Elevated Existence September 2016 Self-Help Book Picks

Posted on by Tammy

Each month, a ton of new spiritual and self-help books hit the market. It’s easy to get overwhelmed or miss out on some new releases.

We created Elevated Existence Monthly Book Picks to help our readers narrow down their search, and make sure they don’t miss some great options!

The books for this month were chosen by our editor’s as their picks for September 2016. They are listed below in alphabetical order. Click on each title to go directly to Amazon and find out more about the book.

“Believe, Ask, Act: Divine Steps to Raise Your Intuition, Create Change and Discover Happiness,” by MaryAnn DiMarco — Psychic medium, intuitive counselor and spiritual teacher, MaryAnn DiMarco shares her teachings for developing intuition to us to control life using three powerful steps: Believe, Ask & Act. This includes belief in a higher power, asking the right questions to our personal team of angles, guides and departed loved ones, and take action to create change. She also shares how to identify and remove the spiritual, emotional and real-world obstacles holding us back.

“The Book of Joy: Lasting Happiness in a Changing World,” by Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu and Douglas Carlton Abrams — Two great spiritual mentors His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, share their wisdom about living with joy, even when faced with adversity. Both have been tested with personal and national adversity, and they share their personal stories of struggle and renewal, as well as the most recent findings in the science of deep happiness and daily practices to anchor our emotional and spiritual lives.

“Let Your Spirit Guides Speak: A Simple Guide for a Life of Purpose, Abundance and Joy,” by Debra Landwehr Engle — Are you ready to build a relationship with your spirit guides? Learn how to connect to them for help with everything from simple to challenging life decisions. Learn how to utilize spirit guides to fulfill your life purpose, make decisions to move forward faster, stop sabotaging and judging yourself and more.

“Making Friends with Your Mind,” by Pema Chodron — Bestselling author Pema Chodron help us stop fighting with our thoughts and reopen ourselves to wonder as naturally as we breathe. During the sessions in this audio, she helps the listener bring awareness to inflexible thoughts through meditations, daily practices and small changes that can impact our lives.

“Marrow: A Love Story,” by Elizabeth Lesser — New York Times bestselling author of “Broken Open,” Elizabeth Lesser’s new memoir,” Marrow: A Love Story,” chronicles the journey of donating bone marrow when her sister needs a transplant, and the lessons learned, including acceptance, authenticity and love. The sisters delve into what Lesser calls a “soul marrow transplant,” examining family history, having difficult conversations, offering forgiveness and more. When her sister’s body is not strong enough to fight, the story evolves into how even our most difficult experiences offer opportunities for spiritual growth.

“Radical Beauty: How to Transform Yourself from the Inside Out,” by Deepak Chopra and Kimberly Snyder — Bestselling author Deepak Chopra teams up with Hollywood nutritionist and New York Times bestselling author of The Beauty Detox Solution, Kimberly Snyder to teach their six pillars of healthy living focused on internal and external nourishment, sleep, living naturally, avoiding excess stress and better understanding the relationship between emotions and inflammatory foods. The authors offer practical tips, tools, innovative routines and foods to help us reaching our highest potential of beauty and health, including do-it-yourself home skin care and beauty remedies and delicious recipes.

“The Recovering Spender: How to Live a Happy, Fulfilled, Debt-Free Life,” by Lauren Greutman — After years of struggling with too many bills and not enough money to pay for them, Lauren Guetman found herself drowning in debt until she finally faced her extreme spending habits and took action. Now she shares the strategies she developed to change her own life and bring her family budget back to black, including taking inventory of spending, decluttering finances, doing an expense audit, curbing spending and defining values.

“Uncharted: The Journey Through Uncertainty to Infinite Possibility,” by Colette Baron-Reid — Our September YouTube interview, Colette Baron-Reid shares how we can all learn to sail into uncharted waters, away from the familiar ways not working for us anymore, to discover the infinite potential we have access to in order to co-create the life we desire along with Sprit. She teaches us how to draw our own map of the soul for an inward journey through five interconnected realms of co-creation — Spirit, Mind, Light, Energy and Form.

“The Universe Has Your Back: Transform Your Fear to Faith,” by Gabrielle Bernstein — The New York Times bestselling author teaches readers how to transform fear into faith in order to live a divinely guided life. Each story and lesson guides readers to release blocks to happiness, security and clear direction, and explain how to find strength, support, safety and joy, while unleashing the power of their true presence.

“What if This is Heaven? How Our Cultural Myths Prevent Us from Experiencing Heaven on Earth,” by Anita Moorjani — Elevated Existence September 2016 cover story interview, and author of “Dying to Be Me,” Anita Moorjani reveals the biggest myths that are holding us back from being authentically who we are, and who we planned to be before incarnating in this life. She uses examples from her own life and others to break these common myths, including spiritual people don’t have egos and we get what we deserve in life.

Anita Moorjani: Bringing Heaven to Earth

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Known around the world for her bestselling book, “Dying to Be Me: My Journey From Cancer to Near Death, to True Healing,” Anita Moorjani chronicled her near death experience from which she returned to her body — which was dying from Stage 4 cancer — and within weeks the cancer reversed and her body completely healed.

In her newest book, “What If This Is Heaven: How Our Cultural Myths Prevent Us from Experiencing Heaven on Earth,” she takes on the biggest myths in today’s society influencing our everyday lives, including “You Get What You Deserve,” “Loving Yourself is Selfish,” and “Spiritual People Don’t Have Egos.” She believes these myths are keeping us from being our authentic selves and living the lives we are meant to live.

