In the hustle and bustle of life, it's easy to lose sight of something important: ourselves. We often spend so much time prioritizing others or our job or any number of things that we forget to prioritize our own needs, be they creative, emotional, physical, or something else. Through wisdom, practical advice, and personal reflections, these books invite you to reclaim space, make your needs a priority, and care for your body, mind, and spirit.
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Books to Cultivate Creativity
In today's grind culture, hobbies become side hustles. Work creeps into leisure time. Perfectionism reigns. We look up to experts, and we look down on amateurs. But what if being a total amateur is actually a good thing? From Karen Walrond, author of The Lightmaker's Manifesto and Radiant Rebellion, comes In Defense of Dabbling: a delightful jaunt into how to resist grind culture and do the things you love, even if you're not any good at them.
Why should we make art while injustice and suffering wreak havoc? How can we justify making beautiful things? From award-winning author Mitali Perkins comes an essential companion for writers, artists, and other creatives who long for a more just world. We must keep making art infused with truth, beauty, and goodness, not to ignore a world in distress but for the sake of loving it. With vivid stories, practical ideas, and reflection and discussion questions, Just Making will inspire you to keep making beauty in a broken world.
Once you begin looking for joy, you can find it pretty much anywhere. In Jennifer McGaha's fifty-fifth year, she began to take note of simple, everyday things that struck her as beautiful or humorous or intriguing and kept a list of all the accomplishments, large and small, that actually mattered to her. These observations became her Joy Document, a radical act of reclaiming joy and an exercise in paying attention. Full of wit, heart, and reflective questions to help readers create their own joy documents, The Joy Document is a welcome companion for midlife transformation.
Whether you're a dabbler, a career creative, or a self-proclaimed tortured artist, The Artist's Joy is for you. Professional oboist and creativity coach Dr. Merideth Hite Estevez guides artists in all levels and disciplines to build a creative life that resonates deeply with their core values. Complete with practical guides and companion playlist.
Books on Emotions and Mental Health
Many of us can regurgitate why healthy boundaries and saying "no" are important. So why are we still over-accommodating and actively participating in imbalanced relationships that fuel anxiety and exhaustion? In Serial Fixer, psychotherapist and wellness consultant Leah Marone will help you break old habits of fixating on—and fixing—the problems of others. Examine your habitual need to control, understand why you feel so invested in other people's drama, and explore ways to release perfectionism's grip.
Every good parent wants to create relationships with their children that are filled with joy, connection, and healthy attachment. Yet well-meaning but traumatized parents—those who suffered as children or who are dealing with traumatic events as adults—tend to see the world from a survival point of view. Post-Traumatic Parenting goes far beyond the fad social-media trends like "gentle" and "responsive" parenting to provide a clear, easy-to-follow, and substantive guide, helping you break the cycle, enjoy the journey, and create healthy, joyful, dynamic, lasting relationships with your children.
You can find peace, whether or not you forgive those who harmed you. Feeling pressured to forgive their offenders is a common reason trauma survivors avoid mental health services and support. You Don't Need to Forgive is an invaluable resource for trauma survivors and their clinicians who feel alienated and even gaslighted by the toxic positivity and moralism that often characterize attitudes about forgiveness in psychology and self-help.
Millions of us are desperately trying to rewrite our past by unconsciously repeating it—unknowingly reenacting the traumatic events in our lives in an effort to complete unfinished business or undo what was done to us. These unconscious efforts to undo trauma only bring more pain, more disappointment, and more psychological damage. Unless we process past traumas, we can't heal them. Put Your Past in the Past by renowned psychotherapist Beverly Engel will help you face your past head-on to find true and lasting wholeness.
Books on Telling Your Story
We absorb the world around us through stories. It's how we make sense of our surroundings, our communities, and ourselves. But the stories we tell ourselves are not an end-all, be-all. Instead, they're all part of a larger, ongoing, unfinished narrative—one that we must continually refresh. That's where Story Work comes in. Through essays and prompting questions, GG Renee Hill invites readers to breathe new life into the stories we carry. Hill invites us to the transformative practice of creative self-discovery through storytelling—treating our life experiences as creative material that we have the power to shape.
What is it about fathers and father figures that looms so large in the lives of so many? So wonders Patton Dodd in this intimate reflection and memoir in which he wrestles with a dad-sized hole, the gap between the father he yearned to have and the father he got—an absent-while-present alcoholic whose unreliability caused chaos for everyone around him. A lyrical, emotional meditation on the failures and glories of dadhood, The Father You Get resonates for anyone who struggles with the fathers they got, the fathers they wish they had—and anyone struggling to become the parent they hope to be.
Many of us want to advocate for causes we care about—but which ones? We want to work for change—but will the emotional toll lead to burnout? In The Lightmaker's Manifesto, activist Karen Walrond shares strategies to help you define the actions that bring you joy, identify the values and causes about which you are passionate, and put them together to create change.
Between the Listening and the Telling
Stories tether us to what matters most: our families, our friends, our hearts, our planet, the wondrous mystery of life itself. Yet the stories we've been telling ourselves as a civilization are killing us. With a foreword by Anne Lamott, Between the Listening and the Telling offers an alloy of story, commentary, and meditation. In an era of runaway loneliness, alienation, global crisis, and despair, sharing stories helps us make a home within ourselves and one another.
Books to Help You Connect with Mind, Body, and Spirit
Beginning in around the third century CE, a group of monastics known as the desert mothers and fathers retreated to the deserts of northern Egypt, Syria, and Palestine to pursue lives of silence and prayer. A key phrase, repeated often among the sayings of the desert mothers and fathers, is "Give me a word." Fast-forward many centuries to the present day, and we find the practice of seeking a word being reclaimed by the spiritually minded in new ways. Give Me a Word will gently lead you through the process of receiving your word, testing its resonance, and embracing its meaning.
Too many of us are stuck on the treadmill of consumer spirituality, clinging to the illusion that we are in charge of our own spiritual growth and development. But the path of true transformation, according to Hunter Mobley, isn't in doing more, but in doing less—in letting go of control and adopting a contemplative posture that will naturally lead us to our true self. Letting Go, Finding You shows how a contemplative spiritual path, informed by the Enneagram, will allow you to finally stop striving after false promises and start surrendering to the truest version of yourself.
These days, many of us live in a state of overreactive fight-or-flight response and chronic stress. But new developments in brain science have recently proven that an intentional practice of pausing for a few minutes actually rewires our brain in ways that make us calmer, less reactive, and better able to see the bigger picture. In Practice the Pause, spiritual director and writer Caroline Oakes explores how a seven-second pause practice can move us beyond the fight-or-flight responses of our ego in our daily lives and actually equip us to cultivate the common good in the world.
Weeping, one of our most private acts, can forge connection. But many of us have been taught to hide our tears. When writer Benjamin Perry realized he hadn't cried in over ten years, he undertook an experiment to cry every day. Learning to Cry explores humans' rich legacy of weeping and helps us reclaim our crying to bring us into deeper relationship with a world that's breaking.
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