male to female transformation stories Audiobooks

Prior to 1990, fewer than five percent of domestic infant adoptions were open. In 2012, ninety percent or more of adoption agencies are recommending open adoption. Yet these agencies do not often or adequately prepare either adopting parents or birth parents for the road ahead of them! The adult parties in open adoptions are left floundering. There are many resources on why to do open adoption, but what about how? Open adoption isn't just something parents do when they exchange photos, send emails, share a visit. It's a lifestyle that may feel intrusive at times, be difficult or inconvenient at other times. Tensions can arise even in the best of circumstances. But knowing how to handle these situations and how to continue to make arrangements work for the child involved is paramount. This book offers readers the tools and the insight to do just that. It covers common open-adoption situations and how real families have navigated typical issues successfully. Like all useful parenting books, it provides parents with the tools to come to answers on their own, and answers questions that might not yet have come up. Through their own stories and those of other families of open adoption, Lori and Crystal review the secrets to success, the pitfalls and challenges, the joys and triumphs. By putting the adopted child at the center, families can come to enjoy the benefits of open adoption and mitigate the challenges that may arise. More than a how-to, this book shares a mindset, a heartset, that can be learned and internalized, so parents can choose to act out of love and honesty throughout their child’s growing up years, helping that child to grow up whole.

Longtime manuscript editor and Chicago Manual of Style guru Carol Fisher Saller has negotiated many a standoff between a writer and editor refusing to compromise on the “rights” and “wrongs” of prose styling. Saller realized that when these sides squared off, it was often the reader who lost. In her search for practical strategies for keeping the peace, The Subversive Copy Editor was born. Saller’s ideas struck a chord, and the little book with big advice quickly became a must-have reference for copy editors everywhere. In this second edition, Saller adds new chapters, on the dangers of allegiance to outdated grammar and style rules and on ways to stay current in language and technology. She expands her advice for writers on formatting manuscripts for publication, on self-editing, and on how not to be “difficult.” Saller’s own gaffes provide firsthand (and sometimes humorous) examples of exactly what not to do. The revised content reflects today’s publishing practices while retaining the self-deprecating tone and sharp humor that helped make the first edition so popular. Saller maintains that through carefulness, transparency, and flexibility, editors can build trust and cooperation with writers. The Subversive Copy Editor brings a refreshingly levelheaded approach to the classic battle between writers and editors. This sage advice will prove useful and entertaining to anyone charged with the sometimes perilous task of improving the writing of others.

Change The World By Changing Yourself Find answers: Today, it’s easy to get outraged by world events, frustrated by our own personal battles, and disenfranchised from government and leadership. Born of moral indignation, informed by decades of study, and seasoned by a life of devoted self-cultivation, Monk Yun Rou’s Mad Monk Manifesto has the answers we’re looking for, organically cohering personal prescriptions and calls to social and political action in one powerful document. Discover venerated wisdom: Based on ancient Chinese wisdom such as Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching , Mad Monk Manifesto is part tour guide to consciousness, part recipe for personal development, part prescription for environmental salvation, and part handbook for social change. In approximately 70,000 words, the book’s six chapters (framed by an introduction and afterward) follow the traditional Taoist prescription for changing the larger world by changing ourselves first. Improve yourself―and the world: In the same way ripples move away from a stone dropped into a pond, Mad Monk Manifesto begins with our personal lives, discussing topics such as diet, exercise, meditation, and mind/body practice, and spreads to our public environment, describing ideas such as what we can do to improve the community, the government, and the world. Full of everything from advice for a healthy, conscious lifestyle to suggested actions we can take to enhance the lives of friends, family, coworkers, and community members, Mad Monk Manifesto highlights spirituality and service, the goals of an awakened life. Learn something new: Each chapter of Mad Monk Manifesto is creative and fresh, offering proactive solutions in single-paragraph exhortations and prescriptions against a backdrop of lessons from Chinese history, the wisdom of ancient sages like Lao Tzu, and stories born of author Monk Yun Rou's journey from privileged Manhattanite to practicing Taoist monk. Inspirational and informative, exhortative and prescriptive, this modern Alan Watts creates a complete and immersive experience for everyone who picks up his Mad Monk Manifesto ―a portrayal of everything from the mundane to the sublime through the lens of the philosophy best known from George Lucas’ Star Wars saga, the Green Movement, and surf and hippie cultures. Emerge with a new way of seeing life, a series of concrete steps to take for personal transformation, and an action plan for working in the community to provoke change. Mad Monk Manifesto is precisely what the world needs at a time of unprecedented environmental disasters, international instability, and divisive and unreliable leadership. After reading this book, you will learn: How to relax, rectify, and rebalance life How to bolster the community and deepen culture How to effect positive change in commerce, government, power, and the environment For readers of Alan Watts, Ursula Le Guin, and Change Your Thoughts―Change Your Life by Dr. Wayne W. Dyer

