Kiera Van Gelder's first suicide attempt at the age of twelve marked the onset of her struggles with drug addiction, depression, post-traumatic stress, self-harm, and chaotic romantic relationships-all of which eventually led to doctors' belated diagnosis of borderline personality disorder twenty years later. The Buddha and the Borderline is a window into this mysterious and debilitating condition, an unblinking portrayal of one woman's fight against the emotional devastation of borderline personality disorder. This haunting, intimate memoir chronicles both the devastating period that led to Kiera's eventual diagnosis and her inspirational recovery through therapy, Buddhist spirituality, and a few online dates gone wrong. Kiera's story sheds light on the private struggle to transform suffering into compassion for herself and others, and is essential reading for all seeking to understand what it truly means to recover and reclaim the desire to live.

By the first day of kindergarten, Olga Trujillo had already survived years of abuse and violent rape at the hands of her tyrannical father. Over the next ten years, she would develop the ability to numb herself to the constant abuse by splitting into distinct mental “parts.” Dissociative identity disorder (DID) had begun to take hold, protecting Olga’s mind from the tragic realities of her childhood. In The Sum of My Parts, Olga reveals her life story for the first time, chronicling her heroic journey from survivor to advocate and her remarkable recovery from DID. Formerly known as multiple personality disorder, DID is defined by the presence of two or more identities. In this riveting story, Olga struggles to unearth memories from her childhood, and parallel identities—Olga at five years old, Olga at thirteen—come forth and demand to be healed. This brave, unforgettable memoir charts the author’s triumph over the most devastating conditions and will inspire anyone whose life has been affected by trauma.

Let's face it: life gives you plenty of reasons to get angry, sad, scared, and frustrated-and those feelings are okay. But sometimes it can feel like your emotions are taking over, spinning out of control with a mind of their own. To make matters worse, these overwhelming emotions might be interfering with school, causing trouble in your relationships, and preventing you from living a happier life. Don't Let Your Emotions Run Your Life for Teens is a workbook that can help. In this book, you'll find new ways of managing your feelings so that you'll be ready to handle anything life sends your way. Based in dialectical behavior therapy (DBT), a type of therapy designed to help people who have a hard time handling their intense emotions, this workbook helps you learn the skills you need to ride the ups and downs of life with grace and confidence. This book offers easy techniques to help you: •Stay calm and mindful in difficult situations •Effectively manage out-of-control emotions •Reduce the pain of intense emotions •Get along with family and friends

Difficult emotions like anger, fear, sadness, guilt, and shame are part of being alive and are meant to help protect us, but when they get out of control, these emotions can also cause severe pain. When you're in the grip of an emotional storm, it's all too easy to overreact, lash out at others, or become angry with yourself. Therapists created dialectical behavior therapy, or DBT, to help people with overwhelming emotions calm themselves when their feelings become too painful or out of control. The Dialectical Behavior Therapy Diary presents an overview of each of the four DBT skills-distress tolerance, mindfulness, emotion regulation, and interpersonal effectiveness-and includes a journal you can use each day to monitor your successes, chart your progress, and stay on track making productive changes in your life. With this diary, you can: •Learn over twenty techniques to use when you feel overwhelmed •Observe and record your progress each day •Find out which coping strategies work best for you •Discover nutrition and lifestyle changes that can make you feel better

When you have difficulties managing your emotions, it can feel like you’re losing control of your whole life. Anger, hurt, grief, worry, and other intense feelings can be overwhelming, and how you react to these emotions can impact your ability to maintain relationships, succeed at work, or even think straight! If you find it difficult to understand, express, and process intense emotions—and most of us do—this book is for you. Calming the Emotional Storm is your guide to coping with difficult emotions calmly and responsibly by using powerful skills from dialectical behavior therapy. This method combines cognitive behavioral techniques with mindfulness practices to change the way you respond to stressful situations. By practicing these skills, you can stop needless emotional suffering and develop the inner resilience that will help you weather any emotional storm. This book will teach you how to: • Establish a balanced life for an everyday sense of well-being • Let go of unwanted worries and fears • Become better at accepting yourself and others • Work through a crisis without letting emotions take over

This is an excellent guide to Hanif Kureishi's ground-breaking novel. It features a biography of the author (including an in-depth interview with Kureishi), a full-length analysis of the novel, and a great deal more. If you're studying this novel, reading it for your book club, or if you simply want to know more about it, you'll find this guide informative and helpful. This is part of a new series of guides to contemporary novels. The aim of the series is to give readers accessible and informative introductions to some of the most popular, most acclaimed and most influential novels of recent years - from ‘The Remains of the Day' to ‘White Teeth'. A team of contemporary fiction scholars from both sides of the Atlantic has been assembled to provide a thorough and readable analysis of each of the novels in question.

