Coming Alive: 4 Tools to Defeat Your Inner Enemy, Ignite Creative Expression & Unleash Your Soul's Potential - Softcover

Michels, Barry; Stutz, Phil

 
9780812984545: Coming Alive: 4 Tools to Defeat Your Inner Enemy, Ignite Creative Expression & Unleash Your Soul's Potential
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0812984544 ISBN 13: 9780812984545
Verlag: Random House Publishing Group, 2020

Inhaltsangabe

“The tools Barry and Phil teach in Coming Alive gave me the courage and clarity to align myself with the truth—no matter how hard or painful it seemed at the time.”—Gwyneth Paltrow

Tap into the Life Force with this critical and contemporary guide to unlocking our most powerful selves—from the bestselling authors of The Tools (and goop’s resident shrinks).

Phil Stutz and Barry Michels’s tools are featured in Stutz, a Netflix original documentary directed by Jonah Hill and co-produced by Joaquin Phoenix
 
In The Tools, Michels and Stutz revolutionized the world of personal growth. Now, in Coming Alive, they guide readers toward a wellspring of positive energy: the source of creativity, renewal, and engagement. The first step in gaining mastery over one’s life—in deepening both emotional and spiritual experiences—is identifying the enemy within, which Michels and Stutz have named Part X. This formidable adversary is a shape-shifter: it may be the voice in your head that is a torrent of negativity; it may take the form of outside forces that conspire against you. In whatever guise it appears, Part X aims to derail your progress, keep you small and stuck, and defeat hope.
 
The four vital tools in Coming Alive help you connect to the Life Force—a wellspring of positive energy that is the source of creativity, renewal, confidence, and engagement—and harness the energy and will to combat Part X. Drawing insights from their decades of psychotherapeutic practice, their lived experience, and their moving and generous understanding of our interconnectedness, Michels and Stutz have created a paradigm-shifting guide to achieving optimal mental health and spiritual well-being. 

Praise for Coming Alive

“What a gift! A riveting exploration of four (bone-chillingly relatable) modern ailments and their thrillingly practical solutions . . . Singular in its approach and deeply spiritual in its concerns, Coming Alive is a book I’ll be pressing on friends and foes alike.”—Maria Semple, author of Where’d You Go, Bernadette

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Barry Michels and Phil Stutz are the New York Times bestselling authors of The Tools and the resident therapists on Goop. They have appeared on Nightline, Charlie Rose, and The Dr. Oz Show and have been featured in such print and online publications as The New Yorker, Time, Psychology Today, and Vanity Fair. Michels, a psychotherapist, has a BA from Harvard, a law degree from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MSW from the University of Southern California. Stutz, a psychiatrist, graduated Phi Beta Kappa from City College in New York and received his MD from New York University.

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Chapter One

Reclaiming Your Life

Phil exposes the inner enemy that traps you in a limited existence, and guides you through the first steps toward activating your full potential.

How I Came Alive

I became aware of the power of the life force as a college student—­but it wasn’t part of my course work. At seventeen, I was already in my sophomore year. Physically and emotionally immature, I belonged back in high school. During my freshman year I had indulged my greatest love—­basketball. When I was sixteen years old, I played on the best freshman team the school had had in years.

Now I wanted to move up to the varsity. I wasn’t ready. I needed to wait a year and get bigger and stronger. But I was a gym-­rat whose pulse would quicken at the sound of the bouncing ball. I made the team—­barely—­and then I got what I deserved. I spent the next two years “riding the pine.” (The pine was the wooden bench the scrubs sat on during games.)

Worse than not playing was the dismissive way the coach treated the scrubs. By the time I was a senior, my confidence was destroyed. But what happened in that final season prepared me for the future in a way I never could have anticipated.

The team was even better than when I was a freshman. The best player was an All-­American point guard. I was his substitute, which meant I only played when he was injured or had fouled out—­usually when the score was close and the crowd was going berserk.

If I sat inertly watching, by the time I entered the game I’d be so cold I could barely move. So I’d “put myself in the game” from the bench. I’d jump up and down, scream at the top of my lungs, yell out where the screens were, etc. Besides keeping me loose, it had an effect I didn’t anticipate—­it lifted up the energy of the guys actually playing.

The best moments were when my excitement spread to the rest of the team. I learned that I could inspire others to do things they’d never done before. It was at those moments that I felt most alive. What I didn’t realize at the time was that I was being prepared for my future.

