Presented here for the first time in English as "Monastic Wisdom," this collection of Elder Joseph's letters makes the wealth of his wisdom and experience available to readers from all walks of life. As his struggles and lifestyle of stillness unfold, readers witness his difficult trials and battles with the demons, his profound visions and spiritual guidance, his martyric endurance in illnesses and finally his holy repose.

This treasury of personal counsels and homilies given by Elder Ephraim clearly delineates the Patristic path to sanctification. In "Counsels from the Holy Mountain" he gives advise on every aspect of the spiritual struggle with insight acquired from his experience as a monk for more than fifty years and as the spiritual father of thousands of clergy, monastics, and laymen.

In Living Divine Relationships, Master Zhi Gang Sha, world-renowned physician, teacher, and author, gives you the keys to Living Divine Relationships with God, with your spiritual teachers and masters, and with your own soul. He also provides practical techniques for building and nourishing your divine relationships, such as: How to open your spiritual channels and communicate soul to soul with God; how to arrange your home and structure your day to nourish your divine relationships; how to fully open to your life purpose; as well as ways to accelerate your spiritual growth, clear karma, and more. To live in sacred relationship is to hold, cherish, and honor the beauty and the holiness of the connection with God. In Living Divine Relationship, Master Sha shows that when we live from this connection, we become our own highest nature. It is from this awareness that we understand the connectedness between ourselves and the entire universe.

The life of the Elder Joseph the Hesychast is a shining contemporary example of heroism and self-denial, struggle against the passions of the old man and the demons, and resurrection ‘of the new nature created after the likeness of God’. The Blessed Elder, having himself arrived at the longed for dispassion, which in the language of the Fathers is called ‘Love’, gave a new thrust to Athonite Monasticism towards the acquisition of the virtues, mental prayer and the retaining of the mind, the nous. With his persistence in the rigour of turning the mind inward and in the labour of the intellect the Elder revived the Palamite Theology and brought it back to the forefront. Six great monasteries of the Holy Mountain have been repopulated by his spiritual children, and a multitude of other monastics and laymen follow his spiritual teaching and his radiant example. His Life is simple; he did not finish even his primary studies; by his life, however, he has put to shame the ‘wise’ of the world. Through his life and prayers may we all arrive at least to some measure at this divine simplicity. (From the Prologue of the book)