Search results for ""Author The School of Life""

When trying to deal with our current troubles and anxieties, it can be deeply irritating to be asked to consider our childhoods. They happened so long ago; we can probably barely remember, let alone relate to, the little person we once were. But one of the most powerful explanations for why we may, as adults, be struggling, is that we were denied the opportunity to fully be ourselves in our earliest years. Perhaps we were over-disciplined and cowed, not allowed to be wilful or difficult – and so learnt to tell white lies and people-please. Or perhaps our caregivers were preoccupied or fragile and so we had to assume the role of parent, burying our true needs and desires deep underground. When we thoroughly examine our upbringings, the larger implications for our adult selves are clear to see. Once we understand the roots from which our flaws stem, we can set about correcting the harmful behaviours we mistakenly believe to be innate. This book is a guide to better understanding our younger selves in order to shape who we wish to be in the future. It explores to what extent we can pin our actions in the present to our experiences in the past, and how we might then break free from the learnt patterns of our childhoods.

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An original and comprehensive look at what it is we seek when we set off on an adventure abroad - and at how we can travel better, so that our experiences overseas become truly transformative and memorable. Going travelling is one of the few things we undertake in a direct attempt to make ourselves happy - and frequently, in fascinating ways, we fail. We get bored, cross, anxious or lonely. It isn't surprising: our societies act as if going travelling were simple, just a case of handing over the right sum of money. But a satisfying journey isn't something we can simply buy: it's the result of an art that has to be learnt. This is the guide: not to any one destination but to travel in general. It talks to us, among other things, about how we should choose a place to go, what we might do when we get there, how we should make good moments stick in our minds and why hotel rooms can be such liberating places... In a succession of genial essays, we become students of an unexpected but vital topic: how to understand and more fully enjoy (what should be) some of the finest experiences of our lives. What people are saying about How to Travel: "How to Travel helped me narrow down where I want to travel to, why I want to travel there, and who I want to travel with. The blank pages included gave me room to respond to the questions posed in the essays, which made the reading experience that much more enjoyable. I highly recommend this book to anyone who dreams of experiencing a culture or world outside of their own but can't decide on a place." Larysa "A lovely collection of thought provoking short essays with note pages for jotting down things like 'useful foreign phrases' or to 'give drawing a go'. This book is very well presented with interesting quotes, images and photographs on different coloured pages on quality paper. It therefore has a nice feel and is really easy to read, no complex theories here. However, each piece on different aspects of travel is written well and makes you think which has real value...So enjoyable, and a perfect gift for someone preparing to travel." Sue "In classic School of Life form, the content is compellingly presented in an uncommon way, playful while authoritative." Rick "Has little pockets and fill in spaces that are so useful." Joana

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A soothing gallery of artworks and photography to guide us on a journeytowards calm.

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A blank notebook with a soft back with rounded corners, bellyband & elastic closure.

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We’re hugely dependent on language to express how we really feel, and yet words often feel curiously vague or frustratingly inaccurate. There are lots of moods, needs and feelings that our own language has not yet properly pinned down. The perfect word - even if it comes from abroad - helps us explain ourselves to other people, and its existence quietly reassures us (and everyone else) that a state of mind is not really rare, just rarely spoken of. This set of cards define some of our favourite words from the world’s languages and married them up with complementary images to create cards that bring some of our most important feelings into focus. We’ve created them to prompt greater reflection about the nature of language and the emotions. Example Cards: DUENDE (Spanish): A heightened sense of emotion created by a moving piece of art. FORELSKET (Norwegian): The euphoric feeling at the beginning of love. We can’t believe someone so perfect has wandered into our lives. They enhance and complete us. We might report: ‘I was overpowered by forelsket as our fingers interlaced…’

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Typically, we stumble on fascinating conversation topics a little bit by chance. Shyness can hold us back. Too often, we revert to polite, but not especially inspired, staples. Arranged to accompany each course, these twenty beautifully designed Conversation Menus lead us artfully to some of the most fascinating and revealing conversation topics. They invite us to open up about themes such as love, money, travel ambition, self-knowledge and the meaning of life. They contain questions and invitations to discussion that will raise smiles, build friendships and foster the best kind of intimacy, ensuring that our meals together can be everything we hoped. Questions Include: What do you blame your parents for? What do you wish your partner could forgive you for? Have you ever sabotaged your own success? Who did you have a rush on during your school years? Describe your first memorable encounter with another culture. What should children learn about the adult world? In what ways is your family especially odd? Who have you had to eject from your social life – and why? How would you like to be remembered? What shaped your attitudes to money?

