“Who am I becoming?” That was the question nagging pastor and author John Mark Comer. Outwardly, he appeared successful. But inwardly, things weren’t pretty. So he turned to a trusted mentor for guidance and heard these words: “Ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life. Hurry is the great enemy of the spiritual life.”

It wasn’t the response he expected, but it was—and continues to be—the answer he needs. Too often we treat the symptoms of toxicity in our modern world instead of trying to pinpoint the cause. A growing number of voices are pointing at hurry, or busyness, as a root of much evil.
 
Perfect for anyone looking to de-stress and connect more during this holiday season, The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry is a fascinating roadmap to staying emotionally healthy and spiritually alive in the chaos of the modern world.

We are constantly being formed by the world around us. To be formed by Jesus will require us to become his apprentice. 

To live by what the first Christian disciples called a Rule of Life—a set of practices and relational rhythms that slow us down and open up space in our daily lives for God to do what only God can do—transforms the deepest parts of us to become like him. 
 
This introduction to spiritual formation is full of John Mark Comer’s trademark mix of theological substance and cultural insight as well as practical wisdom on developing your own Rule of Life.
 
These ancient practices have much to offer us. By learning to rearrange our days, we can follow the Way of Jesus. We can be with him. Become like him. And do as he did.

Why does spiritual growth seem so difficult?

God's vision for your life is not just that you are saved by grace, but that you also learn to live by grace, flourishing with the Spirit flowing through you. And this book will show how God's perfect vision for you starts with a powerful promise: All those who trust in God "will be like a tree planted by the water that sends out its roots by the stream. It does not fear when heat comes; its leaves are always green. It has no worries in a year of drought and never fails to bear fruit" (Jeremiah 17:7-8).

Pastor and bestselling author John Ortberg first helps gauge your spiritual health and measure the gap between where you are now and where God intends you to be. Then he provides detailed tasks and exercises to help you live in the flow of the Spirit, circumventing real-world barriers--pain and sorrow, temptations, self-doubt, sin--to flourish even in a dark and broken world.

Description goes herePeter Scazzero learned the hard way: you can't be spiritually mature while remaining emotionally immature. Even though he was the pastor of a growing church, he did what most people do--avoid conflict in the name of Christianity; ignore his anger, sadness, and fear; use God to run from God; and live without boundaries.

Eventually God awakened him to a biblical integration of emotional health and the spiritual practice of slowing down and quieting your life for to experience a firsthand relationship with Jesus. It created nothing short of a spiritual revolution in Scazzero, in his church, and now in thousands of other churches.

In this updated edition, Scazzero shares new stories and principles as he outlines his journey and the signs of emotionally unhealthy spirituality. Then he provides seven biblical, reality-tested steps to become emotionally mature.

Brother Lawrence was a seventeenth century Christian who had a dramatic spiritual awakening at the age of eighteen. Seeing a tree in winter, his soul suddenly opened to the presence of God. Within six years he had entered a Carmelite monastery in Paris, where he worked chiefly in the kitchen, cooking and cleaning. He practiced a simple and natural method. He merely turned his attention to the Divine Presence available at all times during any activity. He reports that he was as fully present with God while washing dishes in the kitchen as he was when partaking of the sacrament in worship.

The profound peace and joy evident in Lawrence's life attracted many visitors, who sought to learn the secret of his unique spiritual practice.

Gerald G. May, MD, one of the great spiritual teachers and writers of our time, argues that the dark 'shadow' side of the true spiritual life has been trivialised and neglected to our serious detriment. Superficial and naively upbeat spirituality does not heal and enrich the soul. Nor does the other tendency to relegate deep spiritual growth to only mystics and saints. Only the honest, sometimes difficult encounters with what Christian spirituality has called and described in helpful detail as 'the dark night of the soul' can lead to true spiritual wholeness.

May emphasises that the dark night is not necessarily a time of suffering and near despair, but a time of deep transition, a search for new orientation when things are clouded and full of mystery. The dark gives depth, dimension and fullness to the spiritual life.

