Inprint - New Books of interest by Jeanne Spiro

The Trance of Scarcity: Hey! Stop Holding Your Breath and Start Living Your Life by Victoria Castle. (Sagacious Press, $15.97, Paperback.)

We all know how to struggle, but do we know how to stop struggling and allow the natural cycle of abundance to work its magic in our lives? Do we hold a view of life in which we are unceasingly nourished, in which we unceasingly nourish our world in return? Such an approach to life is rare. Too often we feel overwhelmed by the all too apparent global disarray.

This book will help you break free from the Trance of Scarcity. Apply its principles and practices, and you hold the key that unlocks a profound shift in your experience. You will begin to understand, in the breath and the body, that money and meaning can, in fact, work in harmony. Breaking free from the prevailing Trance of Scarcity is a way out of what doesn’t work. You can learn to literally embody the state of abundance; of living in the world with greater effectiveness and ease.

Awakening: A Daily Guide to Conscious Living by Shakti Gawain. (Inner Ocean Publishing, $15.95, Paperback.)

Today, with the ecological, social, and political challenges we face in addition to our personal issues, it is essential that we learn to live more consciously. Bestsellng author and personal growth pioneer Shakti Gawain offers a beautiful new edition of Awakening: A Daily Guide to Conscious Living. This book of meditations is organized thematically around the calendar seasons and inspires us to recognize and release old patterns and beliefs, while opening up to new approaches in all areas of life.

Many of us are on a journey of consciousness, seeking to bring our lives into greater alignment with the natural laws and universal principles. With all of the cultural challenges that we must face, in addition to our own personal challenges, this journey is by no means an easy one. We are at an advantage, however, when we take the time to get into contact with our essential spiritual wisdom. Taking time to care for ourselves allows us to integrate this wisdom into all levels of our being: mental, emotional, physical. Awakening offers inspiring assistance on the journey of consciousness.

Sacred Signs: Hear, See, and Believe Messages from the Universe by Adrian Calabrese, Ph.D. (Llewellyn, $12.95, Paperback.)

When Adrian Calabrese’s father was in surgery for a life-threatening medical condition, she asked for a sign that her father would survive—and she immediately received one. Now she shares her secrets for getting clear guidance for the universe in Sacred Signs, teaching a simple three-step method for receiving divine messages.

Sacred Signs is not a sign dictionary. Calabrese believes that the interpretation of a sign is as unique as the individual receiving it. The checklists and questionnaires throughout the book help readers focus their desires to communicate more effectively with the universe. Success stories provide inspiration and further demonstrate how you can use this personalized, nondenominational approach to interpret divine signs.

The Identity Code: The 8 Esential Questions for Finding Your Purpose and Place in the World by Larry Ackerman. (Random House, $21.95, Hardcover)

Despite what you may have been told when you were a child, you cannot be whatever you want to be in life—you are already what you were meant to be. The secret to uncovering who you are, and your purpose, is built into you in the form of a code—the identity code. Much like your genetic code, our identity code provides a complete map of how you were designed to live.

The Identity Code shows you how to crack your identity code. It reveals the Laws of Identity and the 8 essential questions they encompass. Answer the questions that frame the identity code and the contours of your life will shift. You will not only emerge stronger, you will emerge larger: larger in heart, larger in influence, larger in your capacity to love and be loved. You will understand the why of your life. As your identity gradually becomes clear it will become the foundation upon which you’ll make truly meaningful decisions about what work is right for you, build and maintain relationships that matter, and even discover the interests and hobbies that make sense for you.

The Tarot: History, Symolism, and Divination by Robert M. Place. (Tarcher/Penguin, $16.95, Paperback)

The Tarot is one of the few books that cuts through conventional misperceptions to explore the Tarot deck as it really developed in the Middle Ages and Renaissance Europe. Mining the hermetic, alchemical, and Neoplatonic influences behind the evolution of the deck, Robert Place provides a historically grounded and compelling portrait of the Tarot’s true origins, without overlooking the deck’s mystical dimensions.

Most books on the tarot tend to stress the deck’s uses as a tool of synchronous understanding at the expense of historical accuracy, and vice versa. In The Tarot, Place weds reliable history with a practical exploration of the intuitive help and divinatory guidance that cards can bring. He presents techniques that offer new and valuable ways to read and interpret the cards. Based on a simple three-card spread, Place’s methods can be used either by the seasoned practitioner or the new inquirer.

Life Beyond 100: Secrets of the Fountain of Youth by C. Norman Shealy, M.D., Ph.D. (Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, $24.95, Hardcover.)

If you could stay vital and mentally alert into your sunset years, would you choose to live to age 100? Would you want to live to 120 and even beyond? The idea of living well beyond one hundred years, and enjoying those years in good health, used to be the stuff of science fiction. No longer. C. Norman Shealy, whom Caroline Myss calls a “wizard-genius-scientist-mystic-physician,” provides a new concept of longevity, one that reveals that we can live far longer than current science suggests.

Basic healthy living and the use of alternative therapies have long been touted as the way to well-being, but Dr. Shealy takes these tenets a step further. From the physiology of stress and its effect on the human mind and body to the importance of DHEA; from the proven techniques of photostimulation and biofeedback training to groundbreaking suggestions for alleviating depression; from Shealy’s electromagnetic framework of life to his recommendations for optimal health, Life Beyond 100 presents a detailed roadmap to achieve healthy aging—or youthing. It begins by investigating the evolution of medical care in this country, revealing its excessive use of drugs, its risks to life and well-being, and the fact that medical treatment itself is now the third cause of death in this country. So how do we avoid getting trapped in a failing medical system? By healing from within and learning to alleviate the psychological and physical stress that fuels premature aging. Life Beyond 100 shows you how.

Spirit on the Move: Personal Essays on Yoga in Daily Life edited by Linda Johnsen (Himalayan Institute Press, $12.95, Paperback.)

What does “yoga” mean to you? If you’re one of the uninitiated, you may view it as a sequence of relaxation exercises, summed up by the image of a lithe young woman leaning so far backward she can touch the floor with her fingertips. If you’ve taken a yoga class or two, you realize the poses are only the beginning, that there is a spiritual component as well. And if you’re a more advanced practitioner, you have slowly come to see that yoga is a way of life—a path for experiencing the world in a richer, truer, deeper way. That’s the point of Spirit on the Move, a compilation of articles originally published in Yoga International magazine.

Articles in this book range in tone from thoughtful and deeply spiritual to light and humorous. They contain insights from hatha teachers and students, people facing illness and people recovering, new mothers and old souls. Yoga has many different lessons to teach us, but all of them center on how to bring our inner life into our outer life. Linda Johnsen expresses this idea by citing a quote from yoga master Krishna Vasuedeva: “Yoga is skill in action.”