BEA 2010 was a success. Jonathan Kaplan signed copies of his upcoming book, Urban Mindfulness and Troy Dufrene signed copies of the recently released When Things Go Terribly, Horribly Wrong. Our sales managers met with their reps. We gave away t-shirts crafted after Present Perfect and The Lotus Effect.

May is Borderline Personality Disorder Awareness Month. To recognize it, we're giving away five copies of The Buddha & the Borderline

When: Today! (May 27)

Where: Twitterverse

How to Participate:

1. Follow @NewHarbinger on Twitter.
2. Visit http://twitter.com/NewHarbinger and retweet our current post.

Selection of Winners:

1. The first 5 people who retweet the post will receive a copy of The Buddha and the Borderline.
2. We will DM the winners to let them know that they’ve won.

Prize:

• Free copy of The Buddha and the Borderline! Free shipping!

Our booth is set up and we are rolling here at BEA. If you would like to visit us, we are at booth #2942. Some NHP employees are snapping away at different things going on at BEA. You can view all of our latest photos at Facebook page.

We're giving away free t-shirts at BEA in celebration of Pavel Somov, Ph.D.'s two upcoming books, Present Perfect and The Lotus Effect. Come to Booth #2942, drop off your business card, and that's it! Winners will be notified and we'll mail your shirt to you.

excerpt from The Estrogen-Depression Connection

Remember the stops along a subway system, where we can hop off to make a phone call, that is, to send a message? Imagine that estrogen has the ability to send a text message via cell phone. Estrogen helps direct the creation of the structures we mentioned earlier, and it also sends those biochemical messages. The biochemical messages, much like the text messages of our cell phone, are sent via chemicals known as neurotransmitters. Just as we need to have the right phone number to send the text message, we also need to have the correct neurotransmitter.

excerpt fromThe Estrogen-Depression Connection

Depression can occur in a subset of susceptible women

as a result of natural fluctuations in estrogen levels

associated with the developmental stages of a woman’s life.

Let’s break this sentence down into sections:

excerpt from Conquer Your Critical Inner Voice by Robert W. Firestone, Ph.D., Lisa Firestone, Ph.D., and Joyce Catlett, M.A.

How is it that we can be so turned against ourselves? Where did this enemy within come from? How did we end up with this critical inner voice? The answers lie in the past when, as children we were trying to cope with our lives in the best way possible.

The nature and degree of this division within ourselves depends on the parenting we received and the early environment we experienced. Parents, like all of us, have mixed feelings toward themselves; they have things they like about themselves and they have self-critical thoughts and feelings. The same negative feelings that parents have toward themselves are unfortunately often directed toward their children as well. Therefore, parents have both loving feelings toward their children as well as critical thoughts and negative feelings toward them. Mothers and fathers who feel that they are bad find it difficult to believe that something good could come from them. In addition, children, just by their presence, tend to stir up in their parents the feelings they had when they were children. If a parent has unresolved feelings from their trauma or loss in his or her past, these feelings will impact his or her reactions to his or her children.

Calming Your Anxious Mind

Anxiety, fear, and panic are indeed upsetting. A central theme in this book is that most people have not been properly educated about the nature of these feelings (they are not you and not permanent), and certainly have not been properly trained to handle them in a skillful, meditative way (using affectionate, non-judging attention to alter the old mind-body habits of struggle and reactivity). The result is that there is a tendency to identify with anxiety, fear, or panic, and to become lost in the aversion to them as it arises, fills your awareness, and drives your consciousness moment by moment.

It can be helpful to remember that your inner life—distressing or not—is worthy of attention, and so are you! In fact, your best hope for changing the distress you feel is by trusting that turning toward the experience is the way home. The processes of anxiety, fear, and panic may generate doubts and discouraging thoughts that distract you from actually turning attention toward the unfolding experience, but don’t let yourself be fooled! There is a different way to relate to the pain of anxiety, fear, or panic besides taking them as an identity, or making war on them.

Excerpt from Calming Your Anxious Mind

Worry is another way thoughts and feelings can affect health. We have seen how worry can be understood as the patterns of thinking driven by feelings of anxiety. Often, the content of the thoughts reflects a person’s attempt to cope with or eliminate the discomfort and ill ease present as part of their experience of anxiety.