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An inspiring curated selection of 40 photographs and artworks with accompanying essays examining the skill of confidence. The difference between success and failure often comes down to an ingredient that we are seldom directly taught about and may forget to focus on: confidence. Here is a supreme guide to a fatefully neglected quality – made up of a series of short essays that encourage us into a new and more fruitful state of mind. We hear why we should dare to try, why the past doesn’t have to dictate the future, why we can alter the way we speak to ourselves and why there are so many reasons to keep faith with our most ambitious aspirations. The images that accompany each essay are there to ensure that we aren’t merely intellectually stirred to change our lives but are also given the best kind of visual assistance. Within its modest size, this book succeeds at a mighty feat: unlocking our latent powers and edging us on with kindness and creativity to become the best version of ourselves.

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Our societies frequently proclaim their enormous esteem for culture. Music, film, literature and the visual arts enjoy high prestige and are viewed by many as getting close to the meaning of life. But what is culture really for? This book proposes that works of culture were all made, in one way or another, with the idea of improving the way we live. The book connects a range of cultural masterpieces with our own pains and dilemmas around love, work and society, and invites us to see culture as a resource with which to address the complex agonies of being human. It provides us with enduring keys to unlocking culture as a way of transforming our lives.

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Many of us find ourselves in the odd situation of not believing in religion – but nevertheless being interested in it, moved by it and sympathetic to some of its aims. We may enjoy religious art and architecture, music and community, and even some of the rituals – while being unable to believe in angels, divine commandments or stories about the afterlife. This book is about those feelings and what we might do about them. The School of Life is a secular organisation fascinated by the gaps left in modern society by the gradual disappearance of religion. We’re interested in how hard it is to find a sense of community, how rituals are dying out and how much we sometimes crave the solemn quiet you find in religious buildings. This book lays out how we might absorb the best lessons of religion, update them for our times and incorporate them into our daily lives and societies – without taking on the supernatural or doctrinaire elements. This book tries to rescue some of what remains wise and useful from all that no longer seems (to many of us) to be quite true.

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An average couple will have between thirty and fifty significant arguments a year - and yet we’re seldom taught very much about why they happen and how they could grow a little less intense. This is a guide to arguments in love: it teaches us why they might occur, what their symptoms are, how we could learn some wiser ways of communicating and how we would ideally patch up after a fight. The book looks at twenty of the most common arguments - including ones about sex, money, in-laws, who is ‘cold’ and who is ‘over-emotional’ and the state of the bathroom and the finances. We recognise our own antics but also pick up consoling and wise ideas on how to skirt certain conflicts going forward. The tragedy of every sorry argument is that it is constructed around a horrific mismatch between the message we so badly want to send (‘I need you to love me, know me, agree with me’) and the manner in which we are able to deliver it (with impatient accusations, sulks, put-downs, sarcasm, exaggerated gesticulations and forceful ‘f *** yous’). A bad argument is a failed endeavour to communicate; this is a definitive guide to how we might argue better. ‘The priority is not so much to avoid points of contention as to learn to handle them in less counterproductively vindictive and more gently strategic ways. We need a lot help in order in order to acquire the complex art of converting our poisonous arguments into effective and compassionate dialogues.’

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We have so many vague feelings of hurt, envy, anxiety, and regret, but for the most part we never stop to make sense of them. It’s too un-comfortable and especially difficult because we are so often busy and frazzled, hyper-connected yet a bit lonely. To really understand what we feel and think, we must turn away from distractions, common sense, and other people’s opinions. We need to develop intimacy with ourselves. Our un-thought thoughts contain clues as to our needs and our longer-term direction. Writing them out is key. Through writing, we recognise patterns to observe and, perhaps, outgrow. We can strategise – a remarkably neglected task. We can ask ourselves why we make the choices we do. We can question faulty narratives and create new ones. We can consider ideas before we commit to them, and reinforce good ideas we already know. Writing is ultimately the task of discovering and developing what we think. There could hardly be a more important personal goal.

