Book Excerpts
I am pleased to have permission to reprint excerpts from several books that can support your efforts to make a change in your life. Some address the issue of change directly. Others simply encourage you to be the best you can be under the circumstances in which you find yourself.
Check out the brief excerpts below and then click on the "read more" link for each to get a fuller excerpt that gives a better picture of the book itself.
  Multitasking Virus in Our Classrooms, an article by the author of The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance.
The Art of Learning discusses the prevalence of college student's multi-tasking and their inability to fully absorb a classroom discussion. The author, the subject of the book and movie, Searching for Bobby Fischer, describes what happened when he visited a professor's classroom and changed the atmosphere by writing a letter to the students.
Read the article and then go to Amazon.com to learn more about The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance.
  Busy Women Can Be Mindful Too
Because women possess an innate ability to perceive an expanded range of feelings, thoughts, and experiences, we are adept at consciously handling several things at once. That doesn't mean you don't get frazzled and frustrated. It does mean you can feel even better and more productive by attentively, purposely, and nonjudgmentally staying in the present moment.
Read more of the excerpt from The Mindful Woman: Gentle Practices for Restoring Calm, Finding Balance, and Opening Your Heart by Sue Patton Thoele.
  A Woman's Call to the Ministry
For many Christian denominations, believing that you have been called is a central requirement for getting ordained. Whether you believe your call came as the voice of God or as a feeling inside of you, you have to be able to tell your story to others in a way that reveals you have indeed been called to be a minister. The task of the budding minister is to persuade a committee or a priest or a pastor not only that she wants to be ordained but that God intends for her to be ordained.
Read more of the excerpt from A Church of Her Own: What Happens When a Woman Takes the Pulpit by Sarah Sentilles.
  Our Kinship With Animals Wild and Domestic
"Ace and I lead a line of twelve guests on horseback up Pelican Valley on a clear Yellowstone day, a day of crystal air. The water in Pelican Creek sparkles. Sandhill cranes ride the length of the sky, their ululating as primeval as the place. Scattered across the valley, small groups of buffalo graze tall, yellowing grass, the grass barely moving in the calm noon."
Read more of the excerpt from Ask Now the Beasts: Our Kinship with Animals Wild and Domestic
by Ruth Rudner.
  The Enslaving Illusion of Love
"Love is one of the greatest illusions that people have. This illusion of love is often the biggest obstacle to our relationship with God and to our greater and deeper experience of the Divine.
Reflect for a moment on the story of the couple who were so madly in love that every parent who had a teenage child would point to them and say, 'If you want to know what love is, look at that couple.' One day the man died. The woman was so devastated that on his tombstone she had engraved in bold letters, 'The light of my life is gone.' People would go there to show their children that inscription and to talk about this ideal couple and how they loved each other."
Read more of the excerpt from How Big is Your God? by Paul Coutinho, SJ
  The Loving Gift of Being Fully Present
"What would it be like if you and your partner became excellent listeners on a daily basis? For example, think back through the months or years you have known your partner and recall the times when the two of you talked like best friends who truly cared about each other. What did it feel like to have a soul mate who was 100 percent there for you? Wouldn't it be great to have that sense of deep connection again in your conversations?"
Read more of the excerpt from Wake Up or Break Up: 8 Crucial Steps to Strengthening Your Relationship by Leonard Felder, Ph.D.
  Meditation — It's Not What You Think
"It might be good to clarify a few common misunderstandings about meditation right off the bat. First, meditation is best thought of as a way of being, rather than a technique or a collection of techniques.
I'll say it again.
Meditation is a way of being, not a technique.
This doesn't mean that there aren't methods and techniques associated with meditation practice. There are. In fact, there are hundreds of them, and we will be making good use of some of them. But without understanding that all techniques are orienting vehicles pointing at ways of being, ways of being in relationship to the present moment and to one's own mind and one's own experience, we can easily get lost in techniques and in our misguided but entirely understandable attempts to use them to get somewhere else and experience some special result or state that we think is the goal of it all."
Read more of the excerpt from Coming to Our Senses: Healing Ourselves and the World Through Mindfulness by Jon Kabat-Zinn.
  Field Notes on the Compassionate Life
"Life offers up its own daily catechism, even if it's just seeing people in a little better light. Why not just resolve to give everyone the benefit of the doubt? "If we treat people as they ought to be," said Goethe, almost nailing it, "we help them become what they are capable of becoming." Or more to the point: Treat them as they already are, if we but had the Good Eye to see it."
Read more of the excerpt from Field Notes on the Compassionate Life: A Search for the Soul of Kindness by Marc Ian Barasch.
  Don't Notice Anything
"My mother didn’t try to stab my father until I was six, but she must have shown signs of oddness before that. Her detached gaze, the secret smile. Something.
"We were living in a two-room apartment over the dance floor of a nightclub. My father was performing in the show that played below us every night. We could hear the musical numbers through the floorboards, and we had heard the closing number at midnight. My father should have come back from work hours ago."
Read more of the excerpt from Never Have Your Dog Stuffed: And Other Things I've Learned by Alan Alda.
  Creating Positive Change: There Is No Beginning Too Small
"Have you ever had the feeling while reading a newspaper, listening to a lecture, or sitting around a dinner table talking with friends about current events, that 'Something ought to be done about that'? Or perhaps you have felt appalled by an injustice of some sad event and thought, 'What is to be done?' "
Read more of the excerpt based on Paradigm Found: Leading and Managing for Positive Change, by Anne Firth Murray, Founding President of The Global Fund for Women
  Eat Only Chicken the Day of the Game
"I don't believe in magic, of course. Hardly anybody does, but we all live by it. It permeates our lives every day, and we wouldn't give it up for all the science on earth. Most of us can't. We can't because we aren't aware of how completely we live within its thrall. Who can break a bond they don't know exists?"
Read more of the excerpt from the book Not In Kansas Anymore: A Curious Tale of How Magic Is Transforming America by Christine Wicker
  When Ordinary People Achieve Extraordinary Things
"I believe it is possible for ordinary people to achieve extraordinary things. For me, the difference between an "ordinary" and an "extraordinary" person is not the title that person might have, but what they do to make the world a better place for us all."
Read more of this excerpt from the book This I Believe: Personal Philosophies of Remarkable Men and Women edited by Jay Allison and Dan Gediman |
