Inprint - New Books of interest by Jeanne Spiro

50 Ways to Leave Your 40s: Living It Up in Life’s Second Half by Sheila Key & Peggy Spencer, M.D. (New World Library, $14.95, Paperback.)

Experiencing that fiftieth birthday can be daunting for even the hardiest boomers, but reading 50 Ways to Leave Your 40s can help make the process easier and maybe even fun. In fifty short chapters or Ways, this handy book explains how to make one of life’s great transitions a time of opportunity, growth, and celebration, with some laughs thrown in.

50 Ways to Leave Your 40s is an interactive, thoughtful, and entertaining resource for the mid-lifer. It challenges one to think about aging in new ways while not denying the inevitable downside. Each chapter contains five sections: a core essay that addresses a midlife issue; a section urging readers to try something physical; one that contains writing or drawing prompts for further introspection and artistic exploration; exciting things to try at least once; and one that briefly explores an appropriate health topic. Its easy-to-read entertaining style, intriguing sidebars, and anecdotes make this a tonic for midlife blues.

This is one of those books that needn’t to be read from beginning to end. It is written with a humorous nod to pop culture and an eye for the world view of aging boomers that encourages them to enjoy the ride and the wisdom that comes with age. It is a great gift for those approaching fifty and beyond.

Do It Anyway: Finding Personal Meaning and Deep Happiness by Living the Paradoxical Commandments by Kent M. Keith. (New World Library, $12.95, Paperback.)

As a sophomore at Harvard University, Kent Keith wrote The Paradoxical Commandments to challenge student leaders to do what they felt was right without looking for rewards from others. During the next 25 years, without him even knowing it, his guiding principles took on a life of their own and found a place in popular culture around the world. They have appeared in countless speeches, advice columns, institutions, and thousands of websites.

Keith realized how far they had traveled in 1997 when at a Rotary Club meeting a fellow member announced he was going to read a poem by Mother Teresa.

People are illogical, unreasonable, and self-centered. Love them anyway.

The good you do today will be forgotten tomorrow. Do good anyway.

Honesty and frankness make you vulnerable. Be honest and frank anyway.

To his surprise, Keith recognized the poem as a partial list of his own commandments. After that, he formally published them in his best-selling book Anyway.

Do It Anyway shows us how to find happiness by doing what’s right even in the face of adversity; get past excuses to find personal meaning; and make a difference in the world around us. It includes forty stories of everyday people who live the Paradoxical Commandments each day, finding meaning and deep happiness even when times are tough.

Decoding the Human Body-Field: The New Science of Information as Medicine by Peter H. Fraser and Harry Massey with Joan Parisi Wilcox. (Healing Arts Press, $18.95, Hardcover.)

After decades of research, Peter Fraser has formulated a system that unites the meridian system of traditional Chinese medicine with quantum wave theory to provide the first comprehensive link between the human body’s biochemistry and bioenergetics. He explains that we each have a body-field based on twelve meridian-like channels that process and coordinate information throughout the body and that our health depends on the proper flow and communication of information through these channels.
In Decoding the Human Body-Field, Fraser and Harry Massey describe in detail their revolutionary Nutri-Energetics System, which uses Infoceuticals—liquids infused with organic colloidal minerals that are imprinted with corrective quantum electrodynamic information—to remedy distortions and blockages in the information flow of the body-field. The imprinted information acts as a magnetic signpost to engage the body’s self-healing ability.

This revolutionary system reestablishes the proper flow of information to the body’s energetic fields to promote health. It presents a new integrative model of the energetic physiology of the human body (the human body-field) and its influence on health and shows that a root cause of disease is due to information blockages in the body-field.

Handbook for the Spirit (Revised) edited by Richard Carlson, Ph.D. and Benjamin Shield, Ph.D, foreword by Marianne Williamson. (New World Library, $14.95, Paperback.)

While an individual’s personal relationship with God is the common denominator of many spiritual teachings, religious institutions sometimes interfere with that relationship. That’s why Richard Carlson and Benjamin Shield invited some of the foremost spiritual leaders of our time to write about their own relationship to the Divine. This is a diverse collection of original writings from 25 visionaries including Mother Teresa, Michael Beckwith, Matthew Fox, Shakti Gawain, and Wayne Dyer.