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We have so many vague feelings of hurt, envy, anxiety, and regret, but for the most part we never stop to make sense of them. It’s too un-comfortable and especially difficult because we are so often busy and frazzled, hyper-connected yet a bit lonely. To really understand what we feel and think, we must turn away from distractions, common sense, and other people’s opinions. We need to develop intimacy with ourselves. Our un-thought thoughts contain clues as to our needs and our longer-term direction. Writing them out is key. Through writing, we recognise patterns to observe and, perhaps, outgrow. We can strategise – a remarkably neglected task. We can ask ourselves why we make the choices we do. We can question faulty narratives and create new ones. We can consider ideas before we commit to them, and reinforce good ideas we already know. Writing is ultimately the task of discovering and developing what we think. There could hardly be a more important personal goal.

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We have so many vague feelings of hurt, envy, anxiety, and regret, but for the most part we never stop to make sense of them. It’s too un-comfortable and especially difficult because we are so often busy and frazzled, hyper-connected yet a bit lonely. To really understand what we feel and think, we must turn away from distractions, common sense, and other people’s opinions. We need to develop intimacy with ourselves. Our un-thought thoughts contain clues as to our needs and our longer-term direction. Writing them out is key. Through writing, we recognise patterns to observe and, perhaps, outgrow. We can strategise – a remarkably neglected task. We can ask ourselves why we make the choices we do. We can question faulty narratives and create new ones. We can consider ideas before we commit to them, and reinforce good ideas we already know. Writing is ultimately the task of discovering and developing what we think. There could hardly be a more important personal goal.

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Going travelling can be one of life’s greatest activities – but often, we fail to deepen the experience as much as we should and return home with some of the promise of our trip unrealised. Here is a pack of cards designed to help us get the very best out of travel – and to embed its greatest lessons in our minds. The cards contain questions that we can reflect on ourselves (in a journal or on a train ride) or ask others in a group – and that lead us to think deeply about how we might derive maximal satisfaction from a trip. This is an ingenious, low-tech, high-impact solution to one of the great conundrums of travel: how to ensure that the reality of going away will match our hopes.

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From adolescence onwards, one of the great struggles we face is how to reconcile our own desires with those we find socially acceptable. The best encounters with friends are those where we can talk honestly about what’s going on in our lives, sharing triumphs, joys, fears and longings - without the usual shyness or reserve. This game guarantees that the warmest, most fascinating conversations won’t have to be left to chance. With the help of a dice and some cards, the game asks participants to answer a series of questions around career, sex, money, relationships, family, gently inviting everyone to share important bits of themselves in an intimate and playful atmosphere. By thinking of confessions as a game – as a sociable and exploratory activity, as opposed to a risky affair – the cards prompt us to open ourselves up to interesting and exhilarating conversations, allow us to be a little more honest around the most intimate aspects of ourselves. Example Questions: What did you call your partner in your most heated argument? In your most depressed moods, what do you tell yourself about your career? What are you ashamed of people knowing about you and money? Describe in some detail the first time you had sex. What do you hate most about your children?

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An exploration of children's literature - from J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan to Young Dark Emu by Bruce Pascoe - and the lessons these stories teach about the world around them.

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It isn’t easy to get into a good conversation. Many of our best ones seem to have happened by chance. Far from it - we believe a great conversation always starts with someone asking a great question. In this set of beautiful cards, you’ll find laid out 100 of the very best questions around, carefully designed to get a group of people into exceptionally entertaining and meaningful conversations. Example Questions: What’s the best evening you ever had? Are you where you wanted to be at this stage in your life? What do you and your partner argue about most? What are the best things you owe your parents? Would you be happy to tell your friends how much you earn? Have you ever had a religious experience?

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It can be remarkably hard to tell other people how we really feel; it may even be tricky for us to get clear about our own moods. Mostly, if people ask how we are, we’ll just say, ‘Fine’ - knowing that we’ve provided only a sharp abbreviation of what is actually going on in our minds. This is a tool to help us overcome our vagueness: cards that offer definitions of twenty moods that we can all recognise but that can be hard to pin down and explain. Here are descriptions of - among many other things - the sense of feeling weepy, nostalgic, anxious, and dreamy. These cards help us reach a clearer understanding of our inner emotional weather. They can also be passed on to friends and colleagues (or simply displayed on our desk) so that the world can better know what’s going on inside us, without our needing to explain too much. Quotes From The Cards: ‘Everyone is more anxious than they are inclined to tell us. Even the tycoon and the couple in love are suffering. We’ve collectively failed to admit to ourselves how much it is customary to panic. But we can at least hold out our arms to our similarly tortured, fractured, and above all else, anxious neighbours, as if to say, in the kindest way possible: ‘I know...’ - On Feeling Anxious ‘We should enjoy our obsessive moods. To obsess well is to realise that the lovely person we sketch in our heads is our creation: a creation that says more about us than it does about them. We may not really be getting to know another person properly, but we are growing our insight into who we really are.’- On Feeling Obsessive

