BODY/MIND/SPIRIT
Steadfast on the Path to Wellness
If there is one thing that’s certain in life, it is the constancy of change. Well-paced change keeps us engaged and vital, but too much change too fast leads to stress, disorientation, and even illness.
These books point the way to balance and wholeness: a gentle form of yoga that awakens our innate healing power; rituals and meditations with crystals to access the harmonizing influence of lunar energy; a memoir about the power of nature to restore us to wholeness; insightful thoughts on our connections with animals and how we are bonded with them on an evolutionary path; and an eye-opening look at how women in their later years can blossom into full maturity with wisdom, grace, and yes, joy.
AGING JOYFULLY A Woman’s Guide to Optimal Health, Relationships, and Fulfillment for Her 50s and Beyond Carla Marie Manly, Familius (AUG 1) Softcover $18.99 (256pp), 978-1-64170-141-9 BODY, MIND & SPIRIT
Carla Marie Manly’s inspiring Aging Joyfully recognizes that, from birth, people are pushed to let go and move from one developmental stage to the next. While adulthood is met with eagerness, she says, later years are regarded as more bittersweet, and are marked by accelerating loss. Instead of approaching aging with such fear, Manly’s book encourages women to regard their mature years as years that are full of possibilities.
Encouraging women to be open to new opportunities and to explore whatever brings them joy, satisfies their curiosity, and brightens their future, the text is bolstered by wisdom and experience. In later years, it knows, women become free from many of their earlier obligations and can rediscover the wild, indomitable girls who are living within, just waiting for a chance to reemerge.
Manly’s is a warm, insightful, practical, and humorous guide to a life period she calls the most rewarding of all, despite its challenges. The difficult parts, she says, don’t have to be faced alone: “We can band together in love and community as only women can do.” The book points to inner treasures that chronological age cannot touch and finds beauty in aging, deep love in elder years, and the joy of a mindset that is eager for what’s to come.
The book’s topics include the loss of loved ones, new love, discovering new interests, and staying mentally sharp and physically fit. Advice on managing role changes is imparted, and knowing when to get help is encouraged. Manly is tactful when it comes to addressing topics that many women are too embarrassed to talk about.
Aging Joyfully is a wise, wonderful companion for navigating “one of the most beautiful eras of your life.”
COSMIC CRYSTALS Rituals and Meditations for Connecting with Lunar Energy Ashley Leavy, Fair Winds Press (AUG 20) Softcover $24.99 (192pp), 978-1-59233-885-6 BODY, MIND & SPIRIT
When she was twenty-nine, a total hysterectomy left Ashley Leavy feeling bereft, grieving, and needing the comfort of feminine energy. Bringing together her love of crystals and of the moon, she created a spiritual practice that fostered alignment with the lunar cycles, long a potent metaphor for human life. Her beautiful, sensitive book Cosmic Crystals is an invitation to follow the journey of the moon, that most feminine of astrological elements, through each astrological sign and house to discover the many facets of its healing power.
With the belief that aligning with the moon’s rhythmic changes can make life less turbulent and stressful, the book shares that healers, mystics, and practitioners of magic throughout the world have used crystals as a natural means of amplifying energy and modifying the human energy field for thousands of years. Drawing on modern, Native, and Celtic sources, astrology, and her own spiritual practice and experience with crystals, Leavy’s book is a comprehensive manual of insightful rituals and meditations for practitioners of all levels.
The book reveals the many ways crystals can be used to enhance the emotional connection to energy work; create sacred space; deepen intuitive and psychic abilities; remove negative thought-forms and emotional debris from the human energy body; help with grounding and centering; and promote healing. The book also highlights the promise and potential held in each full moon and demonstrates how to harness lunar energy for good.
Lavish illustrations—each a work of art—are enriching and inspiring. Readers are guided into an in-depth understanding of how to choose, care for, and use crystals to promote healing, abundance, and a more “soulful” life in tune with the cosmos. Whether for personal use or for gifting, Cosmic Crystals is a worthy companion on the quest to understand, deepen, and benefit from the connection with lunar energy.
BE HEALTHY WITH YIN YOGA The Gentle Way to Free Your Body of Everyday Ailments and Emotional Stresses Stefanie Arend, She Writes Press (AUG 20) Softcover $18.95 (210pp), 978-1-63152-590-2 BODY, MIND & SPIRIT
“Yin Yoga practice gives us the peace that we so urgently need in this noisy world,” writes Stefanie Arend in Be Healthy with Yin Yoga. The long, gentle poses of Yin Yoga, she says, allow for time to experience the self in all of its quiet fullness—to go within, notice what is happening, and encounter the Wise One that dwells there.
