If NLP usually turns you off, or you find it gimmicky, manipulative, or overblown, then I would recommend this course as a breath of fresh air for beginners and those with more experience as well.

Description: NLP Marin teaches a set of skills and perceptual frames that combine some core skills and techniques of NLP with a variety of other modalities, such as neo-Rechiean childhood development, Bert Hellinger’s family constellations, and other interesting and useful ideas they have integrated into their work.

I find their particular flavor of NLP is incredibly effective, respectful, and honoring of all aspects of a human being. It is very much in contrast to the feel I get from some other forms of NLP, which occur to me as gimmicky, manipulative, or overblown.

The main trainer/instructor is Carl Buchheit, who I really enjoy learning from. He’s been doing NLP since the late 70s, and is incredibly good at what he does. He’s incredibly sharp, knowledgeable, and has a really quirky sense of humor. I respect him a lot, and I’ve enjoyed every weekend I’ve gone to.

Anecdote: As a result of this training, I quit my job as a software engineer, and chose to start a career as a coach. The model and set of tools here integrated a lot of the other work I had learned elsewhere, and had me realize “Wow, I’m actually damn good at working with people, and have something very real to offer them.” It gave me the confidence to go after what I want, even though it’s a bit scary to do so.

Potential Turn-Offs: If you’re experienced as a coach/therapist, or done a lot of personal work with people, the first course may seem a little basic, and you may get impatient.

You also practice what you learn on other classmates. Sometimes that can be a great experience, and sometimes a difficult one, depending on the skill and competence of the classmate in question.

What I Got out of it: I have trained with them quite a bit, and am nearly complete with my Master’s Certification. (Which requires a total of 16 weekends of training.)

My experience of learning there has been an interesting combination of learning skills, and doing personal growth/development work. A lot of what I have learned has subtly (or dramatically) shifted my experience of people, the world, and especially myself. It’s not as dramatic and concentrated as an Arete circle, but has consistently worked to shift and revise a lot inside of me.

At this point, I feel *way* more acceptance and liking of myself, as well as having a really strong set of techniques I can use to work with people, and make a difference in their lives.

Learn more about NLP Marin

Description: Personal Growth Videos searches and aggregates content from YouTube, Yahoo, Google Video, Revver, Metacafe, Dailymotion, Veoh, ClipSyndicate and Blip.tv to bring the best to one simple location.

Anecdote: “The PGV Tag Cloud makes it easy to find the best videos on the site.”

Potential Turn-Offs: A bit more on the “spiritual” vibe like Adi Da, Ram Dass and Eckhart Tolle.

What I Got out of it: No easier place to find the best personal growth videos on the Web.

Learn more about Personal Growth Video

Shunryu Suzuki Roshi was a Soto Zen priest and the founder of the San Francisco Zen Center. He was born 1904 in rural Japan, arrived in the United States to teach in 1959, and died of cancer in San Francisco in 1971.

Description: I have read many Buddhist books, and this one is my favorite. In fact, I have read many books (full stop), and this one is my favorite. ZMBM is mystical and otherworldly yet day-to-day ordinary, it is philosophical and technical yet beautifully poetic and literary, it is challenging and demands your best yet is gentle and patient, it is traditional yet modern, it is serious and sincere yet light-hearted and easy, it is simple yet deep, it is Japanese yet American. To summarize : pimp as muhfgn hell. Steven Mitchell included excerpts from ZMBM in his anthological collection of traditional “enlightened” writings called “The Enlightened Mind”, and it’s easy to see why. My perspective is that these words emerge from the still silent heart of genuine spiritual liberation.

Anecdote: Suzuki Roshi was purportedly a small man with a wry and sometimes mischievous sense of humor. Once, while being transported between Zen temples, he reportedly ordered a burger, and then, saying he wasn’t that hungry, switched lunches with his driver (later admitting that it was because he thought the guy was too attached to being a hard-line vegetarian). Suzuki Roshi’s, a Zen master in his own right, described him as “soft and warm on the outside, hard as stone [in his self-discipline] on the inside”.

Potential Turn-Offs: I’ll leave others to try to cook some up. I can’t think of any. Maybe if your iman declared jihad on all religions besides your own? Aside from fundamentalism like that, if you’re into depth, clarity, beauty, and profundity, this is a good book for you.

