Friday is Book Day on the blog, when we take a look at books – old and new — that I highly recommend you not miss. This week’s recommended reading: A Thousand Names for Joy, by Byron Katie, with Stephen Mitchell.
I want to tell you something. There is no one who is writing insightful and helpful and put-an-end-to-the-blocks-in-your-life books these days who is doing it any better than Byron Katie. Author of the mega-bestselling Loving What Is, this woman is a fountain of insight, wisdom, compassion, awareness, and clarity — and knows how to serve it up with brevity, humor, style, and wonderful accessibility.
Anyone who is facing any kind of problem or challenge, moment of choice, or difficult passage in their life will benefit more than I can tell you from reading just about anything this wonderful lady writes. I have never met Byron Katie, but would consider it a profound honor to do so.
The subtitle of this particular Katie book is Living in Harmony with the Way Things Are, and it is about exactly that, cutting through the thicket of life’s tangled pathways and moving into the clearing.
This book offers an explanation of the Tao Te Ching as a guide to the peace that is our essential nature. As its book jacket suggests, it is an extraordinary portrait of the Awakened Mind in action.
Writes Katie…

Life is simple. Everything happens for you, not to you. Everything happens at exactly the right moment, neither too soon nor too late. You don’t have to like it–it’s just easier if you do. If you have a problem it can only be because of your unquestioned thinking. How do you react when you believe that the past should have been different? You scare yourself stuck, because what you resist persists (Neale’s note: this line is in word-for-word agreement withConversations with God!) You get to keep your stressful world, a world that doesn’t exist except in your imagination; you get to stay in the nightmare. It hurts to oppose reality, because in opposing reality, you are opposing your very self.

This is as simple and direct and accessible as it gets. And the book is replete with such insights.
Dr. Wayne Dyer calls this a “phenomenal book.” I agree.