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Great Reads

Books:

Story Engineering: Mastering the 6 Core Competencies of Successful Writing by Larry Brooks. Everything you ever needed to know about structuring a story. A must for fiction writers.

The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles by Steven Pressfield. All about recognizing and rooting out that old foe, Resistance. A pep talk for creative artists of all stripes.

Meeting Your Half-Orange: An Utterly Upbeat Guide to Using Dating Optimism to Find Your Perfect Match by Amy Spencer. For singles who look forward to meeting that special someone.

Buddha’s Book of Sleep: Sleep Better in Seven Weeks with Mindfulness Meditation by Joseph Emet. The seven meditations in this book are designed to help you quiet and tame your mind, relax your body, let go of attachment to control, and become the observer of your thoughts and emotions rather than the participant.

The Misleading Mind: How We Create Our Own Problems and How Buddhist Psychology Can Help Us Solve Them by Karuna Cayton. The psychotherapist helps you understand the tricks the mind plays, the nature of problems, and how to replace suffering with long-term happiness by changing habitual toxic ways of thinking and reacting. Not a quick-fix method, but it offers a long-term benefit…with no side effects!

Buddha’s Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom by Rick Hanson and Richard Mendius. A neuropsychologist and a neurologist team up to share a mindful approach to mental health. They offer techniques to help you change the wiring in your brain so you’re firing off those feel-good connections of joy, peace, and compassion instead of worry, sorrow and anger.

The Wise Heart: A Guide to the Universal Teachings of Buddhist Psychology by Jack Kornfield. Part philosophy, part storytelling, this inspirational guide leads you step-by-step through lessons on mindfulness, transforming suffering, and reaching your highest human potential. Savor it slowly.

The Best Meditations on the Planet: 100 Techniques to Beat Stress, Improve Health, and Create Happiness – In Just Minutes a Day by Dr. Martin Hart and Skye Alexander. These easy meditations are suited to anyone new to the practice, or experienced practitioners seeking new techniques.

Soul Searching: A Girl’s Guide to Finding Herself by Sarah Stillman. Written when the author was sixteen, this guide, updated for today’s teens, offers tools such as yoga, meditation, and dream interpretation to help young women overcome the negative messages they encounter both inside and out.

What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20: A Crash Course on Making Your Place in the World by Tina Seelig. Sharing the concepts she teaches in her Stanford course on entrepreneurship and innovation, Seelig challenges you to see obstacles through the lens of possibility. By viewing problems in innovative ways, you’ll discover that opportunities exist everywhere; all you need to succeed is a dose of creative thinking and the resources at hand. The stories in this book will turn your thinking upsidedown.

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain. Introversion isn’t a weakness, as this N.Y. Times Bestselling book proves. There’s an underrated power in those of us who focus intently, develop honest one-on-one relationships, keep our cool, listen well, and engage in meaningful conversations. Here is a source of inspiration for the quiet among us.

A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail by Bill Bryson. Learn about the history of the trail as you follow the true-life, laugh-out-loud adventures of two middle-aged men, who after “years of waddlesome sloth” decide to hike from Georgia to Maine, and discover how unprepared they are for the challenge. Hands down the funniest book I’ve ever read.

Ensouling Language: On the Art of Nonfiction and the Writer’s Life by Stephen Harrod Buhner. Buhner approaches nonfiction writing as a sacred art, beginning with the inner process of following threads of inspiration and writing from a trance state, switching to the outward process of completing a rough draft, then returning to an inward state for revision. He also includes information on the business end of writing.

Blogs:

Mindful: Taking Time for What MattersTips, blogs posts, news and a community for all things mindful, by the folks at Mindful Magazine.

SlumberWise – Sleep Tight, Every Night: Helpful information on everything from the science of sleep, to specific disorders, to tips for sleeping better.

The BloggessThe queen of humor blogging, and bestselling author of Furiously Happy: A Funny Book About Horrible Things and Let’s Pretend This Never Happened. The Bloggess has a bold and quirky viewpoint that she’s unafraid to flaunt, and a real knack for taxidermy. Very funny.

How to Blog a Book: The title says it all, and the blogger, Nina Amir, is generous with her advice.

Robert Fulghum Official Website for author of All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten: Stories, wisdom and chuckles from a bestselling author and ex-singing cowboy.

Moments of Being:  A blend of literary non-fiction and Buddhism by Dani Shapiro.  Her book, Still Writing: The Perils and Pleasures of a Creative Life, was published on October 1, 2013.

 

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