Karla McLaren

Your emotions contain brilliant information. When you learn to welcome them as your allies, they can reveal creative solutions to any situation. For 35 years, empathic counselor and researcher Karla McLaren has developed a set of practical tools for the real-world stresses of family, career, and the quest for personal fulfillment. In The Language of Emotions, she presents her breakthrough teachings for a new and empowering relationship with your feeling states. Your emotions—especially the dark and dishonored ones—hold a tremendous amount of energy. We’ve all seen what happens when we repress or blindly express them. However, there is a powerful alternative. In The Language of Emotions, you’ll learn to meet your emotions and engage with them to safely move toward resolution and equilibrium. Through experiential exercises covering a full spectrum of feelings from anger, fear, and shame to jealousy, grief, joy, and more, you will discover how to work with your own and others’ emotions with fluency and expertise. When we relate to our emotions with respect and authenticity, we can directly access our innermost wisdom, unfold the deepest parts of ourselves, and heal our most painful wounds. The Language of Emotions gives us a much-needed resource for self-understanding and freedom: How to overcome addictions, distractions, and unresolved trauma—the three primary impediments to emotional ease Using the energy of anger to protect and restore personal boundaries Step-by-step guidance in the five skills of the empath (someone skilled in reading emotions) How to balance your “quaternity,” a metaphor for the interplay of mind, body, spirit, and emotions Honoring sadness as a source of release and rejuvenation Joy, the natural response to beauty and communion Praise “In my graduate education in counseling psychology, I found very little information about our emotions. Yet in my work as a therapist and educator, I’ve seen that emotions are key to healing. Karla McLaren’s book offers an outstanding guide to the signals and messages emotions send us, along with clear instructions for intelligent and emotion-supporting actions we can take in response. Karla has made a huge contribution to the well-being of us all; The Language of Emotions will become required reading in all of my courses.”—Nancy —Feehan, MFT, adjunct professor of counseling psychology at the University of San Francisco “Karla McLaren’s unique, empathic view of emotions surprisingly revalues even the most ‘negative’ emotions and opens pathways to understanding the depths of the human soul.” —Michael Meade, author of The World Behind the World and The Water of Life “This book changed the way I relate to others, and to myself, forever.” —Gavin De Becker, author of The Gift of Fear

What Your Feelings Are Trying to Tell You

The Language of Emotions

An in-depth guide for engaging with anxiety—not as an affliction, but as an essential source of foresight, intuition, and energy for completing your tasks and projects. If you're facing anxiety, you've probably got one thing on your mind—how to make it go away. But what if this challenging emotion were actually trying to help? "When we ignore or repress our anxiety,” teaches Karla McLaren, "it can overwhelm us. But when we learn to welcome it with skill, we can access its remarkable gifts." Engaged with wisely, anxiety is your task completion ally—it helps you to focus, plan, take action, and fulfill your goals. With Embracing Anxiety, you'll join this acclaimed educator and researcher to explore: • Principles and practices to befriend your anxiety at every level of intensity (before it overwhelms you) • Strategies to engage with anxiety as a resource for foresight, conscientiousness, and motivation • Why fear, panic, worry, and anxiety are not the same, and tools to work with each effectively • How anxiety blends with anger, sadness, and other emotions, and how to clarify these compounded states • Using McLaren’s Conscious Questioning practice to engage with anxiety and garner its insights • How to embrace procrastination and still get things done "When you identify, listen to, and act on anxiety skillfully, you support its purpose," teaches McLaren, "and allow it to recede naturally until it is needed again." With Embracing Anxiety, you'll learn how to get this powerful emotion on your side.

How to Access the Genius Inside This Vital Emotion

Embracing Anxiety

What if there were a single skill that could directly and radically improve your relationships and your emotional life? Empathy, teaches Karla McLaren, is that skill. With The Art of Empathy, she teaches us how to perceive and feel the experiences of others with clarity and authenticity—to connect with them more deeply and effectively. Informed by current insights from neuroscience, social psychology, and healing traditions, this book explores: Why empathy is not a mystical phenomenon but a natural, innate ability that we can strengthen and develop • How to identify and regulate our emotions and boundaries • The process of shifting into the perspective of others • How to provide support in a sensitive and healthy way • Insights for navigating our hyper-connected social landscape • Targeted chapters for improving family, workplace, and intimate relationships • Ways to expand our empathy to our community, global levels of society, and the natural world Empathy, reflects Karla McLaren, is the skill that builds bridges— a skill that not only creates connection, but that helps us to be more effective in all areas of our lives.

A Complete Guide to Life's Most Essential Skill

The Art of Empathy

How Your Emotions Can Save Your Life

Emotional Genius

An in-depth guide for all workers—employees, managers, and CEOs—on how to engage our emotions in the workplace to create a productive, creative, and truly workable environment. We’ve all been taught that we must suppress or avoid emotions at work, but this inevitably leads to a loss in productivity, diminished creativity, and crushing job dissatisfaction. Research shows 85 percent of us avoid communicating crucial workplace problems upward, and many of us who are employed are actively looking for a different job. What’s going on? “The foundational problem is that we threw emotions out of the workplace, when in fact, emotions contain the information we need to make our workplaces work,” says Karla McLaren. Now this renowned researcher shares her insights on the skills we most need—and are most often absent in the business world—for healthy, functional, and sustainable workplaces. With The Power of Emotions at Work, McLaren teaches communication and empathy skills to workers at all levels, including: How to co-create a healthy and well-balanced social environment that benefits all workers in any type of organization How to recognize your primary emotional role—and the roles of others How to support people in your organization who perform the most “emotional labor” Where to find authentic motivation and engagement in your job How to go from an “unintentional community” to a place of genuine belonging, and much more We all yearn to be our authentic selves at work, where we feel supported and can communicate our feelings and frustrations in a constructive way. Workplaces are “unintentional communities,” says Karla McLaren, because without access to our emotions at work, we are left without the tools we need to do our best work in a functional community. This is your resource to help you understand and engage intelligently with emotions at work—so you can help to create healthy and intentional communities where people and projects thrive.

