Writer, Teacher, Spiritual Counselor
books
It’s Time to Come Home: With Kindness and Compassion, We Come Back to Ourselves
It’s Time to Come Home: With Kindness and Compassion, We Come Back to Ourselves
It’s Time to Come Home: With Kindness and Compassion, We Come Back to Ourselves
There is nothing that compares with feeling comfortable with who we are. It is the wondrous sense that we are at home in ourselves and happy to be us. Yet most of us have great difficulty getting into this delicious state of being. The way home is not through great sacrifices and endless hardships. It is a path through being gentle with ourselves, showing ourselves the kind of love and compassion that we would with any dear friend or beloved.
Here in It’s Time to Come Home you will find ways that haven’t worked and why. You’ll also find ideas, techniques, and perspectives that do work which will help you come back to your home within. And you’ll see that you are just fine the way you are, if you will only accept this truth.
This book joins other personal power books in teaching how to find peace and how to increase levels of happiness.
The audiobook version of this book, read by Stewart, is now available.
The Skills of Pleasure: Crafting the Life Want
It’s Time to Come Home: With Kindness and Compassion, We Come Back to Ourselves
It’s Time to Come Home: With Kindness and Compassion, We Come Back to Ourselves
Pleasure as a much more important part of our lives than we give it credit for. In its many forms, it is what we all crave the most. There are significant ways that we can work with pleasure, not just for enjoying life more, but also to be more effective, creative, caring, loving, healthy, spiritually connected...and happy.
By learning the individual skills that build pleasure and joy, and by using the powerful exercises (including a delicious chocolate meditation), you will soon be able to make a life for yourself that is more deeply satisfying than you’ve ever imagined. There’s no reason to waste another minute on past regret, anger, or fear of the future. Great joy, love, and happiness are your birthright.
Claim them now and learn how to savor yourself by using The Skills of Pleasure
writing the skills of pleasure
In 2005 I was a volunteer at Kalani Oceanside Retreat on the Big Island of Hawaii. “Volunteering” isn’t totally accurate. I did have to pay something for the privilege of working there. Just the same it was a wonderful experience. But I had just gotten a divorce, sold the two businesses that my wife and I had, put the old family house on the market, and left Maine where I had spent more time by far than anywhere else.
At 58, I was ready for my second Saturn return (an astrological milestone of great importance to those who think it has great importance.) While at Kalani I decided to spend my savings and go around the world, a trip that had been calling me for many decades. It was also the time to honor an inner prompting to write about pleasure.
As I traveled around, first by container ship from Los Angeles to New Zealand and then overland as much as possible, the ideas kept coming to me. My observations as a chef, a lomilomi massage practitioner, a sea kayak guide, and simply as a human being, convinced me that most people just didn’t really understand how much life they were passing up in the name of work, duty, tradition, and expectations. The more I thought about it, the more sense it made that there were skills that we could learn to get better at feeling good in our lives. These were skills that probably we more or less knew as young children but that had atrophied in the ensuing years. These were also skills that could be relearned and mastered.
At that point I had been initiated into Aloha International with the official recognition of being an ordained Minister. I had committed to making the world a better place. But, I thought, how does one do that most effectively? For me the answer lies in helping people to stop sabotaging their own happiness.
I drove 12,000 kilometers around the periphery of Australia, contemplating how to simplify my thoughts into 7 skills. Sitting in my hotel room in Bangkok, I thought about the importance of savoring. While riding the train across the Taklamakan Desert in Far Western China I wondered how I could talk about what we have to do when pleasure comes to an end. Looking at the great erotic carvings on the temples in Khajuraho in India, I mused about sacred pleasures. Looking down on the harbor in Cape Town, South Africa, I marveled at the choices we have about what we will focus on, and the effects each choice of focus has on our emotional wellbeing.
It took another 6 years of discussions, meditations, and experimentation to pull all of these ideas together. I made my way back to the Big Island where I was able to explore teaching and explaining these ideas to my weekly Huna Healing Circle classes. I am very grateful to all those who came to those classes and gave me feedback, both positive and negative.
The book I have written is in large part an exposition of the notion that pleasure is a legitimate spiritual path. I had to be sure that it is indeed a valid path with predictable results. I am totally and thoroughly convinced now that by following one’s pleasure, being mindful of both the joy and the dissatisfaction, that it will lead to the greatest feelings and experiences that can be had.
