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The Mandel Center of Arizona's experienced and caring professionals offer our clients emotional, physical and spiritual healing. Because all people are unique, our treatment plans are tailored to your individuality. We are committed to providing the personalized guidance and support necessary to live a healthy and productive life.

The literature listed below is intended to aid our clients, and those who know and love them, in their therapy and healing. This list is in no way comprehensive. These resources are not intended or recommended for use in place of psychotherapy.

Miracle of Mindfulness is a sly commentary on the Anapanasati Sutra, the Sutra on Breath to Maintain Mindfulness.
"Sly" because it doesn't read like a dry commentary at all. One of Thich Nhat Hanh's most popular books, Miracle of Mindfulness is about how to take hold of your consciousness and keep it alive to the present reality, whether eating a tangerine, playing with your children, or washing the dishes. A world-renowned Zen master, Nhat Hanh weaves practical instruction with anecdotes and other stories to show how the meditative mind can be achieved at all times...Read the rest of this review and others at Amazon.com by clicking the book title.
The Alchemist: A Fable About Following Your Dream
Like the one-time bestseller Jonathan Livingston Seagull, The Alchemist presents a simple fable, based on simple truths and places it in a highly unique situation. And though we may sniff a bestselling formula, it is certainly not a new one: even the ancient tribal storytellers knew that this is the most successful method of entertaining an audience while slipping in a lesson or two. Brazilian storyteller Paulo Coehlo introduces Santiago, an Andalusian shepherd boy who one night dreams of a distant treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. And so he's off: leaving Spain to literally follow his dream...Read the rest of this review and others at Amazon.com by clicking the book title.
The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity
With the basic principle that creative expression is the natural direction of life, Julia Cameron and Mark Bryan lead you through a comprehensive twelve-week program to recover your creativity from a variety of blocks, including limiting beliefs, fear, self-sabotage, jealousy, guilt, addictions, and other inhibiting forces, replacing them with artistic confidence and productivity...Read the rest of this review and others at Amazon.com by clicking the book title.
The Vein of Gold: A Journey to Your Creative Heart
In her bestselling The Artist's Way (1992), Cameron offered a 12-week program aimed at recovering one's creativity. Each chapter ended with exercises designed to help a reader glimpse his or her inner artist, which, Cameron said, had been buried alive under a mountain of negative conditioning...Read the rest of this review and others at Amazon.com by clicking the book title.
French Toast for Breakfast: Declaring Peace with Emotional Eating
Judith Ruskay Rabinor, Ph.D., Director, The American Eating Disorder Center of Long Island "Cohen offers a user-friendly guide to understanding and healing the battle with food, fat, and body hatred."
Eating in the Light of the Moon
Christiane Northrup, M.D. author of Women's Bodies, Women's Wisdom "This book is a gift to all women who struggle for true nourishment!"
The Tao of Eating
"Our diet-obsessed culture," observes psychologist and eating disorder specialist Dr. Harper, "has robbed us of a joyful relationship with food." We are deluged by diet information-and misinformation-from doctors and scientists, to celebrities and food industry spokespeople. The pressure to diet and...Read more at Amazon.com by clicking the book title.
Desperately Seeking Self
Lynn Carpenter founder of Sheena’s Place, an eating disorders center in memory of her daughter, who died of anorexia nervosa Toronto, Ontario "With Viola’s guidance and patience, I learned to open my mind and heart, and my healing then began."
Life Without Ed
"The truth is we all talk to ourselves. We just need to get better at it," counsels psychotherapist Rutledge in this self-help book for women with eating disorders, which he wrote with one of his patients, Schaefer, a singer/songwriter and media personality in Nashville, who both binges and purges...Read the rest of this review and others at Amazon.com by clicking the book title.
Anorexia Nervosa: A Guide to Recovery
Lori M. Irving, Ph.D. Assistant Professor, Psychology, Washington State University Book Review Editor, Eating Disorders: The Journal of Treamtent and Prevention "This inspired, compassionate book will be a tremendous resource to persons whose lives are, or have been affected by anorexia."
Bulimia: A Guide to Recovery
Geneen Roth author of several bestsellers including When Food is Love "This is a book that will provide hope, inspiration, and a way out for bulimics and those who love them."
Surviving an Eating Disorder: Strategies for Family and Friends
Siegel and Brisman are founders of Bulimia Treatment Associates; Weinshel is on the faculty of the Ackerman Institute for Family Therapy, both facilities in New York City. These psychologists here offer counsel on bulimia, anorexia and/or compulsive overeating. The text concentrates on women who...Read the rest of this review and others at Amazon.com by clicking the book title.
