One of my mother's favorite lines is "if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all." The principle still rings true, but there's a difference between being nice and being taken advantage of. We sometimes find it difficult to say no. Whatever the reason we can't say no, I'm here to tell us that we can. We can change our situations if we determine that we are ready to. If you are ready for change, I hope that you will engross yourself on this journey of finding your voice.This workbook is meant for anyone who feels beaten down by life. Jesus knows all about you. He is calling you to draw closer to Him and receive His Spirit. He will fill you with a boldness that you have never known (Ephesians 1:18). He already gave you the strength to go through this process (Isaiah 41:10). You are never alone. God is everything you need.During this process, God will reveal things to us that we couldn't see before. We all have mountaintop and valley experiences. He promises to be with us through them all. This workbook will also help us to understand the people around us but use this workbook to understand you first. We need to be able to heal in order to help others.Voices Lost, Spirit Found takes you through a journey of discovering some reasons for repressed emotions. Revealing some unhealthy coping mechanisms is the next step. The final step is to give some healthy coping mechanisms to replace the unhealthy ones. I know you don't like where you are because you're looking for answers. I pray you find the answers through this workbook and prayer. This workbook gives you food for thought and space for your own thoughts and prayers.

At age twenty-six, author Michelle L. Whitlock thought she had it all: her health, a promising career, and a budding new romance. Then she learned that she had HPV, and weeks later her worst nightmare became her reality: she was diagnosed with invasive cervical cancer. Adamant to preserve her fertility, she refused a radical hysterectomy and chose a less extreme, fertility-saving procedure. The surgery was a success, but just years later-a week after the love of her life proposed-Michelle discovered her cancer was back. In this memoir, Michelle narrates her journey through and beyond cancer. She took charge of her health care by carefully choosing doctors and her treatment options. In just eight short weeks, she planned a destination wedding, harvested eggs, and with her fianc, created embryos-their "maybe babies." She got married and ten days later underwent a radical hysterectomy, followed by chemotherapy and radiation. At twenty-nine, Michelle found herself with a new normal, which included menopause, hot flashes, a shortened vagina, and lack of sexual desire. She opens the door to her most intimate moments, frankly sharing how she worked to regain her sex life and providing other women in this situation a roadmap to do the same. This is one woman's story of falling in love, battling HPV and cervical cancer, facing sexual dysfunction and infertility, and becoming her own best advocate. Inspirational, educational and honest, How I Lost My Uterus and Found My Voice tells the emotional story of love and loss, resilience and survival, empowerment and hope for the future. So if you have a vagina or love someone with a vagina, this book is for you! "Michelle Whitlock takes readers through a journey of loss and love and ends up giving a blueprint on how to make a comeback. How I Lost My Uterus and Found My Voice will make you laugh and cry and leave you wanting more. There will be no pages left unturned in this deeply personal memoir. This book isn't just for those who have survived cancer-it's for the masses. How I Lost My Uterus and Found My Voice is a thrilling look at life." -Tamika Felder, founder of Cervivor.org

One writer is stranded by the Second World War. Another flees multiple revolutions to live the rest of his life in Rio de Janeiro. Two others, public about their sexuality at home, choose self-exile. In Lost and Found Voices Luc Beaudoin offers a critical engagement with these four displaced authors: Witold Gombrowicz, Valerii Pereleshin, Abdellah Taïa, and Slava Mogutin. Not quite fitting into their respective diasporas and sharing an urge to express their queer desires, it is in their published works of literature, film, and photography that these writers locate their shifting identities and emergent queer voices. Their artistry is the basis from which Beaudoin traces their expressions of desire in language, culture, and community, offering a contextual queer reading that navigates their linguistic, cultural, artistic, and sexual self-translations and self-portrayals. Their choices are determinative: Gombrowicz masked his attraction to men in his works, keeping the truth hidden in an intimate diary; Pereleshin explored his lust in Brazilian Portuguese after being shunned by the Russian diaspora; Taïa writes in French to destabilize both the language and his status as an immigrant in France; Mogutin becomes a hardcore gay rebel in word and image to rattle assumptions about gay life. Bringing authors generally not familiar to an English-speaking readership into one volume, and including Beaudoin's own experience of living between languages, Lost and Found Voices provides provocative insights into what it means to be gay in both the past and the present.