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A book to inspire closeness and connection, helping people not only to find love but to make it last. Few things promise us greater happiness than our relationships – yet few things more reliably deliver misery and frustration. Our error is to suppose that we are born knowing how to love and that managing a relationship might therefore be intuitive and easy. This book starts from a different premise: that love is a skill to be learnt, rather than just an emotion to be felt. It calmly and charmingly takes us around the key issues of relationships, from arguments to sex, forgiveness to communication, making sure that success in love need never again be just a matter of luck. Part of a new essential paperback series from The School of Life, covering a range of emotional lessons needed in order to lead fulfilled and happy lives.

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A guide to developing the art of finding serenity by understanding the sources of our anxiety and frustrations. Almost all of us wish we could be calmer; it is one of the distinctive longings of the modern age. Across history people have sought adventure and excitement, however a new priority for many of us is a desire to be more tranquil. This is a book designed to support us in our endeavours to remain calm against all the adversities life throws at us. A calm state of mind is not a divine gift, we can alter our responses to everyday things and educate ourselves in the art of remaining calm, not through slow breathing or special teas, but through thinking. This is a book that explores the causes of our greatest stresses and anxieties and gives us a succession of highly persuasive, beautiful and sometimes dryly comic arguments with which to defend ourselves against panic and confusion. Part of a new essential paperback series from The School of Life, covering a range of emotional lessons needed in order to lead fulfilled and happy lives.

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A guide to emotional healing and living a more self-accepting life by learning to love oneself. Behind many of our problems lies an often ignored factor: we don’t like ourselves very much. We are sufferers of self-hatred. We tell ourselves the meanest things. It’s because of self-hatred that we tend to neglect our potential at work and get entangled in unfulfilling relationships, that we lack confidence in our social lives and suffer from anxiety and despair. This is a book that, with immense compassion and fellow feeling, investigates the phenomenon of self-hatred while giving pragmatic advice on how to overcome it. It asks where the feeling comes from, what it makes us do and how we might become kinder and more compassionate towards ourselves. We have probably spent far too much of our lives disliking ourselves and attacking everything we say, do or feel, while not even realising what we’re up to. It’s time to overcome our masochism and move towards a more self-forgiving and accepting stance. On Self-Hatred is a guide to the more compassionate and gentle relationship we should have had with ourselves from the start, and can all achieve now.

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Life constantly requires us to give other people some hugely awkward messages: that we don’t love them anymore; that we do love them (though we’re not meant to); that they smell a bit; that they’re fired; that we’re furious with them (though we adore them) or that their music is too loud... Often, out of embarrassment, we just stay quiet. Occasionally we explode. And typically, we stumble about, looking for the right words – dreading that we didn’t find them and thereby causing more hurt than we should. This is a book to help us locate the best possible words to get across a range of life’s most difficult messages. With twenty case studies drawn from relationships, friendships, work, our families and service situations, we are gently shown what we might – in an ideal world – find ourselves saying to make our intentions known while causing minimal harm. We are guided, among other topics, to how best to end a relationship, how to make it up with a child and how gently to let down a friend who wants more. We laugh, we recognise our troubles – and we’re introduced to a range of deeply empathetic ways to navigate some of our most acute social dilemmas.

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This is a book that celebrates the most neglected but valuable emotion we can feel: melancholy. Melancholy isn’t depression or anger or bitterness, it’s a serene, accepting, gentle, wise and kindly response to the difficulties and occasional misery of being alive. It steers an ideal mid-way course between despair on the one hand and naïve optimism on the other. But melancholy is a well-kept secret. Those who feel the pull of melancholy moods tend to stay quiet about their tastes. We don’t often hear melancholy being celebrated or accorded the respect that it deserves. Melancholy languishes unexplored in a hyper-competitive, noisy, frantic age. And yet the emotion heartily deserves exploration, it is one that leads to reflection and thoughtfulness. This book carefully collects and interprets a selection of the most universally recognisable melancholy states of mind, and thereby renders us less confused by our precious yet elusive feelings. We hear, among other things, about the melancholy of Sunday evenings and the melancholy of adolescence, the melancholy of high summer and the melancholy of crushes. This book offers a varied portrait of melancholy and it’s range of emotions, leading the reader to both insight and self compassion.