What I Got out of it: In the twenty years since I first read it, every time I pick up this book and read a chapter or three, I get something out of it that speaks powerfully and directly to what is going on in my life. The relevant information is usually simultaneously simple, obvious, and everyday-decent, and yet also magical, deep, and paradoxical. I have noticed that my favorite books seem to grow deeper as the years go on, and the deeper I get, and ZMBM was the first book I noticed that seemed to be doing this. I look forward to seeing what as yet undiscovered treasures it will hold for me twenty or thirty years from now.

Learn more about Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, by Shunryu Suzuki

Description: This book is a good basic collection of what modern academic psychological research has to say about being happy, sprinkled in with bits of wisdom from philosophical and religious traditions of the East and West. And you may wonder why the cover of the current edition is a picture of a man riding a swimming elephant, as seen from below. A central theme in the book is that being human is like being a rider on an elephant, the rider being our conscious intentional awareness, and the elephant being our instinctual habitual animal self. The elephant can be trained, slowly, so that it will obey the rider’s whims, but it takes time and patience. Trained, the elephant can do great things, but, if untrained, it can cause destruction. The book also talked at length about the need for love and human connection and for meaningful work for human happiness to flourish.

Anecdote: I read this book on my former housemate Barnaby’s suggestion. He emailed me and said ” I found it to be outstanding. It was the best of the ‘positive psychology’ books that I’ve read (seligman, czikszentmihalyi, etc) by far. A lot of good stuff on Buddhism, too. He says that the current data strongly supports three treatments for depression: SSRIs, cognitive-behavioral therapy, and meditation.” At one point, Barnaby told me, he started talking to a shaved-head guy sitting next to him at the passport office, who had the book with him, only to find out that the man (Reb Anderson) was the former abbot of the Zen Center that Barnaby had lived in for years.

Potential Turn-Offs: Haidt especially examined Buddhism, and its relevance to happiness. I thought that he made some interesting points about Buddhism. I think, however, that he misunderstood and misused technical Buddhist ideas by using the words in their conventional English meanings (i.e. using the word “attachment” as meaning simple caring or emotional investment, rather than the technical Buddhist meaning of a viscosity of internal experience that attempts to unnaturally hold, congeal around, and grab at experiences of pleasure, or “happiness” as simple pleasantness of mood, rather than the Buddhist meaning as liberation from constriction, congealing, and identification with phenomena that enables life to be experienced as natural unforced vibratory emanations from Divinity/Emptiness (which is a “happiness” that includes and transcends both mundane “happiness” and mundane “unhappiness”)). Every time he said, “In the end, I think Buddhism gets it wrong, and I think that happiness instead comes from …”, the thing he stated in contrast to Buddhism with seemed to me to be pretty Buddhist, or at least compatible with Buddhism.

What I Got out of it: I thought that the book was interesting and at times illuminating. I enjoyed it and am glad that I read it, and thought that it was better than most books I have read. Didn’t really blow me to the stars or anything though.

Learn more about The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt

Nisargadatta Maharaj was born in 1897 with the name “Maruti”, and lived a simple uneducated life, as a husband and shopkeeper in the slums of Bombay, until he died in 1981. He is considered by some however to have attained the supreme state of “moksha” (Sanskrit for “enlightenment” or “liberation”), and to be one of the deepest modern masters of the Hindu school of Advaita Vedanta (emphasizing direct nondualistic realization of truth).

In the words of Advaita scholar Dr. Robert Powell, “Like the Zen masters of old, Nisargadatta’s style is abrupt, provocative, and immensely profound — cutting to the core and wasting little effort on inessentials. His terse but potent sayings are known for their ability to trigger shifts in consciousness, just by hearing, or even reading them.”

Description: If you really want to not just understand the concept, but actually learn how it feels to disidentify with yourself as a finite human being, and to instead experience yourself as an expressive action of the entire universe, then this is your book. Nisargadatta’s teachings are relentlessly confrontational and cosmically and mind-blowing. They take every preconceived notion that you have, and blow them out of the water, stretching you much wider open than you even could have conceived possible. This book is IT, the end point of the whole journey.

Anecdote: The philosopher Ken Wilber points out that many of the modern enlightened masters may have been spiritually liberated but were not fully integrated, i.e. were unhealthy in certain areas of their life besides spirituality. Nisargadatta is an example of this - from his state of enlightenment and his role as part-time role as a guru to many, he also ran a store that mostly sold leaf-rolled cigarettes, chain smoked, and died of throat cancer.

