Inprint - New Books of interest by Jeanne Spiro

Five Wishes: How Answering One Simple Question Can Make Your Dreams Come True by Gay Hendricks. (New World Library, $18.95, Hardcover.)

You never know when it is going to happen—when you will experience a moment that dramatically transforms your life. When you look back, often years later, you may see how a brief conversation or an insight you read in a book changed the entire course of your life.

Gay Hendricks had an extraordinary, life-altering experience during a conversation at a party. The gift he received in that meeting became his touchstone for creating the life of his dreams. Now he passes on to us the pivotal insight he gained in that moment. In Five Wishes, he shares the conversation that changed his life and the powerful yet simple process he discovered for turning dreams into reality. He reveals the process he learned and refined for turning wishes into attainable goals. He also provides examples and stories of how others have used and benefited from this process. The book has a website that offers a downloadable worksheet to assist in implementing the process in our own lives. This site also has a seventeen-minute movie that brings to life the conversation described in the book and the revelation of a secret about relationships that anyone who buys the book can download free of charge.

LifePrints: Deciphering Your Life Purpose from Your Fingerprints by Richard Unger. (Crossing Press, $16.95, Paperback.)

Unique, unchanging, and formed five months before birth, fingerprints have been an accepted and infallible means of personal identification for more that a century. But what if the unique patterns on our fingertips could also reveal what we are meant to do with our lives?

In LifePrints, hand analyst Richard Unger presents a groundbreaking method of self-discovery based on 25 years of research and fingerprint statistics for more than fifty thousand hands. Combining the science of dermatoglyphics, the study of fingerprints and related line and hand shape designations, with the ancient wisdom of palmistry, the LifePrints system is a simple yet profoundly accurate means of charting our purpose in life.

Step-by-step instructions help to identify fingerprint types, create a life-purpose statement, and uncover the challenges to be faced before reaching our full potential. Detailed case studies from Unger’s practice, plus fingerprint readings for such famous people as Albert Einstein, John F. Kennedy, Amelia Earhart, Walt Disney, and Charles Manson, allow us to see how each combination of fingerprints can affect the choices we make.

Just as we consult a map to reach an unfamiliar destination, reading fingerprints gives us a compass for meaning and fulfillment as we develop into the people we were meant to be.

The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher’s Life, 10^th Anniversary Edition, by Parker J. Palmer. (Jossey-Bass, $27.95, Hardcover, includes CD.)

For nearly forty years Parker Palmer has worked on behalf of teachers and others who choose vocations for reasons of the heart, but may lose heart because of the troubled, sometimes toxic systems in which they work. The Courage to Teach takes teachers on an inner journey toward reconnecting with themselves, their students, and their colleagues, and toward reclaiming their vocational passion.

It builds on a simple premise: good teaching cannot be reduced to technique, but is rooted in the identity and integrity of the teacher. Good teaching takes myriad forms, but good teachers share one trait: they are authentically present in the classroom, deeply connected with their students and their subject. These connections are held in the teacher’s heart—the place where intellect, emotion, and spirit converge in the human self. Good teachers weave a life-giving web between themselves, their subjects, and their students, helping their students learn how to weave a world for themselves.

In a new Foreword and Afterword, Palmer reflects on a decade of movement-building during which he and his colleagues at the Center for Courage and Renewal have helped thousands of teachers and others restore identity and integrity to professional life. On an accompanying audio CD, Parker and his colleagues talk about the center’s on-the-ground work and share their hopes for this movement toward human wholeness and community.

Searching for Mary Poppins: Women Write About the Relationship Between Mothers and Nannies edited by Susan Davis and Gina Hyams (A Plume Book, $15.00, Paperback.)

Today, 26 million mothers work full-time, thanks to the daily presence of loyal, nurturing, steadfast, and supportive nannies. Articles and commentary on the new nanny culture appear in the media regularly. Nanny novels and movies have captured public imagination and thousands of “how to hire a nanny” guides are purchased every year. Searching for Mary Poppins addresses the unique intimacy and intensity of the nanny-mother relationship through in-depth and sensitive narrative.

