The Essence of Zen

Your heart, my heart, everyone’s heart, is a noisy room full of voices. These voices can come deep from childhood, or from our culture, or from habits embraced in adulthood. These voices run our lives. They can even ruin them. But if we face them, they can also save us.We all have inner stories we tell ourselves – voices that seem inseparable from who we are. They can be crushingly negative, telling us we’ll never amount to anything. Or they can be positive – and keep us addicted to achievement. Either way, if we stay oblivious to them, these inner voices will run our lives. But when we know how to relate to them, they can become our friends and our guides.In this ruthlessly practical and inspiringly visionary book, Ronald Boyd-MacMillan teaches us how to identify our inner voices – whether negative or positive – and gives us five tools to engage with them, leading us into lives of deeper freedom, fullness and joy.

‘DEEPLY HONEST, SURPRISINGLY HILARIOUS AND UPLIFTING’ The Pool ‘HEART-WARMING: UNMISSABLE’ Damian Barr, Metro Susan Calman is a much-loved comedian and writer who has appeared on countless radio and television programmes from The News Quiz and Just a Minute to Armchair Detectives and Secret Scotland. She’s hosted the podcast Mrs Brightside and stole the nation’s hearts in Strictly Come Dancing. Her breakout solo stand up show, Susan Calman is Convicted, dealt with subjects like the death penalty, appearance and depression. It was the overwhelming and positive reaction to the show she wrote about mental health that made Susan want to write a more detailed account of surviving depression when you’re the world’s most negative and anxious person. The Crab of Hate is the personification of Calman’s depression and her version of the notorious Black Dog. A constant companion all her life, the Crab has provided her with the best, and very worst of times. This is a very personal and affecting memoir of how, after many years and with a lot of help and talking, Susan has embraced her dark side and realised that she can be the most joyous sad person you’ll ever meet. CHEER UP LOVE IS FUNNY, POIGNANT AND (HOPEFULLY) INFORMATIVE.IT’S ALWAYS GOOD TO TALK AND TO REALISE YOU ARE NOT ALONE. *If you loved Cheer Up Love, try Sunny Side Up, Susan’s Calmanifesto of Happiness*

Long before the European Enlightenment, scholars and researchers working from Samarkand in modern-day Uzbekistan to Cordoba in Spain advanced our knowledge of astronomy, chemistry, engineering, mathematics, medicine and philosophy. From Musa al-Khwarizmi who developed algebra in 9th century Baghdad to al-Jazari, a 13th-century Turkish engineer whose achievements include the crank, the camshaft and the reciprocating piston,? Ehsan Masood tells the amazing story of one of history?s most misunderstood yet rich and fertile periods in science, via the scholars, research, and science of the Islamic empires of the middle ages.