Recommendations based on "Shape Your Life and Your Destiny"

Many of us find ourselves caught somewhere between unbelieving activists and inactive believers. We can write a check to feed starving children or hold signs in the streets and feel like we've made a difference without ever encountering the faces of the suffering masses. In this book, Shane Claiborne describes an authentic faith rooted in belief, action, and love, inviting us into a movement of the Spirit that begins inside each of us and extends into a broken world.Shane's faith led him to dress the wounds of lepers with Mother Teresa, visit families in Iraq amidst bombings, and dump $10,000 in coins and bills on Wall Street to redistribute wealth. Shane lives out this revolution each day in his local neighborhood, an impoverished community in North Philadelphia, by living among the homeless, helping local kids with homework, and "practicing resurrection" in the forgotten places of our world. Shane's message will comfort the disturbed, and disturb the comfortable . . . but will also invite us into an irresistible revolution. His is a vision for ordinary radicals ready to change the world with little acts of love.

In the spirit of her bestselling The Language of Letting Go, America’s beloved inspirational writer Melody Beattie guides us on a sacred journey as we learn to expand our creativity, embrace our powers, and open our hearts.Writing with the same warmth, honesty, and compassion that has attracted such a loyal following, Beattie now charts a new path toward spiritual growth and renewal. In 365 insightful and delightfully warm daily reflections, Journey to the Heart will comfort and inspire us all as we begin to discover our true purpose in the world and learn to connect even more deeply with ourselves, the creative force, and the magic and mystery in the world around and within us.“Melody Beattie gives you the tools to discover the magnificence and splendor of your being.”—Deepak Chopra, author of Jesus and Buddha

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The bestselling author of The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry equips readers to recognize and resist the lies that seek to rob them of peace and freedom.“Live No Lies is brilliant, deep, scriptural, and will equip you to face the enemy and fight.”—Jennie Allen, New York Times bestselling author of Get Out of Your HeadWe are at war. Not with a foreign government or domestic terrorists or a creepy new artificial intelligence hell-bent on taking over the world. No, it’s a war we feel deep inside our own chests: we are at war with lies.The problem isn’t so much that we tell lies but that we live them. We let them into our bodies, and they sabotage our peace. All around us in the culture and deep within our own body memories are lies: deceptive ideas that wreak havoc on our emotional health and spiritual well-being, and deceptive ideas about who God is, who we are, and what the good life truly is.The choice is not whether to fight or not fight, but whether we win or surrender.Ancient apprentices of Jesus developed a paradigm for this war; they spoke of the three enemies of the soul: the devil, the flesh, and the world. Live No Lies taps into this ancient wisdom from saints of the Way and translates the three enemies for the modern era, with all its secularism and sophistication. As a generation, we chuckle at the devil as a premodern myth, we are confused by Scripture’s teaching on the flesh in an age where sensual indulgence is a virtue not a vice, and we have little to no category for the New Testament concept of the world.In this provocative and practical book, bestselling author John Mark Comer combines cultural analysis with spiritual formation. He identifies the role lies play in our spiritual deformation and lays out a strategic plan to overcome them.Do you feel the tug-of-war in your own heart, the inner conflict between truth and lies? The spirit and the flesh? The Way of Jesus and the world? It’s time to start winning. It’s time to live no lies...

The now--this moment--is the true source of happiness and peace and the key to living a fulfilled and meaningful life. [i]Embracing the Now[/i] by Gina Lake is a collection of short essays about the now that can serve as daily reminders of the deepest truths. Full of clear insight and wisdom, it explains how the mind keeps us from being in the now, how to move into the now and stay there, and what living from the now is like. It also explains how to overcome stumbling blocks to being in the now, such as fears, doubts, judgments, misunderstandings, distrust of life, desires, and other conditioned ideas that are behind human suffering."By becoming aware of what else is showing up in life in this moment besides thoughts, we can begin to really live in this moment and respond to it naturally, uncluttered by our mental commentary. We are in the moment, but without the ego's influence on it. Spiritual freedom is when the voice of the ego no longer dominates and colors the landscape of life. Rather, this voice is one small aspect of the landscape, one other thing that comes and goes in this landscape. This voice becomes impersonal, something that has no more personal relevance than the bird's song or the temperature of the room. It's experienced, but not experienced as "you." Then it's possible to experience the Experiencer, the true self that is behind all life and behind our life. This Experiencer is in love with life, and when we let it live us, we are in love with life, and our actions and words express that. Freedom from the ego brings a relaxation into the true self and the possibility of being that in the world instead of the ego."

