Caring for New Life


Book Description




Nurturing Your New Life


Book Description

Words and recipes for the new mother. For many first-time mothers expectations about their new life come from idealised images on TV, in magazines or online. It's a far cry from what it actually involves: lack of sleep, time and control - and total dependency on you by another. Becoming a mother brings extraordinary physical and emotional changes to a woman's life, but it also taps into deep instincts. Heidi Sze's message is to surrender to the changes, reject the guilt and accept the imperfect reality of this new life. Adjusting expectations and being true to your unique needs will bring a comfort, joy and peace that slavishly following rules, imposing unreachable standards and accumulating rooms of gadgets are unlikely to do. As women go through this profound transition, it is crucial that they identify their support needs and trust their intuition. This book will help women do just that. Many people know Heidi from her blog Apples Under My Bed and Instagram account @heidiapples. Her beautiful words and special focus here on nourishment - with special new-life recipes - will help mothers - and fathers - nurture with reassurance the new life in their hands.




Still Time to Care


Book Description

At the start of the gay rights movement in 1969, evangelicalism's leading voices cast a vision for gay people who turn to Jesus. It was C.S. Lewis, Billy Graham, Francis Schaeffer and John Stott who were among the most respected leaders within theologically orthodox Protestantism. We see with them a positive pastoral approach toward gay people, an approach that viewed homosexuality as a fallen condition experienced by some Christians who needed care more than cure. With the birth and rise of the ex-gay movement, the focus shifted from care to cure. As a result, there are an estimated 700,000 people alive today who underwent conversion therapy in the United States alone. Many of these patients were treated by faith-based, testimony-driven parachurch ministries centered on the ex-gay script. Despite the best of intentions, the movement ended with very troubling results. Yet the ex-gay movement died not because it had the wrong sex ethic. It died because it was founded on a practice that diminished the beauty of the gospel. Yet even after the closure of the ex-gay umbrella organization Exodus International in 2013, the ex-gay script continues to walk about as the undead among us, pressuring people like me to say, "I used to be gay, but I'm not gay anymore. Now I'm just same-sex attracted." For orthodox Christians, the way forward is a path back to where we were forty years ago. It is time again to focus with our Neo-Evangelical fathers on care--not cure--for our non-straight sisters and brothers who are living lives of costly obedience to Jesus. With warmth and humor as well as original research, Still Time to Care will chart the path forward for our churches and ministries in providing care. It will provide guidance for the gay person who hears the gospel and finds themselves smitten by the life-giving call of Jesus. Woven throughout the book will be Richard Lovelace’s 1978 call for a "double repentance" in which gay Christians repent of their homosexual sins and the church repents of its homophobia--putting on display for all the power of the gospel.




Top Five Regrets of the Dying


Book Description

Revised edition of the best-selling memoir that has been read by over a million people worldwide with translations in 29 languages. After too many years of unfulfilling work, Bronnie Ware began searching for a job with heart. Despite having no formal qualifications or previous experience in the field, she found herself working in palliative care. During the time she spent tending to those who were dying, Bronnie's life was transformed. Later, she wrote an Internet blog post, outlining the most common regrets that the people she had cared for had expressed. The post gained so much momentum that it was viewed by more than three million readers worldwide in its first year. At the request of many, Bronnie subsequently wrote a book, The Top Five Regrets of the Dying, to share her story. Bronnie has had a colourful and diverse life. By applying the lessons of those nearing their death to her own life, she developed an understanding that it is possible for everyone, if we make the right choices, to die with peace of mind. In this revised edition of the best-selling memoir that has been read by over a million people worldwide, with translations in 29 languages, Bronnie expresses how significant these regrets are and how we can positively address these issues while we still have the time. The Top Five Regrets of the Dying gives hope for a better world. It is a courageous, life-changing book that will leave you feeling more compassionate and inspired to live the life you are truly here to live.




Living the Good Long Life


Book Description

Martha Stewart’s engaging handbook for living your healthiest life after 40—with expertise from doctors and specialists on eating, exercise, wellness, home, and organizing, as well as caring for others. Martha Stewart’s Living the Good Long Life is a practical guide unlike any other: honest and upbeat, with clear and motivating charts, resources, and tips from doctors and wellness specialists. From the best ways to organize your home to protecting your mental well-being and appearance as you age, this book gives accessible ideas that you can incorporate every day. And when it’s time to explore caregiving for others, you’ll know how to enrich their quality of life while preventing your own fatigue. Martha’s 10 Golden Rules for Successful Aging provide a framework for chapters that cover your changing needs with every decade, including: -Healthy Eating: Stock a healthy pantry for your dietary needs. -Healthy Fitness: Stand strong on your feet by increasing your balance, endurance, and flexibility. -A Healthy Brain: Stimulate new brain activity to prevent memory loss. -A Healthy Outlook: Maintain a sense of daily purpose by strengthening social connections. -Healthy Living Every Day: Medicate wisely while paying attention to aches and pains. -Healthy Looks: Take care of your skin and match your makeup to your age. -Healthy Home: Create a home that is a reflection of how you want to live. -Healthy Living into the Future: Be your own wellness CEO to prevent future illness. -Healthy Caring: Prepare for helping others while caring for yourself, and much more! Healthy living begins with establishing small habits, and with Living the Good Long Life you’ll have a dependable source for thriving in your 40s, 50s, 60s, and beyond. "In my Foundation’s health initiatives—and in my own life—I’ve seen again and again how even small measures to improve your health can make a big difference. Living the Good Long Life is full of simple ideas that can be incorporated into daily routines to help you feel better and keep on doing what you love." —President Bill Clinton "For thirty years, Martha Stewart has carefully coached us on how to take care of our homes, our menus, our crafts. And now in Living the Good Long Life, she has brought her brilliant skills to the mission of helping us take care of ourselves. With sparkling prose, no-nonsense instruction, and, as always, oceans of wisdom, Martha implores readers not to recoil from their advancing years, but to embrace and celebrate them—with invaluable tips on keeping our diets healthy, our bodies pumping, and our outlook forever sunny. I just loved this book." —Marlo Thomas