This collection brings together twenty-five best-selling and award-winning female writers including Marisa de los Santos, Susan Cheever, Joyce Maynard, Daphne Merkin, and Jacquelyn Mitchard. Their candid essays explore the emotional minefield of mother-nanny relationships, delving into the intricate issues that emerge when a mother turns the care of her child over to a stranger. Exploring the nanny conundrum and raising questions that reach beyond money, race, class, gender, immigration, and legality into the darkest areas of love and fear that a mother feels, each contributor offers a viewpoint both disparate and emotionally familiar.

From Elissa Chappell on the strangeness of becoming an employer to Kymerly Pinder on the tenderness she felt for the nanny who’d left her own fifteen-month old son behind; from Daphne Merkin on the challenges of hiring a nanny after having been raised by one to Lauren Slater on her regret at having “given her mothering away” not just out of busyness, but fear, these original pieces offer rare insight into how the mother-nanny relationship can be more fraught and more complicated that a marriage.

Be - Embracing the Mystery by Shirlee Hall. (RealityIs Books, $24.95, Paperback.)

Shirlee Hall, in her new book Be – Embracing the Mystery, offers personal spiritual insights into how to discover and BE our true identity. The book is devoted to sharing her spiritual experiences and knowledge, suggesting step by step how each one of us can be free and whole once we remember and live our truth.

Hall, a spiritual teacher, inspirational speaker, healer and consultant has been a catalyst for the physical, mental and spiritual renewal of thousands of people since she experienced a powerful personal healing in 1971. This dramatic event led to a life of service where visions, intuitive messages and firsthand experience with the “heaven realms” became a daily revelation. In Be – Embracing the Mystery, Hall clearly explains who we are and why we are on earth. The theme of true identity as spiritual beings and rediscovering that identity is paramount in her teaching.

“I wrote BE to fulfill a need in the soul of humanity,” said Hall. “When we connect with the Inner Spirit, we heal and receive the joy and truth, beauty and love that befits the soul.” The message is for everyone. Her healing message provides hope and freedom from suffering and limitation through an awakened higher love, wisdom and intimacy with the Source of all creation. In addition, she contends that spirituality is essential to our survival. Her passionate words offer hope, clarity, truth and a love that is unconditional and is a must-read for those seeking to discover themselves and be healed. She has cracked the code of immortality.

The Instruction: Living the life Your Soul Intended by Ainslie MacLeod. (Sounds True, $24.95, Hardcover.)

Have you ever sensed that your life has a deeper, more meaningful purpose—but don’t know what it is? If so, you’re not alone. To help you and the millions like you, psychic Ainslie MacLeod’s spirit guides have given him a systematic approach to uncovering who you really are and the life your soul has planned for you. They call in The Instruction.

This unique teaching is offered as a step-by-step program for realizing personal fulfillment. It will take you through ten “doorways” to unveil the life plan your soul created before you were even born. These include the Doors to Perception (your soul age and how it shapes your beliefs and behaviors), to Acceptance (are you a hunter, a thinker, a creator? How our soul type reveals your true self), to Balance (how to avoid false goals and diversions), and to Creativity (using past lives to enhance the present).

By taking you on a journey beyond this plane, MacLeod’s system unlocks the secrets of the soul’s purpose, and illuminates the path of every individual’s life.

The Secret of Letting Go by Guy Finley. (Llewellyn Worldwide, $14.95, Paperback.)

The Secret of Letting Go offers real solutions to life’s problems and revels the beautiful truth that the only way to permanently rid ourselves of any difficulty is to no longer live at its level, to let go of who we have been in favor of the stronger and wiser person we are meant to be. It gives us practical instructions and inspiring stories that lead to the discovery of the enlightened life that is possible for all of us, once we master the simple practice of letting go. Freedom from fear and stress, the power to repair broken relationships, a growing sense of love and compassion, a greater measure of self-command—all these gifts can be ours when we learn to let go.

The practice of letting go derives its power from a special part of ourself that cannot be dominated or defeated by anything. Guy Finley describes this part of us at the True Self, the secret essence of our soul that is always open and responsive, never holding onto anything outside the present moment. Nothing in the universe can stop us from letting go and starting over. Our true selves can no more get stuck somewhere than a sunbeam can get caught in a bottle. When we learn to live by the light of our true self, regrets about the past and fears over the future lose all authority to darken our spirit.