From Cradle to Classroom: A Guide to Special Education for Young Children is a book written for regular and special education teachers, school administrators, school psychologists, related educational personnel, day care providers, parents, graduate students, and policy makers who work on behalf of infants, toddlers, and preschoolers to ensure they are ready for formal education when they reach age 5. It reflects a keen understanding that early interventions are most effective in reducing the potential for special education or other support services later in a child’s development. Research shows the benefits of investing in early intervention and high-quality preschool as a way to mitigate educational gaps in learning and to improve the development of children across all domains (Executive Office of the President of the United States, 2015; Lynch & Vaghul, 2015; Yoshikawa et al., 2013). Throughout the book, readers will find strategies to help atypical children navigate the world as they move from infancy to toddlerhood, and to preschool and beyond. The chapters dig deep and offer expansive understandings of the components necessary to ensure young children, especially those with exceptionalities, become successful students.

You will be known by the company you keep! Successfully steer your own life instead of having it determined by others, advises Tobias Beck in this German bestseller narrated in his pithy, to-the-point style. Tobias provides the coaching needed to liberate ourselves from chronic complainers. Killjoys, energy vampires, and chronic complainers. Everyone knows a Debbie Downer, moaning the whole day long because nothing ever goes right. The weather is miserable, it’s Monday, and to top it all off, the doughnut has a hole! Tobias shows us a way out: simply not to bother with such acquaintances at all. Positive thinking for peak performance. Polarizing, provocative and exaggerated, the Liberated® philosophy urges readers to free themselves from negative people in order to live successfully and authentically. With success factors based on 15 years of personal experience in the field of personality development and behavioral psychology, you’ll learn how to: Think in terms of chances and opportunities rather than problems and risks Motivate yourself, forge your own path, and let yourself be guided by your dreams and vision Seek out people who support you and who let you grow and move forward Amusing stories, funny illustrations, and proven techniques. With success stories that are as entertaining as they are instructive, this book is as easy to read as it is unconventional. Part workbook and part self-help and nonfiction, this narrative book includes funny comics to illustrate proven-to-work strategies. If you enjoyed books like The Four Agreements, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, The Empath’s Survival Guide, and The 5 Types of People Who Can Ruin Your Life, then you’ll love Unbox Your Life.

With current statistics suggesting that the average American over the age of 14 engages with screens upwards of 10 hours a day, the topic of our growing dependence upon technology applies to nearly everyone. While the effects differ at each point of development, real changes to the brain, relationships, and personal lives are well documented. Deviced! explores these alterations and offers a realistic look at how we can better use technology and break away from the bad habits we’ve formed. Using personal stories, cutting edge research, and anecdotes from youth, parents, and professionals, Dodgen-Magee highlights the brain changes that result from excessive technology use and offers an approach to the digital world that enables more informed and lasting change and a healthier long-term perspective. Given that the reader is living within a culture of ever-changing and advancing technologies, Deviced! is written in such a way that its contents can weather the constantly changing digital landscape by focusing on the concepts of honest assessment and healthy boundary setting rather than on specific technologies or platforms. Deviced! offers a mindful approach to assessing current technology use, breaking bad habits, setting new norms, and re-engaging with life with renewed richness and awareness.

In a fusion of fact and fiction, nineteenth-century women institutionalized as hysterics reveal what history ignored “ City of Incurable Women is a brilliant exploration of the type of female bodily and psychic pain once commonly diagnosed as hysteria—and the curiously hysterical response to it commonly exhibited by medical men. It is a novel of powerful originality, riveting historical interest, and haunting lyrical beauty.” — Sigrid Nunez , author of The Friend and What Are You Going Through “Where are the hysterics, those magnificent women of former times?” wrote Jacques Lacan. Long history’s ghosts, marginalized and dispossessed due to their gender and class, they are reimagined by Maud Casey as complex, flesh-and-blood people with stories to tell. These linked, evocative prose portraits, accompanied by period photographs and medical documents both authentic and invented, poignantly restore the humanity to the nineteenth-century female psychiatric patients confined in Paris’s Salpêtrière hospital and reduced to specimens for study by the celebrated neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot and his male colleagues. Maud Casey is the author of five books of fiction, including The Man Who Walked Away , and a work of nonfiction, The Art of Mystery: The Search for Questions . A Guggenheim Fellow and recipient of the St. Francis College Literary Prize, she teaches at the University of Maryland.

