Vitality

As seen on the TODAY Show, The New York Times, People Magazine, Mind Body Green, and more “If you would like to live a more fulfilled life, Samantha Boardman has exactly what you need. Everyday Vitality is one part memoir, one part wisdom from years of experience as a psychiatrist, and one part cutting edge scientific evidence. Brilliant, warm, and best of all—an actionable guide to a life well-lived.” —Angela Duckworth, New York Times bestselling author of Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance Science-backed, research-driven, actionable strategies for countering stress and building your resilience “A great deal of everyday wellbeing lies beyond what is happening inside a person’s head. Everyday opportunities and activities that foster growth and build positive resources are not 'icing on the cake,' but the active ingredients of everyday resilience.” —Samantha Boardman, Everyday Vitality In Everyday Vitality, psychiatrist Dr. Samantha Boardman shows readers how to find strength within their stress and how to transform full days into more fulfilling days. Drawing from scientific research and her own clinical experience, she shares strategies for cultivating vitality—the positive feeling of aliveness and energy that lies at the core of well-being and at the heart of a good day. You will discover how increased vitality boosts productivity, builds coping skills, and enhances your ability to manage negative emotions. Dr. Boardman demonstrates how to override counterproductive responses to the onslaught of daily hassles and to respond with flexibility and fortitude instead of fear and rumination. Rather than disengaging from the world while you "find yourself," she shows you how to boost your vitality by living well within the world. As Dr. Boardman explains, the three main wellsprings of vitality are: meaningfully connecting with others; engaging in experiences that challenge you; and contributing to something beyond yourself. These activities foster resilience by boosting emotional stamina and generating uplifts—the counterparts to daily irritations and annoyances. Whether it is having a good conversation, doing a favor for someone, going for a walk, or reading an interesting article and then calling a friend to talk about it, commonplace experiences and micromoments serve as the building blocks of everyday resilience. Everyday Vitality explains how to identify them in your life, develop them, and use them as a foundation on which to thrive. Whether you are twenty or eighty, Everyday Vitality will give you the tools you need to get the most out of each day and to live your life to the fullest.

In Qigong for Health and Vitality, Michael Tse, a Qigong (pronounced chee-gong) master trained by some of China's finest Qigong practitioners, explains the philosophy and practice of Qigong, a form of Traditional Chinese Medicine that combines breathing, posture, and movement to generate internal energy, restore health, and promote a sense of well-being. Qigong for Health and Vitality is the first truly accessible, introductory guide to this three-thousand-year-old for Chinese healing. Michael Tse now teaches in London, and is adept at presenting Qigong's "secrets" to a Western audience. In this book, he presents the background and philosophy of Qigong, detailing its amazing benefits for stress reduction and in the treatment of such chronic conditions as backache, hypertension, insomnia, asthma, arthritis, and headache. In clear text, and with the help of more than one hundred photographs, he provides step-by-step instructions for two types of Qigong exercises: those that improve balance, flexibility, strength, and circulation (especially good for anyone who sits all day in an office or car); and those that derive from tai chi chaun and are learned as a short "moving program" that increases internal energy (chi) and can be used to treat specific health problems. In addition, Michael Ise explains how to use special Qigong meditation exercises to relax and recharge the body's energy and to enhance its natural ability to heal itself. Qigong, as taught by Master Tse, is easy and fun to learn and will lead to immediate and long-lasting health benefits.

People are key elements of wild places. At the same time, human entanglements with wild ecologies involve extractivism, the growth of resource-based economies, and imperial-colonial expansion, activities that are wreaking havoc on our planet. Through an ethnographic exploration of Canada’s ten UNESCO Natural World Heritage sites, Inhabited reflects on the meanings of wildness, wilderness, and natural heritage. As we are introduced to local inhabitants and their perspectives, Phillip Vannini and April Vannini ask us to reflect on the colonial and dualist assumptions behind the received meaning of wild, challenging us to reimagine wildness as relational and rooted in vitality. Over the three years they spent in and around these sites, they learned from Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples about their entanglements with each other and with non-human animals, rocks, plants, trees, sky, water, and spirits. The stories, actions, and experiences they encountered challenge conventional narratives of wild places as uninhabited by people and disconnected from culture and society. While it might be tempting to dismiss the idea of wildness as outdated in the Anthropocene era, Inhabited suggests that rethinking wildness offers a better – if messier – way forward. Part geography and anthropology, part environmental and cultural studies, and part politics and ecology, Inhabited balances a genuine love of nature’s vitality with a culturally responsible understanding of its interconnectedness with more-than-human ways of life.

What does everyone wish they could have at the snap of their fingers? The ability to feel younger and live longer. The sad reality is that we are witnessing obesity and disease at their highest rates in history, despite 24-hour access to a seemingly infinite library of health advice. So what's broken? The general public sees obtaining vitality as a mystery and out of their grasp. Compound this with incessant cannibalistic messaging of the multi-national food companies and their marketing machines, and you get the state of emergency we are presently facing. So what's the answer? How do we battle the multi-billion dollar coffers of these food giants? Ikkuma: Evolution of Vitality is a call-to-action, empowering people and igniting a desire for them to regain control of their health. Gone are the 50 page chapters filled with confusing concepts. Ikkuma breaks through all the rhetoric and delivers easy to follow instructions on how you can be at your physical and mental best - naturally, without gimmicks.

Todays science has a huge knowledge about the compounds in our foods - minerals, proteins, vitamins, antioxidants etc. - but we must include also their vitality properties to fully understand food quality. Vitality here means the ability of living organisms to keep up their life processes and life cycle while being under heavy pressure from the surroundings. So living organisms are not understood based on componds alone, and we must look at their more or less vulnerable organs and life processes. In the same way we need to re-define our concept of health, from absence of single diseases towards the ability of the organism to maintain a complex balance in the organs and the life processes during the major changes taking place recurringly during our life cycle. The book presents in a popular way a spectrum of vitality examples, taken from research and everyday life.

Shelley and Vitality reassesses Percy Shelley's engagement with early nineteenth-century science and medicine, specifically his knowledge and use of theories on the nature of life presented in the debate between surgeons John Abernethy and William Lawrence. Sharon Ruston offers new biographical information to link Shelley to a medical circle and explores the ways in which Shelley exploits the language and ideas of vitality. Major canonical works are reconsidered to address Shelley's politicised understanding of contemporary scientific discourse.

Bookwise is a carefully graded reading scheme organized into five cross-curricular strands, encouraging links to other subjects. Comprising 16 fiction and ten non-fiction titles, the 25 books at each level span a two-year reading age and the three-tier levelling system within each level facilitates an accurate match of reading ability and text. The full-colour readers are accompanied by teacher's guides and resource sheets to help teachers get the most out of their guided reading and writing sessions.