Pain: The Gift Nobody Wants – This autobiography is of an elder statesman in the field of reconstructive surgery, Paul Brand. The son of missionaries in India, he became acquainted with leprosy and its appalling effects in his early life. He trained and qualified as an orthopedic hand surgeon in London. He was one of the first physicians to commit his life to working with lepers as they historically had been shunned by the medical profession. He discovered that the cause of the severe deformities in leprosy and later diabetes was the lack of protective sensation. His insights into pain arise from working with people who could not feel pain. I personally knew him and he is one of the most inspiring people I have ever known.
Victory Over Verbal Abuse: A Healing Guide to Renewing Your Spirit and Reclaiming Your Life – Verbal abuse is an insidious behavior that permeates our culture–from the privacy of our own homes to the public glare of our schools, workplaces, and other institutions. But you don’t have to live with it. In this groundbreaking companion to her bestselling The Verbally Abusive Relationship, acclaimed public speaker, educator and author Patricia Evans brings you the tools you need to triumph over verbal abuse, no matter where or how you encounter it. She’ll guide you step by step through a powerful healing process. With Patricia’s help, you’ll achieve the clarity you need to build a new life–far from senseless accusations, wounding words, and confusing comments that have taken an untold toll on your psyche. You’ll find validation, and learn to believe in yourself–and a better future–once more.
Feeling Good Together: The Secret to Making Troubled Relationships Work – In his bestselling book, Feeling Good, Dr. David Burns introduced Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, a clinically proven, drug-free therapy that has revolutionized the treatment of clinical depression throughout the world. Now, in Feeling Good Together, he presents Cognitive Interpersonal Therapy, a radical new approach that will help you transform troubled, conflicted relationships into successful, happy ones. Dr. Burns’ method for improving these relationships is easy and surprisingly effective. Based on twenty-five years of clinical experience and groundbreaking research on more than 1,000 individuals, Feeling Good Together presents an entirely new theory of why we have so much trouble getting along with each other. The book is filled with helpful examples and brilliant, user-friendly tools such as the Relationship Satisfaction Test, the Relationship Journal, the Five Secrets of Effective Communication, the Intimacy Exercise, and more, so you can enjoy far more loving and satisfying relationships with the people you care about.
Man’s Search for Meaning – Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl’s memoir has riveted generations of readers with its descriptions of life in Nazi death camps and its lessons for spiritual survival. Between 1942 and 1945 Frankl labored in four different camps, including Auschwitz, while his parents, brother, and pregnant wife perished. Based on his own experience and the experiences of those he treated in his practice, Frankl argues that we cannot avoid suffering but we can choose how to cope with it, find meaning in it, and move forward with renewed purpose. Frankl’s theory—known as logotherapy, from the Greek word logos (“meaning”)—holds that our primary drive in life is not pleasure, as Freud maintained, but the discovery and pursuit of what we personally find meaningful.
Journey into Love : Ten Steps to Wholeness – Often our natural vitality and expansiveness are blocked by patterns of which we are not even fully aware. This book shows how to identify these patterns and take practical steps to stop constraining our lives. It is a practical guide to steps we each need to take to heal and blossom into our own true nature as compassionate, spiritual human beings. In this adventure, the authors bring lessons from work with thousands of people in different cultures, revealing how to go beyond the “negative love” syndrome and find our own power, wisdom and voice. Clear, simple, yet profound knowledge and practical tools to free your heart and spirit–a gift of love to anyone on a healing path.
Into the Magic Shop: A Neurosurgeon’s Quest to Discover the Mysteries of the Brain and the Secrets of the Heart – Growing up in the high desert of California, Jim Doty was poor, with an alcoholic father and a mother chronically depressed and paralyzed by a stroke. Today he is the director of the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education (CCARE) at Stanford University, of which the Dalai Lama is a founding benefactor. But back then his life was at a dead end until at twelve he wandered into a magic shop looking for a plastic thumb. Instead he met Ruth, a woman who taught him a series of exercises to ease his own suffering and manifest his greatest desires. Her final mandate was that he keep his heart open and teach these techniques to others. She gave him his first glimpse of the unique relationship between the brain and the heart. Doty would go on to put Ruth’s practices to work with extraordinary results—power and wealth that he could only imagine as a twelve-year-old, riding his orange Sting-Ray bike. But he neglects Ruth’s most important lesson, to keep his heart open, with disastrous results—until he has the opportunity to make a spectacular charitable contribution that will virtually ruin him. Part memoir, part science, part inspiration, and part practical instruction, Into the Magic Shop shows us how we can fundamentally change our lives by first changing our brains and our hearts.