OPEN THE DOOR TO TRANSCENDENCE In the rain forests of northern Peru, studying with shamans, a woman completes her journey of the heart. This book is the story of that journey. Great love and great loss often go hand-in-hand, looking for ways to cope with the immense challenges of losing a loved one and day-to-day survival, Connie Marshall established a connection to a non-ordinary reality, opening a portal to allowing her to transcend the inevitable crumbling of life structures and move to new levels of understanding. Face of Love is a touchingly candid memoir that takes the reader on the author's journey in search of love, self-awareness and the discovery of past lives. Philip Gardiner, Author, Gateways to the Otherworld Connie Marshall has courageously and whole-heartedly shown the way to a deeper examination of her life, providing insights and practices for all people on the path to self-discovery to consider. OH Krill, Author, Montauk Babies This is an intriguing, deeply moving story full of interesting characters and plenty of serious conflicts. The characters are well developed and come alive on the page. The drama is filled with action and dialogue. The author creates good suspense through the way she presents the anecdotes, keeping the reader anticipating what is going to happen next. Skillfully woven memories from childhood trigger similar feelings in current situations, tying everything together in a well-knit manner. William Greenleaf, Author, The Tartarus Incident, Starjacked, Clarion, The Pandora Stone and Time Jumper When a memoir manages to empower its readers, it's a sign of a tale well told. Connie Marshall's book is utterly original and vibrantly erotic: it's a time-traveling memoir tracing a woman's past and present life stories with mysterious dignity. This book chronicles the highs of true love, the lows of failed marriages and the mixed blessings of living on this earth in human form. Marshall's mesmerizing tale vividly illustrates how life's sufferings can serve as a doorway into positive transformation, compassionate action and ultimately, peace of mind. A perfect book for women of all ages -- and the men who yearn to understand them. Kyle Roderick, Managing Editor, www.findbliss.com

In The Narrow Door, Paul Lisicky creates a compelling collage of scenes and images drawn from two long-term relationships, one with a woman novelist and the other with his ex-husband, a poet. The contours of these relationships shift constantly. Denise and Paul, stretched by the demands of their writing lives, drift apart, and Paul's romance begins to falter. And the world around them is frail: environmental catastrophes like the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, natural disasters like the earthquake in Haiti, and local disturbances make an unsettling backdrop to the pressing concerns of Denise's cancer diagnosis and Paul's impending breakup. Lisicky's compassionate heart and resilience seem all the stronger in the face of such searing losses. His survival--hard-won, unsentimental, authentic--proves that in turning toward loss, we embrace life.

This book celebrates the great stripping process of aging, dying and spiritual awakening. Beautiful, poignant, at times humorous, transcendent, messy, down to earth, refreshingly honest--the book explores death, and more importantly, being alive, through a rich mix of personal stories and spiritual reflections. Joan writes about her mother's final years and about being with friends and teachers at the end of their lives. She shares her own journey with aging, anal cancer, and other life challenges. She explores what it means to be alive in what may be the collapse of civilization and the possible extinction of life on earth due to climate change. Pointing beyond deficiency stories, future fantasies, and oppressive self-improvement projects, Joan invites an awakening to the immediacy of this moment and the wonder of ordinary life. She demonstrates a pathless path of genuine transformation, seeing all of life as sacred and worthy of devotion, and finding joy in the full range of our human experience.

