Happy For No Reason: 7 Steps to Being Happy from the Inside Out

I really like how she's consolidated ideas from various sources to make an easy-to-follow program to increase your happiness. The audiobook version comes with 2 pdf files that make it easy to see the daily exercises and action suggestions at a glance. If you want to make big changes in a hurry, I'd recommend this book.

Jacket blurb:

What would it take to make you happy? A fulfilling career, a big bank account, or the perfect mate? What if it didn't take anything to make you happy? What if you could experience happiness from the inside out — no matter what's going on in your life?

In Happy for No Reason: 7 Steps to Being Happy from the Inside Out, transformational expert Marci Shimoff offers a breakthrough approach to being happy, one that doesn't depend on achievements, goals, money, relationships, or anything else "out there." Most books on happiness tell you to find the things that make you happy and do more of them. Although there's nothing wrong with that, it won't bring you the kind of deep and lasting happiness most people long for — the kind you'll never lose, no matter what happens in your life. Based on cutting-edge research and knowledge from the world's leading experts in the fields of positive psychology and neurophysiology, plus interviews with 100 truly happy people, this life-changing book provides a powerful, proven 7-step program that will enable you to be happier right now — no matter where you start.

Studies show that each of us has a "happiness setpoint" — a fixed range of happiness we tend to return to throughout our life — that's approximately 50 percent genetic and 50 percent learned. In the same way you'd crank up the thermostat to get comfortable on a chilly day, you can actually raise your happiness set-point! The holistic 7-step program at the heart of Happy for No Reason encompasses Happiness Habits for all areas of life: personal power, mind, heart, body, soul, purpose, and relationships.

In these pages you'll discover moving and remarkable first-person stories of people who have applied these steps to their own lives and have become Happy for No Reason. You'll read phenomenal tales from a former drug dealer turned minister, a hit filmmaker, and a famous actress who escaped a "family curse," as well as stories from doctors, mothers, teachers, and business executives. You'll learn practical strategies that will help you experience happiness from the inside out.

You don't have to have happy genes, win the lottery, or lose twenty pounds. By the time you finish this book, you will know how to experience sustained happiness for the rest of your life.

Change Your Thoughts, Change Your Life: Living The Wisdom of the Tao

For a Tao-lover like me, this is the ideal book. His translation of the verses are wonderful. The commentary following each verse is insightful and sometimes startling but always shed some light. Each section ends with Do The Tao Now, a way to put the verse into practice. It's very readable and easy to use. The biggest challenge is getting past your own blocks to embrace the message.

Jacket blurb:

Five hundred years before the birth of Jesus, a God-realized being named Lao-tzu in ancient China dictated 81 verses, which are regarded by many as the ultimate commentary on the nature of our existence. The classic text of these 81 verses, called the Tao Te Ching or the Great Way, offers advice and guidance that is balanced, moral, spiritual, and always concerned with working for the good.

In this book, Dr. Wayne W. Dyer has reviewed hundreds of translations of the Tao Te Ching and has written 81 distinct essays on how to apply the ancient wisdom of Lao-tzu to today’s modern world. This work contains the entire 81 verses of the Tao, compiled from Wayne’s researching of 10 of the most well-respected translations of text that have survived for more than 25 centuries. Each chapter is designed for actually living the Tao or the Great Way today. Some of the chapter titles are “Living with Flexibility,” “Living Without Enemies,” and “Living by Letting Go.” Each of the 81 brief chapters focuses on living the Tao and concludes with a section called “Doing the Tao Now.”

Wayne spent one entire year reading, researching, and meditating on Lao-tzu’s messages, practising them each day and ultimately writing down these essays as he felt Lao-tzu wanted you to know them.

This is a work to be read slowly, one essay a day. As Wayne says, “This is a book that will forever change the way you look at your life, and the result will be that you’ll live in a new world aligned with nature. Writing this book changed me forever, too. I now live in accord with the natural world and feel the greatest sense of peace I’ve ever experienced. I’m so proud to present this interpretation of the Tao Te Ching, and offer the same opportunity for change that it has brought me.”

The Shift

I adore the work of Wayne Dyer. It's criminal I haven't posted any of his books before now. This book is a distilled version of his previous book, Change Your Thoughts, Change Your Life, which looked at the sayings of the Tao. Since I would describe myself as Taoist if forced to define myself, this is right up my alley.

In the beginning, he talks about us coming and being spirit. He then moves on to the ego and the lies it tells you. It them moves on to living to a higher purpose. All good stuff. But I found myself struggling to finish the book. No fault of the book but rather with my resistance to its call to give up on attachments. I'm not in the place yet to do that. Hopefully I'll be able to return to this book in six months and be ready for it.

Jacket blurb:

The Shift— the book that was inspired by the movie of the same name—illustrates how and why to make the move from ambition to meaning

As we contemplate leaving the morning of our life, where ego has played a commanding role, and entering the afternoon (and evening), where meaning and purpose replace ambition and struggle, we may encounter unexpected occurrences that accompany this new direction. It’s almost a universal law that we’ll experience a fall of some kind. Yet these falls or low points provide the energy we need to move away from ego and into a life of meaning and purpose.

The Shift doesn’t mean that we lose our drive and ambition; it signifies that we become ambitious about something new. We make a commitment to living a life based on experiencing meaning and feeling purposeful, rather than a life based on never-ending demands and false promises that are the trademark of the ego’s agenda.