Potential Turn-Offs: If you are new to spiritual practice, this is probably not the book for you - I recommend building up to it with some other books, teachers, and experiences first. First off, a lot of what Nisargadatta teaches in the book is difficult to conceptually comprehend - it’s anything but common sense. Also, I’ve heard it said that the reason why we aren’t all directly in touch with the deep enlightened spiritual truth of life here and now is that it can be so terrifyingly raw. Reading this book may leave you a believer of that theory.

What I Got out of it: Reading I Am That had me finally understand the mystical experience, not as a concept, but, from the inside, what it actually feels like. I can only handle the intensity of the book in three to fifteen page doses, but, after such a reading, I feel immense, clear, transcendent, and unstainable. It doesn’t get any realer. KABOOM, bitches.

Learn more about I Am That, by Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Codependent No More introduced the word ‘codependent’ to the wider world. The term ‘codependent’ originated as a term to describe people who use relationships with others as their sole source of value and identity. These people often end up in relationships with either drug addicted or alcohol addicted spouses or lovers. In the book, Beattie explains that a codependent is a person who believes their happiness is derived from other people or one person in particular, and eventually the codependent becomes obsessed with controlling the behavior of the people/person that they believe is making them happy.

Rather like Bill Wilson’s Alcoholics Anonymous five decades earlier, Beattie’s early work took the previously complex object relations and interpersonal theories of psychological theorists like Heinz Kohut, Wilfred Bion, and Otto Kernberg, and put them in language laypeople could easily grasp. Codependent No More also re-phrased many of the notions expressed in the Al-Anon Twelve Step movement into more modern language, and made the notion of addiction to a person part of the western cultural lexicon.”

Description: The book is about learning how to have - wait for it - no more codependency. Beattie worked as a professional writer while she wrote it, so it’s an extraordinarily smooth read, mixing examples with theory, and making deep concepts clear and easy to grasp. Some general themes are cultivating boundaries, a healthy sense of separation, solid self-respect, saying “no”, paying attention to one’s own business, and being able to strong and brave in walking one’s path. It’s also about finding balance and general emotional health, and cultivating the ability to love and care for others for real (in a way that isn’t draining).

Anecdote: My copy of the book is from the original printing. My mom bought it around the time it first came out, and I borrowed it a couple years later. I was a little weirded out seeing her number rankings (from one to five) of herself next to the multi-page list of codependency symptoms. Anyway, after reading it a few times through, I asked if I could keep it, and my mom said yes, and I still have her old copy. I think I bought her a copy of a later printing a few years later.

Potential Turn-Offs: I like listening to books on audio, but, whisky tango foxtrot, could they have found an more mawkish and weepy sounding actress to read the book. Avoid. Also, if the whole “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and, doggone it, people like me” affirmation-twelve step vibe is silly to you, this book may be too (although, honestly, this book will reach out and break your ass bone with a firmly placed kick if you tell it that you think it’s “silly”. Or, actually, more likely, it will just tell you firmly that it doesn’t appreciate your comment, and, calmly and with self-respect, turn and go about its business.)

What I Got out of it: The book is deep, honest, personal, intense, relevant, and practical. I have complete trust in it. Growing from being an anxious, scared-of-people kid, repeated readings of this book gave me a powerful sense of self-respect, of my own worth, and of my own path and core. It’s funny that they got Ms. Weepy to read it for the audio production, because they could have just as easily gotten a Marine Corps sergeant major. Yes. Drop and give me fifty, Recruit - that’s just how it do.

Learn more about Codependent No More, by Melody Beattie

Description: David’s teaching is clear and concise. The instruction makes it easy to figure out where your hands and feet need to be so you can spend the entire class soaking up the sweetness as your breath moves you along. The flowing sequence connects you to your body and breath, even if you just have time for part of the practice. David’s ashtanga inspired class leaves you rejuvenated, full of life, & smiling.

Anecdote: My parents don’t practice yoga, but couldn’t turn off the DVD. Maybe it was the scenic natural setting, the soothing tone of David’s voice, or the connections he draws between the practice on and off the mat that kept us tuned in as if it were the latest arrival from Netflix. The experience created one more connection between myself and my parents.

Potential Turn-Offs: *Warning* : too many of David’s classes may lead you to quit your job & open your own yoga studio in the relatively near future. Side effects may also include: personal transformation, career changes, odd cravings of teacher trainings, a strong urge to tell all of your friends about the infinite benefits of yoga, intense feelings of peace, happiness, bliss, and love.

What I Got out of it: The proof is in the pudding…David was one of my very first yoga teachers, and now I teach yoga too. His classes allowed me to expand my boundaries, let go of what I didn’t need, harness what’s deep inside and let it shine on the outside.

