Connecting Within

As a divorced single mom, Jennie Askins has been inspired to help other single mothers through her creation of an empowerment group called Single Mom Life. She is a speaker and also privately coaches moms to live their best life NOW. This is her first book. www.singlemomempowered.com

A thrilling scientific detective story, The Balance Within tells how researchers finally uncovered the elusive mind-body connection and what it means for our health. Since ancient times humans have felt intuitively that emotions and health are linked, and recently there has been much popular speculation about this notion. But until now, without compelling evidence, it has been impossible to say for sure that such a connection really exists and especially how it works. Now, that evidence has been discovered. In this beautifully written book, Dr. Esther Sternberg, whose discoveries were pivotal in helping to solve this mystery, provides first hand accounts of the breakthrough experiments that revealed the physical mechanisms - the nerves, cells, and hormones - used by the brain and immune system to communicate with each other. She describes just how stress can make us more susceptible to all types of illnesses, and how the immune system can alter our moods. Finally, she explains how our understanding of these connections in scientific terms is helping to answer such crucial questions as "Does stress make you sick?" "Is a positive outlook the key to better health?" and "How do our personal relationships, work, and other aspects of our lives affect our health?" A fascinating, elegantly written portrait of this rapidly emerging field with enormous potential for finding new ways to treat disease and cope with stress, The Balance Within is essential reading for anyone interested in making their body and mind whole again.

The book provides a treatment of college students' friendships that is long overdue. Students, parents, and anyone concerned with maximizing student success will learn much about how friendship networks matter for students' lives in college and beyond

Fellowship. The word gets used a lot in church. But too often our understanding and practice of fellowship are shallow and stripped of the life-giving, life-transforming power God intended community to have. Jesus lived out and taught a deeper, more radical kind of fellowship—a way of interacting that makes others sit up and take notice. These six sessions will show you Jesus’ way of loving others “as I have loved you.”Experiencing Christ Together helps your group explore the five biblical purposes that make up a high-impact Christian life —fellowship, discipleship, ministry, evangelism, and worship. Jesus perfectly lived out God’s purposes for his life, and he taught his followers how to do the same. As you walk in the footsteps of those first disciples listening to and watching Jesus through these studies, you and your group will be transformed. One small group leader put it this way: “The Experiencing Christ Together series has motivated me more than any other Bible study that I have ever been to. This Bible study gets to the heart of the matter—my character in Christ—and that has created action on my part.”

Play is critical to children’s well-being and development. All students should have access to and adequate time for positive play experiences every day. Learning and Connecting in School Playgrounds invites parents, teachers, principals and education administrators to take another look at their school playgrounds as spaces crucial to learning, well-being and development. This book combines research findings, commentary and the authors’ personal experiences and observations together with the views of teachers, principals, parents and students related to play and play spaces. Key content includes consideration of the role of adults in the school playground, the influence of technology on play, the challenges experienced by children transitioning to new school environments and consideration of strategies to support students’ access and participation in the playground. Cases are presented to illustrate the use of an audit tool to enhance school playgrounds. The future of school playgrounds is also considered through the reported hopes and dreams of adults and students and a range of recommendations are made for the review and development of schools’ outdoor play spaces. Learning and Connecting in School Playgrounds is written with a sense of urgency, calling for the recognition of positive play experiences as invaluable to children’s education. It includes important and challenging insights to inform and guide decision-making and will be an essential resource for all stakeholders who share responsibility for children’s participation and learning during school break-times.

The trouble with relationships is other people. We have friends and neighbors, partners and lovers. We live in communities, we come from families, and we earn our living working with or for other people. This simple guidebook utilizes tools to help you determine if a relationship is healthy and offers solutions for change if necessary. It will also help you understand what might be keeping you stuck in a difficult situation and learn what to expect when dealing with transitions and loss. Ultimately you will learn the art of living well, how to flourish in life and form deeper connections with others.

In Complicating, Considering, and Connecting Music Education, Lauren Kapalka Richerme proposes a poststructuralist-inspired philosophy of music education. Complicating current conceptions of self, other, and place, Richerme emphasizes the embodied, emotional, and social aspects of humanity. She also examines intersections between local and global music making. Next, Richerme explores the ethical implications of considering multiple viewpoints and imagining who music makers might become. Ultimately, she offers that music education is good for facilitating differing connections with one's self and multiple environments. Throughout the text, she also integrates the writings of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari with narrative philosophy and personal narratives. By highlighting the processes of complicating, considering, and connecting, Richerme challenges the standardization and career-centric rationales that ground contemporary music education policy and practice to better welcome diversity.

Examining a dozen of the most innovative ways that CIS web services are being disseminated to and drawn from around the world, this book encompasses national mapping service delivery in New Zealand, digital map creation for on-the-run journalists in the United States, and location-based services in Scandinavia. This is a guide for forward-thinking managers in any enterprise who are interested in fully leveraging the power of spatial data and information. Discussed is how increasing integration of GIS into the decision-making processes of government, administrative, academic, and commercial organizations highlights the importance of ensuring that everyone is working from the same consistent data sets.