Do you want to improve your relationships and experience lasting personal change? Join Curt Thompson, M.D., on an amazing journey to discover the surprising pathways for transformation hidden inside your own mind. Integrating new findings in neuroscience and attachment with Christian spirituality, Dr. Thompson reveals how it is possible to rewire your mind, altering your brain patterns and literally making you more like the person God intended you to be. Explaining discoveries about the brain in layman’s terms, he shows how you can be mentally transformed through spiritual practices, interaction with Scripture, and connections with other people. He also provides practical exercises to help you experience healing in areas where you’ve been struggling. Insightful and challenging, Anatomy of the Soul illustrates how learning about one of God’s most miraculous creations―your brain―can enrich your life, your relationships, and your impact on the world around you.

In Anchored, expert teacher Deb Dana shares a down-to-earth presentation of Polyvagal Theory, then brings the science to life with practical, everyday ways to transform your relationship with your body. Using field-tested techniques, Dana helps you master the skills to become more aware of your nervous system moment to moment―and change the way you respond to the great and small challenges of life.

Here, you’ll explore:
• Polyvagal Theory―get to know the biology and function of your vagus nerve, the highway of the nervous system
• Befriending Your Nervous System―attune to what’s going on in your body by developing your “neuroception”
• Using Your Vagal Brake―discover key techniques to consciously regulate the intensity of your emotions
• Connection and Protection―learn to recognize and influence your internal cues for safety and danger
• Your Social Engagement System―find ways to create nourishing relationships with others and the world around you
• Practices and guidance to gently shape your nervous system for greater resilience, intuition, safety, and wonder

In Practice the Pause, spiritual director and writer Caroline Oakes offers easy-to-understand explanations of how this new brain science is confirming what every spiritual tradition has been telling us for millennia: by practicing the pause, we become more self-aware and better able to understand others. We become more "God aware."

With a refreshing focus on the Eastern Christian understanding of Jesus as a master of wisdom, Oakes shines a spotlight on Jesus's own centering pause practice as a transformative path for personal and social change. We learn that even a seven-second pause practice can move us beyond the fight-or-flight responses of our ego in our daily lives and actually equip us to cultivate the common good in the world.

A collection of groundbreaking research by a leading figure in neuroscience.

This book compiles, for the first time, Stephen W. Porges’s decades of research. A leading expert in developmental psychophysiology and developmental behavioral neuroscience, Porges is the mind behind the groundbreaking Polyvagal Theory, which has startling implications for the treatment of anxiety, depression, trauma, and autism. Adopted by clinicians around the world, the Polyvagal Theory has provided exciting new insights into the way our autonomic nervous system unconsciously mediates social engagement, trust, and intimacy.

Trauma is a fact of life. Veterans and their families deal with the painful aftermath of combat; one in five Americans has been molested; one in four grew up with alcoholics; one in three couples have engaged in physical violence. Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, one of the world’s foremost experts on trauma, has spent over three decades working with survivors. In The Body Keeps the Score, he uses recent scientific advances to show how trauma literally reshapes both body and brain, compromising sufferers’ capacities for pleasure, engagement, self-control, and trust. He explores innovative treatments—from neurofeedback and meditation to sports, drama, and yoga—that offer new paths to recovery by activating the brain’s natural neuroplasticity.

Based on Dr. van der Kolk’s own research and that of other leading specialists, The Body Keeps the Score exposes the tremendous power of our relationships both to hurt and to heal—and offers new hope for reclaiming lives.

This book will reveal the power of somatic exercises to help regulate your nervous system and enhance your emotional resilience. You will reduce anxiety, tone your vagus nerve, and create a stronger mind-body connection in just 10 minutes a day.

This is not just a book about exercises but a way of moving that can break your connection with ongoing stress and anxiety to reveal a life of well-being and balance. Inside, you'll find:

-An understanding of somatic practices, showing you why they work and how to create your own practice tailored to your unique needs.

-Mastery of the movements that can create mind-body and nervous system harmony.

