These books cover a range of different topics from finding meaning in life to treating psychological conditions such as anxiety, low self-esteem and depression, to developing your intuition. (The links to books and other materials to purchase are via Amazon and I receive a commission payment from any purchases made via the links as an affiliate. Amazon and the Amazon logo are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates.)
The Mindful Path to Self-Compassion: Freeing Yourself from Destructive Thoughts and Emotions
Dr. Christopher Germer, PhD. Life is hard, but we make it harder on ourselves through undue expectations that can never be lived up to. This means that we spend our lives beating ourselves up, so can never be truly happy as we’ll always perceive ourselves as not good enough. It’s as if we believe that we can only be happy when we are perfect and life does not present any problems to us. That’s never going to happen. By taking a lighter, more accepting and understanding approach to ourselves and those around us, we can achieve that elusive happiness without anything ‘happening’, as we can achieve it through understanding rather than beating ourselves up for imaginary ‘failings’. This book is a complete life-changer and should be compulsory reading for everyone alive.
The Mindful Way Through Depression: Freeing Yourself from Chronic Unhappiness
Williams, Teasdale, Segal, Kabat-Zinn. Jon Kabat-Zinn has pioneered a unique approach to the treatment of depression and other stress-related illnesses. Rather than ‘fixing’ us through drugs or lengthy periods of talking therapies, we can use mindfulness and meditation to allow us to ‘see’ what we really need to heal. This practise of regular mindfulness and awareness lifts the depressive feelings allowing us to discover our lives again. The book comes with an accompanying CD that can be used for step-by-step mindfulness meditation. This is an incredibly powerful treatment to use if you ever find yourself stuck in a depressive cycle or are prone to suffer from bouts of depression.
The Road Less Travelled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth
M Scott Peck. I love this book, it is another life-changer. Dr Peck is a psychiatrist and has distilled his decades of experience into this book. It is incredibly powerful and shows us why our lives are the way they are, together with a way out of it. Read it again and again to help achieve peace and understanding with life. One of the key concepts in the book is that life is hard. But when you accept that it is hard, it no longer feels as hard. Instead you can open up to what it has to offer without the burden of prior expectations.
Man’s Search For Meaning: The classic tribute to hope from the Holocaust
Viktor Frankl. Frankl survived Auschwitz and went on to rebuild his psychological and psychiatric practise after the war. The short book is split into two sections. The first is about how the prisoners survived the camps and the second discusses Viktor Frankl’s therapeutic approach known as ‘Logotherapy’. This involves finding our personal meaning for life and then living true to those values. What I find really powerful about the book is that the first part covers the coping skills that prisoners used to survive without going into the details of the horrors. Other books describe the atrocities committed, but not many talk about the psychological coping techniques employed by the survivors. This is what truly sets it apart and makes it unique.
Sacred Contracts: Awakening Your Divine Potential
Caroline Myss. It’s hard to accurately classify Caroline’s range of work as it really does transcend the mind-body-spirit continuum and ranges from finding our true purpose in life to using chakras and energy flows for medical diagnosis and healing.
In Sacred Contracts, Caroline uses her research and work to help us identify our natural archetypes (a concept from Jungian psychology), to give us a greater understanding of who we are and where our full potential may lie. It uses a full series of exercises to help us first of all establish what our archetypes might be (or our personality types) and then identify the type of work we should be doing and what would make us happiest in life. The premise is that if we working against our natural way of being, we will never achieve our full potential. This approach helps identify our own natural way as a basis for achieving that potential.
Two of Caroline’s other books are discussed in Health Books and Resources.
Reading People: How to Understand People and Predict Their Behaviour Anytime, Anyplace
Jo-Ellan Demetrius. This might seem a strange choice of book to be included here, but I found it to be incredibly powerful for developing intuition and an understanding of other people. The author is an American jury consultant, which means she reads people for a living all day and gets paid for it. As self-exploratory and spiritual paths include compassion, tolerance and understanding of other people, enhancing your skills in reading and understanding them can be hugely important. It helps you put yourself in their shoes. This book is invaluable in helping you do that as the practises force you to stop thinking about yourself all the time and instead think about others – and what could be more spiritual than that. The skill is incredibly valuable and useful to have, it’s the uses to which it is put that can be dangerous if not exercised with wisdom and compassion.
You Do Know: Learning to Act on Intuition Instantly
Becky Walsh. This book also focuses on intuition and how to develop it. The premise is that all the answers we need in our life lie within us, but we have to learn how to listen – that’s intuition. It’s not about ‘getting a bad feeling about something’, as that’s fear rather than intuition. Instead, intuition is based on love and wisdom, which lies within. The book explains that we need to understand and apply some key spiritual concepts in order to develop intuition but they aren’t complex and will help us understand more about what intuition really is and how to use it.
Oriah Mountain Dreamer. This is a lovely little book based on a poem called The Invitation and is designed to reignite our passion for life and bring interest to our relationships with other people. The invitation in question is for people to explore their deepest passions and live according to them. When talking to others we can invite them to talk about their passions, thereby reigniting our own passions and bringing richness to our lives and relationships.
Chicken Soup For The Soul: 101 Stories to Open the Heart and Rekindle the Spirit
This isn’t one book, it’s a series. Some are general and targeted at specific groups of people (such as teenagers, mothers, etc) whereas others are focused on particular situations (such as after a bereavement or facing a crisis). Each book contains uplifting stories and anecdotes, many of which are provided by readers or authors. They are perfect for dipping in and out of when you need some inspiration or a general lift. They provide, as the name suggests, heart-warming metaphorical chicken soup for the spirit and soul, just when we need it, as a good friend or our mother might do for us.
Taking the Leap: Freeing Ourselves from Old Habits and Fears
Pema Chodron. Many of us get caught up in ways of thinking and behaving that are unhelpful but that we don’t seem to be able to break free of. It’s as if we are trapped in a pattern and can’t see the way out. This little book investigates some of the causes of these patterns – or ‘shenpa’s’ as Pema calls them – and provides guidance on how to free ourselves. Pema Chodron is a Canadian single mother who became a Buddhist nun. You can read more about her in Buddhist Thoughts.
Reconciliation: Healing the Inner Child
Thich Nhat Hanh. Many (possibly all) of our issues as adults arise because of our childhood. A true understanding of ourselves as adults needs an investigation of our childhood, both the good and bad bits. This short book shows how we can use mindfulness to see where patterns have been created in childhood that are now not serving us well, so that we can investigate how best to work with them as adults. As well as exercises and mindfulness practises, it also contains some useful case studies of how an exploration of childhood has helped people to move forward with their lives. Thich Nhat Hanh is a Vietnamese Buddhist monk who was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by Martin Luther King. You can read more about him in Buddhist Thoughts.