In Beauty and the Soul, Ferrucci reveals how the overlooked power of everyday beauty can soothe the nagging difficulties of life. More than just a mere accessory, “beauty is a primary principle that touches all parts and functions of our being,” says Ferrucci. “It opens us to the world and brings harmony to our relation with others and to nature.”

Weaving research and case studies together with personal anecdotes and age-old parables that never fail to educate and enlighten, this provocative, accessible work explores the many ways that beauty can uplift, heal and transform—from the tangible to the intangible. For instance, Ferrucci illustrates how beauty can:

• Lengthen life: A Swedish study showed that those who go more often to the theater, movies, concerts and exhibitions have a greater chance of longevity.
• Facilitate healing: A study done in England moved all the staff and patients from an old but serviceable hospital to a new one which was designed to be both functional and beautiful. In the new hospital, the patients were shown to recover 21 percent faster, use fewer pain killers, and feel more satisfied.
• Provide us with a common ground: Beauty can encourage sharing between people, unite them and allow them to better know and enjoy one another.
• Transcend the “prison of the ego”: When we are experiencing awe and wonder, it’s nearly impossible to become ensnared by the hassles of our small, narrower world.

Beauty and the Soul challenges the way we perceive the world around us, guiding us to recognize and make use of the beauty present everywhere—in the environment, our relationships, our actions, words and inner selves.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Piero Ferrucci is a psychotherapist and philosopher. A former student of and collaborator with the transpersonal psychologist Roberto Assagioli, Ferrucci is a staff member of the Psychosynthesis Institute of Florence, Italy, and the International Federation of Medical Psychotherapy. He lives in the Tuscan countryside with his wife and children.

Order the book, now in paperback:

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From Contact Talk Radio: “Howard Falco guests for this radical and eye-opening look at the very nature of you. We will explore Howard’s writings and work on who you (and we all) really are and how that knowledge and understanding opens the door for you powerfully create your life in a more direct and deliberate way in this very moment. Howard Falco had an awakening which, over the course of the last 8 years, has lead him to share and to write some of the most powerful and life-changing information on the nature of reality and life. His upcoming book is I Am.”

A New Design for Living is one of the most important works by Ernest Holmes, second only to his masterwork, The Science of Mind. This cherished title outlines a plan to redesign your life in order to achieve your goals. Holmes’s wisdom guides readers toward positive changes that can improve their personal life, career, physical health, and spiritual well-being.

Discover a Richer Life offers a blueprint to finding health, wealth, and a meaningful life through a relationship with nature and reality. Profound yet simple, the 20 focused essays address themes such as the connection between the mind and physical health, the development of security through faith, and the power of subconscious thought patterns to bringing about positive change.

Living Without Fear provides a guide to liberating yourself from fear while embracing a life of health, happiness, and abundance. The clear, direct essays address topics like how to eliminate superstitions, the power of embracing your individuality, and the importance of preparing yourself to accept prosperity, even before it arrives.

About Ernest Holmes: An internationally known authority on religious psychology and the founder of the Religious Science movement, his inspirational books include the beloved classic The Science of Mind, This Thing Called You, The Art of Life, and The Hidden Power of the Bible.

With e-mail, Facebook, and Twitter, people today are more connected than ever. Yet when a friend gets divorced, loses a parent, or faces a tough transition, these modern tools come up short. In fact, the technologies that were created to bring us together have eroded our ability to connect in an authentic way.

In The Art of Comforting: What to Say and Do for People in Distress, Val Walker reminds us of the importance of making this connection and advises us how to be there for the people that need us  An experienced rehabilitation counselor, Walker consulted 13 top professionals who use comforting skills in their field every day. Their advice will help us comfort loved ones dealing with illness, divorce, death, and hardship. Yet, their tips can also help us support each other in every day situations, like bad days and break-ups. Learn….

• What to say and what not to say to those in distress
• Activities that provide comfort in times of trial
• How to identify and utilize your personal strengths to comfort
• What to write in a card when comforting someone
• Activities to help children deal with disappointment
• How to give bad news in a comforting way

Look for the book in stores October 28th, or pre-order online:

Review: I Am the Word by Paul Selig

I Am the Word might be better called I Am the Challenge.

From the get-go, Paul Selig’s channeled text challenges readers on multiple levels, and the stakes couldn’t be higher: mankind is on the verge of a great awakening—an evolution to the next level of understanding—and readers can tune into that and help make it happen if they open themselves up to a sense of possibility. In doing so, say Selig’s spirit guides, readers will achieve self-actualization and fulfillment.

That’s a tall order, but the book bills itself as “a guide to the consciousness of man’s self in a transitioning time.” It’s a how-to book for the spirit and the self.

Because self-actualization is, obviously, a highly personal experience, I can only speak to the book’s effect on me. Different readers will experience different results, particularly because they’ll approach the book with different expectations and different levels of open-mindedness.

And that is the book’s first challenge: readers have to approach it with an open mind.

“When a person says, ‘I intend to be different,’ one cannot be different without undergoing change and that change is not always comfortable, nor is it always graceful. Period,” the Guides say.