-Guidance on generating your own emotional release, awareness of your emotions, and greater emotional resilience.

-Strategies for cultivating deep body awareness, allowing you to tune into your body's language and signals for stress and relaxation.

Most of us have no idea how others see or process their experiences. And that can make relationships hard, whether with intimate partners, with friends, or in our professional lives. Understanding the motivations and dynamics of these different personality types can be the key that unlocks sometimes mystifying behavior in others—and in ourselves.

This book from Suzanne Stabile, coauthor, with Ian Morgan Cron, of The Road Back to You will:

-Explain the nine Enneagram types and how they behave and experience relationships

-Guide readers into deeper insights about themselves, their types, and others' personalities, and

-Open readers up to have healthier, more life-giving relationships through the wisdom of the Enneagram.

This book will explore questions like: Why do Sixes seem so intimidated and put off by Eights, who only wish the Sixes would stop mulling things over and take action? Why do Fives seem so unavailable, even to their closest family and friends, while Twos seem to feel everybody else’s feelings but their own and end up irritating people who don’t want their help? How in the world can Fours be so open and loving to you one day and restrained and distant other times?

The Enneagram not only answers these questions but gives us a way out of our usual finger pointing and judging of other people—and finding them wanting, perplexing, or impossible. Suzanne's generous, sometimes humorous, and always insightful approach reveals why all the types behave as they do. This book offers help in fostering more loving, mature, and compassionate relationships with everyone in our lives.

What you don't know about yourself can hurt you and your relationships―and even keep you in the shallows with God. Do you want help figuring out who you are and why you're stuck in the same ruts?

The Enneagram is an ancient personality typing system with an uncanny accuracy in describing how human beings are wired, both positively and negatively. In The Road Back to You Ian Morgan Cron and Suzanne Stabile forge a unique approach―a practical, comprehensive way of accessing Enneagram wisdom and exploring its connections with Christian spirituality for a deeper knowledge of ourselves, compassion for others, and love for God.

Witty and filled with stories, this book allows you to peek inside each of the nine Enneagram types, keeping you turning the pages long after you have read the chapter about your own number. Not only will you learn more about yourself, but you will also start to see the world through other people's eyes, understanding how and why people think, feel, and act the way they do.

To guide your first steps into your self-awareness journey, The Road Back to You offers:

-Introductions to each Enneagram type

-Questions to help you identify your number

-Changes you can make today to pursue deeper self-awareness

-Digestible windows into the other types, helping you see others with more compassion and empathy

The wisdom of the Enneagram can help take you further along into who you really are―leading you into places of spiritual discovery you would never have found on your own, and paving the way to the wiser, more compassionate person you want to become.

Richard Rohr and Andrea Ebert's runaway best-seller shows both the basic logic of the Enneagram and its harmony with the core truths of Christian thought from the time of the early Church forward.

Fr. Richard Rohr is a globally recognized ecumenical teacher bearing witness to the universal awakening within Christian mysticism and the Perennial Tradition. He is a Franciscan priest of the New Mexico Province and founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation (CAC) in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Fr. Richard's teaching is grounded in the Franciscan alternative orthodoxy—practices of contemplation and expressing itself in radical compassion, particularly for the socially marginalized.

Whether reciting the gathas in Buddhist practice, the Shema in Judaism, or the Jesus Prayer in Christianity, for centuries the practice of breath prayer has helped center people from a variety of faith traditions on the sacred in everyday life. Through brief words of prayer or petition said silently to the rhythm of one's breath, this simple, meditative act combines praise for the divine with focused intention, creating a profound spiritual connection in the quiet, and even mundane, moments of the day .

In Breath Prayer, Christine Valters Paintner, online abbess of Abbey of the Arts, introduces us to this spiritual practice and offers beautiful poem-prayers for walking, working, dressing, cleaning, sitting in silence, doing the dishes, living in community--breathing the divine into our daily lives. Over time these recitations become as natural as breathing. We don't so much recite the prayers as the prayers recite us, guide us, and open our hearts to the everyday sacred.

