See our other Year in Review Guides:
Theravada/Pali/Insight | Zen and Chan | Tibetan Buddhism
Yoga | Personal Development | Kids Books
We are very happy to share with you a look back at our 2022 books for those who practice in the Personal Development.
Jump to: Excerpts, Reader Guides, Videos & Articles | Books | Card Decks | Audiobooks | Forthcoming in 2023
Getting The Inner Critic - An from Ready by David Richo
In the Face of Violence: A Reader's Guide to Navigating the News
Relationships as a Spiritual Practice - A Q&A with David Richo
Stepping into the Unknown - An Excerpt from Trust the Process by Shaun McNiff
Positive Interventions Through Yoga - An Excerpt from Yoga for Times of Change by Nina Zolotow
Dominic Liber on his book Diving in the Inner ocean - in Conversation with Shambhala Publications
The Happiness Trap: How to Stop Struggling and Start Living
With 50% new material
By Russ Harris
Free yourself from depression, anxiety, and insecurity, and instead build a rich and meaningful life with the updated and expanded edition of the world’s best-selling guide to Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT).
One million copies sold!
In The Happiness Trap, Dr. Russ Harris provides a means to escape the epidemic of stress, anxiety, and depression, unlocking the secrets to a truly fulfilling life.
Updated and expanded by fifty percent in its second edition, this empowering book presents the insights and techniques of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), covering more topics and providing more practical tools than ever before. Learn how to clarify your values, develop self-compassion, and find true satisfaction with this bigger and better guide to:
- Reducing stress and worry
- Handling painful thoughts and feelings more effectively
- Breaking self-defeating habits
- Overcoming insecurity and self-doubt
- Building better relationships
- Improving performance and finding fulfilment at work
New topics include activating self-compassion; how to deal with loneliness, grief, and trauma; how to work with difficult behaviors like people-pleasing, perfectionism, and procrastination; and how to make difficult decisions.
The Happiness Trap is for everyone. Whether you’re lacking confidence, facing illness, coping with loss, working in a high-stress job, or suffering from anxiety or depression, this book will show you how to build authentic happiness, from the inside out.
Pause, Rest, Be: Stillness Practices for Courage in Times of Change
By Octavia F. Raheem
Restoring your body, mind, and spirit amid change is an act of courage, empowerment, and hope. This warm, powerful guide will help you honor the changes and spaces in your life with purposeful rest and reflection.
If you're trying to push your way through endings, beginnings, and places of uncertainty, only to find yourself more confused, disconnected, tired, and uncertain, this book will hold and fortify you. Yoga teacher and activist Octavia Raheem offers us the motivation and guidance we need to restore ourselves in the midst of all sorts of change. Change in our lives—whether it be welcome, joyful, challenging, or more subtle—presents us with the opportunity to pause and gather our energy to work with whatever lies ahead.
Drawing wisdom from yoga philosophy and her many years of teaching experience, Raheem offers us the motivation and guidance we need to restore ourselves in the midst of all types of change. She gives us three simple restorative yoga poses (savasana, side lying pose, and child’s pose), and offers short teachings, reflections, and practices to see us through times of ending, beginning, and liminal/transitional space. She shows us how slowing down, stillness, and deeper connection to our own transitions empower us to move through collective shifts with more grace—and what it means to navigate shifts and change with presence and courage.
Work, Parent, Thrive: 12 Science-Backed Strategies to Ditch Guilt, Manage Overwhelm, and Grow Connection (When Everything Feels Like Too Much)
By Yael Schonbrun
Working parenthood can be overwhelming, frustrating, and riddled with guilt. It can also be a source of joy, inspiration, and creativity. Balancing rich scientific research with friendly, supportive tips and anecdotes, Yael Schonbrun offers a toolkit to help even the most stressed of working parents grow the good while better managing inevitable challenges. She banishes the idea that the key to ultimate working parenthood is the ability to do it all. Instead, the key is to learn how these roles, together, can help you thrive!
