Broken Open

Author: Elizabeth Lesser
Publisher: Villard
ISBN: 1588361594
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 345

Book Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • This inspiring guide to healing and growth illuminates the richness and potential of every life, even in the face of loss and adversity—now updated with additional toolbox materials and a new preface by the author In the more than twenty-five years since she co-founded Omega Institute—now the world’s largest center for spiritual retreat and personal growth—Elizabeth Lesser has been an intimate witness to the ways in which people weather change and transition. In a beautifully crafted blend of moving stories, humorous insights, practical guidance, and personal memoir, she offers tools to help us make the choice we all face in times of challenge: Will we be broken down and defeated, or broken open and transformed? Lesser shares tales of ordinary people who have risen from the ashes of illness, divorce, loss of a job or a loved one—stronger, wiser, and more in touch with their purpose and passion. And she draws on the world’s great spiritual and psychological traditions to support us as we too learn to break open and blossom into who we were meant to be.

Broken Open: Mountains, Demons, Treadmills and a Search for Nirvana

Author: David Clark
Publisher: Independently Published
ISBN: 9781794630550
Category : Sports & Recreation
Languages : en
Pages : 408

Book Description
David Clark is a formerly obese alcoholic and fast food junkie who found a new life in running. Now, thirteen years after his transformation, he shares his inspiring story of taking running to the extreme edge of his physical and spiritual breaking points. Having run more than a hundred races, including the Leadville 100-Mile Trail Run and the Hardrock 100, David has achieved unimaginable success in the ultramarathon world, considering his humble start. From barely finishing his first 5k to running 100 miles in less than eighteen hours, David shatters the notion that the front of the pack is a birthright.Among his many outlandish adventures, David talks about doing ten epic events in one year to celebrate his tenth year of sobriety. This mind-bending year of running included running the Boston Marathon four times in one day, running 343 laps around a high school track and running 48 hours on a treadmill. You will feel like you are running alongside him as he navigates his vision quest-all the while hallucinating and breaking from reality in one of the most epic Badwater 135 race experiences ever told. David's story is raw, honest and pure adrenaline-laden inspiration as he shares his unique brand of Americana and Heavy Metal Buddhism. This book has far more to offer and than just miles travelled and mountains climbed. It's about trying to find a way station of balance somewhere in a world of extremes. It's about running to create a legacy and develop your own inner strengths. After reading Broken Open, you'll never doubt how strong you can be, how much you can endure, or whether or not you are capable of finding true happiness.

Broken Open

Author: Craig Hamilton
Publisher: Random House Australia
ISBN: 1742746233
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 273

Book Description
The true story of how ABC broadcaster Craig Hamilton stared down his demons to survive a mental breakdown. Broken Open is the story of ABC sports broadcaster Craig Hamilton and how, on the eve of the biggest undertaking of his career, he suffered a complete mental breakdown. Instead of covering the Sydney Olympics Craig was confined to a padded cell in a mental institution and later diagnosed as suffering bipolar disorder. This catastrophe not only denied Craig his place at the Games, it almost ruined his career and turned his role as devoted husband and father into a living hell. From his initial shocking breakdown to his gradual and eventual recovery, Craig sifts through the evidence to identify the warning signs that might have told him he was in serious trouble. This trail identifies a family man who could be so typical of any of us. It illustrates that mental illness is not something that just happens to other people. It is an issue much closer to home and touches many more lives than we could ever imagine.

Breaking Open the Head

Author: Daniel Pinchbeck
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 0767907434
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 320

Book Description
A dazzling work of personal travelogue and cultural criticism that ranges from the primitive to the postmodern in a quest for the promise and meaning of the psychedelic experience. While psychedelics of all sorts are demonized in America today, the visionary compounds found in plants are the spiritual sacraments of tribal cultures around the world. From the iboga of the Bwiti in Gabon, to the Mazatecs of Mexico, these plants are sacred because they awaken the mind to other levels of awareness--to a holographic vision of the universe. Breaking Open the Head is a passionate, multilayered, and sometimes rashly personal inquiry into this deep division. On one level, Daniel Pinchbeck tells the story of the encounters between the modern consciousness of the West and these sacramental substances, including such thinkers as Allen Ginsberg, Antonin Artaud, Walter Benjamin, and Terence McKenna, and a new underground of present-day ethnobotanists, chemists, psychonauts, and philosophers. It is also a scrupulous recording of the author's wide-ranging investigation with these outlaw compounds, including a thirty-hour tribal initiation in West Africa; an all-night encounter with the master shamans of the South American rain forest; and a report from a psychedelic utopia in the Black Rock Desert that is the Burning Man Festival. Breaking Open the Head is brave participatory journalism at its best, a vivid account of psychic and intellectual experiences that opened doors in the wall of Western rationalism and completed Daniel Pinchbeck's personal transformation from a jaded Manhattan journalist to shamanic initiate and grateful citizen of the cosmos.

