Humanity today is plagued by a loss of meaning and alienation from self and others. The result is unprecedented levels of divorce, depression, anxiety, addictions, suicide, and crime. Because societal institutions have failed to resolve these and other everyday problems, it is now the task of each individual to heal and unite their divided self: body and spirit, conscious and unconscious, feminine and masculine. Drawing on Jungian psychology and wisdom traditions from world religions, Dr. Raffa offers a self-guided journey to heightened self-awareness and compassion for oneself and others. A self-assessment tool called the Partnership Profile gives readers a personalized status report on their inner forces, including the maturity of four feminine archetypes, four masculine archetypes, and a newly emerging archetype of egalitarian partnership. This awareness, combined with suggested practices, empowers readers to address their imbalances and create the lives for which they yearn.
This is Chicken Soup for the Soul's first book about the growing world of twins and multiples. Twins, parents of multiples, relatives of twins, or anyone interested in twins, triplets, and more will enjoy these inspirational, humorous, and touching stories. Twins and multiples are all over the news these days. Co-author Susan M. Heim, a well-regarded expert on twins, has collected stories that highlight the special bond twins share, the joys and challenges of raising multiples, the multiple blessings of being a twin or having them in the family, and adventures in raising triplets and quadruplets, too! Anyone interested in twins, triples, and more, will enjoy these inspirational, humorous, and touching stories.
A modern-day Wuthering Heights from the author of international bestseller The Eighth Life. Two families, one devastating secret, and an epic story of forbidden love. Eight years have passed since Stella last saw Ivo, but when he returns, the reunion of their unconventional family will change the course of her ordinary life. As children, Stella and Ivo grew close as their parents embarked on an affair that would shatter both families. Later, as teenagers, their own relationship would be the cause of further scandal. Now, as adults, they set out on an odyssey to uncover the truth about another family’s past, and to understand their own. My Soul Twin is an intense love story about forbidden desire, the ties that bind us, and whether we can ever truly forget what we leave behind.
Book 1 of the best selling book series about Christina von Dreien – now in English translation: Christina (born 2001) is a young woman from Toggenburg, Switzerland. She was born with greatly expanded consciousness and thus belongs to a new generation of young evolutionary thinkers who recognise, describe and live human existence as a complexity of quantum physics, neuropsychology and spirituality. She has always shown remarkable insight into today's world events and one cannot help but be astonished by her high ethics, her wisdom and inner peace that hint at a new dimension of being human. Without being overchallenged in any way, Christina displays a completely natural handling of a multitude of paranormal gifts such as multi-dimensional perception, aura perception, clairvoyance, telepathy, telekinesis, contact with other levels of existence, animal and plant communication and the like. From birth, she has also been consciously connected to higher dimensional spheres and civilisations of light. A harbinger of a new stage in human evolution, Christina, together with her twin sister Elena, incarnated on Earth to spread light and peace. She says, "The lights are already here, all over the world. It just needs someone to press the 'On' button." The first book tells the story of Christina's extraordinary birth, childhood and youth up to the age of 16, from the perspective of her mother, Bernadette. For Christina, it was a time of becoming accustomed to three-dimensionality, of being trained and tested in order to prepare herself for her life's task. Christina summarises this task with the three core concepts of freedom, truth and love.
With his stunning debut novel, She's Come Undone, Wally Lamb won the adulation of critics and readers with his mesmerizing tale of one woman's painful yet triumphant journey of self-discovery. Now, this brilliantly talented writer returns with I Know This Much Is True, a heartbreaking and poignant multigenerational saga of the reproductive bonds of destruction and the powerful force of forgiveness. A masterpiece that breathtakingly tells a story of alienation and connection, power and abuse, devastation and renewal--this novel is a contemporary retelling of an ancient Hindu myth. A proud king must confront his demons to achieve salvation. Change yourself, the myth instructs, and you will inhabit a renovated world. When you're the same brother of a schizophrenic identical twin, the tricky thing about saving yourself is the blood it leaves on your bands--the little inconvenience of the look-alike corpse at your feet. And if you're into both survival of the fittest and being your brother's keeper--if you've promised your dying mother--then say so long to sleep and hello to the middle of the night. Grab a book or a beer. Get used to Letterman's gap-toothed smile of the absurd, or the view of the bedroom ceiling, or the influence of random selection. Take it from a godless insomniac. Take it from the uncrazy twin--the guy who beat the biochemical rap. Dominick Birdsey's entire life has been compromised and constricted by anger and fear, by the paranoid schizophrenic twin brother he both deeply loves and resents, and by the past they shared with their adoptive father, Ray, a spit-and-polish ex-Navy man (the five-foot-six-inch sleeping giant who snoozed upstairs weekdays in the spare room and built submarines at night), and their long-suffering mother, Concettina, a timid woman with a harelip that made her shy and self-conscious: She holds a loose fist to her face to cover her defective mouth--her perpetual apology to the world for a birth defect over which she'd had no control. Born in the waning moments of 1949 and the opening minutes of 1950, the twins are physical mirror images who grow into separate yet connected entities: the seemingly strong and protective yet fearful Dominick, his mother's watchful "monkey"; and the seemingly weak and sweet yet noble Thomas, his mother's gentle "bunny." From childhood, Dominick fights for both separation and wholeness--and ultimately self-protection--in a house of fear dominated by Ray, a bully who abuses his power over these stepsons whose biological father is a mystery. I was