Read an interview with Yael on ParentData>>
Emotionally Resilient Tweens and Teens: Empowering Your Kids to Navigate Bullying, Teasing, and Social Exclusion
By Kim John Payne and Luis Fernando Llosa
The tween and teen years are rife with intense social challenges in school, friendships, sports, and other activities where instances of teasing, bullying, social exclusion, and marginalization are unfortunately all too common. Social media has only made this behavior easier and more insidious. Emotionally Resilient Tweens and Teens gives parents vital, proactive strategies to help build strong family relationships that foster trust and connection so that kids can be better prepared for the inevitable social challenges life brings.
Kim John Payne, a leading education consultant and parenting expert, and Luis Fernando Llosa, a writer and longtime sports coach, offer guidance and practical advice to parents, along with ten inspirational stories by young adults who have navigated bullying, teasing, and social exclusion—and triumphed. This book is essential reading for parents and caregivers, educators, coaches, and anyone working with teenagers.
The Self-Talk Workout: Six Science-Backed Strategies to Dissolve Self-Criticism and Transform the Voice in Your Head
By Rachel Goldsmith Turow
Self-talk matters, but what methods of building healthy self-talk actually work? Perhaps you want to be nicer to yourself but don’t really know how to get there. Or maybe you’re someone who assumes self-criticism is a permanent part of your personality. Rest assured that you’re not alone—millions of people struggle with the toll that excessive self-criticism takes on their minds, energy levels, jobs, and relationships. After over twenty years of working with individuals and groups on self-criticism and related challenges, psychologist and mindfulness teacher Dr. Rachel Goldsmith Turow offers the “self-talk workout”—six evidence-based techniques to go from being your own worst critic to your own best friend.
Body Astrology: A Cosmic Guide to Health, Healing, and Harnessing the Power of the Planets
By Claire Gallagher and illustrated by Caitlin Keegan
Let the planets be your guide to reestablish trust in your own body and inner wisdom.
Your astrological makeup is like a window into how your unique body works. Because astrology, life, and the body are constantly changing, Body Astrology goes beyond the basics, teaching you how to interpret your birth chart and craft a whole-body daily and seasonal practice to match.
Recognizing cosmic patterns can help reconnect you with your authentic preferences so you can create a unique daily routine that is tailored to your needs. Nutritionist, certified strength and conditioning specialist, and astrologer Claire Gallagher guides you in the healing powers of each planet and how to use food, movement, and lifestyle to realign and empower. Her integrative and intuitive full-body approach puts the wellness industry on mute so you can have confidence in your own self-directed health choices. You will learn how to:
- Interpret the pivotal pieces of your chart—the Sun, Moon, and rising signs—and how they influence your daily routine
- Understand the dynamics between the elements, signs, and planets and use healing tools to rebalance, restore, or raise you out of a celestial rut
Explore how movement and food needs change throughout the month with lunar cycles and throughout the year (and beyond!) with solar and other planetary cycles.
Returning the Self to Nature: Undoing Our Collective Narcissism and Healing Our Planet
By Jeanine M. Canty
Using the lens of ecopsychology, Returning the Self to Nature shows that the pervasive and extreme forms of narcissism we find in many modern societies are fundamentally the result of alienation from the natural world. But it doesn't have to be that way.
Returning the Self to Nature is written for the person who no longer wishes to function in a world that revolves around selfish, disconnected identity models and yearns to step into healthy relationships with one’s self, one’s community, and our planet.
Seeing the suffering of the planet and that of humans as inseparably linked—the ecological crisis as psychological crisis, and vice versa—opens the door to a mutuality of healing between people and nature. At the heart of both chronic and acute forms of narcissism is a socially constructed false self—an isolated, damaged ego in a delusional cycle of selfishness.
Through unflinching analysis and meditation practices that encourage visualizing and embodying the wild naturalness of being human, the reader will gain skills to begin experiencing a courageous, pluralistic, and ecological self. This book is an invitation to wake up from the dream of the false self and join the movement toward social and planetary healing.
Luminous Darkness: An Engaged Buddhist Approach to Embracing the Unknown
By Deborah Eden Tull
A resonant call to explore the darkness in life, in nature, and in consciousness—including difficult emotions like uncertainty, grief, fear, and xenophobia—through teachings, embodied meditations, and mindful inquiry that provide us with a powerful path to healing.