The Church Cracked Open

Author: Stephanie Spellers
Publisher: Church Publishing, Inc.
ISBN: 1640654259
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 161

Book Description
"This book will make a profound difference for the church in this moment in history." — The Most Reverend Michael B. Curry Sometimes it takes disruption and loss to break us open and call us home to God. It’s not surprising that a global pandemic and once-in-a-generation reckoning with white supremacy—on top of decades of systemic decline—have spurred Christians everywhere to ask who we are, why God placed us here and what difference that makes to the world. In this critical yet loving book, the author explores the American story and the Episcopal story in order to find out how communities steeped in racism, establishment, and privilege can at last fall in love with Jesus, walk humbly with the most vulnerable and embody beloved community in our own broken but beautiful way. The Church Cracked Open invites us to surrender privilege and redefine church, not just for the sake of others, but for our own salvation and liberation.

Broken Open

Author: Aubrey Conley
Publisher: Bookbaby
ISBN: 9781098387563
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 132

Book Description
BROKEN OPEN is a blue print for one's self growth journey. The author has lived life changing experiences that she has learned to find the Silver-lining in all that the universe brings into her path. Aubrey's roadmap helped her seek a united friendship within herself, finding her 'soul-self.' Now she moves through life seeking JOY in every, single, day. She is sharing her revelations with you.

Peace from Broken Pieces

Author: Iyanla Vanzant
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781848504882
Category : Conduct of life
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Part metaphorical teaching story, part wrenching personal chronicle, this phoenix-rising-from-the-ashes tale is about men and money, love and work, mothers and daughters, and life and death. Learn how to put your personal puzzle together, and dare to claim the peace that you truly deserve.

Broken Open

Author: William Cope Moyers
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1616499982
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 264

Book Description
William Cope Moyers was a model of sober success. As his inspiring story of overcoming addiction was on its way to becoming a New York Times bestseller, everyone thought he had finally achieved the redemption promised by recovery—including him. But the perfect story that helped Moyers become a famous face of the recovery movement was already unraveling, revealing a yet-to-be healed chasm between his public persona and conflicted inner life. A follow-up to his 2006 memoir Broken: My Story of Addiction and Redemption, this is Moyers’s story of the ups and downs of life beyond the bright moments of early sobriety and what happened when a new crisis invaded what once seemed like a steady and secure recovery. William didn’t know something was missing until it happened. He’d been in recovery for alcohol and drugs for years. He was a recovery activist and a spokesperson for the gold standard of treatment and recovery organizations. He was a model leader and follower of Twelve Step programs. But, still, he slipped. And his slip lasted a few years. Privately, he was addicted to painkillers while publicly saying he was in recovery from alcohol and drug use. So, was he still in recovery? How could this happen to someone who did everything “right”? How did it go so wrong? With brutal honesty and introspection, William shares what happened after sobriety—after he’d published his candid and shocking memoir, Broken, in 2006. While he no longer frequented or passed out on the floor of crack houses, his life of sobriety wasn’t perfect. But his recovery was strong, or so he thought. Unfortunately, the opioid epidemic was stronger. It broke him. Broken Open could be one long story of self-justification. Instead, William takes a courageous look at the years he struggled and suffered to reclaim his recovery. He concludes by sharing the new perspectives these experiences provided. Recovery isn’t black and white. Our recovery stories aren’t things we have to live up to; they’re journeys we get to live into. All-or-nothing approaches don’t address the complications that make us human. As we continue our life journeys we learn and change and grow—and the things and people that help us sometimes change too.

Broken Open

Author: Lauren Dane
Publisher: Harlequin
ISBN: 1460343379
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 379

Book Description
Beyond passion. And beyond their control… Five years ago, Tuesday Eastwood's life collapsed and left her devastated. After an empty, nomadic existence, she's finally pieced her life back together in the small Oregon town of Hood River. Now Tuesday has everything sorted out. Just so long as men are kept for sex, and only sex… Then she met him. Musician and rancher Ezra Hurley isn't the man of Tuesday's dreams. He's a verboten fantasy—a man tortured by past addictions whose dark charisma and long, lean body promise delicious carnality. But this craving goes far beyond chemistry. It's primal. It's insatiable. And it won't be satisfied until they're both consumed, body and soul…

Heart Broken Open

Author: Ray Gaston
Publisher: Wild Goose Publications
ISBN: 1849521158
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 203

Book Description
A moving and insightful reflection by a Christian minister on his grassroots engagement with Islam - from inner-city parish ministry in Leeds to the streets of Karbala at a time of rising Islamophobia and the 'War on Terror'.