With each of the forty prayers, Paintner includes reflections on life's ordinary beauty and heartfelt advice for discovering the sacred all around. Breath Prayer concludes with guidance for creating your own breath prayers to deepen your practice.

How do we experience rest? Alabaster Co’s new book explores this question and its qualities for our lives, rhythms, and conventions today. 

God rests. From the very beginning, rest is marked with sacred significance among all of creation. God calls individuals and communities alike into lives, rhythms, and conventions of rest. More than a mere afternoon nap, rest is a holy orientation and divine chronology that completes life as we know it. Just as God rests, we rest with God.

This book is meant to move us towards rest, into recovering its wisdom and consequence in our lives. As we contemplate and practice these many qualities of rest, may our personal lives be rejuvenated, our families strengthened, and our communities reoriented towards justice and peace. And may we rest with God. Amen. 

In our frenzied culture, the possibility of living in balanced rhythms of work and rest often feels elusive. This rings especially true for pastors and leaders who carry the weight of nonstop responsibility. Most know they need rest but might be surprised to find within themselves a deep resistance to letting go and resting in God one day a week, let alone for longer seasons of sabbatical.

The journey to a meaningful sabbath practice is slow and gradual, and it is a journey we need to take in community. Sharing her own story of practicing sabbath for the past twenty years, Ruth Haley Barton offers hard-won wisdom regarding the rhythms of sabbath, exploring both weekly sabbath keeping as well as extended periods of sabbatical time.

Sabbath is more than a practice―it is a way of life ordered around God's invitation to regular rhythms of work, rest, and replenishment that will sustain us for the long haul of life in leadership.

What is beauty?

As we encounter and discover God, we are inevitably led to further unpack our sense of beauty and its meaning for our faith-lives. As a culture, we often describe God as true and good. We use beauty less often—and we struggle to articulate the intuitive relationship between it and the things of God: calling, spirituality, mission, and more. 

This book is designed to bridge the gap. Through the story of Mark 14:1-11, The Story of the Woman with the Alabaster Jar, this book explores beauty and its profound implications for our lives.

Since its first publication, The Artist's Way phenomena has inspired the genius of Elizabeth Gilbert and millions of readers to embark on a creative journey and find a deeper connection to process and purpose. Julia Cameron's novel approach guides readers in uncovering problems areas and pressure points that may be restricting their creative flow and offers techniques to free up any areas where they might be stuck, opening up opportunities for self-growth and self-discovery.

Conceived over thirty years of painting and creating in his studio, this book is Makoto Fujimura’s broad and deep exploration of creativity and the spiritual aspects of "making." What he does in the studio is theological work as much as it is aesthetic work. In between pouring precious, pulverized minerals onto handmade paper to create the prismatic, refractive surfaces of his art, he comes into the quiet space in the studio, in a discipline of awareness, waiting, prayer, and praise.

Ranging from the Bible to T. S. Eliot, and from Mark Rothko to Japanese Kintsugi technique, he shows how unless we are making something, we cannot know the depth of God's being and God's grace permeating our lives. This poignant and beautiful book offers the perspective of, in Christian Wiman's words, "an accidental theologian," one who comes to spiritual questions always through the prism of art.

Ginger Garrett reveals how every woman can accent her God-given beauty using the hidden treasures of the ancient Scriptures-where every scent and every act of beautification had spiritual and emotional significance.
A woman's longing to present herself as physically beautiful is universal. Beauty is extolled throughout the Bible as complementing God's plan for women's lives. There are currently no books that examine the beauty practices of biblical women, the plants and products God created to accent their beauty, and the spiritual roots of feminine rituals.
Beautiful women abound in the Bible: Queen Esther, the bride of Solomon, Delilah, Rachel, Sarah, and more. Their beauty was a gift from God, and God also supplied the many foods, spices, and oils that perfected each woman's appearance. In Beauty Secrets of the Bible, Ginger Garrett helps readers accent their God-given beauty using these secrets.