Darkness is deeply misunderstood in today’s world, yet it offers powerful medicine, serenity, strength, healing, and regeneration. All insight, vision, creativity, and revelation arise from darkness. It is through learning to stay present and meet the dark with curiosity rather than judgment that we connect to an unwavering light within. Welcoming darkness with curiosity, rather than fear or judgment, enables us to access our innate capacity for compassion and collective healing.
Dharma teacher, shamanic practitioner, and deep ecologist Deborah Eden Tull addresses the spiritual, ecological, psychological, and interpersonal ramifications of our bias towards light.
Tull explores the medicine of darkness for personal and collective healing through topics such as:
- Befriending the Night: The Radiant Teachings of Darkness
- Honoring Our Pain for Our World
- Seeing in the Dark: The Quiet Power of Receptivity
- Dreams, Possibility, and Moral Imagination
- Releasing Fear—Embracing Emergence
Tull shows us how the labeling of darkness as “negative” becomes a collective excuse to justify avoiding everything that makes us uncomfortable: racism, spiritual bypass, environmental destruction. We can only find the radical path to wholeness by learning to embrace the interplay of both darkness and light.
Ready: How to Know When to Go and When to Stay
By David Richo
The guide to finding your perfect timing for life’s biggest decisions—whether to stay or go in relationships, jobs, locations, and everything that matters most.
Do we stay in what we know? Or is it the right time to leave and make a change? In more than 50 years as a psychotherapist David Richo has been asked versions of this question more than any other, coaching countless people of all ages through agonizing decisions related to their partnerships, their career, their home, their faith. In Ready, he shares the deep wisdom we need to make these decisions—and feel confident in following through. The book looks at the mystery of timing, why we stay too long, why we leave too soon, and what it feels like when the timing is right.
Richo shows that readiness is about more than just making a choice. Being ready means we understand ourselves deeply—we are prepared to take action (and staying is an action!), and we are equipped with what it takes to follow through. Filled with relatable stories and helpful practices, including meditation, self-inquiry, journaling, and affirmations, Ready helps us understand our own perfect timing to stay or to go.
The Art of Money Workbook: A Three-Step Plan to Transform Your Relationship with Money
By Bari Tessler
The first-of-its-kind workbook that uses three easy steps to repair your relationship with money, from financial therapist Bari Tessler.
Few things in life can feel as stressful and daunting as money and finances—get ready for that to change. The Art of Money Workbook offers an empowering new framework to create sustainable change and strengthen your relationship with money.
Tessler offers a program that integrates practical financial tools with supportive somatic practices to bring more compassion, honesty, and awareness to your relationship with money. Her three-phase process—Money Healing, Money Practices, and Money Maps—will help you make choices that reflect your values, become aware of spending patterns, and create new financial habits. This workbook offers self-reflective exercises and tools that will encourage you to write your own money memoir, set regular money dates (with yourself and/or your partner), and plan for the future.
Bari Tessler is a warm, compassionate guide with a Masters Degree in Somatic Psychology—and for over twenty years, her Art of Money methodology has helped thousands of people understand and navigate their financial life. Her gentle encouragement and practical tools will offer you new avenues for creativity and joy with an abundance of support.
New in Paperback
What We Say Matters: Practicing Nonviolent Communication
By Ike K. Lasater and Judith Hanson Lasater
Learn how to communicate with compassion and choose language that reflects your personal values and aims with this essential guide to Nonviolent Communication (NVC). Judith Hanson Lasater and Ike Lasater, longtime students of yoga and Buddhism, had studied the concepts of satya (truth) and the Buddhist principle of right speech for years, but it was not until they began practicing Marshall Rosenberg’s techniques of NVC that the concept of speech as a spiritual practice became real for them.
