Recommended Books

Spiritual Wellbeing 

   Michael Lerner: Spirit Matters

Spirit Matters is for anyone who longs to live in a world with stronger spiritual values and less emphasis on ecological destruction, material gain, and technological progress. Michael Lerner instead offers a manual on how to introduce solid and healthy spiritual values into our world culture and presents an intelligent vision of people sincerely caring for one another and our planet.

 Eckhart Tolle: A New Earth

Following on from The Power of Now, Tolle provides the spiritual framework for people to move beyond themselves in order to make this world a better, more spiritually evolved place to live. Shattering modern ideas of ego and entitlement, self and society, Tolle lifts the veil of fear that has hung over humanity during this new millennium, and shines an illuminating light that leads to happiness and health that every reader can follow.

 Menachem Ekstein: Visions of a Compassionate World

Visions of a Compassionate World is a practical guide for spiritual development that addresses the whole person: Mind, body and soul. In an age of self-discovery and search for self-awareness, this dynamic work from half a century ago brings clarity through meditation, guided imagery, psychology, and Kabbalah. With its uplifting message of universal peace, Visions of a Compassionate World reveals a spiritual path, away from ego-traps and self-centred consciousness, toward the pursuit of a more compassionate life.

This book reveals the factors contributing to the perilous state in which we find our world today. Laitman's book not only demonstrates that ego has been the basis for all suffering throughout human history but also reveals why we are subject to suffering due to our egos, and how we can turn our plight to pleasure, our troubles to opportunity. "From Chaos to Harmony" determines that we can and must collectively rise to a new level of existence and explains how we can accomplish this goal on personal, social, national and international levels.

Peaks and Valleys is a story of a young man who lives unhappily in a valley until he meets an old man who lives on a peak, and it changes his work and life forever. Initially, the young man does not realize he is talking with one the most peaceful and successful people in the world. However, through a series of conversations and experiences that occur up on peaks and down in valleys, the young man comes to make some startling discoveries. Eventually, he comes to understand how he can use the old man's remarkable principles and practical tools in good and bad times and becomes more calm and successful himself.

 

Gerald Epstein: Kabbalah for Inner Peace

Dr Gerald Epstein offers a contemporary approach to the 4,000 year-old spiritual tradition called Visionary Kabbalah. This practice weaves the wisdom of Kabbalah with short mental imagery exercises. Through this path, we discover new perspectives, create change, and open ourselves to Spirit. Epstein shows us how to conquer the inner terrorist of anxiety and self-doubt, master our financial worries, cope with physical pain, and deal with past trauma.

 


The book begins with a lengthy, austere and deeply moving personal essay about Frankl's imprisonment in Auschwitz and other concentration camps for five years and his struggle during this time to find reasons to live. The second part of the book, called "Logotherapy in a Nutshell" describes the psychotherapeutic method that Frankl pioneered as a result of his experiences in the concentration camps. Frankl argues that man's deepest desire is to search for meaning and purpose.

 

 Alex Pattakos: Prisoners of Our Thoughts

This book builds on the work of the world-renowned psychiatrist, Dr. Viktor Frankl, and extrapolates 7 key themes from his philosophies, providing a condensed and practical explanation and examples of how Frankl's concepts can be applied to finding the deeper meaning in the personal and professional challenges we face every day.


 Synchronicity: The Inner Path of Leadership

Synchronicity illustrates that leadership is about the release of human possibilities, about enabling others to break free of limits-created organizationally or self-imposed. Although this book describes the author's personal journey, it contains profound messages about organizational learning and effectiveness.

 

Nancy Kline: Time to Think - Listening to Ignite the Human Mind

The power of effective listening is recognised as the essential tool of good management. In this book, Kline describes how we can achieve this, and presents a step-by-step guide that can be used in any situation. Whether you want to have more productive meetings, solve business problems or build stronger relationships, this book offers you a new world of possibilities. 

 

Ken Robinson: The Element - How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything

The element is the point at which natural talent meets personal passion. It is here that people feel most themselves, inspired and able to achieve at their highest levels. In this ground-breaking book, world renowned creativity expert Ken Robinson identifies a crisis in education and business: whether it's a child bored in class, a disillusioned or misused employee or someone who feels frustrated but can't quite explain why, too many people don't realize what they are capable of achieving. Robinson argues that age and occupation are no barrier and explains how it is possible for each one of us to reach our element.

 

Health and Healing

Many of the books currently available today focus on the philosophy behind Kabbalah, but this book attempts to bring to a wide audience the secret of how best to create healthy, prosperous and joyous lives. Locating Kabbalah in the context of modern science, this accessible and practical guide outlines basic principles, the six keys to physical and spiritual healing and numerous exercises to help deal with specific health problems.