still afraid of his anger but saw how he punished weakness--pounced on it. Out of self-preservation I hid my fear, Dominick confesses. As for Thomas, he just never knew how to play defense. He just didn't get it. But Dominick's talent for survival comes at an enormous cost, including the breakup of his marriage to the warm, beautiful Dessa, whom he still loves. And it will be put to the ultimate test when Thomas, a Bible-spouting zealot, commits an unthinkable act that threatens the tenuous balance of both his and Dominick's lives. To save himself, Dominick must confront not only the pain of his past but the dark secrets he has locked deep within himself, and the sins of his ancestors--a quest that will lead him beyond the confines of his blue-collar New England town to the volcanic foothills of Sicily 's Mount Etna, where his ambitious and vengefully proud grandfather and a namesake Domenico Tempesta, the sostegno del famiglia, was born. Each of the stories Ma told us about Papa reinforced the message that he was the boss, that he ruled the roost, that what he said went. Searching for answers, Dominick turns to the whispers of the dead, to the pages of his grandfather's handwritten memoir, The History of Domenico Onofrio Tempesta, a Great Man from Humble Beginnings. Rendered with touches of magic realism, Domenico's fablelike tale--in which monkeys enchant and religious statues weep--becomes the old man's confession--an unwitting legacy of contrition that reveals the truth's of Domenico's life, Dominick learns that power, wrongly used, defeats the oppressor as well as the oppressed, and now, picking through the humble shards of his deconstructed life, he will search for the courage and love to forgive, to expiate his and his ancestors' transgressions, and finally to rebuild himself beyond the haunted shadow of his twin. Set against the vivid panoply of twentieth-century America and filled with richly drawn, memorable characters, this deeply moving and thoroughly satisfying novel brings to light humanity's deepest needs and fears, our aloneness, our desire for love and acceptance, our struggle to survive at all costs. Joyous, mystical, and exquisitely written, I Know This Much Is True is an extraordinary reading experience that will leave no reader untouched.
“ . . . an impressive, commanding novel about black girl magic . . . The Goddess Twins is an emotive and powerful feminist novel that inspires the innate goddess in every girl..” —Foreword Reviews “Family bonds create the magic in this stirring fantasy.” —Kirkus Reviews It’s days before your eighteenth birthday, but your mother is missing and suddenly you have supernatural powers. What are you willing to face to discover the truth of who you really are? After years of traveling the world, black identical twins Aurora and Arden think they’ve settled into normalcy in Ohio. But days before their eighteenth birthday, the snarky twins develop powers in telekinesis and telepathy―at the same time that their famous mother, who’s on tour in London, disappears. Searching for answers and determined to rescue her, the sisters unearth truths that threaten to extinguish their bond and demolish their strength as individuals. Can they trust their beguiling, newly discovered British cousins when they barely trust one another? Should they heed the warnings of their immortal grandmother, a Patoi-chatting goddess, who says she’s friendly with The Fates and can see inside a person’s very soul? In order to succeed in their quest, these goddess twins must work together, master their powers, and unveil a horrifying, century-old family mystery. Otherwise, they may not live to see eighteen―or their mother again.
What if you got a wrong memo about what God wants of you, and ran with (or against) it for years? Raffa helps you find and take joy in healing painful divides this could cause in yourself and relationships, and between values like masculine/feminine and spiritual/unspiritual in your world. She presents this process as an authentic spiritual practice--from a seasoned, progressive Christian Jungian perspective--to become wisely open-minded and open-hearted.
If you are reading this right now you have been guided here by a higher power for a reason. Nothing in life is a coincidence. Now I must warn you, this is a love story told like no other. This a not just a love story to finding your soulmate or twin flame, but the path back to finding yourself and the love within. The truth is, if you can't love yourself, who can love you in the way that you deserve to be loved? This is my personal diary as to how my entire life changed with a thirty-second hug. Yes, a hug that triggered a kundalini spiritual awakening. As I hugged this person who I had not seen in over twenty years, I felt this fireball of energy ignite within my root chakra, and within seconds that fireball of energy shot out the top of my head like a firework. I felt a burning feeling through my entire body. As he walked away to get in the truck to go home, I thought, "Why are you leaving me here? Take me home with you. I love you." Weird thought to have, considering I was married and had been with the same person for fourteen years at that time. As this person I hugged drove out of sight, I felt as if my heart had been thrown out of my chest and stabbed to death. I went back inside my house. Nothing seemed right anymore. I became very sick and tired. I felt like a completely different person. The rose-coloured glasses came off and I saw my life for what it really was. This was the beginning of my journey into the dark night of the soul. Throughout this book I explain exactly what happened to me. Everything from the kundalini spiritual awakening, spirit, chakras, telepathic communication, different soul connections, dream-sharing, astral travel, past-life regression, different types of therapy, reprocessing trauma on a soul level, healing inner-child wounds, manifestation, how to control spiritual gifts, leaving an abuse cycle and so much more. If you are currently looking outside yourself for your soulmate or twin flame, I encourage you to read my book. If you have already found your twin flame, I hope my story can help you on your journey. If you are are seeking guidance for any spiritual awakening or looking to enhance your spiritual gifts, I have tips throughout the book as to what I did to embrace my gift instead of fear it. My story may sound crazy, and to be honest when I read it I can't believe all of this stuff is actually happening to me. I admit it can be unbelievable at times, as these things can be scary. I assure you this is all 100% true-this is real, this is me. This is my story . . .
