skull with sword through it Audiobooks

“It’s like the meanest, wildest monkey running around my head, constantly looking for ways to bite me.” That was how Kirsten Pagacz described her OCD to her therapist on their first session when she was well into her 30s she’d been following orders from this mean taskmaster for 20 years, without understanding why. Initially the tapping and counting and cleaning and ordering brought her comfort and structure, two things lacking in her family life. But it never lasted; the loathsome self-talk only intensified, and the rituals she had to perform got more bizarre. By high school she was anorexic and a substance abuser, common "shadow syndromes" of OCD. By adulthood, she could barely hide her problems and held on to jobs and friends through sheer grit. Help finally came in the form of a miraculously well-timed public service announcement on NPR about OCD -- at last her illness had an identity. Leaving the OCD Circus reveals the story of Pagacz’s traumatic childhood and the escalation of her disorder demonstrating how OCD works to misshape a life from a very young age and explains the various tools she used for healing including meditation, cognitive behavioral therapy, yoga, exposure therapy, and medication.

Few of us know how to navigate the territory of traumatic loss successfully. Sweet Sorrow shows how we can respond and grow stronger from loss and suffering. Written by a psychologist and certified bereavement trauma specialist in the decade following the loss of her husband, father, mother, and only sibling, this carefully considered work provides perspective on grief and healing over time. This longer-term approach allows readers to have a more complete and accurate picture of the oscillations of grief over time. The book describes not only the immediate agony of the author’s losses, but also the process of starting over and making a successful new life as a single person full of hope and joy. Sweet Sorrow combines the author’s psychological expertise and clinical experience with the compelling art of memoir to illuminate the surprising ways in which loss survivors can grow and even thrive to achieve wholeness after heartbreaking, traumatic losses. Using findings from post-traumatic growth, as well as evidence-based psychological approaches, Sweet Sorrow illustrates through story and example, ways for grief survivors to start over, to manage chaos and stress, to let go, and to heal with new strategies and re-storying. Sweet Sorrow also provides resources and recommendations for self-care, as well as tips and suggestions for all of us trying to respond creatively and helpfully to those around us suffering loss. Ultimately, Sweet Sorrow is a book of inspiration intended to companion readers through the processes of loss and grief much like a helpful Sherpa might guide a lost traveler.

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.

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.

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

Dead foods—devoid of any microscopic life—are causing us to feel sick, tired, and depressed. In A Gut Instinct: Conquer Your Sweet Tooth by Tuning Into Your Microbiome, Heather Wise takes you through her personal journey uncovering a hidden inner world of microflora that shapes our mood, physical health, sweet cravings, and even genes. Sweet Palate gives practical steps in rebalancing and healing our gut microbial balance to relieve stress, digestive upsets, inflammation, bloat, excess belly fat, and improve our mood. Wise offers a much sought after alternative to the complex world of fad diets and calorie counting in this easy, evidence-based guide for wellbeing. Rooted in scientific research and providing a number of healthy sweet fixes high in prebiotics and probiotic foods that support the growth of healthy gut flora, this book is a practical guide to help heal our relationship with food and tune into what our gut has been trying to tell us.

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.

“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.

He’s a fool for letting her go… Wyoming rancher Quinn McKay is biding his time until his wife comes to her senses and calls a halt to this trial separation—he’d never believed their marital rough patch could become permanent. Libby McKay knew when she married the gruff cowboy that he wasn’t one to blather on about his feelings. But three months have passed, and her stubborn-as-a-mule husband is still living by himself. Seems he’d rather hold onto his pride than hold onto her. When Quinn realizes Libby is determined to move on if he doesn’t change, he asks her for one weekend to rekindle their love life and to hash out their differences. Reigniting their passion is easy. The hard part comes when they open up to each other and sort through past mistakes, figuring out if what remains between them is strong enough to survive a new beginning.