NATIONAL BESTSELLERA spiritual thought-leader and featured guest on Oprah’s SuperSoul Sunday helps us learn to quiet fear and anxiety and discover the powerful wholeness that exists within us all in this inspiring and affirmative guide.Achieving equilibrium in today’s age of anxiety can seem like a near-impossible—even frivolous—task. Panache Desai offers a refreshing, surprisingly unusual approach to meet the challenges of the modern moment and heal the fractured self it produces.For Desai, the soul—whole, unbroken, at peace, and one with the life source—isn’t a destination. It already exists within each of us, just waiting to be revealed. It is not something we have to work to develop—it is our birthright. And when we are in union with our soul, we experience a personal evolution that not only illuminates our individual cosmic purpose but helps us to engage the sense of purpose and presence necessary to remake the world itself.You Are Enough offers a straightforward, non-judgmental, and approachable process of revealing the soul, of coming into alignment and harmony with our true selves. Combining personal narrative, clear and inspiring philosophy, and prescriptive practices, it reveals that the way through is the way in—that the way through fear, self-doubt, and anxiety is accepting and embracing dissonance and emotional and psychological blockages, so that we can approach our lives and the world from a perspective that understands our fears are not who we are. Desai’s goal is simple: to guide readers through radical self-acceptance toward a life of ultimate peace and fulfillment.Beautifully designed, this enlightening volume by a fresh voice shows us that while life may have caused us to forget our power, potential, light, and love, they are always there, just waiting to be discovered.

“To me, hard times are like hide-and-seek—where is the solution, where is the hope? We can never give up looking for these things because they are just waiting to be found.” —Gidon Lev On May 8, 1945, when he was just ten years old, Gidon Lev was liberated from a Nazi concentration camp after four nightmarish years. Twenty-six family members, including Gidon’s beloved father and grandparents, were murdered in the Holocaust. Only Gidon and his mother survived. From the depths of despair, a little boy who had lost so much was determined to build a life filled with adventure and love. And that is exactly what he did. Today, a spritely and cheerful octogenarian and father of six, Gidon speaks to celebrities and diplomats all over the world and has taken social media by storm—all with his signature candor, charm, and wisdom. Just what makes this Holocaust survivor, rascal, and dogged optimist tick? Sharing remarkable stories from his extraordinary life, Lev reveals his secrets of happiness and fulfillment. From reconciling with the sometimes painful past to embracing this singular gift called life, Gidon has never taken a day of his life for granted—and neither should we. “You don’t get the life you want,” Gidon says, “you get the life that you get.” Let’s Make Things Better is the story of an indomitable spirit whose cheerful determination to never give up is just what we need during these uncertain times. Now more than ever, Gidon Lev has important lessons for us all about life and how to live it well: having the courage to stand up to hate, living for the moment, believing in ourselves, nurturing loving and caring relationships, and always, always believing that a better world is something worth fighting for.  

#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The inspirational classic from a renowned spiritual leader that "offers a moving and humane approach to understanding life’s windstorms” (Elisabeth Kübler-Ross). When Harold Kushner’s three-year-old son was diagnosed with a degenerative disease that meant the boy would only live until his early teens, he was faced with one of life’s most difficult questions: Why, God? Years later, Rabbi Kushner wrote this straightforward, elegant contemplation of the doubts and fears that arise when tragedy strikes. In these pages, Kushner shares his wisdom as a rabbi, a parent, a reader, and a human being. Often imitated but never superseded, When Bad Things Happen to Good People is a classic that offers clear thinking and consolation in times of sorrow.

Beth Kempton's The Way of the Fearless Writer is a mindful approach to the writing life, based on Buddhist thought…

Ten years after Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s death: “An inspiring…guide to life, distilled from the experiences of people who face death” (Kirkus Reviews)—the beloved classic now with a new introduction and updated resources section.Is this really how I want to live my life?Each one of us at some point asks this question. The tragedy is not that life is short but that we often see only in hindsight what really matters.In this, her first book on life and living, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross joins with David Kessler to guide us through the practical and spiritual lessons we need to learn so that we can live life to its fullest in every moment. Many years of working with the dying have shown the authors that certain lessons come up over and over again. Some of these lessons are enormously difficult to master, but even the attempts to understand them can be deeply rewarding. Here, in fourteen accessible chapters, from the Lesson of Love to the Lesson of Happiness, the authors reveal the truth about our fears, our hopes, our relationships, and, above all, about the grandness of who we really are.

Building on the astonishing success of The Power of Now, Eckhart Tolle presents readers with an honest look at the current state of humanity: He implores us to see and accept that this state, which is based on an erroneous identification with the egoic mind, is one of dangerous insanity.Tolle tells us there is good news, however. There is an alternative to this potentially dire situation. Humanity now, perhaps more than in any previous time, has an opportunity to create a new, saner, more loving world. This will involve a radical inner leap from the current egoic consciousness to an entirely new one.In illuminating the nature of this shift in consciousness, Tolle describes in detail how our current ego-based state of consciousness operates. Then gently, and in very practical terms, he leads us into this new consciousness. We will come to experience who we truly are—which is something infinitely greater than anything we currently think we are—and learn to live and breathe freely.