Brain Lock: Free Yourself from Obsessive-Compulsive Behavior
An estimated 5 million Americans suffer from obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and live diminished lives in which they are compelled to obsess about something or to repeat a similar task over and over. Traditionally, OCD has been treated with Prozac or similar drugs. The problem with medication, aside from its cost, is that 30 percent of people treated don't respond to it, and when the pills stop, the symptoms invariably return.
Second Star to the Right
Leslie Hiller's world is growing smaller. It used to be large enough to include her worrisome but loving mother, her doting father, her close friend Cavette, and all the other people and places that made up her upper-class, A+ life. But now it has shrunk to the size of a dinner plate full of food--which she scrapes out her bedroom window to avoid eating. Leslie, a perfectionist who loves to be in control, finds she can't control the fear that she will somehow fail to be the perfect daughter, perfect student, and perfect friend. So she decides to master the one thing over which she is certain she has complete domain: food. Even when it becomes apparent to everyone that her severe dieting has become a life-threatening habit, Leslie still can't stop: "I want to be happy. And being happy means being thin."
Diary of an Anorexic Girl
Morgan Menzie takes readers through a harrowing but ultimately hopeful and inspiring account of her eating disorder. Her amazing story is told through the journals she kept during her daily struggle with this addiction and disease. Her triumphs and tragedies all unfold together in this beautiful story of God's grace. Features include: daily eating schedule, journal entries, prayers to God, poems, and what she wished she knew at the time. It's the true story of victory over a disease that is killing America's youth.
Stick Figure: A Diary of My Former Self
In the image-conscious world of 1970s Beverly Hills, 11-year-old Lori knows she's different. Instead of trading clothes and dreaming of teen idols like most of her pre-adolescent friends, Lori prefers reading books, writing in her journal and making up her own creative homework assignments. Chronically disapproving of her parents' shallow lifestyle, she challenges their authority and chafes under their constant demands to curb her frank opinions and act more "ladylike." Feeling as though she has lost control over her rapidly changing world, Lori focuses all her concentration on one subject: dieting. Her life narrows to a single goal--to be "...the thinnest eleven year old on the entire planet." But once she achieves her "stick figure," Lori really sees herself for the first time in a restaurant bathroom mirror and decides then and there to bring herself back from the brink of starvation.
How Did This Happen? A Practical Guide to Understanding Eating Disorders - for Coaches, Parents and Teachers
Written for coaches, teachers, parents and other caregivers, "How did this happen?" covers all of the areas that you may have questions or concerns about-includeing preventing, identifying and treating eating disorders, getting help for someone you know who may have an eating disorder, and what to expect if formal treatment is necessary.
Necessary Losses: The Loves, Illusions, Dependencies, and Impossible Expectations That All of Us Have to Give Up in Order to Grow
Personal experience, great literature liberally quoted here, and study of psychoanalytic theory are combined in this far-ranging, somewhat rambling book by Redbook columnist Viorst to demonstrate that growing and aging involve a succession of conscious and unconscious losses, including the loss of...Read the rest of this review and others at Amazon.com by clicking the book title.
Teachings on Love
For venerated Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh, love is more than an emotion. Drawing on millennia of Buddhist wisdom and his own therapeutic methods, Teachings on Love further develops his practical notion of interbeing in terms of love. If all things are interrelated, what could be more paramount to negotiating those relations than love? And more than just a way of relating, love is a way of living: "Love by the way you walk, the way you sit, the way you eat." Nhat Hanh supports his practical advice with numerous verses for enhancing mindfulness, prostrations for expressing reverence, and succinct formulas, such as the Five Awarenesses and the Five Mindfulness Trainings. The fifth mindfulness training exemplifies the broad scope of Nhat Hanh's love: "Aware of the suffering caused by unmindful consumption, I am committed to cultivating good health, both physical and mental, for myself, my family, and my society by practicing mindful eating, drinking, and consuming." Thich Nhat Hanh forever writes with reassuring warmth, from which readers may derive insight as well as comfort.
Anger: Wisdom for Cooling the Flames
Anger can be one of the most frustrating emotions, carrying us headlong away from ourselves and depositing us into separation and dismay. Vietnamese monk and world teacher Thich Nhat Hanh tackles this most difficult of emotions in Anger. A master at putting complex ideas into simple, colorful packages, Nhat Hanh tells us that, fundamentally, to be angry is to suffer, and that it is our responsibility to alleviate our own suffering. The way to do this is not to fight our emotions or to "let it all out" but to transform ourselves through mindfulness. Emphasizing our basic interdependence, he teaches us how to help others through deep listening and how to water the positive seeds in those around us while starving the negative seeds. Serious though lighthearted, Anger is a handbook not only for transforming anger but for living each moment beautifully.