He turns back to me that evil lust filled glint in his eyes I have seen on his face for the past year. ‘You’re such a little cock tease, you think you can walk around in your little shorts and skirts like you do thinking there is no consequences you’re going to learn exactly what that means now open up my girl,’ my eyes widen in horror as he thrusts his hips towards my face. Aurora Anderson and her mother Sarah flea in the middle of the night after suffering from abuse from the one man they both thought they could trust. They plight takes them as far as the Silver Brooke Pack where Alpha Matthew Reynolds welcomes them in. A romance transpires between Sarah and Matthew where the two marry forcing Aurora to join her new family where she meets her four new step brothers each more handsome than the last. Still recovering from her trauma, she is confused by her feelings towards her new brothers, despite their taunts and unkind words she feels the undeniable pull. On her 18th birthday she gets her wolf only to learn that she is mated to not one but all four of her step brothers. She fleas for fear of rejection, she knows what this could mean for her mother and after seeing her finally happy after so long so doesn’t know what to do. Will Aurora and Sarah both find a way to have their happy ending? Will their past come back to haunt them? Can Aurora even handle having four mates? What other secrets have been hidden that threaten their futures?

“Papa explains the war like this: ‘When the elephants dance, the chickens must be careful.’ The great beasts, as they circle one another, shaking the trees and trumpeting loudly, are the Amerikanos and the Japanese as they fight. And our Philippine Islands? We are the small chickens.” Once in a great while comes a storyteller who can illuminate worlds large and small, magical and true to life. When the Elephants Dance introduces us to the incandescent voice of Tess Uriza Holthe, who sets her remarkable first novel in the waning days of World War II, as the Japanese and the Americans engage in a fierce battle for possession of the Philippine Islands. The Karangalan family and their neighbors huddle for survival in the cellar of a house a few miles from Manila. Outside the safety of their little refuge the war rages on—fiery bombs torch the beautiful Filipino countryside, Japanese soldiers round up and interrogate innocent people, and from the hills guerillas wage a desperate campaign against the enemy. Inside the cellar, these men, women, and children put their hopes and dreams on hold as they wait out the war, only emerging to look for food, water, and medicine. Through the eyes of three narrators, thirteen-year-old Alejandro Karangalan, his spirited older sister Isabelle, and Domingo, a passionate guerilla commander, we see how ordinary people must learn to live in the midst of extraordinary uncertainty, how they must find hope for survival where none seems to exist. They find this hope in the dramatic history of the Philippine Islands and the passion and bravery of its people. Crowded together in the cellar, the Karangalans and their friends and neighbors tell magical stories to one another based on Filipino myth and legend to fuel their courage, pass the time, and teach important lessons.

Many of us share a shameful little secret: deep down we feel like complete frauds and are convinced that our accomplishments are the result of luck rather than skill. This is a psychological phenomenon known as 'Imposter Syndrome'. This book examines the reasons why up to 70% of us are developing this syndrome-and what we can do about it. All of us, at one point or another, have questioned our capabilities and competence. Maybe you've wondered how you got hired and, handed big job responsibilities? One recent article suggested that 70% of people "will experience at least one episode" of IS in their lives. Imposter Syndrome (also known as imposter phenomenon, fraud syndrome, or the imposter experience) is a concept describing individuals who are marked by an inability to internalize their accomplishments and a persistent fear of being exposed as a 'fraud'. The term was coined in 1978 by clinical psychologists Pauline R. Clance and Suzanne A. Imes. Despite external evidence of their competence, those exhibiting the syndrome remain convinced that they are frauds and do not deserve the success they have achieved. Proof of success is dismissed as luck, timing, or as a result of deceiving others into thinking they are more intelligent and competent than they believe themselves to be. This book presents an accessible and engaging examination of IS and how it effects us, not just at work, but as teenagers, parents and beyond. Using interactive quizzes to help you identify if you suffer and offering tips and tools to overcome your insecurities, psychologist Dr Sandi Mann will draw on her experience not only as an academic, but also as a practitioner, to present a comprehensive guide to understanding and overcoming IS.