Psychology

A music prodigy, head of her class, and well-liked in school, Emily Paulson decided early that embellishment paved the road to success. As she grew up, she figured out how to make the picture look even better - with a successful husband, five beautiful children, and all the required accompanying accoutrements.

Then along came social media, where those pictures of the perfect life grew her a following of women who believed that everything about Emily was #blessed #inspo. But behind the filtered façade was a reality filled with trauma, addiction, and dysfunctional behavior. From disordered eating to breaking the law and nearly destroying her marriage, Emily had been running from her own trauma for years. Living a life shot through with more self-destruction than she could track, Emily knew things had to change when she woke up one morning and realized that she was barely participating in the picture she had so carefully crafted.

Highlight Real: Finding Honesty and Recovery Behind the Filtered Life is the true story of what happens when a so-called perfect mother and businesswoman is forced to find reckoning with her past and build a future based on the authenticity she has always sought. Searingly honest, heartbreaking and packed with uncountable did-she-actually-just-say-that moments, Highlight Real is a memoir of healing as well as a fully modern look at what happens when the filters fall off and real life emerges into the light.

Did you know that the most creative companies have centralized bathrooms? That brainstorming meetings are a terrible idea? That the color blue can help you double your creative output?
From the "New York Times "best-selling author of "How We Decide" comes a sparkling and revelatory look at the new science of creativity. Shattering the myth of muses, higher powers, even creative types, Jonah Lehrer demonstrates that creativity is not a single gift possessed by the lucky few. It s a variety of distinct thought processes that we can all learn to use more effectively.
Lehrer reveals the importance of embracing the rut, thinking like a child, daydreaming productively, and adopting an outsider s perspective (travel helps). He unveils the optimal mix of old and new partners in any creative collaboration, and explains why criticism is essential to the process. Then he zooms out to show how we can make our neighborhoods more vibrant, our companies more productive, and our schools more effective.
You ll learn about Bob Dylan s writing habits and the drug addictions of poets. You ll meet a Manhattan bartender who thinks like a chemist, and an autistic surfer who invented an entirely new surfing move. You ll see why Elizabethan England experienced a creative explosion, and how Pixar s office space is designed to spark the next big leap in animation.

Collapsing the layers separating the neuron from the finished symphony, "Imagine "reveals the deep inventiveness of the human mind, and its essential role in our increasingly complex world.

http: //www.jonahlehrer.com/"

It is the hardest thing anyone can face--the death of a child. A tragedy that has affected millions also touched Donald M. Murray, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Boston Globe, twenty-five years ago. Now, for the first time, he fully expresses what he lost--and learned--in a book even more moving than his inspiring volume on aging, My Twice-Lived Life.

Lee Murray was Donald and Minnie Mae's middle child, one of three girls. An avid oboe player accepted by a prestigious conservatory, the family "caretaker" with compassion for everyone, a young woman with a devoted boyfriend and the whole world ahead of her--Lee succumbed at age twenty to Reye's Syndrome, commonly considered a childhood illness. In The Lively Shadow, her father remembers the hell of her passing and the healing it took him years to finally experience.

From hearing the initial news that Lee was in the hospital and the four harrowing days spent by her bedside, to trying to teach, write, and love others while grieving, to learning to live at last with only Lee's memory, Donald Murray embarks upon a journey that is at once universal and informed by his own life's details. Whether he's feeling irrational guilt at not being able to protect his child or pulling off the highway to release a primal howl, the pain Murray feels brings him finally to a place of peace, an acceptance whereby he realizes "the most terrible experience in my life has also been a gift," requiring "a continuous celebration of the commonplace."

Unflinching in its honesty, The Lively Shadow is a beloved author's most impressive achievement--a book bound to be of continuing comfort to anyone who has lost a loved one, a touchstone on a topic few have written about, let alone addressed so openly.

Dr. Brian L. Weiss was a scientist and psychotherapist, molded by years of disciplined study into a conservative professional. He was aware of research programs in parapsychology at major universities, but they seemed too far-fetched to consider seriously.

Then he met Catherine.

For more than a year he used conventional therapy to help his young and beautiful patient overcome recurring nightmares and anxiety attacks. When nothing worked he tried hypnosis. Undergoing an astonishing series of trance states, Catherine recalled past-life memories that proved to be the causes of her problems. In the incongruously quiet, dimly lit setting of Dr. Weiss's office, Catherine spoke in clear and vivid terms of numerous lifetimes she had experienced, crossing classes and genders, centuries and civilizations.

These remarkable sessions profoundly altered the mind and soul of both patient and therapist. In a matter of months, Catherine's symptoms disappeared and she resumed a life happier and more peaceful than ever before.

We all suffer the loss of a loved one. This uplifting book will guide you on your journey through grief and inspire you with evidence of the afterlife.

A practicing lawyer for over two decades, Mark Anthony is also a gifted medium who has worked with thousands of clients. He shares incredible true stories of contact with spirits and their enduring messages of forgiveness, gratitude, and acceptance. Even more remarkable, you will be able to recognize and make contact with the spirits of your loved ones.

Compelling, comforting, and inspiring for those of all backgrounds and faiths, Never Letting Go offers true healing through messages of hope from the Other Side.

Watch Mark Anthony discuss Never Letting Go here.

Praise:
"This deep, emotionally touching book is destined to become a metaphysical classic."--Joyce Keller, author of Seven Steps to Heaven

"An enlightening journey through coping with grief and discovering spiritual renewal. I highly recommend this book!"--Jeffrey A. Wands, author of Another Door Opens