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Meditation: Where to Begin

Full Catastrophe Living (Revised Edition): Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness

By Thich Nhat Hanh, Jon Kabat-Zinn

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The bible for secular mindfulness!

Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life

By Jon Kabat-Zinn

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A lovely poetic series of reflections to accompany Full Catastrophe Living...

Meditation For Dummies, with Audio CD

By Stephan Bodian, Dean Ornish

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A wide range of meditation practices suitable for beginners with CD...

Secular Meditation: 32 Practices for Cultivating Inner Peace, Compassion, and Joy - A Guide from the Humanist Community at Harvard

By Greg Epstein, Rick Heller

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From the meditation leader of the Humanist Mindfulness Group at Harvard University....

The Mindful Way Through Depression: Freeing Yourself from Chronic Unhappiness

By Jon Kabat-Zinn, John Teasdale, Mark Williams

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Highly recommended by many therapists, includes a helpful CD...

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Talking Back to Anxiety
  • The Anxiety and Phobia Workbook: 6th Edition

    By Edmund Bourne

  • Feel the Fear . . . and Do It Anyway

    By Susan Jeffers

  • The Mindfulness and Acceptance Workbook for Anxiety: A Guide to Breaking Free...

    By Georg H. Eifert, John P. Forsyth

  • The 10 Best Anxiety Busters: Simple Strategies To Take Control Of Your Worry

    By Margaret Wehrenberg

  • Dance of Fear: Rising Above Anxiety, Fear, and Shame to be Your Best and...

    By Harriet Lerner

Getting Better at Getting Mad

When Anger Hurts Your Relationship: 10 Simple Solutions for Couples Who Fight

By Matthew McKay, Kim Paleg

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A simple, practical books for couples...

Anger: A Message for Men

By Keith Ashford

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A good book for guys...

Dance of Anger: A Woman's Guide to Changing the Patterns of Intimate Relationships

By Harriet Lerner

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The Compassionate-Mind Guide to Managing Your Anger: Using Compassion-Focused Therapy to Calm Your Rage and Heal Your Relationships

By Paul Gilbert, Russell L Kolts

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Cultivate compassion and overcome your anger!

The Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills Workbook for Anger: Using DBT Mindfulness and Emotion Regulation Skills to Manage Anger

By Alexander L. Chapman, Kim L. Gratz, Marsha M. Linehan

In the store

Learn to use CBT for emotional regulation of your triggers and anger.

Mind

The Memoir

Article By Alison Wearing

Date: 1 Nov 2015

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Related...

Glass Castle
The Year of Magical Thinking
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Wave
Know the Night: A Memoir of Survival in the Small Hours
Honeymoon in Purdah: An Iranian Journey
Confessions of a Fairy's Daughter: Growing Up with a Gay Dad

There is a myth floating around that I’d love to deflate. The myth is this: the harder the life, the better the memoir. Before I reach for a pin and poke into the skin of that belief, however, I must pause and concede that some of the most celebrated memoirs of our day—The Glass Castle, The Year of Magical Thinking, Angela’s Ashes, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Wave, Wild—all have soul-crushing tragedy at their core. What makes these books great memoirs, though, is not the scale of the tragedies they recount, but rather the writing that has sculpted and chiselled and scraped and carved and sanded and blended and redefined and refined those stories into exquisitely wrought works of art. This behind-the-scenes work—think years of balled-up paper piling up in a corner alongside mountains of snotty Kleenexes—is often overlooked because a) who wants to talk about snotty Kleenexes, and b) it is the content of the stories that tends to get all the attention.

A couple of years ago, I published a memoir. “You think that’s something,” a surprising number of people would tell me as I signed books. “You should hear about my childhood...” Which was a statement I always found a bit odd. Akin to looking at an artist’s still life painting and commenting, “You think that’s a bowl of apples. You should see the apples at my house...”

Because here’s the thing: our stories are just apples. They may become the subject, the inspiration, the focus, the portal, the clay, the melodic line, the instrument—pick your metaphor—through which we choose to express our creative impulses, but their ability to come to life (and, ideally, to transcendence) depends not upon the apples themselves, but upon the tools, the craft, the grunt work, and the inspiration available to facilitate that elusive passage from object to art.

Last year I was a reader for the CBC Nonfiction Competition, meaning that over the course of several months I was to read and rate (in a complex system: thumbs-up or thumbs-down) about 250 essays of ten pages or less. Many, if not most, of these submissions were memoirs of some kind: stories about childhood misadventures, illness, abuse, recollections of family dinners and arguments, sketches of aging parents.

There were many excellent stories, and as I pared down my ‘thumbs-up’ stack to the requisite twelve selections, what struck me was this: the subject didn’t matter—not at all. What mattered was what the writer did with what they had. A harrowing account of a peripatetic childhood involving sixteen schools from Seattle to Siberia was no more impressive than a story about a thumbnail if the writing of the former did not have the strength to get us through one school, let alone sixteen, and the language of the latter shimmered and spiralled off the page. (By the way, this is pure invention.

There were no stories about Siberian schools or thumbnails.) There is no doubt that having a rich and interesting childhood is priceless fodder for a great memoir (read Alexandra Fuller!), but the two things aren’t as immediately interchangeable as people might assume. It isn’t the impossible hardship within the story that make it compelling, but the years of invisible work involved in transforming ‘my story’ into ‘a story,’ and the quiet carpentry of language that frames, buttresses and lifts a literary castle out of what was once an enormous slag heap.

There are more excellent memoirs than I could possibly recommend (including all of the above), but if I had to choose three that model exceptional artistry and architecture of language, they would be:

There is a Season by Patrick Lane

Know the Night: A Memoir of Survival in the Small Hours by Maria Mutch

The House with the Parapet Wall by John Terpstra

Go To Mind
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