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A beautifully designed, easy-to-read guide filled with compassionate wisdom, heartfelt stories, and imaginative exercises to help you lead a more creative and fulfilling life. Dr. Cat's Helping Handbook has 55 in-depth chapters and 500-plus margin quotations from writers around the world.
Customer Review: Wisdom, compassion, and inspiration
I love this book! It is rich with practical ideas. Dr. Cat's chapters are short and to the point. Her basic message is be compassionate with yourself and to take good care of yourself. She shows us how to do exactly that. A wide variety of topics make this handbook a treasure. Included are an emergency plan for anger overload, the gratitude cleanup list, relating with respect, and many others. I especially like her collection of the brilliant quotes she has scattered throughout the book. Recommended for learning to take gentle care of a human being, you!
Customer Review: A Powerful Guide to Help You Liberate Your Heart
Dr. Cat Saunders' life purpose is to liberate her heart. In Dr. Cat's Helping Handbook: A Compassionate Guide for Being Human, she shows how readers can do the same. This handsome and well-crafted first book is her contribution to the process of personal growth. Packed with wisdom, empowerment, and love, Dr. Cat's Helping Handbook reveals ways to move from merely living life to loving life. This transition can occur through a change of consciousness induced by exploring the depths of emotion in very practical ways. According to Dr. Cat, it's possible to shift a frame of reference to a place where guilt is useful, pain has a message, and addiction leads to awareness. What's more, it is possible to keep all emotions, none of which are good, bad, right, or wrong. Dr. Cat is a gentle inner guide sharing intimate aspects of her own learning to illuminate the underlying truths of addiction, abuse, anger, shame, and fear. "When you meet your needs as they are, without judgments or conditions, they can evolve naturally in a way that supports your spiritual growth," says Dr. Cat. "It's not necessary to pit your spirituality against your humanity." Fifteen years in the making, Dr. Cat's Helping Handbook is full of hard-won wisdom. Being in tune with both the mental and physical worlds, Dr. Cat draws from a lifetime of intensity. She demonstrates that it's possible to learn from and be in charge of life itself. Courageously, she explores what it means to be alive. She has a talent for distilling her personal experience into practical pathways for life discoveries. For instance, she uses "conscious ritual" as a creative way to meet her need for connection. "With compassion for my human tendency toward attachment and familiarity, I use rituals to celebrate these tendencies in positive ways, instead of denying them. Conscious ritual increases awareness; addiction decreases it." Dr. Cat insightfully suggests that what may not be working in life can be an opening to what works if there is willingness to recognize fears of both pain and pleasure. Such fears, she says, are openings to aliveness. Step-by-step, she tenderly shows how to move deeper into feelings. This allows for the emergence of a truer connection to self and confidence that encourages being in the moment, spontaneity in expression, and enthusiasm for life. Not afraid to take strong positions, Dr. Cat speaks frankly about such things as "the fight-or-flight response that goes beyond personal anger to collective survival." She discloses how she makes sense of violence and war, and explains how she makes peace with her pacifist tendencies "so they don't tyrannize all my other principles." Finally, she dares readers to explore their relationship with violence "all the way down to its most terrifying, enigmatic, primitive core." Through an amazing range of thought-provoking and memory-stimulating exercises, Dr. Cat models digging deeply to excavate the buried parts of self. At the same time, she honors the body with love, compassion, and wonder. In short, Dr. Cat's Helping Handbook will work on you, and inspire you to work on yourself, relentlessly assisting you in becoming your own best ally. There are several special gifts in this volume of more than fifty chapters, including "How to Be Seriously Silly," "The Dilemma of Forgiveness," "Four Principles of Effective Apology," "The Resolution Prayer," "Death as an Adviser," and "My Personal Rules of Respect." There is also an in-depth section called "The Group as Healer," along with a section of guided meditations, plus an extensive and helpful bibliography. For good measure, Dr. Cat has included a wonderful collection of pithy quotes in the margins, adding just the right touch. This powerful guidebook can open sensitive eyes and lead right to the heart of the matter. If you follow Dr. Cat's loving advice, you may liberate your own heart. --L. Marie Hanthorn


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