Books by Category - Health and Healing

Browse by Category - Health and Healing

Aligned, Relaxed, Resilient

The emphasis on the mind in meditation can be somewhat misleading: If we pay attention only to mental processes and overlook the experience of the body, we can remain stuck in our heads and not be able to break free of the involuntary thinking that we find so claustrophobic and toxic. This short, practical guide helps us embrace the fact of our embodiment—the experience of the sensations, movements, and gestures of the body—and to realize that mindfulness is the natural state of awareness of a body that has learned how to experience its feeling presence. Johnson takes us through the three primary principles of the posture of meditation: alignment, relaxation, and resilience. He devotes a large part of each chapter to specific practices to help the reader experience different aspects of physical presence.

This book is of interest to meditators of all traditions—Buddhists, Hindus, Christians, Jews, and others—as well as therapists, bodyworkers, and anyone interested in body-centered psychology and other natural modes of healing.

Aligned, Relaxed, Resilient

Awakening the Heart

Can a meditative practice assist and promote the healing relationship between psychotherapist and patient? The notable contributors to this practical book draw on a wide range of Eastern and Western disciplines—psychoanalysis, Gestalt, Aikido, and various Christian, Hindu, and Buddhist contemplative traditions—to show that it can. What they propose is a meeting between the Western psychotherapeutic approach—grounded in working with the personal problems and the need to carve out a strong awareness of self—and Eastern tradition, which emphasizes a larger kind of awareness and equanimity as a continuously available source of clarity and health for those who know how to find it. They show that joining psychotherapy with meditation can mutually awaken the hearts of both therapist and client, sparking them both to open more fully. 

Awakening the Heart

Boundless Healing

This book offers simple meditation techniques to awaken healing energies in the body and mind. Using Buddhist principles as a basis, Tulku Thondup has created a universal guide that anyone can use. It will benefit those who want to preserve good health as well as those who need comfort and relief from illness or mental distress.

These meditations draw on our innate capacity for imagination and memory, our natural enjoyment of beauty, and our deep-seated longing for a state of quiet calm. For all those who wish to become healthier, happier, and more peaceful in everyday life.

Boundless Healing

The Complete Book of Chinese Health and Healing

Here is the first complete manual of Chinese medicine specifically written for the layperson. Filled with illustrated exercises and recipes, this book offers a unique, integrated system of preventive health care so that now anyone can promote good health, longevity, and spiritual awareness using these traditional techniques.

Included are:

• Key concepts of Chinese medical theory
• Dozens of illustrated T'ai Chi and Chee-gung exercises
• The Chinese approach to healing common ailments
• Authentic secrets of Taoist sexual yoga
• Therapeutic food recipes and herbal tonics
• Alternative treatments for diseases such as AIDS and cancer
• Resource listings: teachers, schools, centers, stores, and mail-order suppliers 

The Complete Book of Chinese Health and Healing

Cool Water

The key to ongoing freedom from alcoholism or any other kind of addiction is right before us, here and now, in the ordinary and perfect present moment. The problem is that addictions are often the result of our efforts to escape living in the present in the first place. Bill Alexander's unique approach uses mindfulness, story, and meditation to help alcoholics and others learn to come back to the moment and to find healing there.

Cool Water

The Courage to Be Present

The quality of presence a psychotherapist or counselor brings to the therapeutic relationship makes all the difference in effective treatment. With this groundbreaking new application of Buddhist practice to psychotherapy, Karen Kissel Wegela offers mental heath professionals a Buddhist’s perspective on bringing compassion, patience, generosity, and equanimity to their work with clients. She presents as a model the Buddhist ideal of the bodhisattva, the archetypal being whose life is radically dedicated to seeking the benefit and welfare of others over his or her own.

