10 Inspiring Books You’ll Want To Add to Your Wish-List (A.S.A.P) & Devour After the Kids are In Bed!

1.  A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose (Oprah’s Book Club, Selection 61)

This inspiring book is number one on this list because this is THE book that set me on the path of mindfulness. 

It changed my entire world and perspective.  I try to read this book once a year.

Amazon description:  With his bestselling spiritual guide The Power of Now, Eckhart Tolle inspired millions of readers to discover the freedom and joy of a life lived “in the now.”

In A New Earth, Tolle expands on these powerful ideas to show how transcending our ego-based state of consciousness is not only essential to personal happiness but also the key to ending conflict and suffering throughout the world.

Tolle describes how our attachment to the ego creates the dysfunction that leads to anger, jealousy, and unhappiness, and shows readers how to awaken to a new state of consciousness and follow the path to a truly fulfilling existence.

Illuminating, enlightening, and uplifting, A New Earth is a profoundly spiritual manifesto for a better way of life—and for building a better world.

2. Wherever You Go, There You Are – Jon Kabat – Zinn

Wherever you go there you are is a wonderful book that dives into mindfulness and meditation in simple, easy to follow terms. 

Jon Kabat Zinn is the mindfulness master himself and he also gives practical exercises to help you along your journey.

Amazon Description:  Jon Kabat-Zinn goes much more deeply into the practice of meditation. To Kabat-Zinn, meditation is important because it brings about a state of “mindfulness,” a condition of “being” rather than “doing” during which you pay attention to the moment rather than the past, the future, or the multitudinous distractions of modern life.

The idea that meditation is “spiritual” is often confusing to people, Kabat-Zinn writes; he prefers to think of it as what you might call a workout for your consciousness. This book makes learning meditation remarkably easy (although practicing it is not). But it also makes it seem infinitely appealing. –Ben Kallen

3. Get Out of Your Head: Stopping the Spiral of Toxic Thoughts

You can choose hope in the midst of chaos. 

This inspiring book for women to read, Get Out of Your Head, challenges you to exercise your God-given power to shift negative thinking patterns and take back control of your thoughts and emotions.
 
“A must-have resource for anyone looking to get control of their thoughts.”—Lysa TerKeurst,

Amazon Description:  Are your thoughts holding you captive? I’ll never be good enough. Other people have better lives than I do. God couldn’t really love me. Jennie Allen knows what it’s like to swirl in a spiral of destructive thoughts, but she also knows we don’t have to stay stuck in toxic thinking patterns.
 
As she discovered in her own life, God built a way for us to escape that downward spiral. Freedom comes when we refuse to be victims to our thoughts and realize we have already been equipped with power from God to fight and win the war for our minds.

4.  Maybe You Should Talk to Someone – Lori Gottlieb (Best in NEW Inspiring Books)

Maybe you Should Talk to Someone is now being developed as a television series with Eva Longoria and ABC!  

And for good reason, it will challenge you to see yourself in an entirely new light, all while being laugh-out-loud funny!

“This is a daring, delightful, and transformative book.” (Arianna Huffington, founder, Huffington Post and founder & CEO, Thrive Global)

Amazon Description: From a New York Times best-selling author, psychotherapist, and national advice columnist, a hilarious, thought-provoking, and surprising new book that takes us behind the scenes of a therapist’s world – where her patients are looking for answers (and so is she).  

As Gottlieb explores the inner chambers of her patients’ lives – a self-absorbed Hollywood producer, a young newlywed diagnosed with a terminal illness, a senior citizen threatening to end her life on her birthday if nothing gets better, and a 20-something who can’t stop hooking up with the wrong guys – she finds that the questions they are struggling with are the very ones she is now bringing to Wendell.  

With startling wisdom and humor, Gottlieb invites us into her world as both clinician and patient, examining the truths and fictions we tell ourselves and others as we teeter on the tightrope between love and desire, meaning and mortality, guilt, and redemption, terror and courage, hope and change.  

5. Something More: Excavating Your Authentic Self, Sarah Ban Breathnach

It’s been a while since I read Something More but I still remember and use some of the principles in my life. 

This is an inspiring book for women everywhere, and the lessons within have a way of just sticking with you. 

We learn that there is so much more to life than money, sex, and love.

Amazon Description:  From the author of the bestselling “Simple Abundance” comes a provocative and powerful life “bible” for women around the world. In this insightful and eloquent book, Sarah Ban Breathnach explores the nine stages necessary to living authentically: Sensing, Surviving, Settling, Stumbling, Selling Out, Starting Over, Searching, Striving, and finally, Something More.

6. Tuesdays with Morrie: An Old Man, a Young Man, and Life’s Greatest Lesson- Mitch Albom

I love all books by Mitch Albom, he delivers simple books with deep messages.

