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.

The Energy Cure: How to Recharge Your Life 30 Seconds at a Time

I got really excited by this book. It's an easy read, full of energy tips for easy reference. It's divided into seven sections

1. Connect To Your Spiritual Core
2. Understand The Energy Of Feelings
3. Organize Your Thoughts
4. Appreciate Your Body
5. Assess Your Environment
6. Increase Your Passion!
7. Look to The Future

Each one of these have subsections, making it easy to find areas of concern for you right now when you need to. There were a couple of things I was able to make use of right away. I've been interested in energy work for quite a while, especially the whole question of raising personal energy, and this has been one of the best books I've read on the subject. I'm planning to add this to my collection for those times when I need a little more help.

It just has one flaw. It badly needed an edit. It's riddled with spelling and grammatical errors. However, they're not so overwhelming that it takes away from the very valuable message it imparts. This is a great book to get your feet wet in spiritual development but has something to offer students at every level.

Jacket blurb:

If the terms "spread too thin," "drained," and "strung out" sound familiar, it is because they accurately describe the chronic energy deficiency that many people experience today. The demands of a fast-paced world often pull our energy in multiple directions, leaving us depleted and overwhelmed. Gulping down Red Bull or relying on adrenalin for energy is not a long term solution but is being treated as such, thus causing many stress-related illnesses.

In The Energy Cure, psychotherapist and energy coach Kimberly Kingsley introduces personal energy management--a way to live life to its fullest while preserving and renewing your most precious resource. Learning to harness and manage your personal energy can elevate you from survival mode to a place where you grow and thrive. As a guide to personal energy management, this book teaches you to:

* Increase resilience against daily challenges by cultivating an energy buffer.

* Use the language of energy for making everyday decisions.

* Protect yourself from "drains" that exist in every sphere of life.

* Become free from self-defeating thoughts and behaviors that deplete energy.

We often ignore the most subtle signs of energy deficiency--excessive hunger, irritability, and even boredom. These signs indicate that it is time to plug into your internal source of energy and become charged from within. Instead, we often mistakenly over-consume as a way to energize. This strategy provides short bursts of energy followed by a lull, taking us to ever lower energy levels.

This perpetual chase of energy from outside sources keeps us drained. But you can reverse this downward cycle and have the life of your dreams. With The Energy Cure, you'll see how to make life-enhancing choices, not life-depleting ones, every moment of every day.

Steering by Starlight

This is the second book by Martha Beck that I've read.(I'll write about The Joy Diet soon too.) One of the things I love about Martha Beck is her style: straightforward with home truths and humour mixed in. She has wonderful turns of phrases, like this: "I also got married and had myself three rug rats, demonstrating the sound life-planning skills of a meth addict who goes bungee jumping without a cord."

It came to me at just the right time, as I was heading into the "Ring of Fire" as she calls it. In particular, her advice to "let the moment be what it is" has been a lifeline at times. Another idea I really liked was making your choices based on what feels expansive and being aware of what things make you feel constricted.

The first four chapters are a progressive mechanism to deal with challenges in your life, with each chapter talking in depth about each method. The next five deal with finding your path and strategies to help you both uncover and guide your next steps.

Some of it covers familiar ground, and it synthesizes the ideas in The Joy Diet, but I really loved the approach. I especially found useful the ideas of starting from the end and leaning into the Ring of Fire. I haven't decided yet if it's going into my personal library, but I'm seriously thinking about it.

You can read an except here. The jacket blurb is below.

How to live your right life no matter what!

Described as one of the best-known life coaches in America in media such as Psychology Today, NPR, and USA Today, O columnist Martha Beck has demonstrated a rare gift for helping people whose lives have gone off course to find their way back to authentic, rewarding lives. Now, in Steering by Starlight, Martha Beck describes the step-by-step process she uses with her private clients to help them find their way back to their "homing instincts" - their true destinies.

Bringing together cutting-edge research in psychiatry, neurology, and related fields in an accessible, substantive, original way, Dr. Beck offers powerful new methods for solving the problems that beset ordinary people. Using her trademark wisdom, empathy, and engaging style, she connects readers with personal coping strategies that are not yet widely available as she helps them overcome the alienation that is causing them to lose sight of their own North Star.

Dr. Beck identifies three stages along the path to recapturing a satisfying life:

• "the stargazer" helps readers understand why it's so easy to lose themselves and offers strategies for sighting their North Star


• "the mapmaker" uses this newly clarified perspective to evaluate one's situation and plot a course for upcoming years


• "the pathfinder" discusses the adventures that may be encountered as one travels along this new life course

Whether it's seeking better relationships, more focused career direction, the achievement of specific fitness goals, or a more harmonious lifestyle, Steering by Starlight's colorful anecdotes, case studies, and exercises will point the way.

Being In Love

I've just finished reading this book and it was incredibly refreshing to read someone who has the same views on love and relationships (or "relating", as he prefers to call it) as I do. This is not to say the ideas presented aren't challenging, because they are. I'm just glad to know that I'm not the only one who believes that this type of love and relationship is possible.

From the jacket cover:

What Is Love?

In this thoughtful, provocative work, Osho--one of the most revolutionary thinkers of our time--challenges us to question what we think we know about love and opens us to the possibility of a love that is natural, fulfilling, and free of possessiveness and jealousy.

With his characteristic wit, humor, and understanding, Osho dares us to resist the unhealthy relationship patterns we’ve learned from those around us, and to rediscover the meaning of love for ourselves. "By the time you are ready to explore the world of love, you are filled with so much rubbish about love that there is not much hope for you to be able to find the authentic and discard the false."

By answering the questions that so many lovers face, Osho shares new ways to love that will forever change how you relate to others, including how to:

* Love without clinging
* Let go of expectations, rules, and demands
* Free yourself from the fear of being alone
* Be fully present in your relationships
* Keep your love fresh and alive
* Become a life partner with whom someone could continue to grow and change
* Surrender your ego so you can surrender to love

Being in Love will inspire you to welcome love into your life anew and experience the joy of being truly alive by sharing it.