Jim Palmer The Practice of Being Alive

You can keep your whole life running and still go missing from it. The work gets done. The messages get answered. The days go by. And somewhere in there you stepped back from your own life and kept going from a few inches outside it - present enough to function, but no longer quite in it. Nothing breaks. Nothing looks wrong. And almost nothing in modern living asks you to step back in. The Practice of Being Alive is about that distance, and how we come back. Jim Palmer - a former megachurch pastor and the founder of the Center for Non-Religious Spirituality - names a kind of health we don't have a word for: not of the body, which we call physical, or of the mind, which we call mental, but of your relationship to your own existence. He calls it existential health, and he follows it through the four places a life can thin: your footing within yourself, your presence with the people closest to you, your belonging in community, and your place before the sheer size of things. This is not another program for fixing yourself. It refuses the promise that enough insight, discipline, or self-work will finally make life resolve. What it offers instead is plainer and sturdier - a way of staying in contact with the life you are actually living, without waiting for it to resolve. Not once, but again and again. It asks nothing about what you believe, and meets you exactly where you are. For anyone who is functioning fine and still feels absent, this is a book about coming back. With a foreword by Prof. Dr. Jessica Böhme. "Honest, searching, and deeply human - a book for anyone who has ever held everything together while wondering where they went." - Kate Eckman, author of The Full Spirit Workout