Here are 100 books that Beyond Happiness fans have personally recommended if you like
Beyond Happiness.
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I have always been the ‘observing individual’ and deeply interested in knowing the connection between mind and soul. This always led me to the question what are the roots of happiness and content? Since materialism has a strong, complex, and intricate impact on our lifestyle and choices, my observation led me to conclude that despite unparalleled access to wealth, people still struggle with concepts of serenity, peace, happiness, and contentment. This disconnect prompted me to explore the various socio-psychological dimensions of materialism. While writing this book my objective was to highlight subtle yet profound materialistic omnipresence on our life choices, often at the expense of genuine well-being.
Any book written with an imaginative undertone gets to be amongst my favorites. In this brilliant book, the foibles of imagination and illusions of foresight are discussed, which cause each of us to misconceive our tomorrows and misestimate our satisfactions.
What I really like is the penetrating insight and sparkling prose that the author has used. Moreover, the very interesting take on why we seem to know so little about the hearts and minds of the people we are about to become has a flavor of its own. Mature readers will definitely love it!
Bringing to life scientific research in psychology, cognitive neuroscience, philosophy, and behavioral economics, this bestselling book reveals what scientists have discovered about the uniquely human ability to imagine the future, and about our capacity to predict how much we will like it when we get there.
• Why are lovers quicker to forgive their partners for infidelity than for leaving dirty dishes in the sink?
• Why will sighted people pay more to avoid going blind than blind people will pay to regain their sight?
• Why do dining companions insist on ordering different meals instead of getting what they…
A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.
German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
I am the founder and principal of Work & Think, LLC., and help clients make complex decisions that include a realistic understanding of uncertainty. My Spangler Ethical Reasoning Assessment® (SERA®) is used across industries and around the world, enabling individuals to combine critical thinking and values to make complex decisions. I am a frequent keynote speaker, a corporate consultant, a researcher, and an author. My new book is Reasoning for Business. Learn more at my website.
I find this book answers questions many people ask: Why aren’t we always logical? What gets in the way of our making effective decisions?
I first read this book when I started my consulting practice and realized I needed to combine psychology with philosophy in teaching critical thinking in professional settings. People want to understand why we can be unreasonable in the first place. Kahneman’s book helped me improve my own thinking, making me aware of the ways my previous experiences quickly provide interpretations of new experiences.
I find the ability to “hit the pause button” regarding my response to a specific situation and to ask myself, “Is my immediate, intuitive response useful or misleading me?” is one of my most important insights from this book.
The phenomenal international bestseller - 2 million copies sold - that will change the way you make decisions
'A lifetime's worth of wisdom' Steven D. Levitt, co-author of Freakonomics 'There have been many good books on human rationality and irrationality, but only one masterpiece. That masterpiece is Thinking, Fast and Slow' Financial Times
Why is there more chance we'll believe something if it's in a bold type face? Why are judges more likely to deny parole before lunch? Why do we assume a good-looking person will be more competent? The answer lies in the two ways we make choices: fast,…
I’m passionate about productivity that enhances life, not erodes it. After years of chasing more—more certifications, more races, more promotions—I faced a health crisis that forced me to redefine success. Now, I’m on a mission to help people and companies find real productivity without sacrificing relationships or health. My background as a speaker, trainer, and coach drives me to show others how sustainable habits can declutter not just our workspaces but also our minds and bodies. True productivity isn’t about doing more; it’s about creating space for what truly matters.
This book is one of those foundational books that shifted my approach to both personal and professional habits. The science and storytelling brought habit formation to life, showing me how small changes could drive big outcomes. Like Cal Newport’s and Gretchen Rubin's work, it’s practical and realistic, offering insights I could apply directly to my routines and business practices.
Duhigg’s breakdown of how habits work—and how to reshape them—gave me new tools for building sustainable, intentional habits and teaching others to do it, too. This one has stayed with me and remains a key influence on how I approach productivity.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • This instant classic explores how we can change our lives by changing our habits.
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Wall Street Journal • Financial Times
In The Power of Habit, award-winning business reporterCharles Duhigg takes us to the thrilling edge of scientific discoveries that explain why habits exist and how they can be changed. Distilling vast amounts of information into engrossing narratives that take us from the boardrooms of Procter & Gamble to the sidelines of the NFL to the front lines of the civil rights movement, Duhigg presents…
Sine, a professor of creative writing, accompanies Sam, a neuroscientist, on a conference trip to a Hotel Castle. Sam wants to present a new device, the "monitor." Sine hopes to recover from tending to her mother who just passed away.
