Mindfulness for Chocolate Lovers

A Lighthearted Way to Stress Less and Savor More Each Day

Diane R. Gehart

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
• Year: 2019
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781538129074
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Mental Health & Wellbeing

An accomplished and honored professor, psychotherapist, author, and chocolate connoisseur, Diane Gehart identifies surprisingly efficient and fun ways to increase your daily dose of joy. Drawing on positive psychology, Eastern wisdom, and three decades of psychotherapist know-how, she outlines a no-nonsense yet good-humored path to get you where you want to go. She will teach you step-by-step how to:

Identify the essential elements necessary for life-long happiness and add them to your everyday habits.Develop an unshakable sense of inner joy that sustains you in good times and bad.Engage your most painful life circumstances to dramatically improve your life for the better.Navigate common pitfalls and challenges, including skillfully handling the most difficult personalities and relationships.Transform how you journey through life—making it a joy ride regardless of weather or other unforeseen circumstances.

First, she debunks popular myths that have us looking for happiness in all the wrong places and then offers an accurate map for getting where we want to go. Next, readers will learn the hardest but ultimately most liberating lesson: making friends with life and all that is, including the good, the bad, and the ugly—which includes black widow spiders for some of us. From there, you will learn surprisingly playful and palatable options for maximizing your joy, including mindfulness, crazy wisdom, compassion, and ethical living. Finally, you will learn how to avoid—or at least survive—the common pitfalls and the dangerous snakes that line the path from where you are to where you want to go.

If you have avoided meditation and similar practices for most of your life because they are dull and boring, you may find something that suits your refined and zesty taste for living here. Along the way, you will have numerous opportunities to laugh, to cry, and to reconnect with the best within yourself. You will suddenly discover your most desperate challenges dissolving before you, revealing an easier path and renewing your delight in living and loving. Worst-case scenario: You will have educational excuses to savor some chocolate delights, enjoy a few good laughs, and gain a handful of new insights about your life.

Whether you are reeling from a devastating break-up; feeling adrift professionally; struggling with depression, anxiety, or more severe mental health issues; or simply wanting to feel happier given the numerous blessings in your life, this book will help you make changes that you could never accomplish before because you will now be motivated to do something different.

Ultimately, this book invites you to play. To laugh. To love. To heal old heartbreaks. To overcome what was once impossible. To open your heart to life and all it has to offer: white, milk, and dark. The stresses of modern life often create the illusion that life is hard, painful, and lonely. You are only a few bites away from an entirely different approach to living a sweeter life.

Table of contents

• Author’s Introduction: Would You Rather Eat Chocolate than Meditate?
• Warning: Couch Potatoes and Voyeurs
• 1 Chocolate Meditation: A Taste of the Good Life
• 2 From Chocoholism to Chocolate Snobbery: Becoming a Seeker of Extraordinary Happiness
• 3 Chocolate Is a Vegetable: Mapping the Truths You Live By
• 4 Who Moved My Chocolate? Befriending Problems, Befriending Life
• 5 One Bite Is All It Takes: Mindfully Waking Up to Your Life
• 6 With or Without Nuts? Crazy Wisdom and the Back Door to Happiness
• 7 Fierce Compassion: Opening Your Heart to Milk, White, and Dark
• 8 There’s No Wrong Way to Eat a Reese’s—Or Is There? Ethics and Happiness
• 9 Artificial Chocolate and Comfort Foods: Dangers and Pitfalls on the Path
• 10 The Art of Savoring: Joyfulness as a Way of Life
• Notes: Academic Bits and Pieces
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author