Yearnings

"Irwin Kula shows us how to to live our humanness -- the pleasures and the challenges, the messiness and the triumphs -- with a profound acceptance of our desires and foibles and a joy that can only come from understanding." --Deepak Chopra "Yearning. After twenty-three years as a rabbi, I can think of no more defining human experience." Life can be messy and imperfect. We're all looking for answers. And yet, as renowned rabbi Irwin Kula points out, the yearning for answers is no different now than it was in the times that gave rise to Moses, Buddha, and Jesus. Far from being a burden, however, these yearnings can themselves become a path to blessing, prompting questions and insights, resulting in new ways of being and believing. In this, his first book, Rabbi Kula takes us on an excursion into the depths of our desires, applying ancient Jewish tradition to seven of our most wonderful yearnings. Merging ancient wisdom with contemporary insights, Rabbi Kula shows how traditional practices can inform and enrich our own search for meaning. More importantly, he invites us to embrace the messiness and complexities of the human experience in order to fully embrace the endless and glorious project of life.

Shortly after the book’s protagonists moved into their apartment complex in Sarajevo, they, like many others, were overcome by the 1992-1995 war and the disintegration of socialist Yugoslavia More than a decade later, in post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina, they felt they were collectively stuck in a time warp where nothing seemed to be as it should be. Starting from everyday concerns, this book paints a compassionate yet critical portrait of people’s sense that they were in limbo, trapped in a seemingly endless “Meantime.” Ethnographically investigating yearnings for “normal lives” in the European semi-periphery, it proposes fresh analytical tools to explore how the time and place in which we are caught shape our hopes and fears.

The global pathways that connect cities and nations are congested with people, money, and cultural transmissions. Transnational Yearnings maps a new way to look at modern contact zones and the personal interconnections that inform them by tracing circuits of migration and leisure travel between postcolonial Jamaica and Toronto, a city that has become for Jamaican Canadians both a place of promise and cultural vitality and a site of criminalization and exclusion through deportation. Innovative and provocative, this book is about the desires, intimacies, and power relations that at once inform and reflect transnational migration and the diasporization of urban space.

The archetypal and symbolic qualities of mystical states of consciousness are ineffable, timeless, and fleeting, but they act as powerful reminders that it is possible to transcend our limited understanding to glimpse a unified eternal reality, which we are part of. The pilgrimage of life ends in death--there is no denial of this fact, but in Immortal Yearnings, we are asked to consider whether by giving the symbolism from universal imaginings a voice, we can use our perception to enrich our myths about death. Annamaria Hemingway PhD is a writer, speaker, spiritual counselor and member of the International Association for Near-Death Studies. ,

Only death could stop the obsessed Joy Foster. She told Terry of her desire. He was amused. Joy had the last laugh. Mary screamed “Murderer! Murderer!” She vowed death to the assassin. Dan shocked Roxanne with his afterlife revelation. Strange happenings after his death. Did Roxanne suddenly become a Psychic? Luke King wished he’d hear three little words, before the last sunset. Mark broke a significant promise. Jennifer wondered whether the most sacred promise of all would be next. Mark suffered greatly from breaking his promise. Did the poor boy Johnny Price (JP) become a millionaire?

Yukon Yearnings is the story of my kayak trip down the Yukon River, from the source to the Bering Sea. The paddling distance for that solo kayak journey was just over 2,300 miles. It was not until completing the journey and retturning home that I discovered that no one else had achieved that. I was the first person to have paddled the entire Yukon River. Prior to the current kayak trip I had paddled two thousand miles of the river from Lake Atlin, British Columbia, to Russian Mission, Alaska. My reason for going back to the Yukon was not to be the first person to paddle the whole river. My reason was to experience the wilderness again. Paddling in the solitude of that wilderness enclosed me in the peace of the lakes and the river. There were no distractions, no time constraints, and no urgent pressures to be in a certain place by a certain time The deep, quiet forests and the snowcapped mountains just enraptured me. Passing the villages and stopping in some allowed me to meet the people living on the river. Their kindness was as significant as the beauty of the nature all the way to the Bering Sea.

This is a compelling, introspective account of the life of Isabella Tanikumi, who takes her readers on a journey through various phases of her remarkable life- from her family's survival during the devastating earthquake of 1970 in Huaraz, Peru, to the trials of overcoming heartbreaks of her youth. Conquering personal insecurities led to exploring the reaches of her intellect while facing the tragic, and untimely death of her beloved sister, Laura. Despite language barriers and the consequent obstacles of fitting in, Tanikumi wittily narrates her struggles with her assimilation into American life and culture. Forging many enduring friendships most notably with Julie, who rescued her from the depths of grief. Tanikumi also interweaves a dialogue with her long lost love Eduardo. This novel tacitily and expressly addresses Eduardo as a salient recipient of her reflections. Ultimately, Tanikumi is able to share her gratitude and joy as well as her insatiable thirst for life

In Yearnings of the Soul, Jonathan Garb uncovers a crucial thread in the story of modern Kabbalah and modern mysticism more generally: psychology. Returning psychology to its roots as an attempt to understand the soul, he traces the manifold interactions between psychology and spirituality that have arisen over five centuries of Kabbalistic writing, from sixteenth-century Galilee to twenty-first-century New York. In doing so, he shows just how rich Kabbalah’s psychological tradition is and how much it can offer to the corpus of modern psychological knowledge. Garb follows the gradual disappearance of the soul from modern philosophy while drawing attention to its continued persistence as a topic in literature and popular culture. He pays close attention to James Hillman’s “archetypal psychology,” using it to engage critically with the psychoanalytic tradition and reflect anew on the cultural and political implications of the return of the soul to contemporary psychology. Comparing Kabbalistic thought to adjacent developments in Catholic, Protestant, and other popular expressions of mysticism, Garb ultimately offers a thought-provoking argument for the continued relevance of religion to the study of psychology.