When they arrive, Sine is in a dream-like state. Real…
I have a Ph.D. in Psychology and a lifelong fascination with people and why they do the things they do, including why I do the things I do. My life and career have been all about trying to learn as much as I can about psychology, brain science, how people think, how people learn, and how to use this body of knowledge and research to understand myself and others. My work is about applying behavioral science to the design of technology to better fit and serve people.
Redirect describes the research on how self-stories drive our behavior. “Self-stories” are the small stories we tell ourselves and others about why we do what we do. There are two reasons why this book is so amazing: First, it makes you see that these largely unconscious self-stories are really controlling our whole lives, and secondly, Dr. Wilson shares his research on how very easy it actually is to change the stories and therefore change our lives. I’ve used his techniques many times to make it through my own life challenges and it works. Changing your self-story is the only way to get your life to change. Luckily, if you follow Dr. Wilson’s research and techniques you will discover it is much easier than you think to change the stories.
What if there were a magic pill that could make you happier, turn you into a better parent, solve a number of your teenager's behavior problems, reduce racial prejudice, and close the achievement gap in education? There is no such pill, but story editing -- the scientifically based approach described in Redirect -- can accomplish all of this.
The world-renowned psychologist Timothy Wilson shows us how to redirect the stories we tell about ourselves and the world around us, with subtle prompts, in ways that lead to lasting change. Fascinating, groundbreaking, and practical, Redirect demonstrates the remarkable power small changes…
Sensei Koshin Paley Ellison is an author, Soto Zen teacher, and Jungian psychotherapist. Koshin co-founded the New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care, which offers contemplative approaches to care through education, personal caregiving, and Zen practice. He is the author of Wholehearted: Slow Down, Help Out, Wake Up. And the co-editor of Awake at the Bedside: Contemplative Teachings on Palliative and End of Life Care. He is a recognized Zen teacher by the Soto Zen Buddhist Association, White Plum Asanga, and American Zen Teachers Association.
Dharma successor to Taizan Maezumi Roshi, Charlotte Joko Beck, was a musician, mother, partner and a person deeply interested in the integration of deep practice in the midst of our ordinary lives. Through her warmth and clarity, this book explicitly explores love, relationships, work, dear, ambition, and suffering. It is a beautiful book about how to live fully.
Charlotte Joko Beck is one of the most popular Zen teachers currently teaching in the West.
This beautifully written book is a Zen guide to the problems of daily living, love, relationships, work, fear and suffering. Beck describes how to be in the present and living each moment to the full.
I'm a writer and a late-life fine arts photographer. For eight years I had been writing a book set in the personal and historical past. I would sit at the computer, shut my eyes, and say to myself, “Go deeper.” Eventually, I was able to recall long-forgotten details. When I looked up from those years of writing, the memoir, entitled Phantom Limb, was finished and being published. However, I discovered that I could no longer see – really see – what was around me. Along the way, I had lost that alert attention to the way light falls, to colors that used to hit me between the eyes. I felt the loss deeply. I’ve always loved to look. I had to do something to summon it back.
This is a book that gets obstacles for seeing out of the way. This is the book I turn to if I’m sad, unsure, not confident. It’s not that this Zen master makes me happy or sure of myself. No, she puts my life in perspective: What is the big deal? I imagine her saying. You are a small thing in the universe. But while you are here, it's important to do your work. Read it and you’ll be back in the river, whisked along in the current, one more unimportant but vitally aware part of the great stream of life.
The best-selling author of 'Everyday Zen' shows how to awaken to daily life and discover the ideal in the everyday, finding riches in our feelings, relationships, and work. 'Nothing Special' offers the rare and delightful experience of learning in the authentic Buddhist tradition with a wonderfully contemporary Western master.
In an age of splendor, a heretic king strips Egypt bare—forcing his queen to quell rebellion and plunging his children into a conspiracy against the crown.
Salvation in the Sun follows Nefertiti as she ascends the throne beside Pharaoh Amenhotep—soon to become Akhenaten—just as he declares war on Egypt’s ancient…
James Ford is a Zen teacher and the author or editor of five books on Zen history and spirituality. His history of Zen in the West, Zen Master Who? captured the personalities who formed our emerging Western schools, while the Book of Mu, which he compiled and edited with Melissa Myozen Blacker is considered essential for any contemporary student of koans, Zen’s arcane spiritual discipline.
Robert Aitken was the first American born Zen teacher to be ranked an equal among the first generation of Zen missionaries from East Asia. Several of his books count as classics, but Mind of Clover stands out for its clarity while introducing Zen's ethical precepts as an essential container of Zen practice.
In Taking the Path of Zen, Robert Aitken provided a concise guide to zazen (Zen meditation) and other aspects of the practice of Zen. In The Mind of Clover he addresses the world beyond the zazen cushions, illuminating issues of appropriate personal and social action through an exploration of the philosophical complexities of Zen ethics.