It is often said that that one never completely recovers from the loss of a loved one and the shock of bereavement leaves an indelible scar on one's soul that remains forever. Despite this, most bereaved people do return to living productive and meaningful lives, understanding that such pain is unavoidable and part of the human experience. However, in some cases the negative feelings and emotions do not subside over time and what psychologists refer to as "complicated grief" takes hold. This is a serious and debilitating condition that can take a toll on emotional and physical well-being. The good news is that, with appropriate help and support, even sufferers of complicated grief can transform their lives. This workbook is an essential part of the method known as "Love Knows No Death," an innovative approach to grief transformation. This counseling approach, which integrates both written and video lessons, reflects an "unbelievable truth" that the human mind, consciousness and personality do not end with the death of the physical body. In other words, your deceased love one is not, in fact, deceased. As one progresses through the workbook it becomes apparent that there is no religious agenda. The reality that we survive death is based upon established evidence and not blind faith, and the reader is encouraged to do their own reading, learning and thinking. The entire approach is based upon education and not preaching. This innovative approach to grief transformation is based upon established techniques of cognitive therapy. In other words, "The way you feel depends entirely on the way you think." When we learn to think "non-negatively" and replace negative, unrealistic and distorted thoughts with more balanced, neutral and realistic ones, dramatic results can be attained. The chapters and videos in this approach will take readers on a journey of exploration as they examine possible stumbling blocks, what really dies at death, and learn about the substantial evidence for life after life. Some of the phenomena examined include the powers of the mind, deathbed visions, near death experiences, apparitions, mediumship and instrumental trans-communication. Mental health professionals are coming to realize that patients who believe that their deceased loved ones still survive do better than those who do not believe in survival. The "Love Knows No Death" approach recognizes that vague hope or wishful thinking does not have the power to transform grief. Such transformation can only come from "knowing," which can be attained only through personal experiences, thorough examination of the evidence, and changing the way we think. Those who put the effort into diligently following this workbook may very well experience life changing effects. The "afterlife perspective," once integrated into the grieving process, will allow you to lead a better life and truly honor those who have passed before you.

A renowned Tibetan lama’s guidance for supporting your loved ones through death and for dying without fear yourself. “Helping our loved ones at the time of death is the best service we can offer them, our greatest gift. Why? Because death is the most important time of life: it’s at death that the next rebirth is determined.”—Lama Zopa Rinpoche For years Lama Zopa Rinpoche envisioned a practical book to inform students of how to help loved ones have a beneficial death. How to Face Death without Fear has been compiled from years of Rinpoche’s teachings and has been lovingly edited by Venerable Robina Courtin. Rinpoche provides detailed advice on how to help your loved ones prepare for the end of their life with courage, acceptance, and a mind free of fear. With great care, he explains what to do in the months, weeks, and days before death, how to handle the moment itself, what to do after the breath has stopped, and finally, what to do after the mind has left the body. Rinpoche provides the mantras, prayers, and meditations appropriate for each stage. This new edition of Rinpoche’s modern classic How to Enjoy Death makes it easy for the reader to find the right practice at the right time. This handbook is an essential reference for Tibetan Buddhist caregivers, hospice workers, and chaplains. But, as Rinpoche points out, it is not only for people who work with the dying; it is education we all need. You’ll find solace in this wealth of advice, and you’ll also gain the confidence to ensure that your loved one’s death—and your own—will be joyful and meaningful.

Through her selection of fourteen essays, Tess Cosslett charts the rediscovery by feminist critics of the Victorian Women Poets such as Emily Brontë, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti, and the subsequent developments as critics use a range of modern theoretical approaches to understand and promote the work of these non-canonical and marginalised poets. While the essays chosen for this volume focus on these three major figures, work is also included on less well-known poets who have only recently been brought into critical prominence. The introduction clarifies for the reader the themes, problems and preoccupations that inform the criticism and provides a useful guide to the debates surrounding poetry and feminism, investigating such questions as, how feminist are these poems, and does a women s tradition really exist? The advantages and disadvantages of applying different critical approaches, such as psychoanalytic and historicist, to the understanding of this period and genre are also fully explored.

