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Waking Up
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 Heart Advice for Difficult Times
Pema Chödrön
2000
Pema Chödrön is an American Buddhist nun and one of the foremost students of Chögyam Trungpa. She is resident teacher at Gampo Abbey in Nova Scotia, the first Tibetan monastery in North America established for Westerners. Pema Chödrön says in the preface to this beautiful book that she realized, while re-reading transcripts of talks she had given,
Gradually, as I read more, I began to see that in some way, no matter what subject I had chosen, what country I was in, or what year it was, I had taught endlessly about the same things: the great need for maitri (loving kindness toward oneself), and developing from that the awakening of a fearlessly compassionate attitude toward our own pain and that of others…The other underlying theme was dissolving the dualistic tension between us and them, this and that, good and bad, by inviting in what we usually avoid.
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 Messages from the Future
Hank Wesselman
1995 (First of a Trilogy)
http://www.sharedwisdom.com/ (video interviews)
Spiritwalker would make an engrossing mystery novel, one of those that's difficult to put down - but I had to keep remembering with a kind of a shock that not only is it being presented as autobiographical, but if it is a true story it reflects directly on us, here and now.
Wesselman, your more or less standard left-brain anthropologist, is unexpectedly cast into out-of-body experiences in which he travels to what turns out to be 5,000 years in the future, and experiences that world through the body of a man who is apparently his descendent in the distant future, or himself in an alternate reality.
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 Embracing Your Life with the Heart of the Buddha
Tara Brach, Ph.D.
2003
Bio
Interview
Buy this book new or used from Amazon 
What Tara Brach terms “radical acceptance” is the fundamental basis for any quest for self-understanding, and also the first requirement for loving others. Of course this is not a new idea—we all know we need to have self-love and self-esteem, and there are hundreds of other books and magazine articles that say so. This is also a crucial piece of the influence of the mind and the emotions on our physical health. What is not always so clear is what real self-love and self-esteem look like, to us, here and now in this moment, or how to achieve them. She unpacks the concept in a beautiful way, relating many personal experiences, stories of clients and students, and quotations from other disciplines, so that it is easy to connect with and understand.
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 Jill Bolte Taylor, Ph.D.
2009
Original TED talk
Excerpt from book
Interview on Oprah
You don’t really need to read the book to get the message, since there are videos and interviews available and she has been on Oprah. But she does talk in some detail in the book about her mother’s tireless care of her after the stroke, which she credits for her recovery. She describes right after the stroke as being like a person with no skin, so that when she got to the hospital, the bright lights, the noise, people speaking loudly to her, were like torture. She finds especially important being allowed to sleep. Her mother defended her from visitors and intrusions, worked with her on exercises to help her recover, but then insisted that she sleep until she had regained her strength before she tried again.
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 Blind Hero of the French Resistance
1998, 2006 (reprint)
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I first heard mention of Jacques Lusseyran in an article by Dr. Oliver Sacks which discussed adaptations to blindness. Long after, I remembered and looked up the book, and found it just been republished in a second edition, in paperback. I fell in love with this child, his parents, and his friends, with the extraordinary man he became and his experience of the world, so much richer than mine - although technically he was blind, and I can see. His story reminds me that because I can see, I can constantly be distracted from what is essential by what is apparent. Lusseyran’s access to his inner world, his amazing relationship to the physical world, his deep experience of love and relatedness, his intellectual curiosity, and his optimistic courage and determination to act on his convictions are unforgettable.
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 A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment
Eckhart Tolle
1999, 2004
Buy new or used from Amazon
Also recommended on CD
Written in a question-and-answer format based on questions asked by students, The Power of Now is a guide to changing one’s angle of view on the “reality” of one’s life in such a way that every moment, in whatever circumstance, is revealed as an opportunity for development. The philosophy is similar to the Buddhist path, and he connects it with the heart of other religious traditions as well. The strength of Tolle’s approach is its extreme practicality. It’s easy to say, and we hear all the time, “Be in the present moment.” Habituated as we are to navigating our lives locked into what Tolle calls “psychological time,” or the personal drama that plays continuously in the mind and is made up of past experience and future hopes or fears, it is not so clear how to do that. He makes it obvious why being with attention in each moment is both possible and necessary.
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 Discovering the Magic and Grandeur of Ordinary ExistenceTimothy Miller, Ph.D.
A creative, humorous and closely-reasoned explanation of how our desire for “more” causes us to suffer unnecessarily, and what to do about it. It’s framed as a self-help book of sorts, but the presentation of the idea and the examples he uses are brilliant. There are lots of newer book on this subject, but he is not only early but right on.
Enjoyment of life’s pleasures does not necessarily arise from the satisfaction of one’s desires, and “renunciation” of desire does not necessarily hinder profound enjoyment. He is not talking about renunciation quite with the meaning of nonattachment to desire. "Renunciation means giving up the idea that you are entitled to More; it means giving up the idea that not getting More is a catastrophe; it means giving up the idea that if you don't always get More, you have failed in some way; it means giving up the idea that getting More is so essential that it is okay to harm yourself or others in order to succeed."
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 Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason
Sam Harris
2004
www.samharris.org (also find his new book, Letter to a Christian Nation.)
Buy new or used from Amazon.com
Sam Harris courageously breaks the taboo against questioning the validity, and the sanity, of the religious beliefs of others, and states publicly with vigorous writing and compellingly logical arguments what many of us have been forced to conclude privately from observation:
Unwavering faith in the truth of often fantastical and bloodthirsty ancient religious texts
+ technologically sophisticated weaponry
= probable destruction of civilization.
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 The Practice of Jung’s PsychologyJune Singer
One of the first introductions to Jungian analysis for the layperson, this is a juicy, poetic, and powerful book about what Jung has called “individuation” through the therapeutic process. “Individuation means becoming a single, homogenous being, and insofar as ‘individuality’ embraces our innermost, last, and incomparable uniqueness, it also implies becoming one’s own self…we could also translate individuation as ‘self-realization.’ (Jung). By forging and strengthening the connection between the conscious, the personal unconscious, and the collective unconscious, one widens access into the depths of the self and outward into the world."
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 A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth1978, re-issued 2003 Buy new or used from Amazon This classic of psychotherapeutic self-help gives a clear picture of the issues and dramas that can be confronted and resolved in therapy, and what he sees as the relationship between psychological development and spiritual growth. The first two sections on Discipline and Love are excellent, unusually straightforward discussions from a more or less traditional analytical point of view. The section on Religious Traditions clarifies ways in which early religious upbringing and parental directives often create unconscious conflicts in later life. Grace, the final chapter, is Peck’s own philosophy of God, and for some it may be irrelevant—but his discussion of laziness is equally applicable to any kind of developmental path. With or without a therapist, his clarity provokes insight. |
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 A Handbook for Living in the Present Moment
Also: Waking Up: Overcoming the Obstacles to Human Potential
Charles T. Tart, Ph.D.
This book is written from the presentations given at a workshop on Tart’s psychological approach to mindfulness in 1991. This is to some degree based on Gurdjieff's work, and is about waking up moment by moment during everyday life. It retains the immediacy and informality of the workshop, and since Tart answers questions from students, he covers a lot of the practical practice of mindfulness. He has a great sense of humor and this is a fun book to read.
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Meaning & Purpose 
