Searching for the meaning of lifes experiences? Your soul purpose? Unlocking the Invisible Child: A Journey from Heartbreak to Bliss reveals the key to self-healing of body and mind, through the grace and gratitude of the heart and soul, via the all-knowing, compassionate invisible child within. In Unlocking the Invisible Child: A Journey from Heartbreak to Bliss, Laura Mayer shares her remarkable journey. It began with the discovery of a crippling and supposedly fatal disease at age fourteen. She chronicles the forty-year course of the disease, along with her multistage self-healing process, and suggests that anyone can take a similar journey to heal their own life. Mayer knows that all the medicine in the world could not have healed her, had she not gone deeper and unlocked the invisible child inside her. Over the past five years, Mayer has witnessed a total transformation in body, mind, and spirit. Aware that if she could mend her heart, her body would heal, she started to trust in the universe and listen to its messages. There are as many paths toward healing as there are individuals in need of healing. This means there is no formula, no sure-fire, cookie-cutter method that applies to everyone. Unlocking the Invisible Child is the amazing account of Laura Mayers remarkable journey. She reveals to us a truththat healing is and has always been the unique journey of the soul. Mayer writes from the heart. Her courageous account will inspire and encourage anyone who wants to be more than they are at present. Larry Dossey, M.D. author of The Power of Premonitions, Healing Words, and Reinventing Medicine

More than twenty essays and speeches show Paterson's passion for reading, her ideas about writing, her spiritual faith, and her conviction that the imagination must be nourished.

ABDUCTION Isandro is thirteen years old when his parents are denounced and Franco’s Nationalists take them by force from their village home. The boy’s unusually keen sense of hearing warns him of the soldiers´ approach and his father just has time to hide him. One of the attackers returns stealthily and through a crack in the floor boards, Isandro watches him. It is a face he will never forget. ESCAPE Now alone and distrustful of the villagers, the boy escapes to a cave in the high Sierra of the wild Alpujarran mountains of Andalucia. His companions are wild boar, mountain goats, lynx, gigantic eagle owls, rabbits, hawks, deer and vipers and ultimately an abandoned hunting dog terrified of guns. SURVIVAL His lone survival, his journey into manhood and his unrelenting quest for justice, lead him to an awareness of passionate love and to the discovery of the secret of his birth...

Trapped in the twisted world of a paranoid schizophrenic mother, Lenore Ossen is shut away from the outside world. For her, there is no school. No classmates. No friendships with other children. Under her mother's insane rules, she can't even turn to family members for solace, and so, day after day, she lives in panic and fear. How can she survive such terrible treatment? In deep despair, Lenore learns to retreat to the safety of her own mind. There she creates a world of fantasy and yearns for someone to take her away from her deranged mother. But there is no one. Most people suffering such abuse would go out of their minds. What makes Lenore different? How does she endure? What drives her to rise above her traumatic past? In this compelling true story, Lenore Ossen describes what living in isolation with a psychotic mother feels like to an innocent child. In telling how she broke free of the nightmare enslaving her, she reaches out to give hope and comfort to other victims of abuse.

In 1996, America abolished its long-standing welfare system in favor of a new and largely untried public assistance program. Welfare as we knew it arose in turn from a previous generation's rejection of an even earlier system of aid. That generation introduced welfare in order to eliminate orphanages. This book examines the connection between the decline of the orphanage and the rise of welfare. Matthew Crenson argues that the prehistory of the welfare system was played out not on the stage of national politics or class conflict but in the micropolitics of institutional management. New arrangements for child welfare policy emerged gradually as superintendents, visiting agents, and charity officials responded to the difficulties that they encountered in running orphanages or creating systems that served as alternatives to institutional care. Crenson also follows the decades-long debate about the relative merits of family care or institutional care for dependent children. Leaving poor children at home with their mothers emerged as the most generally acceptable alternative to the orphanage, along with an ambitious new conception of social reform. Instead of sheltering vulnerable children in institutions designed to transform them into virtuous citizens, the reformers of the Progressive era tried to integrate poor children into the larger society, while protecting them from its perils.

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A “vivid and devastating” (The New York Times) portrait of an indomitable girl—from acclaimed journalist Andrea Elliott “From its first indelible pages to its rich and startling conclusion, Invisible Child had me, by turns, stricken, inspired, outraged, illuminated, in tears, and hungering for reimmersion in its Dickensian depths.”—Ayad Akhtar, author of Homeland Elegies ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New York Times • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Atlantic, The New York Times Book Review, Time, NPR, Library Journal In Invisible Child, Pulitzer Prize winner Andrea Elliott follows eight dramatic years in the life of Dasani, a girl whose imagination is as soaring as the skyscrapers near her Brooklyn shelter. In this sweeping narrative, Elliott weaves the story of Dasani’s childhood with the history of her ancestors, tracing their passage from slavery to the Great Migration north. As Dasani comes of age, New York City’s homeless crisis has exploded, deepening the chasm between rich and poor. She must guide her siblings through a world riddled by hunger, violence, racism, drug addiction, and the threat of foster care. Out on the street, Dasani becomes a fierce fighter “to protect those who I love.” When she finally escapes city life to enroll in a boarding school, she faces an impossible question: What if leaving poverty means abandoning your family, and yourself? A work of luminous and riveting prose, Elliott’s Invisible Child reads like a page-turning novel. It is an astonishing story about the power of resilience, the importance of family and the cost of inequality—told through the crucible of one remarkable girl. Winner of the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize • Finalist for the Bernstein Award and the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award • Longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize

When Charlie insists that his little sister, Lola, leave him and his friend Marv alone to play, she agrees but soon she and her invisible friend, Soren Lorensen, must come to the boys' rescue.