About Loving Books



Bibliotherapy
In addition to  mindfulness therapies, creative arts, and ecopsychology, I often integrate bibliotherapy into sessions to help shepherd a mourner through their own unique grief journey. Here are just a few, of my many, favorite books for healing based on genre: 


On Death 

On Death and Dying 
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross 

The Denial of Death 
Ernest Becker 

Intimate Death 
Marie de Hennezel 

On Our Way 
Robert Kastenbaum

When Children Die
Institute of Medicine

Stillbirth: Prediction, prevention, and management
Ed Catherine Spong


Wolf in the Attic
Sophia Richman


Man's Search for Meaning
Viktor Frankl


Numinous

Dark Night of the soul
St. John of the Cross, tr. by Mirabai Starr

A Grace Disguised
Gerald Sittser

The Awakened Heart
Gerald May

A Grief Observed
C.S. Lewis

The Way of the Heart
Henri Nouwen

The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying
Sogyal Rinpoche

The Places that Scare You
Pema Chodron

Existential Suffering

The Loss of Sadness
Allan V. Horwitz & Jerome Wakefield

A Cry Unheard: The Medical Consequences of Loneliness
James J. Lynch

Healing the Soul in the Age of the Brain
Elio Frattaroli

The Problem with Pain
C.S. Lewis

Night
Elie Wiesel

The Gift of Therapy
Irvin Yalom

The Psychology of Shame
Gershen Kaufman

The Wisdom of the Wilderness
Gerald May

Neuroscience and Trauma

The Neuroscience of Psychotherapy
Lou Cozolino

Existential Psychotherapy
Irvin Yalom

Muses, Madmen, and Prophets
Daniel Smith

Creating Sanctuary
Sandra Bloom

Your Drug may be Your Problem
Peter R. Breggin & David Cohen




Some of my Favorite Book Excerpts


It isn't what you did in the past that will affect the present.  It's what you do in the present that will redeem the past, and thereby change the future.  

-Paulo Coehlo, Aleph

I want to unfold.
I do not want to remain folded up anywhere,
because wherever I am still folded,
I am untrue.
- Rainer Maria Rilke
Hold the sorrows of the world in your heart while always keeping your sight on the 
Great Eastern Sun.  -Trungpa Rinpoche
Until the missing story of ourselves is told, nothing besides told can suffice us; we shall go on quietly craving it.  
- Laura Reding
 Life can be the same after a trinket has been lost but never after the loss of a treasure. 
-Paul Irion
If a man wishes to truly know his path, he must close his eyes and walk in the dark.  
-St John of the Cross
This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy... My religion is kindness.  
-The Dalai Lama
No great art has ever been made without the artist having known danger. Surely all art is the result of one’s having been in danger, of having gone through an experience all the way to the end, where no one can go further.
-Ranier Maria Rilke
"When watching the geese go home, I find that in silence without a thought or a movement, I am part of the great migration that will take me from one place to another.   When one thing dies, all things die together. When on thing is missing, everything is missing.  And must be found again in a new whole and everything wants to be complete, everything wants to go home."   
-David Whyte  
On the straying moonbeams I shall steal over your bed, and
lie upon your bosom while you sleep. I shall become a dream, and through the little opening of your eyelids I shall slip into the depths of your sleep; and when you wake up and look around startled, like a twinkling firefly I shall flit out into the darkness.
-Tagore
Frodo: I wish the ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened!
Gandalf: So do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.
I would like to beg you, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search   for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them in this moment. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, 
someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, 
live your way into the answer.
-Rilke
You and I will be together ‘til the universe dissolves.  
-Rumi
The person who, being really on the Way, falls upon hard times in the world, will not, as a consequence, turn to that friend who offers him refuge and comfort and encourages their old self to survive. Rather, he will seek out someone who will faithfully and inexorably help him to    risk himself, so that he may endure the difficulty and pass courageously through it. Only to the extent that a person exposes himself over and over again to annihilation, can that which is indestructible be found within them. In this daring lies dignity and the true spirit of awakening.
-Karlfried Graf Durckheim
Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We might expect to be  prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to  feel literally crazy.                               -Vanessa Redgrave
Peace is not something you can force on anything or anyone... much less   upon one's own mind. It is like trying to quiet the ocean by pressing upon the waves. Sanity lies in somehow opening to the chaos, allowing anxiety, moving deeply into the tumult, diving into the waves, where underneath, within, peace simply is.     -Gerald May
Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It's a relationship between equals. Only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others. Compassion becomes real when we recognize our shared humanity.
- Pema Chödrön
[Mourning is] what you have left after someone you love dies. It's the only thing left of that person. Your love for, your missing, them. And as long as you have that, you're not alone -- you have them ... Your grief is their presence on earth. 
-Andrew Holleran’s Grief
I almost prefer the moments of agony. They are at least clean and honest. 
-C.S. Lewis
I help them be with what is true.  The healing comes from that.  -Dr. Robert Hall
If you haven't wept deeply you haven't begun to meditate.  -Ajahn Chah
Seeking to forget makes exile all the longer. The secret to redemption lies in remembrance. 
-Richard von Weizsäcker
What we speak becomes the house in which we live. - Hafiz
‎To the extent that I managed to translate the emotions into images--that is to say, to find the images which were concealed in the emotions--I was inwardly calmed and reassured. Had I   left those images hidden in the emotions, I might have been torn to pieces by them.   
-Carl Jung
I have not ceased being fearful but I have ceased to let fear control me. I   have accepted  fear as a part of life, specifically the fear of change, the fear   of the unknown, and I have   gone ahead despite the pounding in the heart  that says, “Turn back, turn back; you’ll die if you venture too far.” 
-Erica Jong
I hope you will go out and let stories happen to you, and that you will work them, water them with your blood and tears and you laughter till they bloom, till you yourself burst into bloom.
-Clarissa Pinkola Estes
If the person you are talking to doesn't appear to be listening, be patient. It  may be that he has a small piece of fluff in his ear.
-Winnie the Pooh

The soul still sings in the darkness telling of the beauty she found there; and daring us not to think that because she passed through such tortures of anguish, doubt, dread, and horror, as has been said, she ran any the more danger of being lost in the night. Nay, in the darkness did she, rather, find herself.
-St. John, Dark Night of the Soul