Lost Voices of Modernity uncovers the story of the most popular and perhaps the most maligned modern Chinese literary journal, Xiaoshuo yuebao (The Short Story Magazine). First published in Shanghai in 1910, Xiaoshuo yuebao boasted a circulation of ten thousand within its first three years of publication. Scholars have long characterized the journal as little more than superficial popular entertainment (primarily action/adventure and love stories) and attributed its early popularity to an urban audience's need for distraction and escape. Now, however, Denise Gimpel's persuasive and effective study reveals a journal of serious appearance and intent. By placing publication, contributions, and contributors within their specific cultural, social, and political contexts, Gimpel provides an astonishingly cogent picture of a reform-through-fiction project created and managed by a dedicated body of writers attempting to address the concerns of the day. Xiaoshuo yuebao informed the growing reading public of national and international issues, science, and foreign lands. Read in context, the stories, essays, plays, and poems published in its pages--largely in the form of the "new fiction" that had been hailed as the sociopolitical cure-all of the early twentieth century--constitute a panorama of the reforms being discussed at the time at all levels of public and private life.

In this illuminating book, Dr. Nellie Radomsky explores the complexity of chronic pain in women and evidence for its association with abuse--an issue largely unrecognized by medical practitioners. Modern medical training emphasizes diagnosis and cure, but chronic pain problems often have no identifiable organic cause, and the women who suffer are often not listened to in the doctor’s office. Lost Voices: Women, Chronic Pain, and Abuse addresses how women, by gaining knowledge of the ways the medical culture--and the larger culture--have silenced them, may move into a healing process and learn to speak out. The author encourages women in pain to give voice to their buried experiences and shows them that speaking out about their experiences with abuse and chronic pain can be the first step on the road to healing. The author explores the lost voices of women in pain through stories based on her personal encounters with patients in her practice. These women and their case histories help illustrate the interactions of chronic pain and abuse and the complexity of the doctor-patient relationship. Among the many areas Dr. Radomsky examines are: how the medical culture has silenced women chronic pain in women with a history of abuse the relationship of women’s healing processes and the sense of finding and expressing “lost voices” the doctor-patient relationship and obstacles to healing the limitation of medical models with respect to understanding complex chronic pain issues how acute and chronic pain differ and how physicians and patients alike struggle with this understandingScientific but very readable, Lost Voices assists readers in the search for answers to complex pain problems. It is a hope-full resource for women struggling with chronic pain and personal abuse issues and an enlightening guide for physicians, therapists, and others working with these women. Professionals working in the area of chronic pain, readers involved in feminist issues, and academic physicians interested in medicine as culture will find Lost Voices a revealing book.

American soul music of the 1960s is one of the most creative and influential musical forms of the twentieth century. With its merging of gospel, R&B, country, and blues, soul music succeeded in crossing over from African American culture into the general pop culture. Soul became the byword for the styles, attitudes, and dreams of an entire era. Female performers were responsible for some of the most enduring and powerful contributions to the genre. All too frequently overlooked by the star-making critics, seven of these women are profiled in this book -Maxine Brown, Ruby Johnson, Denise LaSalle, Bettye LaVette, Barbara Mason, Carla Thomas, and Timi Yuro. Getting started during the heyday of soul, each of these talented women had recording contracts and gave live performances to appreciative audiences. Their careers can be tracked through the popularity of soul during the 1960s and its decline in the 1970s. With humor, candor, pride, and honest recognition that their careers did not surge into the mainstream and gain superstardom, they recount individual stories of how they struggled for success. Their oral histories as told to David Freeland address compelling issues, including racism and sexism within the music industry. They discuss their grueling hardships on the road, their conflicts with male managers, and the cutthroat competition in the recording business. As each singer examines her career with the author, she reveals the dreams, hopes, and desires on which she has built her professional life. All seven face up to the career swings, from the highs of releasing the first hit to the frustrating lows when the momentum stops. Although the obstacles to stardom are heartbreaking, these singers are committed to their art. With determination and style these seven have pressed onward with club appearances and recordings. They survive through their savvy mix of talent, hubris, and honesty about their lives and their music.

Expert, practical help for women who preach or lead worship Many women preachers and worship leaders have trouble speaking; they struggle to fully use their physical voices. Maintaining that there is often a disconnect between the woman's self-understanding as a preacher and her own body, Nancy Lammers Gross presents not only techniques but also a theologically empowering paradigm shift to help women fully embody their God-given preaching vocations. Grounding her work in the biblical story of Miriam, Gross begins with a discussion of how women are instrumental in the work of God. She then tells stories, including her own, of women's experiences in losing connection to their bodies and their physical voices. Finally, Gross presents a constructive resolution with exercises for discovering and developing a full-body voice.

Provides methods for learning how to listen to one's inner voice via meditation, releasing blockage, distinguishing divine voices, and developing a personal plan for spiritual fulfillment, in a volume accompanied by a CD containing special guided meditation techniques. Original.