Breaking Open

In a broken world, we ache for a way to walk through life without giving up or giving in. Instead of breaking down, Jesus offers us another way: breaking open. Discover a new way of living and rise with hope, power, and purpose! Everyone aches to be whole. We ache to be healed. We ache to be restored. But most of the time we wouldn’t put it into words. We just know we are broken because our child is addicted. We ache because the depression of our youth is now the depression of our golden years. We are stretched to the point of breaking because our career ambitions position us to commit to a pace we can’t sustain. Miscarriage, divorce, loneliness. In all of it, we ache. In Breaking Open, Pastor Jacob Armstrong exposes the seven dangerous ways that we commonly seek to avoid a breakdown, showing how these seven ways are stealing life from us, and then walks us through a progression of seven Jesus-ways that move us from merely breaking to breaking open. It is these Jesus-ways that get us to the good stuff: a life filled with hope and opportunity. In Breaking Open, you discover how your greatest heartaches can open you up to the life God desires for you, learn how to slow down from a frenzied pace and settle into the spacious life you have been longing for right now, stop living a cheap imitation of life and develop trust in who God says you are, receive permission not to have it all together by finding the power to love and live vulnerably, and find the courage to name the achy undercurrent in your soul so you can break it wide open and let Jesus heal you and make you whole. Jesus never intended for us to break and stay shattered, but to fall and rise differently. To rise with power, rise with hope, rise with purpose. In Breaking Open, learn to rise open to a new way of living!

Will help those who Break open the Word in RCIA and those involved in Lectionary-based faith sharing or Bible study groups to hear the Word as a living Word and to know that the Word they are hearing is compatible with what the biblical authors are teaching.

Personal accounts exploring the shift from mental illness to spiritual awakening. The first book in which people discuss their own spiritual emergencies and share what helped them through. Our authors are the experts of their own experience, and they share their wild journeys with courage, insight and poetry. There are fascinating parallels in their experiences, suggesting minds in extremis go to similar places. These are beautiful postcards from the edge of human consciousness, testaments to the soul's natural resilience. Our authors have returned from their descent with valuable insights for our culture, as we go through a collective spiritual emergency, with old myths and structures breaking down, and new possibilities breaking open. What is there beyond our present egocentric model of reality? What tools can help us navigate the emergence? "This book is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the connection between spiritual awakening and what we normally term 'mental illness.' It is full of inspirational and moving stories that show that psychological disturbances often lead to significant personal growth, if supported properly. As a culture, we urgently need a new paradigm of mental illness and treatment, and this and this book makes an important contribution to that shift.' Steve Taylor PhD, author of The Leap and Spiritual Science

In this work, prominent Italian American creative women discuss the ways their heritage has impacted their works. They discuss the ways that their childhood memories of immigrants and their practices have been a strong foundation for their creativity.

A dazzling work of personal travelogue and cultural criticism that ranges from the primitive to the postmodern in a quest for the promise and meaning of the psychedelic experience. While psychedelics of all sorts are demonized in America today, the visionary compounds found in plants are the spiritual sacraments of tribal cultures around the world. From the iboga of the Bwiti in Gabon, to the Mazatecs of Mexico, these plants are sacred because they awaken the mind to other levels of awareness--to a holographic vision of the universe. Breaking Open the Head is a passionate, multilayered, and sometimes rashly personal inquiry into this deep division. On one level, Daniel Pinchbeck tells the story of the encounters between the modern consciousness of the West and these sacramental substances, including such thinkers as Allen Ginsberg, Antonin Artaud, Walter Benjamin, and Terence McKenna, and a new underground of present-day ethnobotanists, chemists, psychonauts, and philosophers. It is also a scrupulous recording of the author's wide-ranging investigation with these outlaw compounds, including a thirty-hour tribal initiation in West Africa; an all-night encounter with the master shamans of the South American rain forest; and a report from a psychedelic utopia in the Black Rock Desert that is the Burning Man Festival. Breaking Open the Head is brave participatory journalism at its best, a vivid account of psychic and intellectual experiences that opened doors in the wall of Western rationalism and completed Daniel Pinchbeck's personal transformation from a jaded Manhattan journalist to shamanic initiate and grateful citizen of the cosmos.

We need a more creative approach to teaching writing. A methodology incorporating creativity, as modeled by students in this text, demonstrates the kind of progress we are all seeking, offering an exciting challenge for young writers and educators alike.

Breaking Open Gods Word: A Three-year Cycle of Reflections on the Sunday Readings of the Liturgical Year invites readers to embark upon a journey through the riches of the Catholic Churchs three-year lectionary for readings for Sunday Mass. The lectionary, a sequence of appointed passages from the texts of the Old and New Testaments, pairs readings with the seasons and feasts of the church year. Sister Celine Goessl, a member of the Sisters of Mercy of the Holy Cross, has taken a lifetime practice of prayerful listening to the messages God shares through scriptural texts and brought it into conversation with her immersion in the details of daily life to create the collection of reflections appearing in Breaking Open Gods Word. The intent of this collection is to help Gods Word enflesh itself in the readers daily life and to empower him or her to take action to live as Christs presence in other peoples lives. You may watch the changing of the seasons in your parishs worship and hear the variety of texts read at Mass. As you do, and you find life presenting you with ever-changing challenges to your faith, Breaking Open Gods Word offers to accompany you on your daily journey. Along the way, Sister Celine Goessls prayerful reflections can offer you inspiration and guidance for living and witnessing faithfully in whatever circumstances you face each day.

Volume three in a three-part series that functions as a pastoral tool for sharing the word of God; focuses on Cycle C and emphasizes using the lectionary in catechesis throughout the year.