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.