Accessing the Vital Intelligence in Your Workplace

The Power of Emotions at Work

Janja Lalich

Actor Michelle Pfeiffer. Humorist Garrison Keillor. Actor Joaquin Phoenix. Musician Lisa Marie Presley. Actress Glenn Close. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Actress Rose McGowan. Each of these well-known people has more than fame in common; each was born or raised in a cult. We think of cults as bizarre, inexplicable, or otherworldly places that only strange people inhabit, but cults and other abusive and high-demand groups (and relationships) are actually quite commonplace. In fact, the behaviors, social pressures, and authoritarian structures that create cults exist to a greater or lesser extent in every human relationship and every human group. Cult behavior is human behavior � and by studying cults, we can learn remarkably useful things about the social world and our place in it In the first in-depth research of its kind, sociologist and cult expert Janja Lalich interviewed sixty-five people who were born in or grew up in thirty-nine different cultic groups spanning more than a dozen countries. What�s especially interesting about these individuals is that they each left the cult on their own, without outside help or internal support. In Escaping Utopia: Growing Up in a Cult, Getting Out, and Starting Over, Lalich and award-winning author (and fellow cult survivor) Karla McLaren craft Lalich�s original and groundbreaking research into an accessible and engaging book, the first of its kind focusing on this particular population. Lalich and McLaren explore fundamental questions about human nature, human development, group dynamics, abuse and control, and triumphs of the human spirit in the face of intense and extended suffering.

Growing Up in a Cult, Getting Out, and Starting Over

Escaping Utopia

Auras and chakras are natural human boundary and energy systems. This guidebook by a therapist is an examination of the aura and chakras, providing material on each of the chakras, and on defining, cleansing and protecting a personal aura. It is designed to demystify the subject and empower all readers.

The Owner's Manual

Your Aura and Your Chakras

A clear and comprehensive text for the restoration and maintenance of your subtle energy system. McLaren, who has worked with survivors of abuse and trauma, shows how to clear the chakras of old hurts and to cleanse and strengthen the aura for protection against invasive energy. Bibliography. Index.

Your Aura & Your Chakras

An in-depth guide for engaging with anxiety—not as an affliction, but as an essential source of foresight, intuition, and energy for completing your tasks and projects. If you're facing anxiety, you've probably got one thing on your mind—how to make it go away. But what if this challenging emotion were actually trying to help? "When we ignore or repress our anxiety,” teaches Karla McLaren, "it can overwhelm us. But when we learn to welcome it with skill, we can access its remarkable gifts." Engaged with wisely, anxiety is your task completion ally—it helps you to focus, plan, take action, and fulfill your goals. With Embracing Anxiety, you'll join this acclaimed educator and researcher to explore: Principles and practices to befriend your anxiety at every level of intensity (before it overwhelms you) Strategies to engage with anxiety as a source of foresight, conscientiousness, and motivation Why fear, confusion, and panic are not the same as anxiety, and tools to work with each effectively How anxiety blends with anger, depression, and other emotions, and how to clarify these compounded states Using McLaren’s Conscious Questioning practice to engage with anxiety and garner its insights How to embrace procrastination and get things done "When you identify, listen to, and act on anxiety skillfully, you support its purpose," teaches McLaren, "and allow it to recede naturally until it is needed again." With Embracing Anxiety, you'll learn how to get this powerful emotion on your side.

How to Access the Genius of This Vital Emotion

Actors Michelle Pfeiffer, Glenn Close, Rose McGowan and Leah Remini. Humorist Garrison Keillor. Musician Lisa Marie Presley. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. Each of these well-know people has more than fame in common; each was born or raised in a cult. We think of cults as bizarre, inexplicable, or otherworldly places that only strange people inhabit, but cults and other abusive and high-demand groups (and relationships) are actually quite commonplace. In fact, the behaviors, social pressures, and authoritarian structures that create cults exist to a greater or lesser extent in every human relationship and every human group. Cult behavior is human behavior – and by studying cults, we can learn remarkably useful things about the social world and our place in it In the first in-depth research of its kind, sociologist and cult expert Janja Lalich interviewed sixty-five people who were born in or grew up in thirty-nine different cultic groups spanning more than a dozen countries. What’s especially interesting about these individuals is that they each left the cult on their own, without outside help or internal support. In Escaping Utopia: Growing Up in a Cult, Getting Out, and Starting Over, Lalich and award-winning author (and fellow cult survivor) Karla McLaren craft Lalich’s original and groundbreaking research into an accessible and engaging book, the first of its kind focusing on this particular population. Lalich and McLaren explore fundamental questions about human nature, human development, group dynamics, abuse and control, and triumphs of the human spirit in the face of intense and extended suffering.

Karla McLaren

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