Self Joy

Taking everything they know from more than a decade of working with the queer and trans community, their personal journey of gender exploration, and clinical best practices, licensed therapist, coach, and speaker Rae McDaniel created the Gender Freedom Model. A uniquely supportive narrative for gender exploration and transition grounded in queer joy, their nine-pillar model has helped thousands of transgender and nonbinary individuals explore gender through play, pleasure, and freedom. And now, it can help you too.

It is well-known that the Danish have a fantastic balance of work and home life, that working late is discouraged, parental leave is split equally, and long relaxing summer holidays are the norm. They even have a word that means “happiness at work”—arbejdsglæde. All of this is true while the rest of the western world are struggling with a burn-out epidemic, so where are we going wrong?

How to Be Happier is Vol. 1 of a series about personal transformation. It is part of a set of audiobooks that will help you to achieve long lasting change and success in your life in a wide variety of areas. It is meant to be a blueprint to help you recognize ways that you can find more joy and happiness in your day-to-day living...and then use that new sense of joy to go on to create an actionable plan for achieving various goals in your life.

Imagine a company where people love coming to work and are highly productive on a daily basis. Imagine a company whose top executives, in a quest to create the most "fun" workplace ever, obliterate labor-management divisions and push decision-making responsibility down to the plant floor. Could such a company compete in today's bottom-line corporate world? Could it even turn a profit?

The Unexpected Joy of the Ordinary theorises that the solution is rediscovering the joy in the ordinary that we so often now forget to feel. Because we now expect the pleasure of a croissant, a hot shower, a yoga class, someone delivering our shopping to our door, we no longer feel its buzz. The joy of it whips through us like a bullet train, without pause. Catherine Gray was a grandmaster in the art of eye-rolling the ordinary and skilled in everlasting reaching. Until the black dog of depression forced her to rethink everything.

For more than 20 years, Betty Dodson has been dedicated to taking the shame out of masturbation, showing it to be a healthy form of sexual expression. With warmth and intelligence, and informative line drawings, Dodson explains how anyone can learn to fully enjoy the pleasures of self-love, pointing out that masturbation is still the safest sex.

While there are rewards to caring for those we love, there is no denying being a caregiver is a stressful job. It’s physically demanding, mentally exhausting, and emotionally draining. It simply wears us thin.

Thanks to her blog, Adventures from the Bedrooms of African Women, Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah has spent decades talking openly and intimately to African women around the world about sex. For this book, she spoke to more than 30 African women across the globe while chronicling her own journey toward sexual freedom.

Retired wreckhead Catherine Gray, author of surprise best seller The Unexpected Joy of Being Sober, is now in her ninth sober year and has learnt a damn sight more. This hotly anticipated sequel enlists the help of experts and case studies, turning a curious, playful gaze onto provocative questions. Is alcohol a parenting aid? Why are booze and cocaine such a horse and carriage? Once an addict, always an addict? How do you feel safe—from alcohol, others and yourself—in sobriety?

It's time to discover the joy of being selfish and reclaim your life through the art of boundaries! Life coach and influencer @scarrednotscared Michelle Elman is here to teach you the practical side of self-love. Creating and upholding strong boundaries will teach others how to treat you, rid your life of drama and toxic relationships and allow you to love yourself and others in the best way you can.

Spilt Milk Yoga is a companion guide for mothers who want to experience the happiness, peace, and purpose available in each moment, and who want to be more present and connected to themselves and their children.

Leadership coach, lawyer, photographer, and activist Karen Walrond knows that when you care deeply about the world, light can seem hard to find. But when your activism grows out of your joy - and vice versa - you begin to see light everywhere.

International best-selling author and leading global expert on mental strength Amy Morin turns her focus to feminism, explaining what it means - and what it takes - to be a mentally strong woman in the age of the #MeToo and #TimesUp movements.

Overthinking is when your brain just won’t switch off. It feels like it’s stuck going around and around on the same loop as a hamster stuck on a wheel. But while the hamster is having fun and getting fit, you’re feeling lower and lower and burning out.

After the sudden death of her husband, Sheryl Sandberg felt certain that she and her children would never feel pure joy again. "I was in 'the void,'" she writes, "a vast emptiness that fills your heart and lungs and restricts your ability to think or even breathe." Her friend Adam Grant, a psychologist at Wharton, told her there are concrete steps people can take to recover and rebound from life-shattering experiences. We are not born with a fixed amount of resilience. It is a muscle that everyone can build.

EMDR is designed to ease the distress you associate with traumatic memories, combining cognitive, somatic, and emotion-focused therapies with bilateral stimulation—usually guided eye movements.

Tabitha Brown's path to stardom was a long and winding one. For years she pursued acting while raising a family and dealing with undiagnosed chronic autoimmune pain. Before she became vegan, her condition made her believe she wouldn't live to see forty. Now she's one of the most popular personalities in the world, with millions of followers on TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook whom she inspires to live and eat well with her blend of homespun wisdom and delicious home cooking. With her relatable personality and health struggles, Tabitha connects with a good story and gentle hand.

Author Joel Primus grew up believing he needed to "do good" and "be good" to earn his parents' love and society's acceptance, but no matter what he accomplished, he never felt good enough. This underlying feeling of "badness," which he tried desperately to ignore, permeated much of his life. Psychiatrist Carl Jung calls the unsavory aspect of our personality the "shadow self," and the more we distance ourselves from it, the more anxiety, shame, and unworthiness grows.

Why do so many of us stop learning new skills as adults? Are we afraid to be bad at something? Have we forgotten the sheer pleasure of beginning from the ground up? Inspired by his young daughter’s insatiable curiosity, Tom Vanderbilt embarks on a yearlong quest of learning - purely for the sake of learning. Rapturously singing Spice Girls songs in an amateur choir, losing games of chess to eight-year-olds, and dodging scorpions at a surf camp in Costa Rica, Vanderbilt tackles five main skills, but learns so much more.

You know those awful, terrible, sucker-punch moments in life? The ones that knock you down, burn you up, or make you cringe so hard you wish it was all a bad dream? Probably–because we all do. These epic, messy, oh-no-oh-crap moments of chaos are just part of life–yet, as Dr. Neeta Bhushan shows us, they're also beautiful opportunities for change.