4 Books We’re Reading to Replenish Our Energy

1) Don’t Tell Me to Relax

Emotional Resilience In the Age of Rage, Feels & Freak-Outs

Spiritual bypassing, a term first coined in psychology, refers to misusing spirituality or wisdom teachings by zeroing in on their “feel-good” aspects, while minimizing the reality of pain (our own, as well as others’). But is the only alternative to feel paralyzed by raging despair?
Don’t Tell Me to Relax, De La Rosa’s second book, arrives at the perfect time to inform a growing cultural awareness that neither approach will get us very far. “May we never forget: Often the deepest truths are the ones that challenge us,” he writes.

Skillfully drawing on neurobiology, mindfulness teachings, and psychotherapy, De La Rosa acknowledges that suffering is caused by a multitude of factors: from the systemic, like racism, ableism, homophobia, and economic disempowerment, to the personal—dysfunctional upbringings, traumatic losses, physical and mental health struggles. Having faced some of these himself, he doesn’t negate their importance in our lives, nor claim we should just get over them. Instead he empowers us, through direct and insightful prose, to touch in with these parts of ourselves that hurt. The book’s focus is “on radical nonpathology, embedding it in an empowerment model: the truth that the inherent wisdom, clarity, and freedom of our deeper nature need not wait for anyone or anything else to come along.” Throughout, De La Rosa offers seemingly simple yet transformative practices to help us (re) discover our innate curiosity and introspection. When we don’t “relax” but instead deepen into awareness and compassion, we can channel our efforts in the direction of healing—both for ourselves and for our world. —AT

2) Thinking and Eating

Recipes to Nourish and Inspire

A cookbook unlike any other, Thinking and Eating explores “how the sensory realm can be deployed to help with the transmission of ideas.” Food, like art, can inform us about how we should live. In the first section, a list of virtues—each paired with a single ingredient— accompanies delicioussounding recipes. Hope is a lemon, for instance, maturity a fig. Subsequent sections offer recipes and menus for a variety of moods: when alone (I don’t like myself very much), with friends (Why do we keep talking about house prices?), and in relationships (How can I graciously withdraw from a sulk?). What’s not to love about a book that asserts, “the mushroom is an edible treatise on the oddity of existence”? Seconds for me, please.—SD

3) Mind, Consciousness, and Well-Being

At 350+ pages, Mind, Consciousness, and Well-Being is a door-stopper, as they say in publishing. But it’s also a treasure trove of content presented by a fine collection of teachers and researchers, covering a wide array of topics: self-compassion, mindfulness in the workplace, love, habit-formation (and breaking), depression, race and interconnectedness, and attention, among many others. It’s not the sort of book you breeze through when you’re about to turn in for the night. It’s more of a state-of-the-art overview of