For over thirty-two years, Stephen and Ondrea Levine have provided emotional and spiritual support for those who face life-threatening illness and for their caregivers. Through their healing and forgiveness workshops, many writings, and compassionate interaction with others, they have deeply touched the lives of people throughout the world. The Healing I Took Birth For is the heartfelt sharing of Ondrea Levine's life of service. It's a deeply inspiring example of how one faces illness, great personal difficulties, spiritual practice, grace-and the spiritual unfolding from a limited sense of self into the deathless essence of pure Being. The catalyst for sharing Ondrea's story came about as a result of a medical prognosis that foretold the end of a lifetime of spiritual exploration. In this deeply touching collaboration between Ondrea and Stephen, they struggle with the heart-breaking/heart-healing task of trying to express, through the limitations of language, both Ondrea's inner experiences and the significant outward events in her life-or, as Ondrea likes to call it, a "love story." "This is the most intimate collaboration of any we have worked on," says Stephen, "It gave us an even deeper opportunity to be within each other's experience in a most remarkable way. It was nothing short of grace to be able to write this story in her first person singular. It represents part of her healing process as well as mine." "Stephen and Ondrea's teachings have served as a profound source of wisdom and inspiration for me over the years. Their work is created from a place of reverence and compassion, and as such benefits all who seek to live with a clarity, resolve and an open heart." -Rich Fernandez, Ph.D., head of Learning & Organizational Development, eBay Stephen and Ondrea Levine are the authors of more than ten books, including Who Dies, Embracing the Beloved, and A Year to Live. While they live in relative isolation in northern New Mexico, the www.LevineTalks.com website is a way for them to connect with an outside audience and continue their teaching work.
For more than 32 years, Stephen and Ondrea Levine have provided emotional and spiritual support to those who face life-threatening illness and their caregivers; deeply affecting hundreds of thousands of people in the process. The Healing I Took Birth For, which was begun after Ondrea’s own medical prognosis that foretold the end of a lifetime of spiritual exploration, is the culmination of her work. Their collaboration, in the service of the dying, especially during the height of the AIDS epidemic, set them both more deeply on the path of compassion—compassion for self, for others, for all. The Healing I Took Birth For is the heartfelt sharing of Ondrea’s life of service and a deeply inspiring example of how one faces illness and great personal difficulties, with a deep spiritual practice and grace. It is the most “intimate collaboration” she and Stephen have worked on and it will inspire readers to find their own way toward living a life of compassion.
A therapist and childbirth educator shows expectant mothers how to reconnect with the natural and spiritual worlds to make the birth experience unique and to build a spiritual connection with their children.
This unique book focuses on the healing potential of pregnancy, childbirth, and postpartum rather than on the medical aspects. In Birth as a Healing Experience: The Emotional Journey of Pregnancy Through Postpartum, you will find childbirth preparation discussed as a means to empower women and their partners in the childbirth experience.
In his groundbreaking first book, Your Soul's Plan, Robert Schwartz brought the idea of pre-birth planning into the mainstream. Now, his brilliant sequel Your Soul's Gift delves even deeper by exploring the pre-birth planning of spiritual awakening, miscarriage and abortion, caregiving, abusive relationships, sexuality, incest, adoption, poverty, suicide, rape, and mental illness. Working with a team of gifted mediums, Schwartz brings forth great love and wisdom from the other side to explain why such experiences are planned and the deep, soul-level healing they can create. Through the stories in Your Soul s Gift you can: -Develop greater self-love as you become aware of the tremendous courage it takes for you to plan a life on Earth and to live the life you planned -Emerge from victim consciousness to know yourself as the powerful creator of your life -Forgive those who have hurt you and create a lasting inner peace -Understand the qualities you came into this lifetime to cultivate and express -See profound purpose in experiences that once appeared to be meaningless suffering -Develop a heartfelt knowing of your infinite worth, beauty, magnificence, and sacredness as an eternal soul.
Would you like to understand the deeper spiritual meaning of physical illness, parenting handicapped children, drug addiction, alcoholism, the death of a loved one, accidents, deafness, and blindness? Your Soul’s Plan (which was originally published under the title Courageous Souls: Do We Plan Our Life Challenges Before Birth?) explores the premise that we are all eternal souls who plan our lives, including our greatest challenges, before we are born for the purpose of spiritual growth. Through compelling profiles of people who knowingly planned the experiences mentioned above, Your Soul’s Plan shows that suffering is not purposeless, but rather imbued with deep meaning. Working with four gifted mediums, author Robert Schwartz reveals the significance of each person’s life plan and allows us a fascinating look into the “other side.” Each personal story focuses on a specific life challenge, organized by type for easy reference. Accessible both to those familiar with the metaphysical aspects of spirituality and to the general reader, the moving narratives that comprise Your Soul’s Plan help readers awaken to the reality that they are transcendent, eternal souls. With this stirring book as a guide, feelings of anger, resentment, guilt, and victimization are healed and transformed into acceptance, forgiveness, gratitude, and peace. Robert Schwartz is also the author of Your Soul’s Gift: The Healing Power of the Life You Planned Before You Were Born, which explores the pre-birth planning of spiritual awakening, miscarriage, abortion, caregiving, abusive relationships, sexuality, incest, adoption, poverty, suicide, rape, and mental illness. There’s also a chapter about the pre-birth planning we do with our future pets. Robert Schwartz is a hypnotherapist who offers general Spiritual Guidance Sessions, Past Life Soul Regressions, and Between Lives Soul Regressions. Visit Robert online at www.yoursoulsplan.com.
This narrative history of one of the most far-reaching social movements in the 20th century shows how it defied the law and made the use of contraception an acceptable social practice—and a necessary component of modern healthcare. A History of the Birth Control Movement in America tells the extraordinary story of a group of reformers dedicated to making contraception legal, accessible, and acceptable. The engrossing tale details how Margaret Sanger's campaign beginning in 1914 to challenge anti-obscenity laws criminalizing the distribution of contraceptive information grew into one of the most far-reaching social reform movements in American history. The book opens with a discussion of the history of birth control methods and the criminalization of contraception and abortion in the 19th century. Its core, however, is an exciting narrative of the campaign in the 20th century, vividly recalling the arrests and indictments, banned publications, imprisonments, confiscations, clinic raids, mass meetings, and courtroom dramas that publicized the cause across the nation. Attention is paid to the movement's thorny alliances with medicine and eugenics and especially to its success in precipitating a profound shift in sexual attitudes that turned the use of contraception into an acceptable social and medical practice. Finally, the birth control movement is linked to court-won privacy protections and the present-day movement for reproductive rights.
An authoritative guide to natural childbirth and postpartum parenting options from an MD who home-birthed her own four children. Sarah Buckley might be called a third-wave natural birth advocate. A doctor and a mother, she approaches the question of how a woman and baby might have the most fulfilling birth experience with respect for the wisdom of both medical science and the human body. Using current medical and epidemiological research plus women's experiences (including her own), she demonstrates that what she calls "undisturbed birth" is almost always healthier and safer than high-technology approaches to birth. Her wise counsel on issues like breastfeeding and sleeping during postpartum helps extend the gentle birth experience into a gentle parenting relationship.
For more than 30 years, Yoga Journal has been helping readers achieve the balance and well-being they seek in their everyday lives. With every issue,Yoga Journal strives to inform and empower readers to make lifestyle choices that are healthy for their bodies and minds. We are dedicated to providing in-depth, thoughtful editorial on topics such as yoga, food, nutrition, fitness, wellness, travel, and fashion and beauty.
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.
