It's hard to make time for a meaningful spiritual life. This book can help you do it: by making small, clever changes to your environment. Spiritual Design offers a wealth of research to help you enrich your spiritual life, whether your goal is to meditate or pray regularly, follow a personal calling, or anything in between. You'll also learn about breaking bad habits and avoiding the moments of weakness we later regret. You'll apply lessons from behavioral science - the interdisciplinary study of how people make decisions in their daily lives - to design your environment to support spiritual growth and practice. This process, Spiritual Design, includes: Understanding how our minds are wired, and how our cognitive biases can lead us into temptation or hinder us from following through on our spiritual leadings, Overcoming the common obstacles that we face, and building habits that help us make time for our spiritual life, Learning why our daily lives are structured to distract us from what matters, and how to change that. Dr. Stephen Wendel is a behavioral scientist, who leads a team of researchers that helps people overcome behavioral obstacles in their lives. In Spiritual Design, he offers practical lessons on applying behavioral science in one's spiritual practice regardless of one's beliefs or denomination. To learn more about Spiritual Design, read Steve's blog at www.spiritualdesign.co.

A new wave of products is helping people change their behavior and daily routines, whether it’s exercising more (Jawbone Up), taking control of their finances (HelloWallet), or organizing their email (Mailbox). This practical guide shows you how to design these types of products for users seeking to take action and achieve specific goals. Stephen Wendel, HelloWallet’s head researcher, takes you step-by-step through the process of applying behavioral economics and psychology to the practical problems of product design and development. Using a combination of lean and agile development methods, you’ll learn a simple iterative approach for identifying target users and behaviors, building the product, and gauging its effectiveness. Discover how to create easy-to-use products to help people make positive changes. Learn the three main strategies to help people change behavior Identify your target audience and the behaviors they seek to change Extract user stories and identify obstacles to behavior change Develop effective interface designs that are enjoyable to use Measure your product’s impact and learn ways to improve it Use practical examples from products like Nest, Fitbit, and Opower

Do you want to improve your relationships and experience lasting personal change? Join Curt Thompson, M.D., on an amazing journey to discover the surprising pathways for transformation hidden inside your own mind. Integrating new findings in neuroscience and attachment with Christian spirituality, Dr. Thompson reveals how it is possible to rewire your mind, altering your brain patterns and literally making you more like the person God intended you to be. Explaining discoveries about the brain in layman’s terms, he shows how you can be mentally transformed through spiritual practices, interaction with Scripture, and connections with other people. He also provides practical exercises to help you experience healing in areas where you’ve been struggling. Insightful and challenging, "Anatomy of the Soul" illustrates how learning about one of God’s most miraculous creations—your brain—can enrich your life, your relationships, and your impact on the world around you.

This updated edition of The Oxford Handbook of Psychology and Spirituality codifies the leading empirical evidence in the support and application of postmaterial psychological science. Lisa J. Miller has gathered together a group of ground-breaking scholars to showcase their work of many decades that has come further to fruition in the past ten years with the collective momentum of a Spiritual Renaissance in Psychological Science. With new and updated chapters from leading scholars in psychology, medicine, physics, and biology, the Handbook is an interdisciplinary reference for a rapidly emerging approach to contemporary science. Highlighting fresh ideas and supporting science, this overarching work provides both a foundation and a roadmap for what is truly a new ideological age.

This Handbook draws together leading social scientists in the world from multiple disciplines to articulate what is known and needs to be known about spiritual development in childhood and adolescence.

This book is for mental health practitioners who want to enhance their clients' psychological wellbeing using therapeutic tools drawn from spiritual and religious thought. What can a non-religious therapist do when a client directly requests help with a problem involving spiritual matters? How can a therapist who is engaged in a religious tradition frame strategies such as discerning vocation, participating in spiritual or religious rituals, and forgiving in ways that are acceptable to secular clients?Thomas Plante answers these questions and more by presenting thirteen tools to improve psychological and spiritual health that can be integrated into secular or religious-oriented practice. ""Spiritual Practices in Psychotherapy"" first reviews history, philosophy, and research behind and evidence for integrating tools such as meditation, learning from spiritual models, and becoming part of something larger than oneself into therapy practice. Dr. Plante makes a case for integrating spiritual and religious tools in therapy as part of ethical practice, and as a way to add value to services such as assessment, counseling, and consultation with other professionals. A rich and diverse collection of case illustrations shows how to conduct psychotherapy using these tools, and walks readers through real-world examples of how to consult with clergy. Finally, the book offers an agenda for continued research and education and a variety of resources for further study in this area.

The Science of Spirituality is a ground-breaking book that integrates the individual systems of science, psychology, philosophy, spirituality and religion into a unified system that describes the multi-dimensional nature of man and the universe. It provides a more comprehensive description of reality than conventional science can offer and fully explains the mechanisms behind an array of paranormal phenomena that mainstream science chooses to ignore. It explains the science behind religious, spiritual and new-age belief systems, and sheds light on some common misconceptions. The Science of Spirituality systematically describes the mechanisms behind a diverse range of subject matter including: consciousness, sleep and dreams, reincarnation, religion, creation, evolution, space and time, higher dimensions, heaven and hell, ghosts, angels and demons, out of body experiences, near death experiences, clairvoyance, psychic abilities, personal development, meditation and the meaning of life.