Inprint - New Books of interest by Jeanne Spiro

The Greatest Secret of All: Moving Beyond Abundance to a Life of True Fulfillment by Marc Allen. (New World Library, $18.00, Hardcover.)

While the “secret” in The Secret—how to use the power of the mind to create wealth and success—is wonderful to know, The Greatest Secret of All goes one step further by also revealing what is truly important in life: fulfillment, a sense of ease, and inner peace.

Marc Allen, founder of New World Library, woke up at the age of thirty in a state of shock. He realized he had no job, no savings, and could barely come up with the money to pay his rent each month. That was when things began to change for him. He sat down and wrote an ideal scene of what he wanted his life to look like in five years and began putting the natural laws of manifestation to work in his life. Thirty years later he’s a multi-millionaire and successful author.

In The Greatest Secret of All, Allen offers a clear explanation of the steps to manifestation. He says we are powerful, creative beings, and when we focus our conscious minds on a goal, our limitless subconscious minds get to work and show us the way, step by step, to attain our goals. He goes on to explain that there are far greater secrets than the law of attraction, and tells us the simple secret of a life well lived, a life of happiness and inner peace, a life of purpose, a sacred and miraculous life. He also gives us the most powerful secret of all: we can realize our greatest creative, emotional, and spiritual potential only when we learn to love and serve ourselves and others.

Allen reminds us that we all have a great purpose in life, a great mission, vocation, and calling. He says we are here to reach our full potential, to evolve as much as possible, and to contribute to the betterment of humanity, and we will get there only by working in true partnership with others. The Greatest Secret of All reveals the simple, heartwarming secret of a truly successful and abundant life.

The Age of Miracles: Embracing the New Midlife by Marianne Williamson. (Hay House, Inc., $22.95, Hardcover.)

There is a need for change as we get older, an emotional pressure for one phase of our lives to transition into another. There simply comes a time in our lives when it’s time for one part to die and for something new to be born. The Age of Miracles psychologically and spiritually reframes this transition so that it leads to a wonderful sense of joy and awakening.

Our ability to rethink our lives holds our greatest power to change them. What we’ve called middle age need not be seen as a turning point toward death. It can be viewed as a magical turning point toward life as we’ve never known it. We had much more energy when we were young, but were clueless about what to do with it. Although we may have less energy now, we have far more understanding of what each breath of life is for. We have a destiny to fulfill, not of a life that’s simply over, but of a life that is finally truly lived.

Midlife is not a crisis; it’s a time of rebirth. It’s not a time to accept the end; it’s a time to accept life, and to finally, truly live it as we know deep in our hearts it was meant to be lived.

Digital Dharma: A User’s Guide to Expanding Consciousness in the Infosphere by Steven Vedro. (Quest Books, $16.95, Paperback.)

We are surrounded by what techno-aficionado Steven Vedro calls the Infosphere, an electronic web produced by all of the telecommunications technologies pulsating around us. These technologies can be viewed as a product of the creative collective mind and therefore encoded with core lessons of human evolution and transformation. Laptops, cell phones, PDAs, GPS locators, and wireless Internet offer new ways of communicating with our inner selves and with others.

Vedro says we can integrate these technologies into our spiritual practice. He calls this process our Digital Dharma, the path toward greater self-awareness and enlightenment. Following this path helps us recognize the impact of technology on our inner life and teaches us to overcome the challenges presented by modern media.

Using the seven chakras, the basic energy centers in the body used by many ancient yogic traditions to link our physical selves to higher levels of consciousness, as a model for achieving Digital Dharma, Vedro compares each chakra to different media form (e.g., radio, television, text messaging, etc.) so we can identify our own level of consciousness. Each chapter ends with a meditation exercise to facilitate self improvement.

Release Your Brilliance: The 4 Steps to Transforming Your Life and Revealing Your Genius to the World by Simon T. Bailey. (Collins, $19.95, Hardcover.)

Each of us is born brilliant. Then we spend the rest of our lives having our brilliance buried by people, circumstances, and experiences. Eventually, we forget that we ever had genius and special talents, and our brilliance is locked away in a vault deep within. We settle for who we are, instead of striving for who we were meant to be.

