Mindfulness for Chocolate Lovers: A Lighthearted Way to Stress Less and Savor More Each Day: Diane R. Gehart: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

Mindfulness for Chocolate Lovers

A Lighthearted Way to Stress Less and Savor More Each Day

Mindfulness for Chocolate Lovers

A Lighthearted Way to Stress Less and Savor More Each Day

Description

An accomplished and honored professor, psychotherapist, author, and chocolate connoisseur, Diane Gehart identifies surprisingly efficient and fun ways to increase your daily dose of joy. Drawing on positive psychology, Eastern wisdom, and three decades of psychotherapist know-how, she outlines a no-nonsense yet good-humored path to get you where you want to go. She will teach you step-by-step how to:

Identify the essential elements necessary for life-long happiness and add them to your everyday habits.Develop an unshakable sense of inner joy that sustains you in good times and bad.Engage your most painful life circumstances to dramatically improve your life for the better.Navigate common pitfalls and challenges, including skillfully handling the most difficult personalities and relationships.Transform how you journey through life—making it a joy ride regardless of weather or other unforeseen circumstances.

First, she debunks popular myths that have us looking for happiness in all the wrong places and then offers an accurate map for getting where we want to go. Next, readers will learn the hardest but ultimately most liberating lesson: making friends with life and all that is, including the good, the bad, and the ugly—which includes black widow spiders for some of us. From there, you will learn surprisingly playful and palatable options for maximizing your joy, including mindfulness, crazy wisdom, compassion, and ethical living. Finally, you will learn how to avoid—or at least survive—the common pitfalls and the dangerous snakes that line the path from where you are to where you want to go.

If you have avoided meditation and similar practices for most of your life because they are dull and boring, you may find something that suits your refined and zesty taste for living here. Along the way, you will have numerous opportunities to laugh, to cry, and to reconnect with the best within yourself. You will suddenly discover your most desperate challenges dissolving before you, revealing an easier path and renewing your delight in living and loving. Worst-case scenario: You will have educational excuses to savor some chocolate delights, enjoy a few good laughs, and gain a handful of new insights about your life.

Whether you are reeling from a devastating break-up; feeling adrift professionally; struggling with depression, anxiety, or more severe mental health issues; or simply wanting to feel happier given the numerous blessings in your life, this book will help you make changes that you could never accomplish before because you will now be motivated to do something different.

Ultimately, this book invites you to play. To laugh. To love. To heal old heartbreaks. To overcome what was once impossible. To open your heart to life and all it has to offer: white, milk, and dark. The stresses of modern life often create the illusion that life is hard, painful, and lonely. You are only a few bites away from an entirely different approach to living a sweeter life.

Author’s Introduction: Would You Rather Eat Chocolate than Meditate?

Warning: Couch Potatoes and Voyeurs

1 Chocolate Meditation: A Taste of the Good Life

2 From Chocoholism to Chocolate Snobbery: Becoming a Seeker of Extraordinary Happiness

3 Chocolate Is a Vegetable: Mapping the Truths You Live By

4 Who Moved My Chocolate? Befriending Problems, Befriending Life

5 One Bite Is All It Takes: Mindfully Waking Up to Your Life

6 With or Without Nuts? Crazy Wisdom and the Back Door to Happiness

7 Fierce Compassion: Opening Your Heart to Milk, White, and Dark

8 There’s No Wrong Way to Eat a Reese’s—Or Is There? Ethics and Happiness

9 Artificial Chocolate and Comfort Foods: Dangers and Pitfalls on the Path

10 The Art of Savoring: Joyfulness as a Way of Life

Notes: Academic Bits and Pieces

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

Index

About the Author

Product details

Published	Sep 05 2019
Format	Paperback
Edition	1st
Extent	200
ISBN	9781538129067
Imprint	Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Illustrations	3 b/w photos; 10 tables; 1 graph; 24 textboxes
Dimensions	8 x 6 inches
Publisher	Bloomsbury Publishing

In this interactive study, the author walks readers through meditations, worksheets, and exercises that provide a road map (not a treasure map) to joy. . . . Chocolate is used as a lure and a reward for these activities, enabling readers to understand just what does and doesn’t result in happiness. It’s quickly apparent that happiness lies in the present moment, and Gehart uses a sense of play and years of experience as a counselor to encourage participants to shift their thinking from an outer to an inner focus and to enjoy the journey. Readers willing to put in the effort and dig deeply into their thoughts will be rewarded with both chocolate and inner peace.

Booklist
Rarely has a work tackled life’s weightier themes with such relaxed confidence and freedom. Gehart faces down subjects fraught with meaning in every reader’s life with a smile rather than a wagging finger and it makes the experience of reading Diane R. Gehart’s Mindfulness for Chocolate Lovers a rewarding ride from beginning to end.

Indie Source Magazine
Mindfulness for Chocolate Lovers is well written and constructed from beginning to end and stands as a work you can return to long after first reading. . . . I hope this won’t be Gehart’s last word on the subject; the world can use more books like this.

Mobangeles
. . . one of the most impressive aspects of Diane R. Gehart’s Mindfulness for Chocolate Lovers is her willingness to recognize, from the outset, that her potential readers likely know what changes they need to make in their lives to enjoy greater personal happiness. She identifies motivation, or lack thereof to be exact, as the principal stumbling block preventing people from incorporating a different design for living promising greater personal satisfaction and a stronger connection to individual ideas of happiness. Her positive point of view on the latent potential within us all is refreshing; each of us, mired in discontent, can slip into the trap of blaming insurmountable internal limitations on our failure to know joy. Gehart sees no such limitations, only possibilities.

Independent Music and Arts, Inc.
Freud famously said that the most we could expect from life is ordinary misery. Diane Gehart's Mindfulness for Chocolate Lovers refutes this cynical idea. It combines disparate elements (one ancient–Buddhism and one modern–Positive Psychology) to provide a tested roadmap to extraordinary happiness.

Bill O'Hanlon, featured Oprah guest and author of "Do One Thing Different"
A refreshingly fun and sweet take on mindfulness and joyful living. Diane’s gift for translating ancient Eastern philosophies into everyday contexts shines in this approachable yet in-depth contemporary guide.

Bettina Bush, Editor-at-Large, Working Mother Magazine and Host of Working Mother Radio