Many things threaten the faith of youth today, but none more than science. The commitments of science and Christianity seem to be at odds—science makes truth claims based on experiments and proofs, while religion asks for belief and trust. But Andrew Root demonstrates that, in fact, the two are not incompatible. Root, a renowned expert on adolescent spirituality, shows how science overstates its claims on truth, while faith often understates its own claims. Both faith and science frame the experience and reality of teenagers, and both have something valuable to offer as adolescents develop. Drawing on a fictional account of a youth pastor and the various students he encounters, Root paints a compelling picture of how faith can flourish, even in our scientific age.

Love and Death move through this world of ours like things apart—underrunning it truly, and everywhere present, yet seeming to belong to some other mode of existence. When Death comes, breaking into the circle of our friends, words fail us, our mental machinery ceases to operate, all our little stores of wit and wisdom, our maxims, our mottoes, accumulated from daily experience, evaporate and are of no avail. These things do not seem to touch or illuminate in any effective way the strange vast Presence whose wings darken the world for us. And with Love, though in an opposite sense, it is the same. Words are of no use, all our philosophy fails—whether to account for the pain, or to fortify against the glamour, or to describe the glory of the experience. These figures, Love and Death, move through the world, like closest friends indeed, never far separate, and together dominating it in a kind of triumphant superiority; and yet like bitterest enemies, dogging each other’s footsteps, undoing each other’s work, fighting for the bodies and souls of mankind. Is it possible that at length and after ages we may attain to liberate ourselves from their overlordship—to dominate them and make them our ministers and attendants? Can we wrest them from their seeming tyranny over the human race, and from their hostility to each other? Can we persuade them to lay aside their disguise and appear to us for what they no doubt are—even the angels and messengers of a new order of existence? It is a great and difficult enterprise. Yet it is one, I think, which we of this generation cannot avoid. We can no longer turn our faces away from Death, and make as if we did not perceive his presence or hear his challenge. This age, which is learning to look the facts of Nature steadily in the face, and see through them, must also learn to face this ultimate fact and look through it. And it will surely—and perhaps only—be by allying ourselves to Love that we shall be able to do so—that we shall succeed in our endeavor. For after all it is not in the main on account of ourselves that we cherish a grudge against the ‘common enemy’ and dispute his authority, but for the sake of those we love. For ourselves we may be indifferent or acquiescent; but somehow for those others, for those divine ones who have taken our hearts into their keeping, we resent the idea that they can perish. We refuse to entertain the thought. Love in some mysterious way forbids the fear of death. Whether it be Siegfried who tramples the flaming, circle underfoot, or the Prince of Heaven who breaks his way through the enchanted thicket, or Orpheus who reaches his Eurydice even in the jaws of hell, or Hercules who wrestles with the lord of the underworld for Alcestis—the ancient instinct of mankind has declared in no uncertain tone that in this last encounter Love must vanquish.

Brazil has one of the most vibrant theater cultures in the world, home to a wide variety of theatrical expression. This collection of 15 interviews includes some of the country's most prolific creative minds--Ze Celso (Teatro Oficina), Antunes Filho, Gerald Thomas, Nos do Morro, Rudolfo Vasquez (Os Satyros), Antonio Araujo (Teatro Vertigem), Enrique Diaz (Cia do Atores) and Lia Rodrigues, to name a few--discussing their approaches to the collaborative theater process. They describe a collective creative environment in which practitioners are concerned with fundamental questions about social, cultural and artistic contexts in which productions are staged, and the interdisciplinary climate that predominated from the beginning of the 1980s.

Mrs. Louise Mallard, afflicted with a heart condition, reflects on the death of her husband from the safety of her locked room. Originally published in Vogue magazine, “The Story of an Hour” was retitled as “The Dream of an Hour,” when it was published amid much controversy under its new title a year later in St. Louis Life. “The Story of an Hour” was adapted to film in The Joy That Kills by director Tina Rathbone, which was part of a PBS anthology called American Playhouse. HarperPerennial Classics brings great works of literature to life in digital format, upholding the highest standards in ebook production and celebrating reading in all its forms. Look for more titles in the HarperPerennial Classics collection to build your digital library.