Open your heart and mind to the practice, you’ll realize that you’re stronger than you ever imagined. And that with all that strength comes softness and compassion.

Learn more about Find Balance with David Lurey

Description: A straight up masterpiece. This book is filled with deep, true, authentic Buddhist wisdom, and yet is written in an easy, extraordinarily clear Americanized vernacular. It is a comprehensive introduction for mindfulness meditation practice, filled with clear instructions for the path. The book challenges the reader to go deep and to practice properly, but it also has a simple, patient, humorous, kind, smiling vibe to it. Covers a wide ground, and yet touches on each subject in depth.

Anecdote: It is my experience that neither Bhante G (as he is known)’s other books nor his live lectures are quite as piercingly clear and smooth as this book is. Relevant here are the rumors that MiPE was ghost-co-written with an American professional writer.

Potential Turn-Offs: Don’t read this book if … ummmm …. if you don’t like being happy? Honestly, I can’t really think of any negatives to it. This book rökkz harder than John Bonham flying a F-35 JSF (while wearing Iron Man’s battlesuit).

What I Got out of it: I’ve been sitting meditation for twenty years and teaching it for five, and much of my grounding in the practice has come out of this book. Any meditation practitioner I know who is looking to deepen their understanding of the practice has gotten value from their engagement with this book. It’s everything you wish your mom had taught you about meditation practice. Anytime I pick up and re-read a little bit of it, I feel soothed, clarified, and a feeling of the worthwhileness of being aware, intentional, and alive.

Purchase Mindfulness in Plain English by Bhante Henepola Gunaratana

Description: This is a deceptively basic-seeming book that will actually will reward the reader with as much depth as they are willing to seek from it. Some themes in the book are developing a sense of purpose and intentionality in life, cultivating self-discipline and ethical behavior, and ways to create social networks that work (which, in the end, comes down to love). A big theme in the book is taking on practices and self-cultivations in the service of self-improvement. The writing can occasionally be jargon-y or dense, but it is mostly an extraordinarily smooth clear well-edited read, as Covey skillfully weaves together stories and examples with theories and distinctions.

Anecdote: I’ve read the book only once, but I’ve listened to the 7HoHEP audio tapes many many times. The audio is a recording of Covey giving a supposedly extemporaneous lecture in front of a live audience. Nonetheless, in some cases, the audio is pretty much a verbatim equivalent of the text of the book, which makes me think that either the book is in some cases transcripted, or his live lectures were delivered from a tightly scripted outline.

Potential Turn-Offs: The book recommends a high degree of discipline, intentionality, and self-sacrifice, mentions God more than once, and draws a fair number of examples from business. People who are already hard on themselves, people whose current path is about letting go and going with the flow, or people who categorically have a problem with all businesspeople, may find the tone unpleasant.

What I Got out of it: It would be difficult to overstate the blessings that I have gotten out of this book, and the trust that I have for its teachings. It is just flat out goodness, it is about doing and being good, but taking the path of work and self-challenge, not inactive idealism. It’s one of those books to come back to as you grow, and see how the book has magically grown along with you.

Learn more about The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey

Description: The book starts with Dan getting it all right at Stanford. He’s on the gymnastics team, and he’s good. He gets lots of attention from girls, and is pretty much breezing by. Then he meets Socrates, an unlikely gas station attendant who turns his world upside down. Socrates immediately intrigued Dan when he managed to appear on the roof, seemingly by flying. After that, Socrates leads Dan on a journey of self-discovery and challenge that shakes Dan’s assumptions about the world to the ground. Dan goes through periods of cleansing/fasting, meditation, and seemingly magical journeys when Socrates touches his temples.

Anecdote: The book was an easy read. I took it on my commute (by train) and it was easy to pick up and put down. I did find myself looking for lessons in the book, tips, tricks, keys to the kingdom of heaven. Alas, it was just a good story, albeit an inspiring one.

Potential Turn-Offs: Well, there’s a bunch of stuff that seems pretty unlikely unless you already have experience doing energy work, reiki, and reading auras. Dan takes a few trips that are like lucid dreams that Socrates activates just by touching his temple. Frankly, I’m down with reiki, and fine fine, you’ve got an aura, but the Vulcan mind meld is a bit much even for me.

What I Got out of it: While I didn’t start a meditation practice the next day, I did get a chance to be more mindful of my state, my reactions, the way I eat, what I eat, etc. I’d say I got a glimpse of being more intentional and that felt good.

Buy th book: Way of the Peaceful Warrior by Dan Millman