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Raising a child to be an authentic and mentally robust adult is one of life’s great challenges. It is also, fortunately, not a matter of luck. There are many things to understand about how children’s minds operate and what they need from those who look after them so they can develop into the best version of themselves. The Good Enough Parent is a compendium of lessons, including ideas on how to say ‘no’ to a child one adores, how to look beneath the surface of ‘bad’ behaviour to work out what might really be going on, how to encourage a child to be genuinely kind, how to encourage open self expression, and how to handle the moods and gloom of adolescence. Importantly, this is a book that knows that perfection is not required – and could indeed be unhelpful, because a key job of any parent is to induct a child gently into the imperfect nature of everything. Written in a tone that is encouraging, wry and soaked in years of experience, The Good Enough Parent is an intelligent guide to raising a child who will one day look back on their childhood with just the right mixture of gratitude, humour and love.

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This is a book that should never fall into the hands of children – for it is filled with the darkest truths about life that might unbearably depress the young. However, for the older ones among us, this is a book full of solace, humour and relief. In a charming, naively illustrated tale, we follow the adventures of Bunny – a version of all of us – as he encounters a series of obstacles we are in some ways liable to recognise from our own lives. Watching poor Bunny, we end up delighted we’re not alone, and perhaps smiling darkly in sympathy with his sorrows. Children might even have the odd peek inside if they dare.

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Choosing a partner is one of the most consequential and tricky decisions we will ever make. The cost of repeated failure is immense. And yet we are often so alone with the search. Partners used to be found for us by parents and society. Now we are expected to follow our feelings - and so locate people by ourselves, according to intuition. This should be an improvement, but our emotions often pull us towards hugely problematic characters and dynamics. How to Find Love explains why we have the ‘types’ we do - and how our early experiences give us scripts of how and whom we can love. The book provides a crucial set of ideas to help us make safer, more imaginative and more effective choices in love.

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The Great Thinkers is a collection of some of the most important ideas of Eastern and Western culture - drawn from the works of those philosophers, political theorists, sociologists, artists and novelists whom we believe have the most to offer to us today. We've worked hard to make the thinkers in this book clear, relevant and charming, mining the history of knowledge to bring you the ideas we think have the greatest importance to our times. This 480-page book contains the canon of The School of Life, the gallery of individuals across the millennia who help to frame our intellectual project - and we have succeeded if, in the days and years ahead, you find yourself turning to our thinkers to illuminate the multiple dilemmas, joys and griefs of daily life.

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It is a daily undertaking – a morning shot of coffee, an absentminded sandwich at your desk, a hastily assembled dinner with the remnants from the fridge... With its every day ubiquity we can make the mistake of assuming that food is of little importance, or simply fuel to see us through the day. But what is its real impact on our emotional lives, and how can we better nourish ourselves? What we eat and how we eat it has a significant impact on our psychological well-being. In recent times, our society has been eager to recruit food to the project of physical health, but we’ve not always paid so much attention to how cooking and eating can assist us with our emotional health. With over 150 recipes, Thinking & Eating shows how ingredients and dishes can be supporters of certain ideas, emotions and states of mind that best help us confront the challenges of existence. In each recipe we discover of the ways in which food can store, memorialise and transmit the most important ideas of our lives.

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Often, when we need to mark where we’ve got to in a book, we bend back the page or reach for an old receipt, but there’s a particular pleasure in having a robust and elegant bookmark to hand. Here are twenty bookmarks, unusually assembled into a small pull-out ‘book’ that simultaneously offers, across its surfaces, an essay on the business of reading: why we do it, what the best books do for us, and how literature might change our lives. This book of bookmarks prompts small, artful occasions when, at the start or end of a reading session, we can pause to consider the power of books and their vital place in our lives. Excerpts Include: “The moment we cry in a book is often not when things are sad but when they turn out to be more beautiful than we expected. We cry about our hopes” “One kind of good book leaves us asking: how did the author know that about me? By looking particularly deeply into their own secrets, authors simultaneously guess everyone else’s” “The best books put their finger on emotions that we recognise as deeply our own, but could never have formulated on our own.” “Books are like people; we meet many but fall in love very seldom. Perhaps only ten books will ever truly mark us. We shouldn’t feel ashamed of abandoning the ones that don’t work for us”

