Like most people today, your life may be running at breakneck speed most the time.  You long for some time to yourself to just slow down and re-group.  When clients ask me how they can find time to do that, I remind them that there’s one very easy way to put a little more peace in your life.  At the same time you can also broaden your knowledge, empower your goals and just re-think life from a different perspective – all by reading a book!

Life Too Hectic? Find More Peace In A Book

If you’re like me, you walk by a bookstore and think about all the great books out there that you haven’t read.  Running all week with jobs, family, errands, as well as the constant drone of intense 24 hour news broadcasts, traffic jams, noise, can leave you feeling frazzled.  But, reading a great, inspiring, personal peace-promoting book is one of the easiest ways to relax and slow down the pace of your life.  Here are 3 that you may not have read that can help you put a little more peace into your life.

1.  Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert Pirsig, 1974.  This book has become a classic must-read. It’s about a man who takes a journey to California on his motorcycle, with his son and, for a short while, his close friends.  It reflects on various philosophical discussions, experiences along the way, ways of handling them, that tend to reveal the quality of life itself and the search for meaning.

These lessons are symbolized in the ways the men maintain their motorcycles – the friend preferring the “chance” method and being at the mercy of others to fix it for him and the narrator preferring the “rational, problem solving” method of diagnosing it and fixing it himself.  Is life rational – backed up by science and reason or is it irrational backed up by bursts of creativity and intuition that seem to come out of nowhere?

Even reading a few pages of this book everyday can spur you to think more deeply about not only life itself, but your own ways of perceiving things, and can help you find some peace in its modern lessons of wisdom.

2.  Conversations with God, by Neale Donald Walsh, 1995. When this book first came out, its author was a talk show sensation.  It’s written as a dialogue of questions to God with answers.  Walsh created the book in a period of his life when he was at a particularly low point, angry, and questioning his own faith in God.  He wrote down a series of questions that he would ask if he actually had the chance to talk to God.  Walsh claims that while writing them, he heard a voice over his shoulder say, “Do you really want an answer to these questions or are you just venting?” When he turned to look no one was there.  He then says he felt the answers to his questions come to him and he began to answer his own questions.  In doing so, he found a theme of 4 common things in his answers that helped him be less angry and brought him peace:

1.  We are all one.

2.  There’s enough.

3.  There’s nothing we have to do.

4.  Ours is not the only way, it’s only one way.

The questions/answers deal with many of life’s issues – both of a personal nature and globally.  But Walsh cautions readers to use their own feelings towards his words in taking meaning from them.  There are now 3 Conversations with God books.  You may find some peace and solace in the answers that came to Walsh as he attempted to answer his own questions about existence.

3. The Path of Empowerment, by Barbara Muciniak, 1988.  This book is truly escapist in nature and is one to read with an open mind.  It provides a unique journey of “enlightenment” through conversations with multidimensional beings called The Pleidians.  The author claims to have been a conduit for these beings to speak through.  Yet, surprisingly, they are very empowering messages of hope, reclaiming your personal power, changing your outdated beliefs (if you have any), how to deal with the growing-ever faster pace of life.

It also offers insights on fear, love, sexual intimacy, creativity, broadening your knowledge base and awareness, and creating a whole new world of success for yourself.  It may seem a little out there, but it does offer some surprisingly empowering messages.  You just may come away from reading a few pages here and there feeling more at peace and able to keep pursuing your goals.

Take one of these books – or one of your own choices – to a quiet place and allow yourself to immerse in their words.  You can drive to the local bookstore, get a coffee, find a corner chair, or take a drive to the park and sit on a bench for an hour.  Reading books are like entering the private world of the author and learning someone else’s take on life.  They inspire you to slow down, take a deep breath, and look at life differently, which can help you put a little more peace in your life everyday.

Stay Well,
Dale Brown, B.S., M.A., C.E.C.
Certified Empowerment Coach

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_and_the_Art_of_Motorcycle_Maintenance

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversations_with_God