Handbook for the Spirit (formerly For the Love of God) was written with the premise that a spiritual foundation is the basis on which all the elements of our lives rest. It explains that strengthening this foundation does not necessarily come from being more pious or dogmatic, but from an intimate understanding of our connection with God. With this in mind, each contributor has created an expression of his or her own personal spiritual vision. Each has shared what it is like to have a personal relationship with God, how this relationship developed, and how it manifests in his or her life, relationships, and career.

12 Stupid Things That Mess Up Recovery: Avoiding Relapse through Self-Awareness and Right Action by Allen Berger, Ph.D. (Hazelden, $14.95, Paperback.)

It sounds so simple, just stop drinking (or drugging, or bingeing, or gambling) and everything will be fine. The truth is, getting in touch with the destructive beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors that sabotage recovery requires focus and dedication to change.

Allen Berger tells us that to grow in recovery, one must grow up emotionally. This means getting honest with oneself and facing up to the self-defeating thoughts and actions that put sobriety at risk. Although there are as many ways to mess up recovery as there are alcoholics and addicts, some general themes exist. Believing life should be easy, not making amends, and confusing self-concern with selfishness are just a few of the common attitudes that can hinder sobriety.

In simple, down-to-earth language, Berger explores the twelve most commonly confronted beliefs and attitudes that can sabotage recovery. He provides tools for working through these problems in daily life. This useful guide offers fresh perspectives on how the process of change begins with basic self-awareness and a commitment to working a daily program.

Simple Ways: Towards the Sacred by Gunilla Norris. (BlueBridge, $18.95, Paperback.)

In the rush of everyday life, we tend to lose touch with the inner peace and joy that is available in each moment. Being human, we often long for something more transcendent than the ordinary, but then we quite often miss that which is numinous and extraordinary right here and now.

In Simple Ways, Gunilla Norris has distilled a lifetime of seeking and reflecting into a beautifully worded, lucid, and practical primer for prayer, meditation, and mindful living. Divided into four sections, her book offers us a wide range of accessible ways towards the holy in our daily lives: Towards the Sacred with Our Bodies; Towards the Sacred in our Dwellings; Towards the Sacred with our Every-day Things; and Towards the Sacred in our Gratitude. No matter what our spiritual background, these ways are completely available to any of us, as long as we make conscious choices in our daily routines to embrace them.

A profound and poetic celebration of our search for the Sacred, Simple Ways invites us to be more careful and aware of the world in our selves in order to discover that we live in a holy environment, and that the meaning of our daily lives can be found and experienced exactly where we are.

The Gift of Years: Growing Older Gracefully by Joan Chittister. (BlueBridge, $19.95, Hardcover.)

Joan Chittister invites us to embrace older age as a natural part of life that is both active and contemplative, productive and reflective, and deeply rewarding. She encourages us to cherish the blessings of aging and to overcome its challenges. She also shows us clearly that this is a special period of life—maybe the most special of them all. Older age gives us wisdom, freedom, and prosperity of another kind. Older age enlightens—not simply ourselves, but also those around us. To live these years well, we need to look at every one of them head up and alive. Life is not about age, about the length of years we manage to eke out of it. It is about living into the values offered every day, about growing older with grace.

The Gift of Years looks at the many dimensions of aging, the purposes and concerns, struggles and surprises, the potential and joys. It deals with the sense of rejection that comes from feeling out of it. It reflects on the temptation to isolate oneself from the changes taking place, and on the need to stay involved. It discusses issues of health and wellbeing and the need to put one’s affairs in order. It describes what happens as old relationships shift, change and disappear in favor the many new people and new challenges that come to take their place. It talks about the fear of tomorrow and the mystery of forever—and how to cope with it all. It is a panoply of central issues that emerge with age to bring us to the fullness of life, to make us new again.

And perhaps the most important dimension of older age is to become aware of its profound purpose: these are the capstone years, the time in which a whole new life is in the making again. The gift of these years is not merely being alive, it is the gift of becoming more fully alive than ever.