Presented as both passive and intensive, Yin Yoga is said to relax and strengthen the body and calm the nervous system, in addition to improving mobility, reducing pain, and enhancing the immune system. Arend asserts that Yin Yoga’s gentle power awakens awareness of the ways the body communicates long before illness arises and activates the body’s innate capacity to heal itself. Her work calls for letting go to it—physically, emotionally, and mentally—and argues that its slow, mindful approach is the least likely to cause injury.
Arend’s encyclopedic approach is satisfying, exploring the concepts behind Yin Yoga in a deep fashion. She traces Yin Yoga’s roots, placing it against a background of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), and explores through it the nature of Yin and Yang; the meridians that carry life force, or Chi, throughout the body; and the Five Elements and the Indian Chakra system.
Throughout, many Yin Yoga asanas (postures) are described in clear terms. Accompanying photographs make them easy to learn. An alphabetical listing of health conditions is provided with beneficial postures for treating them. To meet the needs of individual practitioners, variations and adaptations of the postures are suggested, and healing breathing techniques and questions for reflection take the experience even further.
Long-term health is within reach, Arend affirms, and Be Healthy with Yin Yoga argues that it can be accessed through Yin Yoga’s ability to bring the body, mind, and spirit together in harmony.
LISTENING AT LOOKOUT CREEK Nature in Spiritual Practice Gretel Van Wieren, Oregon State University Press (NOV 30) Hardcover $21.95 (176pp) 978-0-87071-985-1, NATURE
Spiritual wanderer, mystic, and ordained minister Gretel Van Wieren’s memoir of her stint as writer-in-residence in Oregon’s Cascades covers her quest to rediscover her connection with the natural world, which is her main source of spiritual sustenance.
Recalling memories of growing up in Michigan’s Manistee National Forest, the book affirms the rich connection between nature and spirituality. Earthy and poetic, it touches on what can best be learned through intimate contact with nature, from the constancy of change, to how life and death intermingle, to the way lowly spiders create shimmering lace.
Honest and at times raw, the book records moments of intense awareness. Silence opens up the paradoxical creative space between the via positiva and the via negativa. Noting the work of scientists who study the way the forest responds to change, Van Wieren also responds to the forest in body and soul. A spot calls her to sit for a time in silence, answer a wild urge to run, and then refresh herself by skinny-dipping in a creek. Questions open up, inspired by awareness of what is lost when ecosystems are destroyed. Van Wieren muses on mourning irreversible losses and facing inevitable suffering.
Touched by the beauty, the vitality, the myriad shades of green, and the depth of silence encountered in the forest, Van Wieren confronts her lack of answers. She ends as one person faced with the enormity of change. Listening at Lookout Creek, while revealing how immersion in nature can help and be healing, stops short of antidotes for the advancing effects of climate change, and instead reveals how listening to the forest and breathing with it in silence can lead to true care.
THE SOUL LIFE OF ANIMALS Love, Consciousness, and the Animal-human Relationship Hanne Jahr, Polair Publishing (SEP 30) Hardcover $14.95 (120pp), 978-1-905398-40-9, NATURE
Debates over whether or not animals are selfaware beings can get heated, and deciding that they are would require major legal and ethical changes in how they are treated. In The Soul Life of Animals, Hanne Jahr takes a metaphysical approach to the question, bolstered by science, and raises a question that takes the debate even further: do animals have souls?
Jahr’s book focuses on stories about her relationships with animals and is informative and entertaining. It includes the intriguing opinions of esoteric spiritual teachers, from Rudolph Steiner to Alice Bailey, regarding the nature of animals and their evolutionary partnership with humans.
A challenge to the attitudes and beliefs of religious and cultural systems that teach that animals are meant to serve human needs and purposes, the book opens the door to related questions about the way human beings are treated when they are considered less-than by those with power. Jahr’s perspective is at once grand and intimate as she declares what all those who know animals know: that animals are aware, have feelings, and are capable of forming deep and lasting relationships.
Arguing that humans and animals are on an evolutionary path together, this work will help readers to individuate and play a key role in raising the animals they’ve chosen as pets to their next evolutionary level. But it works both ways.
Making a compelling case that human beings can learn from animals and become better people in the process, The Soul Life of Animals is about living from the heart, expressing humility, being gentle, causing no harm, and unconditional love within the great brotherhood of all that lives.
“… allow time to experience the self in all of its quiet fullness—to go within, notice what is happening, and encounter the Wise One that dwells there.”