FREE YOURSELF: 10 Life-Changing Powers of your Wise Heart.” It will appear on bookshelves, kindle and e-book next Fall, 2014. It blends Buddhist wisdom with Body-Centered Therapy into ten practical heart tools that busy people of all faiths can use in two, ten or twenty minutes during their morning meditation, exercise or commute. Beginning with the Power of Conscious Choice & the Power of Simple Questions, our Trusting, Curious Heart lays a foundation to say “yes” to what is and understand how feelings & beliefs influence our actions.
Through our Aware, Resourceful Heart, the Powers of Taking Responsibility & Fearless Love teach us to replace ego reactions with a deeper sense of self. Our Compassionate, Grateful, Forgiving Heart transforms unconscious habits we inherited at birth into healthy choices–toward ourselves and others. As we call one Heart Power into our daily lives for a whole month, we begin to meet life’s challenges, conflicts, pain and stress with compassionate acceptance. Soon we feel lighter, freer, less serious and more peaceful for no logical reason that will ever satisfy the mind.
JOY NO MATTER WHAT: This book is like discovering the map to a priceless hidden treasure. Too often, we are so consumed by the tension, conflict, fears, and worries of life that we forget to feel joy, or even that joy exists. This book shows you how easy it is to feel joy everyday, no matter what your outer circumstances are in any moment. In fact, it helps you tap into the unlimited reservoir of subtle joy inside that is always present. And it reveals how to welcome all of life’s gifts as opportunities, even the “negative” feelings, dislikes, and discomforts we were taught to resist.
With the expanded mind and spacious heart of a therapist for over twenty years, the author uses funny real life examples to teach us how to expand into joy by making three simple choices right in the middle of your busy life: Say “yes” to what is true (and stop judging experiences as good or bad, right or wrong); get to know yourself better by learning to “witness” your habitual reactions with curiosity and wonder; “respond differently” to life, with much more kindness and compassion towards yourself and others. As you let life in, let it be, and let it go, you wear a smile much more often and take yourself, and your experience, much more lightly.
SHORTCUTS TO FREEDOM AND INNER PEACE: live here, inside your heart, awaiting your attention. When you stop letting fear thoughts and reactions overshadow your inner peace, you sink into the spacious freedom alive in every moment. When you allow freedom to share the same space with issues about your love life, sex life, health and money concerns, you bask in the unlimited joy, love, compassion and inner peace that you are born with. The first five chapters release you from the prison of unconscious reactions. Four Heart Choice Tools follow each chapter, nudging you to spend one-to-ten minutes a day practicing Being Present, Curious, Awake, Resourceful and Compassionate.
As you consciously choose to let yourself out of prison one thought, one fear, one reaction at a time, you respond to life from your peaceful, loving, compassionate heart. Freedom is the essential truth of conscious awareness. As you wake up, you are free.
Carolyn Hobbs 