• About two-thirds of Americans classify themselves as worriers.
• About half of that group classify themselves as moderate worriers who worry between 10 and 50 percent of the day.
• The rest of the worriers report that they worry more than eight hours a day.
• Worry has been related to health problems. These include cardiac arrhythmias in patients who have had heart attacks, increased blood pressure in laboratory animals, and asthma in both adults and children.
• Uncertainty as an aspect of worry is particularly potent and toxic. When people are confronted by situations of high uncertainty, when they do not know what will happen next or how they should act, they can experience destructive feelings of helplessness and frustration. Uncertainty keeps people in a constant state of semi-arousal, unable to relax, and the price of this ongoing tension and stress is high.

excerpt from Conquer Your Critical Inner Voice

All of us divided ourselves and have a basic conflict in relation to our goals and aspirations in life. On one hand, we have feelings of warm self-regard, and we have traits and behaviors that we like or feel comfortable with in ourselves. We have natural tendencies to grow and develop and to pursue our personal and vocational goals, as well as desires to be close in our relationships and to search for meaning in life. In this book, these tendencies are referred to as the real you or your real self, because they are made up of friendly, compassionate view of yourself.

by guest blogger Stephanie Sarkis, Ph.D., author of 10 Simple Solutions to Adult ADD, Making the Grade with ADD, and ADD and Your Money

Recently a study published in the journal Pediatrics found a possible correlation between pesticides and ADHD. Out of the 1,139 children in the study (ADHD and non-ADHD), 94 percent were found to have some levels of organophosphate (pesticide) compound in their urine. Out of the children with an above-average level of the compound, 20 percent had ADHD. The rate of ADHD was 10 percent in children who had no level of the compound. This study has caused some concern among parents and others in the ADHD community. However, before we all start buying 100% organic everything, we need to take a closer look at the study.

excerpt from Little Ways to Keep Calm and Carry On

It’s very hard to be tense, anxious, or worried when you are physically relaxed. As we noted in lesson 1, anxiety and worry always imply the presence of a perceived threat. Because you believe danger is present, your body prepares to fight or flee. Your heart rate accelerates, your attention sharpens, the blood flow increases to your arms and legs, your muscles tense, and you’re ready for action. But staying wired like this for long periods can be hard on both the body and the spirit. Moreover, high levels of tension don’t promote clear thinking or effective problem solving. It’s time to relax.

Going for a run, a walk, or laps in the pool can also work well. A hot bath or a massage can help, or even a bit of dancing. If nothing else, just stand up in the middle of the room and shake out your tension. Any physical activity that releases physical tension from your body will help. One of the most effective relaxation methods is simply learning how to breathe. Yes, something as simple as breathing from your abdomen rather than using shallow chest breathing offers a host of benefits to your mind and body. You can do this anywhere: in your car, in a meeting, or even in line at the grocery checkout. It doesn’t take planning, time, or a change in your schedule. Try this:

excerpt from Grieving Mindfully

It is extremely important to remember that the lessons of grief are at their most potent not when they are being learned, but when they are being integrated into your life. It is one thing to read about these ideas, but it is quite another thing to put these ideas into practice. Grief has the power to radically change your life, to encourage a more meaningful, richer life, but only when its lessons are manifested in the way you live your life every day. This means becoming a more active and more mindful participant in your life.

One of the hardest steps in this process can be putting the lessons of grief into practice. Many people I have worked with have a passive appreciation of the concept of mindfulness and the positive transformation of suffering long before they integrate these ideas into their everyday life. By exploring specific areas of their lives, they help this passive appreciation to develop into a more active, dynamic process. It becomes an invigorating, life-affirming task, even though there are still many emotional ups and downs along the way.

