Self-Development Audiobooks

A clinical psychologist specializing in behavioral medicine presents a dozen practical approaches to transforming loss, pain, and suffering into positive growth and hope. Just as some flowers only bloom in the dark, so too, some people only grow by experiencing tough times. Each chapter explains an empirically based principle for handling adversity, followed by writing prompts designed to help readers experience the axiom personally. Tools such as self-reflection, meaning-making, narrative creation, benefit-finding, and inspired value-based action help readers move through their trauma toward a new exuberance for life.

Change The World By Changing Yourself Find answers: Today, it’s easy to get outraged by world events, frustrated by our own personal battles, and disenfranchised from government and leadership. Born of moral indignation, informed by decades of study, and seasoned by a life of devoted self-cultivation, Monk Yun Rou’s Mad Monk Manifesto has the answers we’re looking for, organically cohering personal prescriptions and calls to social and political action in one powerful document. Discover venerated wisdom: Based on ancient Chinese wisdom such as Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching , Mad Monk Manifesto is part tour guide to consciousness, part recipe for personal development, part prescription for environmental salvation, and part handbook for social change. In approximately 70,000 words, the book’s six chapters (framed by an introduction and afterward) follow the traditional Taoist prescription for changing the larger world by changing ourselves first. Improve yourself―and the world: In the same way ripples move away from a stone dropped into a pond, Mad Monk Manifesto begins with our personal lives, discussing topics such as diet, exercise, meditation, and mind/body practice, and spreads to our public environment, describing ideas such as what we can do to improve the community, the government, and the world. Full of everything from advice for a healthy, conscious lifestyle to suggested actions we can take to enhance the lives of friends, family, coworkers, and community members, Mad Monk Manifesto highlights spirituality and service, the goals of an awakened life. Learn something new: Each chapter of Mad Monk Manifesto is creative and fresh, offering proactive solutions in single-paragraph exhortations and prescriptions against a backdrop of lessons from Chinese history, the wisdom of ancient sages like Lao Tzu, and stories born of author Monk Yun Rou's journey from privileged Manhattanite to practicing Taoist monk. Inspirational and informative, exhortative and prescriptive, this modern Alan Watts creates a complete and immersive experience for everyone who picks up his Mad Monk Manifesto ―a portrayal of everything from the mundane to the sublime through the lens of the philosophy best known from George Lucas’ Star Wars saga, the Green Movement, and surf and hippie cultures. Emerge with a new way of seeing life, a series of concrete steps to take for personal transformation, and an action plan for working in the community to provoke change. Mad Monk Manifesto is precisely what the world needs at a time of unprecedented environmental disasters, international instability, and divisive and unreliable leadership. After reading this book, you will learn: How to relax, rectify, and rebalance life How to bolster the community and deepen culture How to effect positive change in commerce, government, power, and the environment For readers of Alan Watts, Ursula Le Guin, and Change Your Thoughts―Change Your Life by Dr. Wayne W. Dyer

This novella is also published as part of the collection SWEET HOME COWBOY. The Hathaway sisters might have grown up apart, but when they agree to move to Jasper Creek, Oregon, to revitalize their grandfather’s farm, it seems a straightforward decision. Until they meet their neighborhood cowboys… Tomboy Joey has more affinity with farm equipment than men, until a brooding cowboy changes her mind. The sisters’ feelings are anything but simple, but with the love and support of each other, they discover that a cowboy might be the sweetest thing of all about coming home.

First featured on a British poster produced during World War II, "Keep calm and carry on" has become the mantra of millions — but exactly how to keep calm remains a difficult question for most of us. The next time you are stressed by pressures of work, overwhelmed by life's challenges, or panicked by problems that seem unsolvable, reach for this book. In LITTLE WAYS TO KEEP CALM AND CARRY ON, you'll find twenty short yet powerful lessons and anxiety-reducing techniques that will help you move past stressful moments with grace. Each lesson is so simple to learn and practice, you'll find that this pocket guide is all you really need whenever you need a little help keeping calm.

In a fusion of fact and fiction, nineteenth-century women institutionalized as hysterics reveal what history ignored “ City of Incurable Women is a brilliant exploration of the type of female bodily and psychic pain once commonly diagnosed as hysteria—and the curiously hysterical response to it commonly exhibited by medical men. It is a novel of powerful originality, riveting historical interest, and haunting lyrical beauty.” — Sigrid Nunez , author of The Friend and What Are You Going Through “Where are the hysterics, those magnificent women of former times?” wrote Jacques Lacan. Long history’s ghosts, marginalized and dispossessed due to their gender and class, they are reimagined by Maud Casey as complex, flesh-and-blood people with stories to tell. These linked, evocative prose portraits, accompanied by period photographs and medical documents both authentic and invented, poignantly restore the humanity to the nineteenth-century female psychiatric patients confined in Paris’s Salpêtrière hospital and reduced to specimens for study by the celebrated neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot and his male colleagues. Maud Casey is the author of five books of fiction, including The Man Who Walked Away , and a work of nonfiction, The Art of Mystery: The Search for Questions . A Guggenheim Fellow and recipient of the St. Francis College Literary Prize, she teaches at the University of Maryland.

With current statistics suggesting that the average American over the age of 14 engages with screens upwards of 10 hours a day, the topic of our growing dependence upon technology applies to nearly everyone. While the effects differ at each point of development, real changes to the brain, relationships, and personal lives are well documented. Deviced! explores these alterations and offers a realistic look at how we can better use technology and break away from the bad habits we’ve formed. Using personal stories, cutting edge research, and anecdotes from youth, parents, and professionals, Dodgen-Magee highlights the brain changes that result from excessive technology use and offers an approach to the digital world that enables more informed and lasting change and a healthier long-term perspective. Given that the reader is living within a culture of ever-changing and advancing technologies, Deviced! is written in such a way that its contents can weather the constantly changing digital landscape by focusing on the concepts of honest assessment and healthy boundary setting rather than on specific technologies or platforms. Deviced! offers a mindful approach to assessing current technology use, breaking bad habits, setting new norms, and re-engaging with life with renewed richness and awareness.

