Strong like Water


Book Description

There's a cost to being a certain kind of strong. When it comes to difficult circumstances, we’ve all heard the platitudes: “No pain, no gain.” “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” But if we spend our lives trying to be “the strong one,” we become exhausted, burned-out, and disconnected from our truest selves. What if it were different? Could there be a different way to be strong? Could strength mean more than pushing on and pushing through pain, bearing every heavy burden on our own? What if, instead, true strength were more like the tide: soft and bold, fierce and gentle, moving together as one powerful force? In Strong like Water, author and trauma therapist Aundi Kolber offers a framework for true flourishing. With each page, you’ll: Learn how your nervous system shapes your experience so that we can move through pain instead of being stuck in it. Explore various practices, rhythms, and resources to support you in challenging circumstances with compassion and hope. Discover how to internalize connection, love, and safety—empowering you with greater resilience. A different, more expansive way of healing, wholeness, and possibly—especially—strength is possible. We were made to be strong like water.




Strong Like Water


Book Description

Laila Tarraf was the Chief People Officer for Peet’s Coffee and Tea, the iconic Berkeley coffee roaster that launched the craft coffee movement in America, but she had a secret: she was failing in the most important relationships in her life. Yes, she was a strong and effective business leader, the successful daughter of immigrants, and the mother of a toddler; but she was also disconnected from her own feelings and had little patience for the feelings of others. All that changed when life handed her a trifecta of losses: her husband died of an accidental drug overdose, and her parents' deaths followed in quick succession. Laila had spent her life leading from the head, convinced that any display of vulnerability would make her soft. What she didn’t expect was that soft would turn out to be strong. As she reconnected to her heart, one painful step at a time, something remarkable happened: she became a better leader, a better mother, and a better person. Her heart turned out to be the true source of her power, at home and at work. This is a book about healing, about waking up, about learning who you are—who you really, truly are at the core—and reclaiming and embracing all the pieces of yourself you long ago abandoned in the name of survival. Women longing for balance will discover a path to infusing our leadership and relationships with love, compassion, and authenticity.




Strong Like Water Guided Journey


Book Description

A five-session guided study for groups or individuals based on the acclaimed Strong Like Water. Do you know what it's like to feel afraid of your own story or your own life? Are you exhausted from the kind of strength it's required you to keep going--but have wondered what other choice can there be? In this five-session guided journey through Aundi Kolber's Strong Like Water, you'll discover that it's possible to be both soft and strong; in fact, they sustain and empower each other. Designed for individual or group use, Aundi will walk readers through the deep work of becoming strong like water--of learning to internalize connection, love, and safety to experience greater healing and resilience. Each session includes: Extended reflection and teaching on themes and principles from Strong Like Water Practical body-centered exercises and invitations to reflect and journal (for individual and group discussion) Creative space for continued processing Introductory video available for streaming




Try Softer


Book Description

Over 100,000 copies sold! In the wise and soulful tradition of teachers like Shauna Niequist and Brene Brown, therapist Aundi Kolber debuts with Try Softer helping us align our mind, body, and soul to live the life God created for us. In a world that preaches a "try harder" gospel―just keep going, keep hustling, keep pretending we're all fine―we're left exhausted, overwhelmed, anxious, and numb to our lives. If we're honest, we've been overfunctioning and hurtling toward burnout for so long, we can't even imagine another way. How else will things get done? How else will we survive? It doesn't have to be this way. Aundi Kolber believes we don't have to white-knuckle our way through life, stuck in survival mode and stressed. In her debut book, Try Softer, she'll show us how God specifically designed our bodies and minds to work together to process our stories and work through obstacles. Through the latest psychology, practical clinical exercises, and her own personal story, Aundi equips and empowers us to connect us to our truest self and truly live. This is the "try softer" life. In Try Softer you'll learn how to: Know and set emotional and relational boundaries Make sense of the difficult experiences you've had Identify your attachment style―and how that affects your relationships today Move through emotions rather than get stuck by them Grow in self-compassion and talk back to your inner critic Trying softer is sacred work. And while the healing journey won't be perfect or easy, it will be worth it. Because this is what we were made for: a living, breathing, moving, feeling, connected, beautifully incarnational life.




A Long Walk to Water


Book Description

When the Sudanese civil war reaches his village in 1985, 11-year-old Salva becomes separated from his family and must walk with other Dinka tribe members through southern Sudan, Ethiopia and Kenya in search of safe haven. Based on the life of Salva Dut, who, after emigrating to America in 1996, began a project to dig water wells in Sudan. By a Newbery Medal-winning author.