Recognizing the Life Force

Winning was great, but the most alive part of the experience—­the part I still remember fifty years later—­was feeling that inner fire grow. The more powerful the other team, the more difficult the challenge, the more inspired we became. The drive to experience this inspired state is what moves competitive athletes to train for hours every day.

But sports are just one place to discover untapped potential. As a psychiatrist, my job isn’t to win basketball games, it’s to help people discover what they’re capable of. This happens in obvious ways, like helping them get a better job, be a stronger leader, or break through a creative block. But our most important potentials aren’t so obvious: to give and receive love, to listen to other people, to accept what life brings, to be patient—­the spiritual and emotional abilities that work inside us and are the essence of what it means to be human. If you were building a fire, they would be the ring of stones that holds in the fire’s heat, allowing the flames of inspiration to grow and connect you to what I came to call the Life Force.

The Life Force speaks constantly—­not in words, but through events. You can feel it as an undeniable presence guiding you. More commonly, you’ll feel its presence for brief moments, usually in reaction to a deeply moving event: the birth of a child, the act of falling in love, or a trip to a faraway place that awakens something deep within you.

Or it can emerge without explanation as a sudden insight into another person, as the solution to a problem that’s defeated you for months or as a burst of creative expression that comes from somewhere beyond you. These moments of inspiration can seem random, but they’re reminders that the Life Force is always there.

But knowing the Life Force is there isn’t enough if you don’t know how to connect to it. Look around. The people you see living inspired, expansive lives are the exceptions. The vast majority of human beings are caught in limited, joyless lives—­every attempt to change seems thwarted.

Maybe you’re a songwriter with an idea for a film script. Rather than becoming excited about writing in a new medium, it feels beyond you and you give up. Or maybe you’ve developed strong feelings for a person you’ve always thought of as a friend, but when you’re around him you automatically close yourself off. Or perhaps you’ve run a lot of 5Ks and you’d like to run a marathon, but you’re not willing to commit to the time it takes to train for one.

All of these people want to open a new door in their lives, but the door is locked. There is only one key: the Life Force itself. But we’ve forgotten how to find the Life Force. In so doing, we’ve lost the key to our own future. How could we lose something so priceless?

Because we look for it in the wrong place. In our consumer culture, we look outside ourselves for everything. Products are sold with the claim they will magically solve life’s problems. The right hair conditioner will attract the perfect mate. The right wristwatch will give you the aura of success. A new car, a new lover, or a new home may create temporary excitement—­but it doesn’t last. Like a child excitedly playing with a Christmas present he’s just unwrapped, we quickly lose interest and move on to another gift.

This fixation on things outside of us makes change impossible. If you want to open the door to a future with real potential, you’ll need to access the inner power of the Life Force. You won’t be able to see it, you can’t hold it in your hand, but when it’s flowing through you it will inspire you to do things you didn’t think were possible.

The Life Force in History, Nature, and People

The belief that an invisible animating energy underlies our existence is thousands of years old. Unlike our modern, mechanical notion of energy, which we understand via mathematics, this is a living energy that we feel inside us. In Eastern religions, this energy, or Life Force, is known variously as prana (in Indian philosophy and medicine), lung (in Tibetan Buddhism), and chi (in Chinese philosophy and medicine). In the Old Testament, it was called ruach, the breath of God, which gave mankind not only life, but the spirit to evolve.

The Life Force itself may be invisible, but evidence of its power is everywhere. It created life on earth and, over untold eons, drove evolution from single-­cell organisms to the unimaginable complexity of the human brain. Every seed that sprouts into a full-­grown plant, every salmon that fights its way against the current to spawn, every sun-­seeking weed growing through cracks in the sidewalk, is an expression of life’s unstoppable energy.

How does this affect you as an individual? The songwriter, lovesick friend, and runner were stuck; maybe they’d failed so many times they lost hope that change was possible. No amount of talking or analyzing could free them from their dark conclusions. But the Life Force affects you in a way that thinking can’t. You can feel its inspiring presence. When you do, you experience a force that has sustained all living forms for millions of years.

It’s natural to think of the Life Force as sustaining growth in nature—­the grass growing, fish swimming, birds flying, etc. But the Life Force is capable of something more: it can fuel the inner growth of each of...

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Verlag
Random House Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2020
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0812984544
ISBN 13 
9780812984545
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
320
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
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