Over the past twenty years, psychotherapist and author David Richo has been gathering powerful quotations from many authors and traditions, quotations that have both given him comfort and challenged him to grow. Now, he has decided to share this very personal collection with fellow seekers. He invites each of us to use these sparks of illumination as he does, as springboards for meditation, reflection and the deepening of our spiritual life. David Richo, PhD is a retreat leader, widely read author, and psychotherapist in Santa Barbara and San Francisco. He is the author of many books, including: Catholic Means Universal: Integrating Spirituality and Religion (Crossroad, 2000) and The Sacred Heart of the World: Restoring Mystical Devotion to Our Spiritual Life (Paulist Press, 2007).

Wisdom's Way: Quotations for Contemplation

Religion & Spirituality

Human Development Books

World Wheel: One Woman's Quest for Peace

Journey with artist, Vijali Hamilton, on her global pilgrimage as she sculpts environmental stone work circling the planet, and stimulates the awakening of community with her World Wheel, Global Peace Through Art, projects. This vividly illustrated autobiography charts the course of one woman transforming a childhood of deprivation and aloneness into a love affair with the entire world. With insights drawn from her own struggles and adventures, and stunning color photographs of her artwork, Vijali urges us to find our own voice as she takes us to the four directions of the world, embracing the planet and its people as one family.

Hamilton, Vijali

Biographies & Memoirs

THE INSANITY OF NORMALITY: TOWARD UNDERSTANDING HUMAN DESTRUCTIVENESS by ARNO GRUEN According to Sigmund Freud, man is born with an innate tendency to destruction and violence; in THE INSANITY OF NORMALITY, the psychoanalyst Arno Gruen challenges that assumption, arguing instead that at the root of evil lies self-hatred, a rage originating in a self-betrayal that begins in childhood, when autonomy is surrendered in exchange for the "love" of those who wield power over us. To share in that subjugating power, we create a false self, an image of ourselves that springs from a powerful and deep-seated sense of fear. Gruen traces this pattern of adaptation and smoldering rebellion through a number of case studies, sociological phenomena - from Nazism to Reaganomics - and literary works. The insanity this attitude produces, unfortunately, goes widely unrecognized precisely because it has become the "realism" that modern society inculcates into its members. Gruen warns, however, that escape from this pattern lies not simply in rebellion, for the rebel remains emotionally tied to the object of his rebellion, but in the development of a personal autonomy. His elegant and far-reaching conclusion is that while autonomy is not easily attained, its absence proves catastrophic to both individual and society. "With compassion and conviction Dr. Gruen carefully exposes the undiagnosed and undisclosed insanity unwittingly accepted as normality... This is a text for leaders and followers, for conformists and rebels alike, for members of the healing professions who seek to repair the destructive fallout from our pursuit of normality and for all who strive for a more compassionate and saner social order." -Montague Ullman, M.D. DR. ARNO GRUEN was born in Germany and emigrated to the United States as a child in 1936. After completing his graduate studies in psychology at New York University, he trained in psychoanalysis under Theodor Reik. Dr. Gruen has held many teaching posts in this country, including seventeen years as professor of psychology at Rutgers University. Since 1979 he has lived and practiced in Switzerland. His groundbreaking first book, THE BETRAYAL OF THE SELF, was published by in 1988. THE INSANITY OF NORMALITY was first published in Germany by Kösel Verlag under the title Der Wahnsinn der Normalität-Realismus als Krankheit: eine grundlegende Theorie zur menschlichen Destruktivität. The book was first published in English in 1992.

The Insanity of Normality: Toward Understanding Human Destructiveness

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Gruen, Arno

Psychology & Counseling

In Mary Within Us, David Richo demonstrates how we have always venerated not the literal Mary but the feminine dimension of the divine that she represents and enriches. Using the titles in the Litany of Loreto with depth and reverence, this book opens a dialogue about Mary as a personification of the virtues and destiny of the human psyche, including the so far unexplored dark side. David Richo, Ph.D., M.F.T., was ordained a priest in 1966 and now works as a psychotherapist in California. He emphasizes Jungian, trans-personal, and spiritual perspectives in his work. Dr. Richo is the author many books on spirituality and human unfolding, including When Love Meets Fear, and Shadow Dance: Liberating the Power and Creativity of Your Dark Side.