Cutting for Stone


Book Description

Marion and Shiva Stone are twin brothers born of a secret union between a beautiful Indian nun and a brash British surgeon. Orphaned by their mother’s death and their father’s disappearance and bound together by a preternatural connection and a shared fascination with medicine, the twins come of age as Ethiopia hovers on the brink of revolution. Moving from Addis Ababa to New York City and back again, Cutting for Stone is an unforgettable story of love and betrayal, medicine and ordinary miracles—and two brothers whose fates are forever intertwined.




The Color of Water


Book Description

From the New York Times bestselling author of Deacon King Kong and The Good Lord Bird, winner of the National Book Award for Fiction: The modern classic that Oprah.com calls one of the best memoirs of a generation and that launched James McBride's literary career. More than two years on The New York Times bestseller list. As a boy in Brooklyn's Red Hook projects, James McBride knew his mother was different. But when he asked her about it, she'd simply say 'I'm light-skinned.' Later he wondered if he was different too, and asked his mother if he was black or white. 'You're a human being! Educate yourself or you'll be a nobody!' she snapped back. And when James asked about God, she told him 'God is the color of water.' This is the remarkable story of an eccentric and determined woman: a rabbi's daughter, born in Poland and raised in the Deep South who fled to Harlem, married a black preacher, founded a Baptist church and put twelve children through college. A celebration of resilience, faith and forgiveness, The Color of Water is an eloquent exploration of what family really means.




Living Rainbow H2O


Book Description

This book is a unique synthesis of the latest findings in the quantum physics and chemistry of water that will tell you why it is so remarkably fit for life. It offers a novel panoramic perspective of cell biology based on water as "means, medium, and message" of life. This book is a sequel to The Rainbow and The Worm, The Physics of Organisms, which has remained in a class of its own for nearly 20 years since the publication of the first edition. Living Rainbow H2O continues the fascinating journey in the author's quest for the meaning of life, in science and beyond. Like The Rainbow and The Worm, the present book will appeal to readers in the arts and humanities as well as scientists; not least because the author herself is an occasional artist and poet. Great care has been taken to explain terms and concepts for the benefit of the general reader. At the same time, sufficient scientific details are provided in text boxes for the advanced reader and researcher without interrupting the main story.




Where the Water Goes


Book Description

“Wonderfully written…Mr. Owen writes about water, but in these polarized times the lessons he shares spill into other arenas. The world of water rights and wrongs along the Colorado River offers hope for other problems.” —Wall Street Journal An eye-opening account of where our water comes from and where it all goes. The Colorado River is an essential resource for a surprisingly large part of the United States, and every gallon that flows down it is owned or claimed by someone. David Owen traces all that water from the Colorado’s headwaters to its parched terminus, once a verdant wetland but now a million-acre desert. He takes readers on an adventure downriver, along a labyrinth of waterways, reservoirs, power plants, farms, fracking sites, ghost towns, and RV parks, to the spot near the U.S.–Mexico border where the river runs dry. Water problems in the western United States can seem tantalizingly easy to solve: just turn off the fountains at the Bellagio, stop selling hay to China, ban golf, cut down the almond trees, and kill all the lawyers. But a closer look reveals a vast man-made ecosystem that is far more complex and more interesting than the headlines let on. The story Owen tells in Where the Water Goes is crucial to our future: how a patchwork of engineering marvels, byzantine legal agreements, aging infrastructure, and neighborly cooperation enables life to flourish in the desert—and the disastrous consequences we face when any part of this tenuous system fails.




Gardening the World


Book Description

Around the world, intensifying development and human demands for fresh water are placing unsustainable pressures on finite resources. Countries are waging war over transboundary rivers, and rural and urban communities are increasingly divided as irrigation demands compete with domestic desires. Marginal groups are losing access to water as powerful elites protect their own interests, and entire ecosystems are being severely degraded. These problems are particularly evident in Australia, with its industrialised economy and arid climate. Yet there have been relatively few attempts to examine the social and cultural complexities that underlie people's engagements with water. Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in two major Australian river catchments (the Mitchell River in Cape York, and the Brisbane River in southeast Queensland), this book examines their major water using and managing groups: indigenous communities, farmers, industries, recreational and domestic water users, and environmental organisations. It explores the issues that shape their different beliefs, values and practices in relation to water, and considers the specifically cultural or sub-cultural meanings that they encode in their material surroundings. Through an analysis of each group's diverse efforts to 'garden the world', it provides insights into the complexities of human-environmental relationships.