Women, Food and God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything

By Geneen Roth

If you suffer about your relationship with food — you eat too much or too little, think about what you will eat constantly or try not to think about it at all— you can be free. Just look down at your plate. The answers are there. Don’t run; look! Because when we welcome what we most want to avoid, we contact the part of ourselves that is fresh and alive. We touch the life we truly want and evoke divinity itself.

According to Roth, your relationship with food, no matter how conflicted, is the doorway to freedom. What you most want to get rid of is itself the doorway to what you want most: the demystification of weight loss and the luminous presence that so many of us call “God.” Packed with revelations on every page, this book is a knock-your-socks-off ride to a deeply fulfilling relationship with food, your body … and almost everything else. Women, Food and God is, quite simply, a guide for life. ($24.00)

Golf’s Three Noble Truths: The Fine Art of Playing Awake

By James Ragonnet

The Buddha’s seven years of wandering in search of enlightenment ended in frustration. So did the author’s 30 years of traversing golf courses! Neither found what they were looking for until they stopped searching outside and started looking within. The result for James Ragonnet was the kind of “second birthday” Eastern thinkers describe as when you “wake up to everything happening around you.”

Through delightful anecdotes and practical lessons, Ragonnet reveals the power of awareness, balance, and unity to banish the dissatisfaction and stagnation so many golfers experience. He shows how “all golf Buddhas — Bobby Jones, Jack Nicklaus, Annika Sorenstam, Tiger Woods — play with their outer and inner eyes wide open,” describes his 12th-green OOGE (“out-of-golf-experience”), and offers readers simple truths that prompt flashes of understanding. These insights invite birdies, drop handicaps, and transform experiences both on and off the course. ($14.95)

A Life of Being, Having, and Doing Enough

By Wayne Muller

From the moment we are born, we are seekers. Our culture obsessively promotes the pursuit of money, success, and self-improvement. At the end of each activity-jammed day, though, we collapse into bed discouraged by everything we have not checked off on our “todo” lists, in despair that whatever we have accomplished is never enough. Worse still, when our dreams become derailed by the inherent tragedies of life — job loss, financial peril, sickness, or the death of a loved one — we feel devastated by the pain and injustice of it all.

Author, therapist and minister Wayne Muller offers healing for the perpetually stressed in this book. By learning compassion and mercy for ourselves, and by recognizing what is most profoundly true about who we are and what we need, we can gain self-acceptance ... so that whatever we choose to do in this moment is wholly enough. The answer to what he describes as “authentic happiness” lies not in seeing the glass as half full instead of half empty ... in reality, he writes, the glass is always half full and half empty. The world is neither broken nor whole, but eternally engaged in rhythms between joy and sorrow. With Muller’s guidance, we may find ourselves on the most courageous spiritual pilgrimage of our lives.

The Shadow Effect: Illuminating the Hidden Power of Your True Self

By Deepak Chopra, Debbie Ford and Marianne Williamson

These three best-selling authors and acclaimed teachers have joined together to share their knowledge on one of the most crucial obstacles to happiness we face: the shadow. These three luminaries, each with a signature approach, bring to light the parts of ourselves we deny but that still direct our life ... for it is only when we embrace our shadow that we discover the gifts of our authentic nature.

The shadow exists within all of us. It is a part of us, and yet we spend most of our life running from it. Far from being scary, however, our dark side holds the promise of a better, more fulfilling life. Our shadow makes itself known every day. It is the reason we get furious over a friend showing up 10 minutes late, yell at our parents or kids when they have done nothing wrong, and sabotage our own success at the worst possible time. Until we are able to embrace our dualistic nature, we will continue to hurt ourselves and those closest to us and fall short of our potential. Combining the wisdom of three experts, this book is a practical and profound guide

Hand Wash Cold: Care Instructions for an Ordinary Life

By Karen Maezen Miller

It’s easy to think that meaning, fulfillment, and bliss are “out there,” somewhere outside of our daily routine. Yet in this playful — yet profound — reflection on awareness, the compelling voice of a contemporary woman reveals the happiness at the bottom of the laundry basket, the love in the kitchen sink, and the peace possible in one’s own backyard.

Follow Karen Maezen Miller through youthful ambition and self-absorption, beyond a broken marriage and into the steady calm of a so-called “ordinary” life. In her hands, household chores and care giving tasks become opportunities for selfexamination, lessons in relationships, and liberating moments of selflessness. With attention, it’s the little things — even the unexpected, unpleasant, and unwanted things—that count. ($14.95)