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Good work involves feeling engaged and motivated by what we’re doing – and battling inertia and weariness with courage and imagination. Fortunately, motivation is not a gift from the gods; it is a quality we can nurture in ourselves and encourage in others. ‘Motivation’ is a tool for increasing our effectiveness; 52 exercises designed to train our brains to find their bearings and generate their very best efforts. Our minds are not machines, and are prone to distractions, indecision and cognitive biases – but these can also be worked around and overcome. Each exercise prompts us to engage in activities and thought experiments that help us to surmount mental blocks and formulate strategies for solving problems and achieving our goals. At once a collection of psychological solutions and calls to action, this is an invaluable resource for unlocking our true potential.

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An insightful and illuminating guide on understanding the psychological legacy left to us by our parents.

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We accept without shame that most organs in our bodies might at some point develop problems – and could need a bit of help. We should not make an exception of our minds. Our lives are so complicated and so filled with burdens, we should be completely unsurprised if, at some point, we felt a need to pull up a white flag and ask for help with our minds. This is a guide to how to cope with a variety of forms of mental pain and unwellness, from the very mild to the more severe. It explains to us how and why we might become ill, how we can explain things to friends and family, how we should take care of ourselves – and how we might adjust our view of ourselves and our future so as to live wisely alongside our difficulties. Throughout the tone is humane, encouraging and rich with experience. A central idea is that there is no need for any of us to suffer alone with our condition and that the best way to mend is to reduce shame, accept our troubles as very normal – and seek out understanding and friendship. It’s by exploring and discussing what has happened to us that we can heal and reduce our sense of isolation. Written with kindness, knowledge and sympathy, and drawing upon the experience and knowledge of The School of Life therapists, this book is an essential tool to help us on the way to our recovery.

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The modern world is richer, safer and more connected than ever before but it is – arguably – also a far less loving world than we need or want: impatience, self-righteousness, moralism and viciousness are rife, while forgiveness, tolerance and sympathetic good humour can be in short supply. This is a book that rallies us to remember how much we all long for, and depend on love: how much we need people to forgive us for our errors, how much everyone deserves to be treated with consideration and imagination and how being truly civilised means extending patience and kindness to all those we have to deal with, even, and especially, those who don’t naturally appeal to us. With the right encouragement, all of us are capable of immense kindness. But without it, we can also quickly descend into something far darker. This book reminds us of our better natures and mobilises us to fight for the kinder, more loving world we essentially long for at heart. Throughout, it frames love not as a romantic, idealistic fantasy, but as a hugely serious and dignified force that can save us from meanness and strife, defend us against chaos – and usher in hope and courage.

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We are so used to living in a media-saturated world that we do not notice just how much damage is being done to us daily by the images we see and the articles and posts we read. If you are often anxious or find it hard to sleep, or you regularly want to give up on your fellow human beings, the reason may come down to the relentless influence of the modern media. How Modern Media Destroys Our Minds is a guide for navigating the media today. The book encourages the reader to consider the many peculiarities of the modern media: its excessive focus on scandal, its emphasis on novelty, its capacity to breed envy and self-hatred, its high-minded defence of itself, its ever shorter attention span and its obsession with fame. The book teaches us how to liberate ourselves from the media, in order to achieve calm and a more generous, original and imaginative state of mind. We are shown how to redress the balance and emerge with a stronger, more positive outlook on life.

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One of the things we all deeply crave, and all richly deserve, is a more exciting life. We know well enough that many things have to be routine, hard and a little bit boring. But we also rightly sense that, if only we can find a way, our lives could be rendered intermittently more joyful, intense, thrilling and beautiful. This is a guide to the more exciting life we know could be ours. It isn’t about the outward things we might do: travel, parachute out of airplanes or learn a foreign language. This is a book of psychology and about how we can nurture a sense of inner liberation, accept our desires and aspirations and then have the courage to set ourselves free. Perhaps for too long we have resigned ourselves to things that aren’t fair or necessary, we have felt too constricted (and perhaps unloved) to communicate well with others and the proper expansion of our characters has been sacrificed for the sake of compliance. Now is a chance to recover some of our spirit, and to become open to the full intensity, beauty and mystery of life and to the richness of our own possibilities. Here is a guide to that more exciting life we know should – and can – be ours.