Release Your Brilliance provides the combination to the vault where our brilliance is kept. After struggling for thirty-two years with disillusion, defeat, and despair, author Simon T. Baily cracked the code to personal transformation, turning his life around and becoming a highly successful entrepreneur, respected family man, and community leader. Using the metaphor that we’re all diamonds in the rough, he shares the four key steps to cut and polish the gems that we are in order to reawaken our genius, reignite our internal light, and release our potential. He guides our transformation with interactive tools such as Personal Appraisal exercises, action steps, and true stories. He urges us to create lasting change by releasing our brilliance.

Healing the Addictive Personality: Freeing Yourself from Addictive Patterns and Relationships by Dr. Lee Jampolsky. (Celestial Arts, $14.95, Paperback.)

Have you tried to make positive changes, only to find yourself stuck? As revealed in his latest book, Dr. Lee Jampolsky says that addiction in all its varieties is human nature; after all, people want to feel good. But when we strive for pleasure we can easily slip into addictive patterns, because when we seek happiness from outside sources—whether in a relationship, job, drug, or possession—we’re operating from a basis of addictive thinking. When addictive thinking becomes the driving force behind our actions, we develop addictive personalities.

Just as addictive personalities can develop, so they can be healed. Healing the Addictive Personality presents ground-breaking techniques to overcome the fears that are addiction’s very foundation. The new approach identities and heals the illusive cycles and patterns of addictive thinking, providing twenty-one daily lessons to retrain the personality, followed by an eleven-week action plan for continued healing. Instead of rehashing traditional programs, it provides a model for deep, positive change that breaks the cycle of addiction at its source: our minds. Outlining the thirteen core beliefs of the Truth-Based Personality, Dr. Jampolsky teaches us to develop effective ways of thinking and relating.

Using the methods laid out in Healing the Addictive Personality, we learn to vanquish fears through peaceful persistence, taking full responsibility for our lives and recoveries. More importantly, we discover how to achieve real happiness, from within.

Happy for No Reason: 7 Steps to Being Happy from the Inside Out by Marci Shimoff with Carol Kline. (Free Press, $24.95, Hardcover.)

Happy for No Reason offers an approach to being happy that doesn’t depend on achievements, goals, money, relationships, or anything else out there. Based on research and knowledge from the world’s leading experts in the fields of positive psychology and neurophysiology, plus interviews with on hundred truly happy people, this book provides a powerful, proven seven-step program that enables us to be happier right now.

Studies show that each of us has a happiness set-point, a fixed range of happiness we tend to return to throughout our life, that’s approximately fifty percent genetic and fifty percent learned. In the same way we’d crank up the thermostat to get comfortable on a chilly day, we can raise our happiness set-point. This program offers happiness habits for all areas of life: personal power, mind, heart, body, soul, purpose, and relationships.

You don’t have to have happy genes, win the lottery, or lose twenty pounds. Happy for No Reason teaches us how to experience sustained happiness for the rest of our lives.

Mysteries of the Bridechamber by Victoria LePage. (Inner Traditions, $19.95, Paperback.)

In Mysteries of the Bridechamber, Victoria LePage tells us that Jesus was a high initiate and master adept of the ancient Judaic mysteries who strove to free people from the dead hand of the ritualists. He was trained in a dissident Jewish brotherhood that arose in Egypt before he was born, which sought to bring back the ancient Judaic mysteries outlawed by the Jerusalem temple. At the heart of this movement was the yogic-based practice known in the apocrypha as the Gnosis of the Heart, which prompoted the union of both sexes in a secret initiatic teaching.

As a fearless social reformer, Jesus wanted to restore the authority of the feminine principle, including asserting the equality of man and woman in the social contract of marriage. He reinstated in his own life the tradition of sacred consortship, a rite known to early church fathers as the bridechamber sacrament, whereby the marriage of the masculine and feminine energies was effected. This rite, LePage suggests, was the primary focus of Jesus’ teachings, the very heart of his advice to love thy neighbor, and the source of his healing power. Mysteries of the Bridechamber explains how, as a master adept of the Temple of Solomon, Jesus derived these teachings directly from ancient Judaic mystery traditions, revealing both a life story for Jesus that differs markedly from the version usually offered, as well as a spiritual practice based on a mystical wisdom tradition of self-initiation and transformation.