11 Most Life Changing Books I've Read
I'm so excited to share the most life-changing books I've ever read. I've read hundreds of personal/spiritual growth books and these are the ones that have had a lasting impact and that I've found to be deeply true and meaningful in my own life.
Most of these books have a theme of healing your energy/emotions and following your intuition which are the 2 keys of my life and work now so it's cool to look back at some of the books I read years ago and see that these principles resonated with my inner being before I even knew how to embody these teachings.
11 Most Life Changing Books I've Read
- Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Anti-Diet Approach By Evelyn Tribole And Elyse Resch
- When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice For Difficult Times By Pema Chodron
- The Great Pain Deception: Faulty Medical Advice Is Making Us Worse By Steven Ozanich
- You Are The Placebo: Making Your Mind Matter By Joe Dispenza
- The Sedona Method By Hale Dwoskin
- Shambhala: The Sacred Path of The Warrior By Chogyam Trungpa
- Dear Lover: A Woman's Guide To Men, Sex and Love's Deepest Bliss By David Deida
- Taking the Leap: Freeing Ourselves from Old Habits and Fears By Pema Chodron
- The Power of Now: A Guide To Spiritual Enlightenment By Eckhart Tolle
- The Surrender Experiment: My Journey Into Life's Perfection By Michael Singer
- Awareness By Anthony De Mello
How These Books Changed My Life & Some Of My Favorite Quotes
1. Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Anti-Diet Approach By Evelyn Tribole And Elyse Resch
How this book changed my life:
- I healed my eating disorder and worrying about food 24/7 and now (and for the last several years), I feel completely free and effortless with food and my body and just trust my intuition to guide me in each moment
Read if you want to:
- Make peace with food
“Intuitive Eaters march to their inner hunger signals, and eat whatever they choose without experiencing guilt or an ethical dilemma.”
2. When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice For Difficult Times By Pema Chodron
How this book changed my life:
- My first experience hearing the wisdom that healing is in letting there be room for all emotions. It wasn't until many years later that I actually experienced this for myself but a deeper part of me knew it was true when I read it.
Read if you want to:
- Fight with life less and let there be room for all of the ebbs and flows
“Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.”
3. The Great Pain Deception: Faulty Medical Advice Is Making Us Worse By Steven Ozanich
How this book changed my life:
- I had chronic back pain for years and after reading this book, it completely disappeared!
Read if you want to:
- Open your mind to the possibility that emotions could be the root cause of many physical ailments and potentially heal any chronic physical ailments you're experiencing
"Pain and other chronic symptoms are physical manifestations of unresolved internal conflict. Symptoms surface as an instinctual mechanism for self-survival. They are messages from the inner self wanting to be heard, but ego takes center-stage, and hides the truth within the shadows of the unconscious mind: which is the body. One purpose of these physical symptoms is to keep the individual focused on his physical body, and away from surfacing emotions."
4. You Are The Placebo: Making Your Mind Matter By Joe Dispenza
How this book changed my life:
- It gave my mind proof that healing beyond belief was possible and put me back in the creator position of my life (rather than victim).
Read if you want to:
- Open to new possibilities of self-healing using your mind and emotions
“To be happy with yourself in the present moment while maintaining a dream of your future is a grand recipe for manifestation. When you feel so whole that you no longer care whether “it” will happen, that’s when amazing things materialize before your eyes. I’ve learned that being whole is the perfect state of creation. I’ve seen this time and time again in witnessing true healings in people all over the world. They feel so complete that they no longer want, no longer feel lack, and no longer try to do it themselves. They let go, and to their amazement, something greater than they are responds—and they laugh at the simplicity of the process.”
5. The Sedona Method By Hale Dwoskin
How this book changed my life:
- I realized not every emotion needs to be analyzed, fixed and dug into. Releasing can be as simple as knowing it's there and letting it drop.
Read if you want to:
- Learn a very simple method for releasing emotions
"Because we spend so much time resisting and suppressing our emotions, rather than letting them flow freely through us, welcoming or allowing an emotion to be is often all that is necessary to allow it to release."
6. Shambhala: The Sacred Path of The Warrior By Chogyam Trungpa
How this book changed my life:
- This book helped me find joy and presence in ordinary moments - simple but very life-changing.
