Vital Signs: The Nature and Nurture of Passion - Tapa dura

Praise for VITAL SIGNS

This magnificent work brimming with gorgeous prose and life enhancing stories and insights reveals how the cultivation of passion is key to the energy, love, creativity, health, and just about everything else that is good and true in our existence. Levoy offers us a thrilling new map to the vital core of all our becomings. To read this book and follow its principles is to stop boring God!

Jean Houston, Ph.D, author of The Possible Human and The Wizard of Us, and Consultant to the United Nations in human and social development
The topic is stimulating and Levoy s faith that we can all find passion in our lives is genuinely stirring.
Publishers Weekly
Our society seems increasingly obsessed with security and playing it safe in every area of life. But along with this trend often comes a deadening and listlessness in living as risk-taking, excitement, and novelty are shoved aside. Gregg Levoy's Vital Signs is a marvelous corrective to this trend. If you could use more passion, wonder, awe, and the sheer juice of being alive, this is your book.
Larry Dossey, M.D., author of One Mind: How Our Individual Mind Is Part of a Greater Consciousness and Why It Matters

If you want to fall in love with life, this is your guide! Vital Signs is a roadmap to living a life using your passions as a compass. Grab a cup of tea, find a quiet spot to sit, and dive into this book. You are about to set upon the journey you were born to take.
Dennis Merritt, author of Your ReDefining Moments and The Art of Uncertainty

Gregg Levoy has written a beautiful book about being enthralled with life by activating the passion that is within. His extraordinarily powerful storytelling, captivating language, and insights into what ignites human hearts with awe makes this book impossible to put down. He reminds us that our inclination to seek out enchantment and wonder needs regular maintenance and that raw experiences, intensity and aliveness, are what stimulate us to ever grander perspectives of this fascinating thing called life. I love this book."
Edward Viljoen, author of The Power of Meditation

Gregg Levoy has discovered the fountain of youth, and his soulful book is the map leading us to the buried treasure of our own passionate aliveness.
August Gold, author of Multiply Your Blessings

Gregg Levoy has the answer to one of life s biggest quandaries: How do you find your passion? Herein lie the keys to living in awe of life. Read this book and soar.
Laura Berman Fortgang, author of Now What? 90 Days to a New Life Direction

"Vital Signs is a vital read if you ve ever wondered how to discover or reclaim your passion. Illuminating how others seize the sweetest aspects out of life, Gregg Levoy unravels the art, wonder, and imperative of falling in love with your own life again and again. Every word is rain for the parched soul."
Tama Kieves, bestselling author of Inspired & Unstoppable: Wildly Succeeding in your Life s Work! and A Year Without Fear: 365 Days of Magnificence

What a timely book this is, and so welcome. A yearning for passionate, engaged living is deep in our souls. That means living with more active appreciation, awe, delight and fascination and with far greater happiness and care for others. Gregg Levoy writes beautifully, with all the contagious vigor and delicacy his subject matter so abundantly deserves. Renewal is possible at any age, he shows. So give this gorgeous book widely, generously, passionately. I will.
Stephanie Dowrick, PhD, author of Seeking the Sacred and Heaven on Earth

Acclaim for Gregg Levoy s CALLINGS
"An absolutely superb book. I was stunned by it. It strikes right to the soul. It's like a remembrance of everything you knew but then forgot."
Jean Houston, author of The Possible Human
Gregg Levoy has written about the nature of guidance with a ringing clarity. CALLINGS is a spiritual seduction that gives form to a universal mystery. I d recommend it to anyone who is seeking to hold the divine hand through a transition in their lives.
Caroline Myss, Ph.D., author of Anatomy of the Spirit
Gregg Levoy s wonderful book is not only filled with wisdom, it is inspiring and illuminating----a book of special insight.
Neale Donald Walsch, author of Conversations With God
Stunning! Wonderful! Levoy writes like a poet. His material is both spiritual and practical. I don t know another book that deals with callings in quite the same way.
Larry Dossey, M.D., author of Healing Words, Prayer is Good Medicine
Ravishing! This book is going to charge off the shelves. It s the kind of book people call each other about to share favorite passages. A book to savor.
Booklist
This inspiring book, elevated far above the category of self-help by Levoy's masterly writing, is a recommended guide for those who dare to examine their dreams and take action to explore them.
Library Journal
Beautifully written.
Book-of-the-Month-Club
"Sensitively written and appreciates the value of the journey as much as the end result."
Good Housekeeping
Solid and wise.
Utne Reader
In the crowded field of books about listening to the heart, Levoy s guidance and encouragement are rewarding.
Publisher s Weekly
Callings is a feast of prose, and filled with wise observations.
Intuition Magazine
An intelligent and articulate exploration.
Body Mind Spirit Magazine
"Gregg's book is a touchstone for anyone seeking something more out of their work, or making a transition."
Kansas City Star

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Discoveror rediscoveryour passion for life.

What inspires passion in your life? And what defeats it? How do you lose it and how do you get it back? In this exuberant and compelling book, Gregg Levoy, best-selling author ofCallings, explores how you can cultivate not just a specific passion, but passion as a mindset---astance---that helps bring vitality to all your engagements, from work and relationships to creativity and spiritual life.
Vital Signs examines the endless, yet endlessly fruitful, tug-of-war between passion and security in our lives, the wild in us and the tame, our natural selves and our conditioned selves, and shows us how to stay engaged with the world and resist the downward-pulling forces that can drain our aliveness.
Vital Signs also encourages courageous inquiry into our dis-passion---where we’re numb, depressed, stuck and bored in our lives---so that we can rework these tendencies in ourselves and claim our rightful inheritance of vitality.
What you’ll learn:
Passion can be cultivated. Turned on as well as turned off. And this happens most readily at the level of the gesture and the moment, not the five-year plan.
Passion is in the risk. In the willingness to step from the sidelines onto the playing field.
Passion breeds passion and disinterest breeds disinterest. If you lack passion in your life, your other relationships---your partnerships, friendships, communities, classrooms, corporations and congregations---will be denied that energy.
Passion is more than exuberance; it's endurance. It's sometimes shoulder-to-the-wheel stamina and patience on the order of years.
Passion is intimately related to health. To the degree that passion is vitality, honoring your passions enhances your vitality.

Drawing from centuries of history, art, science, psychology and philosophy, as well as in-depth interviews with people who rediscovered and reignited passion in their own lives,Vital Signs offers an expansive menu of possibilities for how to claim and reclaim your passion, and will help you maintain a keen awareness of where the pulse is and a determination to plug into that place.