Excerpt from The Untethered Soul

Very few people understand the heart. In truth, your heart is one of the masterpieces of creation. It is a phenomenal instrument. It has the potential to create vibrations and harmonies that are far beyond the beauty of pianos, strings, or flutes. You can hear an instrument, but you feel your heart. And if you think that you feel an instrument, it’s only because it touched your heart. Your heart is an instrument made of extremely subtle energy that few people come to appreciate.

excerpt from Serenity To Go

Carrying the world on your shoulders? ’Fess up. You’re not Atlas, and you’re simply not equipped to lug around all the planet’s—or your office’s—problems. Time to give yourself, your shoulders and back a relaxing stretch.

excerpt from Cool, Calm, and Confident: A Workbook to Help Kids Learn Assertiveness Skills.

For You To Know

Solving problems with other people takes thought and energy. Sometimes it is hard to put aside our angry feelings and try to work things out. Learning and remembering some problem-solving guidelines can make it easier to act and resolve your problems assertively.

C— Calm down. “You have to be calm before you try to solve a problem or you’ll be too angry to think clearly,” she said.

A— Allow a good amount of time. “You have to allow enough time to really sit and listen to each other and work on the problem.”

T— Think ahead. “If you think ahead about what you want to say, what is important to you, and how you might solve the problem, you will stick to the subject and solve things more quickly.”

T—Talk nicely. “No name calling or saying mean things to the other person.”

S— Stay focused on one problem. “Don’t talk about other problems or things that happened days or weeks ago. Just stick to the one problem you have today.”

excerpt from Coping with Cliques

starting off …

You’re thinking that you could never be the bully. Oh no, everyone likes you. Or maybe they don’t like you and they’ve teased you in the past, but you would never ever do to them what they did to you. Well, guess again. After all, you’re only human. If a situation presents itself, wouldn’t you be the slightest bit tempted? You probably would. But resist that temptation, or else the gossip-bully syndrome will go on and on, knocking everyone down and making school utterly and totally poisonous. You can choose to respond in a way that will make it stop.

Excerpt from The Body Image Workbook

Body image forms gradually, beginning in childhood. Life experiences lead some people to relate to their bodies in positive and satisfying ways, while other people travel a less enjoyable path. The factors that influence body image development can be divided into two basic categories:

1. The historical influences from your past are the forces that shaped how you came to view your appearance in the ways that you do.


2. The current influences are the events and experiences in everyday life that determine how you think, feel, and react to your looks.

Excerpt from The Anorexia Workbook

Mental Volleyball

At this point, you may be wondering if this is about anorexia or sports. Don’t worry—volleyball does relate to anorexia. How? Well, the strategy of volleyball is a great way to describe how you are responding to thoughts about yourself. Imagine that a volley ball match is going on inside your mind. Instead of volleying a ball back and forth, the teams inside your head are volleying thoughts about you.

Excerpt from The Family Recovery Guide

The seeds of healthy growth are sown in the transition stage; in early recovery, they begin to take root. Here, the foundation for the individual identity is set in place, bringing new found stability. Early recovery can be a time of unparalleled personal change, hope, and excitement; it can also be a time of trauma, especially at home, where the family members are still functioning with out a strong, healthy family system. Even as growth begins, tensions and set backs are to be expected. During early recovery, the alcoholic and co-alcoholic are still extremely dependent on their relationships with their recovery programs. Their main focus at this time is education about alcohol ism and the process of recovery in general, and on the specific ways in which each particular individual has experienced these realities. To facilitate this education, they learn recovery language, which helps them organize their past experiences and under stand their ongoing thoughts and feelings. By internalizing this new language and the abstinent behaviors that were set in place during transition, they begin to solidify their new alcoholic or co-alcoholic identities. The healthy behavior they practiced in transition starts to become less conscious and more automatic as their impulses to drink or take care of the drinker finally begin to decrease.

Excerpt from The Good Eater

As the basket ball team made the four-hour drive to the San Luis Obispo basketball tournament (the biggest tournament of eighth grade), Coach Whitmore entertained us by predicting who we would all be when we grew up:

Excerpt from Transforming Depression

How well you manage your attitudes and emotions each day determines to a large extent how much vitality you will experience overall. Most people think fatigue sets in because of all the things they have to do or because they didn’t get enough sleep. They often overlook the energy drain from out-of-control emotions.

Different triggers in life can cause stress to run through your system, creating frayed nerves, fatigue, and overwhelming, out-of-control feelings. Once this occurs, it’s important to recover from the stress fast, otherwise your energy drains away. Taking emotional responsibility to get into heart rhythm coherence helps to rebalance your system. Coherence also helps you develop the intuitive discernment to see how to stop draining energy and renew your vitality. This is especially important when you are trying to lift depression.