Mary Within Us: A Jungian Contemplation of Her Titles and Powers

Richo, David

New Age & Spirituality

Love or power ? these are the opposing poles of a choice every child is compelled to make, very early in its life, in a drama that sets it irrevocably on its path through life. This startling new insight into a formative experience fundamental to our development is the subject of THE BETRAYAL OF THE SELF, Dr. Arno Gruen's passionately argued contribution to the psychoanalytic view of the human soul, and what distorts it into pathology. ~~~~ What happens to an infant when it learns that the love it craves from its parents is available only at the price of submission to their will? In paying this price, as Dr. Gruen found in many years of experience with his patients, the infant renounces its true, autonomous self and instead embarks on a search for power with which to manipulate the world around it-a quest that will henceforth rule its life. ~~~~ Dr. Gruen maps out the process by which this striving for power, once the fatal choice has been made, masks the child's inner emptiness, dulls its fears, and soothes its secret feelings of self-loathing. Its need for power soon bars all access to its real emotions, and corrupts all of its relationships into ones based on mastery and domination. The power-oriented world around it, which puts a premium on stoic "strength" and "invulnerability," further confirms the child in this pursuit of power, leading it on to a path of dehumanization which pervades our entire society. Thus human destructiveness and evil are not innate, but develop in a complex process of growth marked by the failure to attain autonomy. ~~~~ In contrast, Dr. Gruen defines autonomy as that state of integration in which we live in full harmony with our feelings and needs. It is a natural state of being experienced in early childhood when the infant is loved unconditionally and without the need to earn this love by the self-sacrifice of submission. It allows the child to remain vulnerable to feelings of self-doubt, helplessness, pain, and rage ? the very emotions the infant fearfully flees in its decision to betray its own self. The fear of these emotions, Dr. Gruen shows, alienates the male in particular, destroying his soul, depriving him of his ability to love, and imposing on him the need to oppress others, women especially. ~~~~ How can therapy help the patient to find the way back to health and his autonomous self? Dr. Gruen discovered the clue to the therapeutic process in the active role the patient originally played in his choice between love and power, when he took refuge in power in his flight from pain. The therapist's task in helping the patient is to teach him how to accept the vulnerability he once feared in order to recover his lost autonomy. ~~~~ By defining man's vulnerability as his strength, Dr. Gruen points the way to a psychoanalysis of personal courage and social responsibility. At the same time, by exposing the childhood split which leads man to abandon his true self, Gruen has written a powerful indictment of our modern culture which mirrors the individual's self-alienation in growing social violence and loss of humanity. ~~~~ DR. ARNO GRUEN, who was born in Germany, emigrated to the U.S. as a child in 1936. He received his psychoanalytic training at New York University, and held many teaching posts in the United States, including seventeen years as professor of psychology at Rutgers University. Since 1979 he has lived and practiced in Switzerland. He is the author of many books and papers in both German and English. His other major work available in English is his 1992 book, THE INSANITY OF NORMALITY: TOWARD UNDERSTANDING HUMAN DESTRUCTIVENESS (republished in 2007 by Human Development Books).

The Betrayal of the Self: The Fear of Autonomy in Men and Women

From the author, Dennis Rivers: In this book I look at the process of prayer with new eyes, and report on my experiments over a lifetime of reaching out, reaching in, and opening up, toward the Divine Presence that calls each of us to a deeper love, a deeper life, and a deeper creativity. Throughout the book, I feature the extraordinary fractal paintings of Vicky Brago-Mitchell to express both growth and development, on one hand, and also how in nature and the spiritual life, the smaller can express the greater, the particle can express the universe.

Prayer Evolving: Five Personal Explorations into the Future of Prayer

Self-Help

Rivers, Dennis

Self-Esteem

Why should there be a "spoken English" New Testament? The simple answer is that using a spoken English style often makes the Good News more accessible to a greater variety of people than a literary style. The English language is always evolving and changing, and every new generation of readers deserves a version of the scriptures that is accessible, understandable, and natural-sounding to them. If you've only heard or read the Bible in one of the relatively traditional translations, it might come as a surprise that the people who wrote the New Testament did not talk or write in old-fashioned language. Like most of us, they wrote in the everyday language of their own time and place. The NT writers often say unexpected, deeply challenging things, and one important way to let their words strike home is to let them speak in a normal, everyday manner. So, to be faithful to the authors of the New Testament, I am deeply convinced that the best translation should sound at least as normal when read aloud in English as their writing did when it was read aloud in their language. -- J. Webb Mealy, PhD, Bible scholar and translator

The Spoken English New Testament: A New Translation from the Greek

Mealy, J. Webb

Christian Books & Bibles

Can tragedy offer unexpected gifts? Yes, is the inspiring answer in Edie Hartshorne's beautiful NECTAR OF MEMORIES, which chronicles in poems and paintings her painful and illuminating twenty-year odyssey through grief after the senseless death of her 20-year old son. Through her courageous self-reflection, therapist Edie Hartshorne uncovers the depth of human resilience, teaching all of us that within the darkness of death and sorrow live shining jewels of wisdom and healing.

Nectar of Memories: A Journey from Grief to Gratitude

Arts & Photography

Hartshorne, Edie

Painting

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