But the process of change, as outlined in the book, opens a reader to wonder, recognition, and knowing—and, in the end, it helps readers manifest themselves “as the energy of love.” That’s intimate—and for some people, uncomfortable—terrain to explore.

The book is also challenging because it’s dense. The text is readable, but the content is heavy and thoughtful, so it’s nothing a reader can skim through. (It’s not a beach read. I speak from experience!) I Am the Word requires concerted attention and reflection—but the payoffs, remember, are potentially huge.

The next challenge, for me, came when the book suggested a radical paradigm shift in my thinking about Christ. “We don’t talk about personage of Christ,” the Guides say in their initial discussion. “We talk about Christ as a creation of the God Self inhabiting man in its fullness.”

Jesus, the Guides say, “is a personage of the Christ, a manifestation of the Christ in fullness, and there are others as well who have ascended to this level or understanding and frequency.”

“To be the Christ,” they go on to say, “simply means to be yourself in full realization of your power as a piece of God in action.” To reach self-actualization, you achieve your “Christed self.”

“[O]nce you bypass the religion and you understand that the Christ is a consciousness, is a frequency, is an offering to man from the Creator to align to, then you begin to have a very different experience of understanding who you are,” the Guides say.

As a Catholic, lapsed as I might be right now, that was kind of a tough concept to wrap my head around—yet, leaving myself open to wonder, as the Guides suggest, I found that the ideas had certain resonance.

While the book is filled with ideas large and small, radical and familiar, comforting and jarring, it’s also an action manual. The Guides invite readers to do. After all, they say, the Word is God in action, and so they invite readers to take part in that action.

“This is the decree,” they say. “You are Word.”

Sometimes, the Guides invite readers to just allow things to happen—like, my frequency would align with the Christ frequency if I simply sat there and allowed it to. Sometimes, the Guides invite readers to repeat intentions:

“I am now choosing to think only those thoughts which will bring me peace and will align me to a high consciousness. I am doing this easily and through my own intention to know myself as Word. Word I am Word through this intention. Word I am word.”

“[An] intention,” the Guides say, “is a way to invoke and express and experience the light in a way that will be wonder-full for you, so that you can move into this as you are required.”

That remains an ongoing challenge throughout the book: being open to wonder so that things fall into place and frequencies align. At times, even Selig, serving as the medium, felt doubt or skepticism, which the Guides address as the channeling session are underway—and since the book is basically a transcript of those channeling sessions, the interactions between Selig and the Guides are included.

Rhetorically, those interactions prove to be useful devices because Selig’s uncertainty can mirror the reader’s, and so as the Guides take time to reassure Selig and explain things for him, the readers get the benefits of those teaching moments and can have their own doubts assuaged.

The Guides prove remarkably patient and remarkably optimistic. Trust them, they say, and everything will work out just fine. “[T]he opportunities you require to bring this growth into achievement will present themselves one day at a time,” the Guides assure—but only if you leave yourself open to the possibilities that they’ll happen.

Ultimately, the more open I was to experiencing what the book had to say—despite the ways it challenged me—the more I got out of the book. For instance, when the Guides would offer an affirmation and then say something like, “Many of you will feel this as a lightening around you” or “As you do this, you begin to experience heat in the heart center,” those things actually happened to me. Again, I can’t attest to the experience others will have—but those things happened to me.

I Am the Word has much to offer readers who are open to the experience. Most importantly, it seeks to help us all be better people and to see the world as a better place. It wants us to reconnect with wonder and with each other. Regardless of the vocabulary the book uses, or the spiritual approach it takes, its final vision is a beautiful one—and a challenge well worth rising to meet.

Book Review: The Fallen Sky – An Intimate History of Shooting Stars
by Christopher Cokinos

If you found yourself craning your neck toward the heavens of late looking for shooting stars – here’s a terrific book to read when you have finished your stint of sky watching.

Author Christopher Cokinos has pulled together a fabulous book on rocks from space, those collectibles from the cosmos. He tells the tale of the “love affair” between meteorites and individuals on the hunt for these specimens from space.

“Meteorites are, in fact, implicated in the seeding of life’s ingredients on Earth,” Cokinos writes. “And even the most indifferent know that these bits of former asteroids have rained devastation in the past and threaten to do so in the future.”

But what is so engaging about this book are the personal looks at explorers, professors, scientists and other characters that are passionate – and even fanatical – about meteorites. In this volume you’ll find yourself intrigued about private collectors of meteorites, as well as those who deal in hocking space stones.

Again, the author has woven together the science of meteorites and those on the chase for them – be it Daniel Barringer who popularized the idea that craters could be produced by meteorites to Harvey Nininger, noted collector and adventurer who opened the first meteorite museum.

The Fallen Sky is full of colorful characters, and generous helpings of mythology to scientific studies of the day. In writing the book, Cokinos takes the reader along on his travels from Kansas to Greenland and from Australia to the South Pole.

Once you’ve finished this book, your next shooting star observation will take on a new world of its own.

Pre-order I AM now:

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