The Courage to Be Present

Creative Recovery

For writers, artists, musicians, and creators in every field, this book offers a complete addiction recovery program specifically designed for the creative person. Full of explanations and exercises, this book presents ways to use your own innate creative abilities in service of your recovery and at each stage of the recovery process. Topics include: the biological and developmental risks unique to creative people; the special personality traits that can inform the recovery process; ways to approach your recovery much like your art; and exercises that promote your creativity and art that aid the recovery process. This book gives a clear picture of the relationship between creativity and addiction and lays out a complete program so that you can live a fully creative and addiction-free life.

Creative Recovery

Getting Our Bodies Back

A habitual movement as common as nail-biting or toe-tapping can be the key to pulling out addictive behavior by its roots. These unconscious movement "tags" indicate the places where our bodies have become split off from our psyches. When brought to consciousness and confronted they will often tell us very plainly where our psychological suffering originated, showing us where to begin reconnecting body and soul. Christine Caldwell, a pioneer in the field of somatic psychology, has created an original model for working with body wisdom called the Moving Cycle. She describes how this form of therapy has worked effectively in her own practice, and she provides practical techniques to show how we can learn to listen to what our bodies are telling us, confront addictive habits, and learn to celebrate our inherent wisdom and elegance. 

Getting Our Bodies Back

Healing Beyond the Body

Does the mind produce consciousness—or transmit it? Can machines detect love? Why has job stress become a worldwide epidemic? Why do objects sometimes seem to have minds of their own? Could war be a biological condition? Dr. Larry Dossey, one of the most influential spokespersons for the role of consciousness and spirituality in medicine, tackles all these questions and more with clarity and wit. In this book, he explores the relationship—often documented in extensive research—between science and "unscientific" topics such as prayer, love, laughter, war, creativity, dreams, and immortality.

Healing Beyond the Body

Muscular Retraining for Pain-Free Living

Here's an innovative and practical approach to eliminating chronic muscle pain, written by a popular occupational therapist with over twenty-five years of experience freeing people from the discomfort of tendonitis, lower back pain, and neck and shoulder tension. These types of chronic pain can be caused by a number of factors, including old injuries, habitual movement patterns, problems with body alignment, psychological causes, and inability to sense your own body movements accurately.Muscular Retraining for Pain-Free Livingclearly and concisely explains the causes of persistent muscle pain and offers a therapeutic exercise program to address these problems and end pain. 

Muscular Retraining for Pain-Free Living

The Open-Focus Brain

This breakthrough book presents a disarmingly simple idea: The way we pay attention in daily life can play a critical role in our health and well-being. According to Dr. Les Fehmi, a clinical psychologist and researcher, many of us have become stuck in “narrow-focus attention”: a tense, constricted, survival mode of attention that holds us in a state of chronic stress—and which lies at the root of common ailments including anxiety, depression, ADD, stress-related migraines, and more. To improve these conditions, Dr. Fehmi explains that we must learn to return to a relaxed, diffuse, and creative form of attention, which he calls “Open Focus.”

This highly readable and empowering book offers straightforward explanations and simple exercises on how to shift into a more calm, open style of attention that reduces stress, improves health, and enhances performance. The Open-Focus Brain features eight essential attention exercises for improving health, along with an audio CD in which the author guides the reader through fundamental Open-Focus exercises that can be used on a regular basis to enhance our health and well-being.

The Open-Focus Brain

Space, Time, and Medicine

What we call modern physics says something entirely new about the world and how it behaves. For many years, these theories have been accepted as the most accurate descriptions we have ever had about our world. Nevertheless, medicine has been reluctant to incorporate these ideas into itself, continuing to view the body as a clockwork mechanism, in which illness is caused by a breakdown of "parts."

Drawing on his long experience in the practice of internal medicine and his knowledge of modern science, Dr. Dossey shows how medicine can and must be updated. Discussing the new theories of Bell, Godel, and others, he opens up startling questions for medicine: Could the brain be a hologram, in which every part contains the whole? Why have ordinary people been able to raise and lower blood pressure at will, control heart rate, body temperature, even one minute blood vessel, in a way no one can explain? What is the role of consciousness in health and illness? 

Space, Time, and Medicine

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