Awakening To Me is the Category Winner in 2014 The Indie Spiritual Book Awards, and 2015 Pinnacle Book Achievement Awards. It is a story of personal metamorphosis, written over the course of several years in real time as life unfolded and lessons were learned. It is a work of naked truth about Kerri Hummingbird's struggles with borderline personality disorder, recovering from divorce after a 20 year marriage, and seeking love from outside herself. The story documents how alternative healing methods (shamanic energy medicine and reiki) and mindfulness practices (Yoga and Toltec wisdom) led to an amazing transformation that arguably negates the former psychological diagnosis. Kerri shares her story so that others may witness that with dedication, faith, and a willingness to shine a light into the shadows, challenges can be overcome and lasting inner peace and self-love can be cultivated. Let Kerri's story and her heartfelt recommendations for self-help inspire you to begin your own journey of healing. "Kerri's raw courage and vulnerable transparency blaze a trail for any woman on a healing journey. Awakening to Me is a magnificent book that takes us behind the scenes of transformation, and shows how even the most difficult situations can be the fodder for finding oneself. Let Kerri's book guide you to find your independence and self-love." — HeatherAsh Amara, author of The Toltec Path of Transformation and Warrior Goddess Training "In Awakening To Me, Kerri shares her intimate and difficult personal and spiritual journey to identify and express her authentic being into the world. Her story is engaging, sometimes disturbing, yet with a clear underlying thread of compassion for herself and others also engaged in their own struggle with borderline personality disorder. In her words, she seeks to give voice to those who have no voice. Her life voyage takes her through light and darkness, to amazing heights and agonizing lows. In her world travels she meets with some of the teachers who have helped shape the views of spiritual development for a generation. Each has something to share with her that may shed light upon your own path, as well. It has been my pleasure and honor to walk with Kerri through some of her journey. I heartily recommend this book to you as a tool for your own amazing self-exploration. Among these pages you will find a courageous and dedicated explorer of life and spirit." — Gerry Starnes, M.Ed, author of Spirit Paths: The Quest for Authenticity “This powerful book intensely and beautifully expresses the internal world of someone with Borderline Personality Disorder. The author takes us on a tour of her internal emotional world: the depths of despair, the emptiness, and frantic efforts to find love. Ms. Hummingbird takes us with her on the journey toward internal independence and core stability – what works and what doesn’t. From her personal work she provides suggestions, exercises and quotes. This book will be of profound use to anyone with this diagnosis, their family members, therapists and allies. In fact, I’d also recommend it for those diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder or who have symptoms of Bipolar Disorder. But, in truth, we can all benefit from reading this book. Awakening to Me is an invitation to self-honesty, persistence in seeking meaningful help, and the long work of sustained effort. This book is well written and well organized but it is the author’s honesty and insight that makes it powerful. Her emotions and thoughts, the related beliefs are clearly described. These are in turn related to events in Ms. Hummingbird's history, into present relationships and dynamics in a manner that doesn’t lose the reader in her internal world. Instead, we understand ourselves better, our friends and family members. We understand better what it means to be human.” — Category Judge, Indie Spiritual Book Awards 2014

A warm and stimulating book, this text describes the India into which the Buddha was born, recounts what is known of his life and the development of his teachings, and then follows the course of Buddhism through succeeding centuries in India and Sri Lanka. Far from being a recluse concerned only with an inner mystical experience, the Buddha always involved himself closely in the social and political world of his time. If he preached detachment from many of the things by which ordinary men are tied, he did so as a means of enriching life rather than escaping it. These examinations and more make this a book to reveal the social-revolutionary potential of Buddhism.

A corrective to the contemporary idea that Buddhism has always been an environmentally friendly religion In the current popular imagination, Buddhism is often understood to be a religion intrinsically concerned with the environment. The Dharma, the name given to Buddhist teachings by Buddhists, states that all things are interconnected. Therefore, Buddhists are perceived as extending compassion beyond people and animals to include plants and the earth itself out of a concern for the total living environment. In The Buddha's Footprint, Johan Elverskog contends that only by jettisoning this contemporary image of Buddhism as a purely ascetic and apolitical tradition of contemplation can we see the true nature of the Dharma. According to Elverskog, Buddhism is, in fact, an expansive religious and political system premised on generating wealth through the exploitation of natural resources. Elverskog surveys the expansion of Buddhism across Asia in the period between 500 BCE and 1500 CE, when Buddhist institutions were built from Iran and Azerbaijan in the west, to Kazakhstan and Siberia in the north, Japan in the east, and Sri Lanka and Indonesia in the south. He examines the prosperity theology at the heart of the Dharma that declared riches to be a sign of good karma and the means by which spritiual status could be elevated through donations bequeathed to Buddhist institutions. He demonstrates how this scriptural tradition propelled Buddhists to seek wealth and power across Asia and to exploit both the people and the environment. Elverskog shows the ways in which Buddhist expansion not only entailed the displacement of local gods and myths with those of the Dharma—as was the case with Christianity and Islam—but also involved fundamentally transforming earlier social and political structures and networks of economic exchange. The Buddha's Footprint argues that the institutionalization of the Dharma was intimately connected to agricultural expansion, resource extraction, deforestation, urbanization, and the monumentalization of Buddhism itself.

Is there more to Buddhism than sitting in silent meditation? Is modern Buddhism relevant to the problems of daily life? Does it empower individuals to transform their lives? Or has Buddhism become too detached, so still and quiet that the Buddha has fallen asleep? Waking the Buddha tells the story of the Soka Gakkai International, the largest, most dynamic Buddhist movement in the world today—and one that is waking up and shaking up Buddhism so it can truly work in ordinary people’s lives. Drawing on his long personal experience as a Buddhist teacher, journalist, and editor, Clark Strand offers broad insight into how and why the Soka Gakkai, with its commitment to social justice and its egalitarian approach, has become a role model, not only for other schools of Buddhism, but for other religions as well. Readers will be inspired by the struggles and triumphs of the Soka Gakkai’s three founding presidents—individuals who staked their lives on the teachings of the Lotus Sutra and the extraordinary power of those teachings to help people become happy.