Aitken's approach is clear and sure as he shows how our minds can be as nurturing as clover, which enriches the soil and benefits the environment as it grows. The opening chapters discuss the Ten Grave Precepts of Zen, which, Aitken points out, are "not…
In 1990, I introduced the idea of emotional intelligence with my colleague Peter Salovey. This was followed, in 2008, with the introduction of the theory of personal intelligence. Emotional, personal, and social intelligence form a group I labeled the “people-centered intelligences,” which are partly distinct from intelligences focused on things such as objects in space and mathematical symbols.
One quality the diverse books I recommend here share in common is that they help us reason about who we are—a key element of personal intelligence.
Is it American History? Counterculture? Something else? To be sure what it is is a very engaging, detailed chronicle of the California Institute at Big Sur and its residents and visitors.
The book provides coverage of a profound and influential interlude of American culture in which drugs, folk-rock, psychology, transhumanism, and other philosophies intermixed with one another.
As a psychologist, I was interested in hearing about Aldous Huxley and Abraham Maslow’s visits; more generally, who knew that Joan Baez and Hunter S. Thompson both lived on the property before the institute was established!
Jeffrey J. Kripal here recounts the spectacular history of Esalen, the institute that has long been a world leader in alternative and experiential education and stands today at the center of the human potential movement. Forged in the literary and mythical leanings of the Beat Generation, inspired in the lecture halls of Stanford by radical scholars of comparative religion, the institute was the remarkable brainchild of Michael Murphy and Richard Price.Set against the heady backdrop of California during the revolutionary 1960s, "Esalen" recounts in fascinating detail how these two maverick thinkers sought to fuse the spiritual revelations of the East…
These books attempt to describe the indescribable, pointing to the unknowable, only the living of which makes living living. What they have in common is that they invite us to practice along with the author, not giving any answers, but inviting us to look. I fell in love with Awareness Practice in my youth and through the decades that love has only deepened. I continue to love this journey of exploration and I hope the books that I have written contribute to that same experience for others. There is nothing more magical than having a direct experience of encountering who we really are, beyond ego’s dualistic world of opposites.
When a clearly enlightened spiritual master speaks to us, our first reaction is often resistance because the message is designed to end the reign of egocentricity and return us to Authentic Being. To me, everything Leo Tolstoy wrote in his maturity offers the same possibility, but none so starkly as My Religion. As with reading Mahatma Gandhi, we have the opportunity to witness the deep practice of an aspirant grappling with transcending the suffering of the human condition, in much the same way John of the Cross describes the “dark night of the soul.” It illustrates every person’s spiritual journey and the uncompromising nature of the path to awakening.
The Journal of Leo Tolstoi is a compilation of Tolstoy's journal entries. They entries range from 1895 through 1899.
Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy (9 September [O.S. 28 August] 1828 - 20 November [O.S. 7 November] 1910), usually referred to in English as Leo Tolstoy, was a Russian writer who is regarded as one of the greatest authors of all time. He received multiple nominations for Nobel Prize in Literature every year from 1902 to 1906, and nominations for Nobel Peace Prize in 1901, 1902 and 1910, and his miss of the prize is a major Nobel prize controversy.
Born the heir of a master woodcutter in a queendom defined by guilds and matrilineal inheritance, nonbinary Sorin can’t quite seem to find their place. At seventeen, an opportunity to attend an alchemical guild fair and secure an apprenticeship with the…
Sensei Koshin Paley Ellison is an author, Soto Zen teacher, and Jungian psychotherapist. Koshin co-founded the New York Zen Center for Contemplative Care, which offers contemplative approaches to care through education, personal caregiving, and Zen practice. He is the author of Wholehearted: Slow Down, Help Out, Wake Up. And the co-editor of Awake at the Bedside: Contemplative Teachings on Palliative and End of Life Care. He is a recognized Zen teacher by the Soto Zen Buddhist Association, White Plum Asanga, and American Zen Teachers Association.
This book inspired my own integration of service and Zen. Issan Dorsey is a person who did not hold back. This portrait of a teacher whose creativity, love, honesty, joy, and compassion continues to awaken new possibilities for engaged Buddhism.
Drag queen. Prostitute. Drug addict. American bodhisattva.
These words describe the unlikely persona of Issan Dorsey, one of the most beloved teachers to emerge in American Zen. From his early days as a gorgeous female impersonator to the LSD experiences that set him on the spiritual path, Issan's life was never conventional. In 1989, after twenty years of Zen practice, he became the Founding Abbot of San Francisco's Hartford Street Zen Center, where he established Maitri Hospice for AIDS patients. Featuring Bernie Glassman's foreword to the second edition, as well as a new foreword by Koshin Paley Ellison, Street Zen…