Here the authors describe their personal journey through NVC and reveal how speech becomes a spiritual practice when you give and receive with compassion all the time—at home, at work, and in the world. They introduce the basics of NVC with clear explanations, personal examples, exercises, and resources. Some of the skills you’ll learn include how to:
- Extend empathy to yourself and others
- Distinguish between feelings and needs
- Make requests rather than demands
- Choose connection over conflict
- Create mutually satisfying outcomes
And much more
The Color Meditation Deck: 500+ Prompts to Explore Watercolor and Spark Your Creativity
By Lisa Solomon
Unleash your creative expression with open-ended watercolor prompts from the author of A Field Guide to Color.
With 62 cards, The Color Meditation Deck offers over 500 potential combinations for endless color meditation opportunities. This deck gives you the mental space to concentrate on the act of creating itself instead of the anxiety that facing a blank page can give. It also adds a layer of surprise and challenge, helping you to break out of “creator’s block” and find fresh inspiration.
Draw a color meditation card (such as “Triangles”) and a parameter card (such as “Limited Palette”), grab your watercolors and paper, and get creative! Paint triangles in rows using red, yellow, and green. Or paint them in a star-shaped pattern. Or paint them willy-nilly across the page in all different sizes (equilateral? isosceles?). You can begin with the full-strength colors and then slowly add in white to tint them lighter each row. The options are endless and it’s totally up to you! You can do quick versions in 5–10 minutes or really slow down and paint for as long as you’d like.
Whether you are an experienced artist or just getting started, these cards will not only lead you to a new relationship with paint and color but will offer a meditative break that can open you up for ideas and inspiration in all areas of your life. With a booklet on basic color theory, materials, and suggestions for how to get started, the deck stands on its own—it is also a perfect companion for fans of A Field Guide to Color who are looking for more color meditations. The package offers a beautiful and colorful cigar-style box with magnetic closure.
The Untamed Elemental: A 52-Card Oracle Deck and Guidebook
By Tasya van Ree
A strikingly original oracle deck from celebrated abstract artist Tasya van Ree, featuring 52 bold representations of animals and earth elements to help you unlock cosmic truths, channel your intuition, and align yourself with the natural wisdom of the earth.
Inspired by the elements of Mother Earth, each card reveals an opportunity for self-discovery, awakening, and a celebration of the mystery and wonder of life. Organized by the five elements—Earth, Water, Air, Fire, and Ether—this deck invites you into a sacred ritual to connect your body, mind, and spirit to the rhythm of the seasons and offers insightful ways to bring imbalances into a state of healing and wholeness.
The Untamed Elemental box contains:
- 52 color cards with original modernist abstract designs by Tasya van Ree along with explanations and contemplative practices for each element
- A color instructional booklet with information on how to integrate the deck into your daily life
- A beautifully designed box for storage with ribbon lift for the cards and magnetic enclosure
Meditate on the Moon card for devotion, stability, and immortality. Draw the Wolf card to awaken your wildness, maternal power, and will to survive. Or contemplate the Storm card, which connects you to your ability to be resilient in the face of transition. Your soul knows the way already. Allow The Untamed Elemental to be your guide.
The Wild and Sacred Feminine Deck: A 52-Card Oracle and Guidebook
By Niki Dewart and Elizabeth Marglin, illustrated by Jenny Kostecki-Shaw
Gorgeously illustrated 52-card deck and guidebook with empowering archetypes of the sacred feminine to amplify your innate knowing and invigorate your potential.
Within you lives the wild and sacred feminine. Invoke her empowering wisdom through cards separated into four facets—Wild (Butterfly, Lioness), Elemental (Mountain, Smoke), Archetypal (Muse, Shapeshifter), and Divine (Inanna, Oshun). Also included is a full-color guidebook, which offers ideas for single-card draws and unique multi-card spreads along with inspiring quotations and an open-ended exploration of each card’s light and shadow aspects. May this deck reveal an exquisite aliveness, where everything is held sacred and nothing is held back.
Honoring the potent and tumultuous time we live in, this insightful oracle deck is an invocation of the sacred feminine and a source of insight for clarity, confirmation, and guidance. The feminine creates and transforms, adapts and abides, loves and consoles. Your own potential is reflected in her many faces.