Live fully and in the moment. Treat others with respect,  kindness, love, and dignity.  In this day and age, it’s easy to lose these simple truths.  Tuesday’s with Morrie is a guide to help you find your way back to peace and contentment.

Amazon Description:  Maybe it was a grandparent, or a teacher, or a colleague.  Someone older, patient and wise, who understood you when you were young and searching, helped you see the world as a more profound place, gave you sound advice to help you make your way through it.

For Mitch Albom, that person was Morrie Schwartz, his college professor from nearly twenty years ago. Tuesdays with Morrie is a magical chronicle of their time together, through which Mitch shares Morrie’s lasting gift with the world.

It’s been ten years since Mitch Albom first shared the wisdom of Morrie Schwartz with the world. Now–twelve million copies later–in a new afterword, Mitch Albom reflects again on the meaning of Morrie’s life lessons and the gentle, irrevocable impact of their Tuesday sessions all those years ago. . .

7. Greenlights – Matthew McConahuey

Greenlights is a new novel from the Academy Award-winning actor, an unconventional memoir filled with raucous stories, outlaw wisdom, and lessons learned the hard way about living with greater satisfaction.

I’ve been in this life for 50 years, been trying to work out its riddle for 42, and been keeping diaries of clues to that riddle for the last 35. Notes about successes and failures, joys and sorrows, things that made me marvel, and things that made me laugh out loud. How to be fair. How to have less stress. How to have fun. How to hurt people less. How to get hurt less. How to be a good man. How to have meaning in life. How to be more me. 

Recently, I worked up the courage to sit down with those diaries. I found stories I experienced, lessons I learned and forgot, poems, prayers, prescriptions, beliefs about what matters, some great photographs, and a whole bunch of bumper stickers. I found a reliable theme, an approach to living that gave me more satisfaction, at the time, and still: If you know how, and when, to deal with life’s challenges – how to get relative with the inevitable – you can enjoy a state of success I call “catching greenlights”.

So I took a one-way ticket to the desert and wrote this book: an album, a record, a story of my life so far. This is 50 years of my sights and seens, felts and figured-outs, cools and shamefuls. Graces, truths, and beauties of brutality. Getting away withs, getting caughts, and getting wets while trying to dance between the raindrops.

Hopefully, it’s medicine that tastes good, a couple of aspirin instead of the infirmary, a spaceship to Mars without needing your pilot’s license, going to church without having to be born again, and laughing through the tears.

It’s a love letter. To life. It’s also a guide to catching more greenlights – and to realizing that the yellows and reds eventually turn green, too. Good luck.

8. Untamed, Glennon Doyle

With over 1 million copies sold (wow) Untamed is “Packed with incredible insight about what it means to be a woman today.”—Reese Witherspoon 

This is how you find yourself.

There is a voice of longing inside each woman. We strive so mightily to be good: good partners, daughters, mothers, employees, and friends. We hope all this striving will make us feel alive. Instead, it leaves us feeling weary, stuck, overwhelmed, and underwhelmed. We look at our lives and wonder: Wasn’t it all supposed to be more beautiful than this? We quickly silence that question, telling ourselves to be grateful, hiding our discontent—even from ourselves.

Untamed shows us how to be brave.

Full of grace and simple truth, The Four Agreements is a handsomely designed book that makes a lovely gift for anyone making an elementary change in life.

The Four Agreements is a code of conduct we can use in all areas of our lives.

The four agreements are:

• Be impeccable with your word.
• Don’t take anything personally.
• Don’t make assumptions.
• Always do your best.

It’s the how and why one should do these things that make The Four Agreements worth reading and remembering. –P. Randall Cohan

Amazon Description: Rooted in traditional Toltec wisdom beliefs, four agreements in life are essential steps on the path to personal freedom. As beliefs are transformed through maintaining these agreements, shamanic teacher and healer don Miguel Ruiz asserts lives will “become filled with grace, peace, and unconditional love.”

10. Mutant Message Down Under- Marlo Morgan (Personal Favorite in Inspiring Books)

Mutant Message Down Under is one of my personal favorites.  (And rated A+ on the list of the most inspiring books to read).

The ancient wisdom and life lessons we can learn from one of the oldest races on the planet stand the test of time.  This is a must-read!

A powerful message for all of us.

“I was hypnotized by the simple truths and spiritual lessons. Read it and tell everyone you know to do the same.” –Wayne Dyer

This incredible adventure story–and New York Times bestseller–offers us an opportunity to discover the wisdom of an ancient culture and to hear its powerful message.

Amazon Description:  An American woman is summoned by a remote tribe of nomadic Aboriginals who call themselves the “Real People” to accompany them on a four-month-long walkabout through the Outback. While traveling barefoot with them through 1,400 miles of rugged desert terrain, she learns a new way of life, including their methods of healing, based on the wisdom of their 50,000-year-old culture. Ultimately, she experiences a dramatic personal transformation.