 

David Zulberg: The Life-Transforming Diet

This simple, practical and anything-but-boring program is more than merely a diet. It is a lifestyle that you can live with, because you are empowered to choose what to eat - and when to eat it. Based on the wisdom of Maimonides, one of the greatest Jewish sages who ever lived and the outstanding doctor of his time, the Life-Transforming Diet will give you the tools for optimum emotional and physical health, a more spiritual outlook and sustainable weight loss, no matter what your age, gender or occupation.


New Economics

David C. Korten: Agenda for a New Economy

Today's economic crisis is the worst since the Great Depression. However, as David Korten shows the steps being taken to address it including pouring trillions of dollars into bailouts for the Wall Street institutions that created the mess - do nothing to deal with the reality of a failed economic system. The financial failure now in the public spotlight is only the tip of the iceberg. The system's social and environmental failures are even more destructive. Putting patches on a failed system is like treating a cancer with band-aids. Korten argues that by changing our economic priorities, measures of success, marketplace rules, power structures, sources of financing, and even the very way we create money, we can build a new economy that generates real wealth instead of phantom wealth.

 

John Lanchester: Whoops! Why everyone owes everyone and no one can pay

In 2000, the total GDP of Earth was $36 trillion. At the start of 2007 it was $70 trillion. Today that growth has gone suddenly and sharply into decline, with an effect roughly resembling that of putting a car into reverse while doing seventy down a motorway. John Lanchester travels with a cast of characters - including reckless banksters, snoozing regulators, complacent politicians, predatory lenders, credit-drunk spendthrifts, and innocent bystanders to understand deeply and genuinely what is happening and why we feel the way we do.

Laitman introduces several extraordinary concepts that weave into a complete solution: the crisis is essentially not financial, but psychological: people have stopped trusting each other, and where there is no trust there is no trade, but only war, isolation, and pain. This mistrust is a result of a natural process that's been evolving for millennia and is culminating today. To resolve the crisis, we must first understand the process that created the alienation.
 


We're always too busy...we try to find happiness through consumption...our communities are dying...where on earth are we going? We have wealth that would have seemed inconceivable to previous generations, but many people find life in the modern world deeply unsatisfying. Richard Docwra examines this paradox: he looks beneath the surface to explore a number of ways in which our lives and our views are affected by the modern world. He identifies some common causes of our malaise, including our society's obsession with economic growth and our lack of appropriate mental tools to equip us for life in the modern world and examines the steps we can take to move towards a better future as a society, and gain more freedom, happiness and fulfilment in our individual lives.

 

Social Entrepreneurship

When Andrew Mawson arrived in Bromley-by-Bow in the east end of London, in the 1980s, it was in a state of social, economic and material disrepair. Living there, getting to know the residents and institutions, he soon realized that by unlocking its untapped potential, the community could begin to turn itself around. The result: the Bromley-by-Bow Centre has encouraged literacy, housing, business, health, welfare and enterprise in the area to flourish. Mawson has succeeded where the government and others have failed. His inspiring book demonstrates how, by seeking creative, dynamic, entrepreneurial ways of tackling seemingly intractable social problems, we can all make real changes in our communities.

Over the last two decades, free markets have swept the globe, bringing with them enormous potential for positive change. But traditional capitalism cannot solve problems like inequality and poverty, because it is hampered by a narrow view of human nature in which people are one-dimensional beings concerned only with profit. In fact, human beings have many other drives and passions, including the spiritual, the social and the altruistic. "Creating a World Without Poverty" tells the stories of some of the earliest examples of social business. It reveals the next phase in a hopeful economic and social revolution that is already under way - unleashing the productive energy of every human being.

Christopher Gergen and Gregg Vanourek: Life Entrepreneurs - Ordinary People Creating Extraordinary Lives

A new generation of "life entrepreneurs" is emerging: people who apply their vision, talents, creativity, and energy not only to their work but to their entire lives, changing the world for themselves and those around them. This book starts by providing strategies for integrating life, work, and purpose and ends by capturing the implications of the current entrepreneurial boom for our workplaces, learning institutions, communities, and families.

 

You don't have to be Jewish...

Marvin J.Shaw: Kosher Happiness - A 12-Step Programme to Reveal and Release Your Inner Potential

The author, Marvin J Shaw is a person of unusual insight and sensitivity and it is this, together with his wide knowledge of Judaism, Psychology, Colour Therapy and Kabbalah that has driven him to write this quite remarkable book.  As a keen observer of the often seemingly insurmountable pressures that beset us all in this age of stress, he has produced what can only be described as a life-line to the many seeking to ameliorate the difficulties in their lives. Kosher Happiness is more than just a book; it is a life programme as it covers, in the twelve months of the Jewish year, every aspect of religious and emotional existence.