The Books of Summer: Self-Improvement

Beauty is Wellness. Wellness is Beauty.

Kerrilynn Pamer and Cindy DiPrima Morisse, founders of CAP Beauty, the all-natural beauty site and store, want to share their deep knowledge of the benefits of natural beauty, foods, and mindfulness techniques with you. Natural beauty is about making choices that create true radiance from the foods we eat to the way we move to how we care for ourselves and our planet.

You’ve already purified your meals, workouts, and bodies by returning to clean naturals. Now it’s time to align your beauty routine with the other wellness practices you follow. What we put on our skin is easily as important as what we put in our mouths. But natural beauty is about much more than just products. Through routines, recipes, and rituals, High Vibrational Beauty addresses beauty from the inside out and vibrancy from the outside in.

Divided into seasons and focused on self-care and rejuvenation, High Vibrational Beauty combines mantras, meditations, natural skin care regimens, and more than 100 plant-based recipes to help you achieve radical radiance. This is the only guidebook you need to create true and lasting beauty for the mind, body, and soul.

Jean-Paul Sartre once declared waterskiing to be “the ideal limit of aquatic sports.” Aaron James, who is both an avid surfer and a professor of philosophy, vigorously disagrees. In these pages, he presents his surfer’s worldview as a foil to Sartre’s, along the way elucidating such philosophical categories as freedom, being, phenomenology, morality, epistemology, and even the emerging values of what he terms “leisure capitalism.”
 
In developing his unique surfer’s philosophy, he draws from surf culture and lingo—and engages with philosophers from Aristotle to Wittgenstein. In the process, he speaks to those of us in search of personal and social meaning—particularly in our current anxious moment—by way of real, authentic philosophy. In or out of the water.

The definitive–and by far the most popular–guide to the therapeutic Japanese practice of shinrin-yoku, or the art and science of how trees can promote health and happiness

Notice how a tree sways in the wind. Run your hands over its bark. Take in its citrusy scent. As a society we suffer from nature deficit disorder, but studies have shown that spending mindful, intentional time around trees–what the Japanese call shinrin-yoku, or forest bathing–can promote health and happiness.

In this beautiful book–featuring more than 100 color photographs from forests around the world, including the forest therapy trails that criss-cross Japan–Dr. Qing Li, the world’s foremost expert in forest medicine, shows how forest bathing can reduce your stress levels and blood pressure, strengthen your immune and cardiovascular systems, boost your energy, mood, creativity, and concentration, and even help you lose weight and live longer.

Once you’ve discovered the healing power of trees, you can lose yourself in the beauty of your surroundings, leave everyday stress behind, and reach a place of greater calm and wellness.

An engaging and practical guided tour of the simple and nature-inspired ways that Finns stay happy and healthy–including the powerful concept of sisu, or everyday courage

Forget hygge–it’s time to blow out the candles and get out into the world! Journalist Katja Pantzar did just that, taking the huge leap to move to the remote Nordic country of Finland. What she discovered there transformed her body, mind and spirit. In this engaging and practical guide, she shows readers how to embrace the “keep it simple and sensible” daily practices that make Finns one of the happiest populations in the world, year after year.

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