Read if you want to:
- Discover the basic goodness and wisdom of human life
"The more you struggle to gain the upper hand, the more speed and aggression you manufacture to overcome your obstacles, the more you become subject to the phenomenal world. The real challenge is to transcend that duality altogether. It is possible to contact energy that is beyond dualism, beyond aggression—energy that is neither for you nor against you. That is the energy of drala. Drala is not a god or spirit, but fundamentally it is connecting the wisdom of your own being with the power of things as they are. If you are able to connect those two things, out of that you can discover magic in everything."
7. Dear Lover: A Woman's Guide To Men, Sex and Love's Deepest Bliss By David Deida
How this book changed my life:
- It helped me realize that letting my emotions flow freely and following my intuition is a gift for my relationship and my natural feminine superpower. It also helped me open, soften and become more present which has opened up a much deeper connection with my husband.
Read if you want to:
- Embody divine feminine energy and create more magnetic polarity with your partner.
"Express spontaneously, practice trusting emotional expression emerging from your heart. Practice offering pleasure, pain and emotions through the openness of your body spontaneously and responsively as soon as they occur, so no residue remains. You can use words to express the flow of energy moving through you but often your heart is most fully expressed through whole-body, non-verbal offerings. Show your hurt through sounds, facial expressions and whole-body gestures."
8. Taking the Leap: Freeing Ourselves from Old Habits and Fears By Pema Chodron
How this book changed my life:
- By time I read this book, I'd already learned how to release stuck energy/emotions which is the practice that changed my life more than anything. This book helped me go even deeper in that practice by explaining it in new ways and really emphasizing allowing emotions when they arise.
Read if you want to:
- Use your fear and emotional pain as a gateway to freedom and wisdom.
"The only way to ease our pain is to experience it fully. Learn to stay. Learn to stay with uneasiness, learn to stay with the tightening, learn to stay with the itch of shenpa, so that the habitual chain reaction doesn’t continue to rule our lives and the patterns that we consider unhelpful don't keep getting stronger."
9. The Power of Now: A Guide To Spiritual Enlightenment By Eckhart Tolle
How this book changed my life:
- This book gave meaning to life. I felt like I could finally understand it and feel resonance with the deeper part of me. I became soooo much more present and my awareness grew immensely after reading this book.
Read if you want to:
- Discover a deeper part of you that's peaceful, wise and eternally present
“Focus attention on the feeling inside you. Know that it is the pain-body. Accept that it is there. Don't think about it - don't let the feeling turn into thinking. Don't judge or analyze. Don't make an identity for yourself out of it. Stay present, and continue to be the observer of what is happening inside you. Become aware not only of the emotional pain but also of "the one who observes," the silent watcher. This is the power of the Now, the power of your own conscious presence. Then see what happens.”
10.The Surrender Experiment: My Journey Into Life's Perfection By Michael Singer
How this book changed my life:
- It showed me a real potential that you CAN live in a surrendered way and you CAN make peace with everything that unfolds. It led to me experimenting with surrender in my own life and realizing for myself that when I let go, life unfolds in ways far greater than I could have predicted.
Read if you want to:
- Surrender and trust what unfolds in each moment.
"When you feel pain, simply view it as energy. Just start seeing these inner experiences as energy passing through your heart and before the eye of your consciousness. Then relax. Do the opposite of contracting and closing. Relax and release. Relax your heart until you are actually face-to-face with the exact place where it hurts. Stay open and receptive so you can be present right where the tension is. You must be willing to be present right at the place of the tightness and pain, and then relax and go even deeper. This is very deep growth and transformation. But you will not want to do this. You will feel tremendous resistance to doing this, and that’s what makes it so powerful. As you relax and feel the resistance, the heart will want to pull away, to close, to protect, and to defend itself. Keep relaxing. Relax your shoulders and relax your heart. Let go and give room for the pain to pass through you. It’s just energy. Just see it as energy and let it go."
11. Awareness By Anthony De Mello
How this book changed my life:
- It helped me see through the illusion of and drop so many things I was attached to and thereby creating unecessary suffering for myself.
Read if you want to:
- Release attachments and free yourself from needing the external to feel whole inside.
“The tragedy of an attachment is that if its object is not attained it causes unhappiness. But if it is attained, it does not cause happiness – it merely causes a flash of pleasure followed by weariness, and it is always accompanied, of course, by the anxiety that you may lose the object of your attachment.”
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