In fact, looking back, she says if she knew everything she knows now, she would not have gotten cancer at all.

“I would have known it is very important to love myself. I truly believed previously that to love myself was selfish, and I believed it made me a better person if I constantly put other people before me and put myself last,” she says in the cover story of Elevated Existence’s September 2016 Issue, explaining she did this to a point where she treated herself like a doormat and let others walk all over her. She was a true people-pleaser and was afraid of saying “no.”

Moorjani gave to the point where she was completely drained, and would feel guilty if she wasn’t helping people who needed her. It became so bad that the day she was diagnosed with cancer, even though there was an immediate feeling of fear, it was followed by relief.

“It was like, ‘Ah, finally, I can do things for myself now. I can take care of myself because I have cancer.’ It’s like the cancer gave me permission. Today, I don’t need cancer. I don’t need permission because I matter. I am a product of the universe. I’m a facet of the universe — a facet of God. There is a reason for me to be here, and this applies to all of us. We’re all here to express God or to express the universe, and if we deny that, if we don’t love ourselves and allow our authenticity and light to shine, then we are denying the facet of God that is expressing itself through us.”

We Don’t Need Fixing
Also in the September 2016 Issue, Moorjani explains how people often get caught up in the need to fix something about themselves, believing something is wrong with them that needs changing. But she realized this belief can actually cause us more problems, bringing about feelings of fear and insecurity.

This is true whether we are trying to heal from a physical illness or trying to fix some other aspect of ourselves. She admits to being a self-help junkie before she got cancer and after her near-death experience, she doesn’t feel like she needs help anymore, because she embraces everything about herself and is alright with being imperfect.

“I know this goes against the genre I write for, but I truly believe that even the belief we constantly need work and help is the problem and not the fact that we actually need help, “ Moorjani says.

For those struggling with an illness, especially cancer, she asks them to stop beating themselves up, or trying to figure out what they did wrong to create it. Rather, they should love and embrace themselves right now in this moment, and be with people who love and value them.

“Ask yourself, ‘what shall I do today to that will bring me joy? What would I be doing today if I loved myself?’ And we should do this whether we are sick or well. That is all we have to do every single day,” she explains.

She also teaches we should do one random act of kindness for ourselves every day that we wouldn’t normally do — something additional that either takes up some time or is something we have been putting off. This can be soaking in the bathtub or going to see a movie we have been meaning to see. It is important to start taking time for ourselves that we would normally allocate to others.

“I know most people who are attracted to my story or are attracted to spirituality and the books and magazines — they have no trouble doing a random act of kindness for other people, so I’m not going to even bother advocating that because I know they give and give and give until they become drained. That was me before I got cancer,” she shares. “What I’m advocating is one random act of kindness for yourself, no matter how busy your day is. In fact, the more busy your day is, the more important it is for you to take time out to do this.”

To read the entire cover story, plus an interview with bestselling author Colette-Baron-Reid about how to create the life we want, and an excerpt from bestselling author Gabrielle Bernstein’s newest book “The Universe Has Your Back,” check out the September 2016 issue here!

Lessons from Heaven

Posted on by Tammy

The story of Anita Moorjani’s near-death experience as told in her bestselling book “Dying to Be Me: My Journey from Cancer, to Near Death to True Healing,” touched the hearts of so many people around the world because she shared not only her extraordinary healing upon returning to her body, but also the lessons and truths she gathered in her brief time in the afterlife.

Specifically, Moorjani spoke about the unconditional love she felt for herself and others, and how she realized the cause of many issues in her life, including cancer, was her own lack of self-love. Her story reinforced many spiritual beliefs, such as we don’t die; the soul lives on forever; and the most important thing in this physical life is love.

In her newest book, “What If This Is Heaven: How Our Cultural Myths Prevent Us from Experiencing Heaven on Earth,” she takes on the biggest myths holding us back from being our authentic selves, and one that jumped out for me was “You Get What You Deserve.”

Moorjani pointed out during our interview for the September 2016 Issue cover story of Elevated Existence Magazine, that despite what many organized religions teach, we are not judged on the other side. We can see how our actions affected the people in our lives, but there is no harsh judgment — only love. More importantly, we don’t feel the need to judge others, even those who may have wronged us during our physical life.

“In the other realm where I shed my body, I was in a state of total clarity, total empathy and total unconditional love,” she says in the September 2016 Issue cover story. “When you are in that state you feel for everybody — even those who have hurt you — with unconditional love. Empathy means understanding where they were, understanding why they did what they did and knowing that they could not have done any differently from where they were standing.”

She believes every single person, no matter what they do, has a story behind them, which made them react the way they did. However, while living here in this physical world, we don’t see other people’s stories, and we don’t know or understand what drives them to do what they do. In the other realm, we can see it all with extreme clarity, and have what she calls “360-degree vision.”

“All is known. All is transparent. You know the story behind what took them to the point of doing what they are doing — even the person holding the shotgun or the terrorist,” she explains. “When you know that story, you realize there is nothing to forgive.”

Imagine if we lived our lives from this vantage point while still in our physical bodies — and this is only one of the myths she takes on in the book!

We are all here as spiritual beings having a human experience, but it IS possible to harness our authentic selves and bring a little piece of heaven into our everyday lives. As Moorjani says in the September 2016 issue:

“It’s not about going out and changing the world. It’s about becoming what we want to see in the world.”