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Children are used to hearing about how important it is to protect nature, but they may not fully understand how the natural world can positively impact their emotional wellbeing. With that in mind, this book shows children how nature can be fun, uplifting, consoling and even offer companionship. This is a book about how nature can touch us all and help us with our lives (especially when we might be feeling bored, sad or lonely). Children learn about the ways in which they can be comforted, inspired and uplifted by examples of nature such as: a flowing river a cow in a field clouds in the sky rabbits in their burrows stars at night a cuddle with a favourite puppy This is an inspirational book, not just educating children about the natural world, but teaching them to love and connect with it. Beautiful illustrations and a tone that is encouraging, warm and accessible makes it easy for children, and their favourite adults, to relate to.

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52 cards designed to help find new ways of thinking about journaling.

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The idea of family lies close to the meaning of life, but in practice, families do not always come together, or chat about what matters, or laugh as much or as often as they should. Everyone gets too busy, or it can feel hard to get into certain topics – and without anyone meaning to, occasions keep slipping by. The Family Game is the solution; this is a game expressly designed to help family gatherings live up to our highest hopes. It consists of a host of questions (chosen randomly with a dice) that kick-start the best sorts of conversations: ones in which we reconnect, say things we always meant to, laugh warmly together – and remember why family counts. The cards cover 5 categories: Gentle Teasing - What would the movie of your family be called? Gratitude - To whom have you been a bit too moody? Self - How would you like to evolve? Memories - What was your favourite time of day when you were little? Regrets - If you could be forgiven for something, what would it be?

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Our society typically devotes huge attention to the start of a marriage – and particularly to the actual wedding ceremony. But the real challenge lies beyond the wedding, with the long years ahead – and here we are too often left on our own. This box is The School of Life’s guide to the rest of a life together, containing twenty beautiful cards which lay out the central ideas on how to make a relationship work over the decades beyond the wedding day. It is filled with artful suggestions on coping with what even the most loving couple will face as they build a life together. This set of cards is both a celebration of marriage and a rich source of insights into the skills it demands. Quotes From The Cards: In Praise of Compromise: ‘Couples who compromise are not the enemies of love: they may be at the vanguard of understanding what lasting relationships truly demand and what they are for. They deserve admiration, not condemnation.’ On Sex and Marriage: ‘The waning of sex is – far more than we collectively admit – a sign that a marriage is stabilising, not failing. If we more publicly admitted this, we’d be less panicked, less ashamed and a little less resentful when the sex got less intense and less frequent.

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We often overestimate how fragile we are. In our nightmares, we assume that life would become impossible for us far earlier than it actually would. In reality, we could manage perfectly well with a lot less than we currently have. Not that we should want this to happen, of course: it’s simply that we could bear it. We forget our resilience in the face of risk and become unnecessarily timid. Our lives become dominated by a fear of losing things that we could in fact do without. This set of cards is designed to gently remind us that we are far stronger than we imagine. Examples 3 a.m. alone in bed is perhaps not the optimal moment at which to derive a true picture of reality. Wait – always – for the perspective of dawn. Things don’t need to be perfect; we are creatures eminently suited to ‘good enough’. It sounds heartless to say: ‘you’ll get over it’. But you will. The brain is designed to exaggerate troubles. We suffer more in our thoughts than in reality.

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We are experts at focusing on what is missing from our lives. Our dissatisfaction often serves us well; it keeps us from complacency and boredom. But we are also dragged down by a pernicious inability to stop, take stock and recognise what isn’t imperfect and appalling. In our haste to secure the future, we omit to notice what is already very good. This pack of cards is designed to help us pause in our striving and, for a few moments, take on board some of what we have to be grateful for - a consoling, inspiring corrective to the lessons in cynicism and sourness that the world teaches every day. Example Cards: There were no outright catastrophes today. Others forget the stupid things we’ve done faster than we do. We can reinvent ourselves – a bit. Other people are usually shyer, sweeter and kinder than we’d anticipated We have managed to learn a few things down the years We don’t have to take ourselves seriously Many of the people we love are still alive. We could disappear for a bit. Many of the world’s most interesting people have written down their thoughts.

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