You Can Get Unstuck When author and podcaster Polly Campbell got tired of her hoodie smelling like pizza and her days being clouded by midlife over-exhaustion, emotional burnout, and boredom, she decided to get off the couch and reclaim her core energy. But could this burned-out, chronically ill, middle-aged mother of a teen rediscover her vitality? Yes. And so can you. Small Steps, Big Energy. Self-help books for women often encourage you to throw out the life you’re living and create a fresh start. You, Recharged isn’t about that. You don’t have to quit your mundane job, cut out cocktails, or sign-off of social media to recharge. Instead, Polly Campbell’s inspirational book is about adding things in―good habits, practices, fun, people, activities, self-care strategies―that ignite your essential energy, the sustainable source that fires you up from within and keeps you going during the good and bad. Meaning Ignites Power. When we align with the things that matter to us and allow the “why” to guide us, we are energized. Sure, there are challenges, setbacks, and plenty of things that piss us off, but they don’t have to deplete us. They don’t have to leave us mentally exhausted or take our power. Instead, our energy can be refocused and redirected into things that we value. You, Recharged will help you discover the small but meaningful ways you can feel happier, healthier, and more alive. In this personal development book, find: Easy-to-apply, practical strategies to ease stress, boost energy, and improve health and well-being Short chapters, delivered in a relatable, conversational tone, with plenty of humor Hope and inspiration, so you know that you can also create a meaningful, satisfying life no matter how stuck, lost, bored, and physically exhausted you feel If you were inspired by motivational books and self-help books like Own Your Everyday , How to Stop Feeling Like Sh*t , or The Self-Love Experiment , then you’ll love You, Recharged .

Facing the loss of a loved one in a death-avoidant culture can be excruciating. Grievers may be expected to put on a brave face, to “move on” quickly, and to seek medication if they are still grief-stricken after an “acceptable” amount of time. Psycho­therapist Judy Heath draws on extensive experience as a grief specialist in private practice to help those struggling with the anguish of loss. Addressing the myths and misinformation about mourning that still abound today, Heath gently coaches readers to understand that coping with loss is a natural process that our society tends to avoid and hurry people through, often leading to unresolved, lasting grief. No Time for Tears offers practical advice for both short- and long-term recovery, including how to manage rarely discussed physical and emotional changes: feelings of “going crazy” and inability to focus; feeling out of sync with the world, exhausted and chilled, and crushingly lonely. This updated second edition includes new information about medication and discusses various types of loss including that of a parent, child, spouse, friend, or pet. Helpful not only to grievers but also to those who care about, counsel, or employ them, No Time for Tears is an essential resource for grief management and recovery.

Everything you need to know about love, life, relationships, sex, men, and being a badass Advice from girl bosses of all kinds: Women are, far and away, the Oral Sex. Women’s Studies scholar Becca Anderson has gathered the wisdom from a chorus of fabulous femmes for this one-of-a-kind advice book. From housewives to Hollywood starlets, from standup comedians to startup entrepreneurs, these badass women offer unvarnished and unabashed opinions and share their frank and forthright thinking on the wild world of relationships. A sassy collection of woman wisdom: This delightfully dishy gathering of gal pals is like having a heart-to-heart with 200 of your closest friends. Garrulous girls and loquacious ladies from every walk of life unleash their wicked wit in this humorous and enlightening compilation and tell it like it is. Topics include What the World Needs Now, Love Hurts, Lost Love, and Are Men Really Necessary. Learn and laugh at the real stories of the amazing women you love: true tales about wild women of yore that entertain as much as they enlighten. From Anais Nin, Lily Tomlin, Amy Bloom, Dorothy Allison, Drew Barrymore, Chrissy Teigan and beyond, there's no shortage of sass, sarcasm, or sizzle and a few shocks along the way! In Badass Women Give the Best Advice , readers will find: Wisdom about sex, dating, break ups, weddings, the prerequisites for the perfect kiss, and more! Quotes and true stories from famous women and girl bosses Quizzes, love and sex bucket lists and topics like “Size Really Does Matter,” and “Cry Me a River, The Weepiest Romantic Movies Ever” that will spice up your sex and love life Be enlightened with these no nonsense takes on dating, love life, sex, self-love, and more!

An entertaining and insightful pageturner about modern marriage and a tight-knit group of friends navigating their 30s and beyond. It's tradition that on everyone's birthday, the three couples gather to celebrate. They've toasted each other's big life milestones, and been there for each other through loss and disappointment, too. Nathan is the first to turn 40, and when the cake arrives, he makes a shocking announcement. The birthday ritual, and the group of friends, will never be the same again. Confessions follow, and secrets get revealed. One couple's crumbling marriage forces the other two couples to reexamine their own marriages, and the fault lines that lurk beneath. Will their bonds be strong enough to survive issues like infidelity, infertility, and waning passion, plus a series of crises that push each relationship to the brink? The answers may prove surprising. A year after Nathan's big declaration, as the group gathers for the year's final birthday celebration, every person and every relationship will be fundamentally changed. Perfect for fans of Emma Straub, J. Courtney Sullivan, and Rebecca Serle, Reservations for Six is a deeply satisfying novel full of wisdom, humor, and heart. It shines a spotlight on the phase of marriage when the fabric has started to fray, and deftly observes how couples cope, grow, and eventually thrive-together or apart.