excerpt from The End-of-Life Handbook

When informed of a loved one’s serious illness, you may wish to find out more information from the doctor. Unfortunately, doctors don’t always communicate with patients and families as effectively as possible (and vice versa). This can occur for lots of reasons. Sometimes the fault lies with doctors: They may use overly technical jargon or fail to spend sufficient time answering questions. On the other hand, sometimes patients and family members can’t think of the right questions to ask, or they may feel so intimidated by the whole process that they remain quiet. If you’ve experienced any of these situations, you know how frustrating they can be. Nonetheless, it’s usually worth making another effort to communicate effectively with your loved one’s physician. In the next chapter, we’ll offer detailed advice about how to maximize your time with the doctor. For now, we’d like to offer some pointers to help you through the first few conversations:

Excerpt from Walking After Midnight

I love being in the center of the busy energy in our home. However, I hold my breath every time the phone rings. I know at any moment the police could call to say there has been some activity on the criminal investigation, and our lives will be thrown into a tailspin.

I agonize over how the waiting must be affecting families on the other side of the tragedy. Surely parents have seen loved teenagers change over the last two years as they have tried to push the events of New Year’s Eve 1997 far, far down into the realm of forgotten memory. I imagine those parents watching in isolation, fearing something horrible has happened to pull the light from their children’s eyes, but having no idea what it was.

Excerpt from Grief’s Courageous Journey

Grief is a highly personal response to life losses. Every relationship we have with a person is unique, irreplaceable, and unrepeatable. Since our relationships are unique, our grief is unique, too.

There are no road maps, no blueprints for grief.

It is always a mistake to judge how another person is expressing grief.

Instead of judging, we must be very patient and accept the uniqueness of ever individual’s grief process, including our own.

excerpt from The Holistic Baby Guide

Treating your baby’s fever and acute symptoms at home is easy enough. The goal of treatment is to encourage healing and stimu¬late a strong immune response. Reducing the fever is not the goal, as the fever will do what is necessary to fight the illness. Natural remedies will encourage the fight.

The first and easiest remedy to try is homeopathic Belladonna. The classical indications for Belladonna are fever with sudden onset, radiating heat, and flushing and redness of the skin. There may be redness (indicating inflammation) at some specific location in the body: in the throat, the ears, the eyes, the skin—pretty much anywhere. Older children will complain of a headache. Babies who need Belladonna are often quiet and subdued, moaning and very hot to touch. Or they may be crying with discomfort. Belladonna is indicated before significant discharge develops with a cold or other symptoms appear later in an illness that would point the way to another remedy.

If babies are very uncomfortable and screaming in apparent pain, then you may want to try giving homeopathic Chamomilla. Often one dose will calm your baby and allow her to get back to sleep.

excerpt from The Joy of Parenting

Take a moment to think about the relationships in your life that are most important to you – those in which you feel closest to someone else. What is it about those relationships that you most value? Take a few moments and jot down your thoughts about this in your parenting journal.

If you’re like many parents, one of the valued characteristics you listed may have been “feeling heard.” When we’re very lucky, we find ourselves in relationships in which people “get” us – they have a solid understanding of our wants, desires, and dreams. They communicate that understanding in how they behave around us – by calling our attention to things we care about or being thoughtful without being asked and without expecting anything in return. Because these things are important to you, you won’t be surprised that these same attributes are probably what your child most values and trusts about her relationship with you.

Taking time to nurture a relationship like this with your child is important. After all, you’re the “base” from which your child ventures out into the world. You ensure his safety and offer a lens through which he will views other important relationships throughout his life. You show your young child how to be in the world by the way you relate to and behave with him. And that is an enormous responsibility – as well as an exquisite gift.

Excerpt from The Balanced Mom

excerpt from Mindful Motherhood

First, I want you to know that being mindful is not yet another goal you must achieve to be a good mom. It’s not about becoming a perfect Zen mama who stays calm, cool, and collected in the face of anything that comes; uses only organic baby foods, clothing, and linens; stays on a career path while also being available to her family; and stays fit and trim all the while. The last thing I want to do with this book is put another giant task on your list of “things I must do to be a good mom.” Mindful motherhood is not about becoming someone other than who you already are.

Mindful motherhood, simply put, is being present, in your body, and con¬nected with your baby no matter what is happening. It’s being aware of your experi¬ence from moment to moment, as it is happening, without pushing it away, trying to make it stay, or judging it as bad or good. It is meeting each situation as it is, and over time, more and more often, approaching whatever is happening with curiosity and compassion.