spiritual life. Olsen explains the purpose and intention of the prayer book with fresh insight, offering practical applications for daily living.