Life Reimagined


Book Description

A practical guide to successfully navigating big life changes faced during middle age and later. Are you at a point in your life where you're asking, “What’s next?” You’ve finished one chapter and you have yet to write the next one. Many of us face these transitions at midlife, but they can happen at any point. It’s a time full of enormous potential, and it defines a whole new phase of life. It’s called Life Reimagined. Here is your map to guide you in this new life phase. You can use the powerful practices and insights to help you uncover your own special gifts, connect with people who can support you, and explore new directions. You’ll be inspired by meeting ordinary people who have reimagined their lives in extraordinary ways. You’ll also read the stories of pioneers of the Life Reimagined movement such as Jane Pauley, James Brown, and Emilio Estefan. They show us that this journey of discovery can help us find fulfillment in surprising new places. One of the profound truths that underlies this book is the liberating notion that each of us is “an experiment of one,” free to find our own path in this new phase of our lives. No old rules, no outdated societal norms, no boundaries of convention or expectation. Let Life Reimagined help you discover your new life possibilities! Winner of the 2014 Silver Nautilus Award




Matters of Care


Book Description

To care can feel good, or it can feel bad. It can do good, it can oppress. But what is care? A moral obligation? A burden? A joy? Is it only human? In Matters of Care, María Puig de la Bellacasa presents a powerful challenge to conventional notions of care, exploring its significance as an ethical and political obligation for thinking in the more than human worlds of technoscience and naturecultures. Matters of Care contests the view that care is something only humans do, and argues for extending to non-humans the consideration of agencies and communities that make the living web of care by considering how care circulates in the natural world. The first of the book’s two parts, “Knowledge Politics,” defines the motivations for expanding the ethico-political meanings of care, focusing on discussions in science and technology that engage with sociotechnical assemblages and objects as lively, politically charged “things.” The second part, “Speculative Ethics in Antiecological Times,” considers everyday ecologies of sustaining and perpetuating life for their potential to transform our entrenched relations to natural worlds as “resources.” From the ethics and politics of care to experiential research on care to feminist science and technology studies, Matters of Care is a singular contribution to an emerging interdisciplinary debate that expands agency beyond the human to ask how our understandings of care must shift if we broaden the world.




Life Is in the Transitions


Book Description

A New York Times bestseller! A pioneering and timely study of how to navigate life's biggest transitions with meaning, purpose, and skill Bruce Feiler, author of the New York Times bestsellers The Secrets of Happy Families and Council of Dads, has long explored the stories that give our lives meaning. Galvanized by a personal crisis, he spent the last few years crisscrossing the country, collecting hundreds of life stories in all fifty states from Americans who’d been through major life changes—from losing jobs to losing loved ones; from changing careers to changing relationships; from getting sober to getting healthy to simply looking for a fresh start. He then spent a year coding these stories, identifying patterns and takeaways that can help all of us survive and thrive in times of change. What Feiler discovered was a world in which transitions are becoming more plentiful and mastering the skills to manage them is more urgent for all of us. The idea that we’ll have one job, one relationship, one source of happiness is hopelessly outdated. We all feel unnerved by this upheaval. We’re concerned that our lives are not what we expected, that we’ve veered off course, living life out of order. But we’re not alone. Life Is in the Transitions introduces the fresh, illuminating vision of the nonlinear life, in which each of us faces dozens of disruptors. One in ten of those becomes what Feiler calls a lifequake, a massive change that leads to a life transition. The average length of these transitions is five years. The upshot: We all spend half our lives in this unsettled state. You or someone you know is going through one now. The most exciting thing Feiler identified is a powerful new tool kit for navigating these pivotal times. Drawing on his extraordinary trove of insights, he lays out specific strategies each of us can use to reimagine and rebuild our lives, often stronger than before. From a master storyteller with an essential message, Life Is in the Transitions can move readers of any age to think deeply about times of change and how to transform them into periods of creativity and growth.




A Whole New Life


Book Description

Reynolds Price has long been one of America's most acclaimed and accomplished men of letters -- the author of novels, stories, poems, essays, plays, and a memoir. In "A Whole New Life," however, he steps from behind that roster of achievements to present us with a more personal story, a narrative as intimate and compelling as any work of the imagination. In 1984, a large cancer was discovered in his spinal cord ("The tumor was pencil-thick and gray-colored, ten inches long from my neck-hair downward"). Here, for the first time, Price recounts without self-pity what became a long struggle to withstand and recover from this appalling, if all too common, affliction (one American in three will experience some from of cancer). He charts the first puzzling symptoms; the urgent surgery that fails to remove the growth and the radiation that temporarily arrests it (but hurries his loss of control of his lower body); the occasionally comic trials of rehab; the steady rise of severe pain and reliance on drugs; two further radical surgeries; the sustaining force of a certain religious vision; an eventual discovery of help from biofeedback and hypnosis; and the miraculous return of his powers as a writer in a new, active life. Beyond the particulars of pain and mortal illness, larger concerns surface here -- a determination to get on with the human interaction that is so much a part of this writer's much-loved work, the gratitude he feels toward kin and friends and some (though by no means "all)" doctors, the return to his prolific work, and the "now appalling, now astonishing grace of God." "A Whole New Life" offers more than the portrait of one brave person in tribulation; it offers honestinsight, realistic encouragement and inspiration to others who suffer the bafflement of catastrophic illness or who know someone who does or will.