Books about Healing Your Life
The Bible
The Secret, Rhonda Byrne
You Can Heal Your Life, Louise Hay
The Science of Mind®, Ernest Holmes
365 Science of Mind, Ernest Holmes
365 Days of Richer Living, Ernest Holmes and Raymond Charles Barker
Discover the Power Within You, Eric Butterworth
Undoing the Knots, Cynthia Paulsen
Watch a Video of Rev Cynthia Paulsen speaking about “Words That Heal”
Words can heal! Rev Cynthia Paulsen
Beyond the power of our own words, other people’s words can also change and heal our lives. I know with certainty that I would not be who I am today if it weren’t for the many spiritual books that I have read. Many of them have positively impacted my spiritual journey and healed my life. They improved my understanding of spiritual principle, moved the trajectory of my life in a better direction, raised my consciousness to a higher level, opened my eyes to new ideas, and gave me tangible tools to improve my life experience. These are a few books that brought me more in alignment with my life purpose, and helped me realize my spiritual truth.
The first book that I believe healed my life is The Bible. Years ago, I worked as a Director of Christian Education at my United Church of Christ church. In order to make the Bible understandable to children and present children’s sermons during the service, I had to read scripture and study commentaries. I began to see The Bible, not as an ancient wisdom text that was boring and hard to understand, but as something that could be simplified, that had a message of positivity and goodness that would inspire children. I found and focused on scripture messages of love, peace, and the goodness of God being available to them. I might have been teaching children, but I was also learning that for myself!
About this time in my life, I was struggling personally through a painful divorce. That was the year the book The Secret by Rhonda Byrne was published. That book taught me that the power of the universe was within me. I learned things like how important it is to feel good in the present moment, how to practice gratitude, and use visualization. The Secret taught me how crucial it was to stop complaining about my perceived problems. This was the first time I had read about the Law of attraction and understood that my thoughts can attract good things into my life—that my words can influence my experience. It made me hungry to learn more, and that is important for our spiritual journey. We need to be led to the next thing that will help us grow spiritually.
The next book that I believe healed my life is ironically titled: You Can Heal Your Life, by Louise Hay. This book helped me notice and heal false thinking from my childhood. It does a great job explaining how false thoughts impact our consciousness. It teaches the value of positive affirmations and includes examples of beautiful affirmative prayers.
That leads me to the next big book that healed my life: The Science of Mind®. It takes time to get used to the language that Ernest Holmes writes within this extensive text, but it is worth it. Using the guide for reading the The Science of Mind® textbook in one year (found in the front of the book) helped me a lot. It bounces you all over the book, reading just a section or two at a time. You’re not reading it in order, but it makes it easier to understand. One day you’re reading from the introduction, then the next day you’re reading a couple inspirational meditations, then you might read about treatments for specific ailments, and then a metaphysical explanation of Jesus’ ministry. That is when The Science of Mind® came alive for me, when I could piecemeal it like that—and read just a little bit, think about it, meditate on it, and move on to the next one. When I finished the book after a year, I couldn’t wait to turn around and read it again from the beginning. These spiritual principles were healing my life!
There are a some great new thought daily readers out there like 365 Science of Mind, written by Ernest Holmes, and 365 Days of Richer Living written by Ernest Holmes and Raymond Charles Barker. Again, these are designed to be read as just a page a day—a few paragraphs for your reading spiritual practice. It’s a daily choice to focus on an uplifting word, an inspirational message, a snippet of spiritual principle. Those books help heal not only because of their spiritual content, but because they help you develop a consistent habit with your spiritual practice.
Another book that helped me heal my life was Discover the Power Within You, by Eric Butterworth. This book was originally published in 1968 and has many new thought nuggets of wisdom in it, the biggest take away being that the power of the Divine is within all of us. You will know and understand that by the time you finish reading of it. Discover the Power Within You brings the potential of Jesus to life as a possibility for you and your life. There are many scripture references in it, and they are given with a great new thought, metaphysical spin. This book shows you that the answer to life is within you. You come away filled with possibility and spiritual confidence.
Another book that I recommend sounds like a shameless plug because it’s my book! Published in August 2023, it is called, Undoing the Knots: Reclaiming Our Good. This book fits the same category of these other books, in that I truly believe it has the potential to heal. It was written with the intention that it can heal the knots in your life—knots are just the problems we all deal with from time to time—things like lack, loneliness, fear, conflict, illness, etc. The purpose of my book is to provide tangible resources: ideas, suggestions, spiritual practices that can help you think about your life in a new way and change your thinking to be in alignment with Spirit. It is a collection of short essays, stories, and meditations that are designed to help you heal your human challenges so that you can experience more good.
It explains various kinds of spiritual practices: how affirmations work, what affirmative prayer is, how simple gratitude can be, how to observe your thoughts and beliefs and why that is so important, why forgiveness is crucial to a healthy and harmonious life, how powerful we are because of our inherent unity with the Divine, and many more.
I believe that everything we could possibly want or need is within us and that there is no limit to the good we can experience because there is no limit to God. I also believe there is no limit to the ways we can heal—the ways Spirit can reach us with a greater understanding. So pick a good spiritual book! There are words out there that can heal. These were just a tiny sampling. There are so many!
What inspirational spiritual books have healed your life?
