Author: lisa-rhyne

The 2025 Mind and Spirit Spotlight for Spirituality and Enlightenment!
Finding Peace in a Busy World

The Mind & Spirit Awards Are Looking to Unplug

In our increasingly fast-paced world, the search for inner peace and authentic connection has become more vital than ever. From mindfulness practices that ground us in the present moment to spiritual frameworks that illuminate our deeper purpose, readers are seeking guidance that nurtures both mind and spirit. The Mind & Spirit Awards for Spirituality and Enlightenment celebrate the exceptional works that provide this essential wisdom, recognizing authors who offer transformative insights and practical tools for living with greater awareness, compassion, and joy.

Celebrating Our Grand Prize Winner!

We’re delighted to celebrate our 2024 Mind & Spirit Division Grand Prize Winner, Marijke McCandless for her inspiring guide Naked in the Now: Juicy Practices for Getting Present. This accessible and warmhearted work offers a refreshing approach to mindfulness, providing simple yet powerful practices that help readers reconnect with themselves and find peace in everyday moments. McCandless understands that many people crave more presence in their lives but feel overwhelmed by complex spiritual practices, so she offers “tiny practices” that deliver “real relief” without requiring major life overhauls.

What makes Naked in the Now truly special is its blend of practical wisdom with gentle encouragement. The book helps readers spark insight and authenticity while quieting their inner critic through practices that can be integrated into busy schedules. McCandless shows the reader that even just five minutes a day can open doorways to the peace, vitality, and joy that already exist within us. She will receive a Chanticleer Editorial Review and has already completed her Awarded Author Interview, allowing readers to explore her insights on mindful living and practical spirituality.

The Mind & Spirit Awards honor the full spectrum of spiritual and wellness literature, encompassing categories from Enlightenment and Spirituality to Mindfulness, Meditation, Well-Being, and Energy work. This comprehensive approach reflects our understanding that spiritual growth takes many forms, whether through Motivational frameworks that inspire transformation or specialized practices that cultivate specific aspects of consciousness and healing.

Explore All Business & Self-Help Divisions

The Mind & Spirit Awards are part of Chanticleer’s comprehensive celebration of transformative non-fiction:
- Harvey Chute Awards for Business & Finance: Business strategy, finance, investing, technology guides, and professional development
- I&I Awards for How-To and Self-Help: Practical guides, self-improvement, skill development, and instructional works
- Nellie Bly Awards for Research and Journalism: In-depth explorations that changes the readers perspective on life
- Military and Front Line Awards for Service to Others: Stories of those who protect and engage in community
One Kiss
By Michelle Ashton

One Kiss by Michelle Ashton is a poignant and emotionally unvarnished memoir of life through loss, healing, and the grim, lovely battle of being human.

One Kiss feels like a private journal—vulnerable, scattered at times, terribly real and sympathetic. Readers walk beside someone who’s still dealing with life’s challenges—working through heartbreak, trying to heal, stumbling, getting back up, and asking big questions she hasn’t yet found the answers to.

Much of this book circles around Ashton’s deep, complicated attachment to Noah, the man she calls “Adonis” and her “Twin Flame.” She relates with painful but relatable honesty how it feels like to wait, to hope, to wonder if you should hold on or walk away. Who hasn’t sat there refreshing their messages or praying for a sign that maybe this time things will turn out differently?

Read More Here

Guided: Lost Love, Hidden Realms, and the Open Road
By Kirsten Throneberry

A Journey First Place Winner!

In her stunning memoir, Guided: Lost Love, Hidden Realms, and the Open Road, Kirsten Throneberry weaves together the highs and lows of a road trip packed with life wisdom, where she explores grief, spirituality, and rekindled hope.

Throneberry’s achingly vulnerable memoir splits its readers’ hearts and tenderly sews them back together.

In the aftermath of the devastating loss of her husband, Kirsten sells her home and takes her two small sons, two elderly pups, and eccentric mother on a year-long road trip around the United States in their new-to-them Bigfoot RV.

Encouraged by the same spirit guides whose earlier advice for her husband’s health left her broken and untrusting, Kirsten must learn to face the open road with an equally open heart and mind.

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Ask Biella
By Syl Sabastian

Syl Sabastian’s Ask Biella is unlike today’s typical self-help books—ones that are quickly read, interpreted, and forgotten. Instead, Ask Biella is a thoughtful and thought-through self-help reference work featuring a fictional guide from Syl Sabastian’s core series fielding deep questions from real readers. It asks its audience for a different kind of commitment to its deep sharing: a raw, self-exploratory approach in which one creates a realistic-ideal world for themselves through the process of positivity and emphasis.

Ask Biella invites readers to turn inward for enlightenment, satisfying their questions with lasting internal empowerment rather than external compromises. Biella reveals the harmful mental habits to which we are all prone and points to the rope that can save us from ourselves. After all, according to Biella, “We, and we alone, are the creators of meaning.”

Biella’s world is rooted in real-world wisdom with an easy-to-follow candor, and pulls from Biella’s “Dictionary-of-Power,” hyphenating and capitalizing particular words and phrases for emphasis to change how the reader engages with the text. For example, Biella hyphenates and capitalizes the phrase “Thinking-Things-Through-TO-THE-END” to capture readers’ attention, changing the way readers’ brains respond to the words via emphasis. These specific words and phrases, or “tools-of-living,” cover a wide variety of topics.

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Coming Out of the Metaphysical Closet
By Lisa Rhyne

In her stunning and intimate memoir Staying Married is the Hardest Part: A Memoir of Passion, Secrets and Sacrifice, Bonnie Comfort takes readers on a decades-long journey of deep love, laughter, and the challenges of a long-term marriage, from first meeting her husband Bob in the late 1970s until his death in 2010.

Throughout their life together, Bonnie and Bob have their fair share of disagreements—including where to live—but the main conflict within their marriage centers around their conflicting sexual needs and preferences.

As a professional psychologist, Bonnie shows the highs and lows of her marriage to Bob, contrasted by her job of helping others with their emotional and relationship problems. Bonnie and Bob’s committed love for one another makes staying married both the hardest and easiest part of their lives regardless of what challenges come their way.

Read More Here

These reviews represent just a glimpse of the transformative wisdom and practical guidance waiting to be discovered in today’s spiritual and wellness literature.

See the Chanticleer Difference for Yourself!

We’re excited about all the inspiring spiritual and wellness works we receive every year for both the CIBAs and for our Editorial Reviews. Throughout this year’s Mind & Spirit Book Awards, we had the pleasure of promoting numerous enlightening titles as they advanced through our competition tiers. The Chanticleer International Book Awards provide ongoing recognition that amplifies authors’ digital footprints through high-traffic website features, social media promotion, newsletter spotlights reaching thousands of industry professionals, and long-tail marketing that continues promoting winners throughout the year and beyond!

This is the journey from beginning to end for the CIBAs! Every list you make means more promotion for you and your work as each advancement tier is posted right here on our website, on our social media, and also out in our newsletter! Your book deserves to be discovered.

Don’t Let Your Wisdom Remain Unshared!

The spiritual and wellness market continues to flourish as readers seek authentic guidance for navigating life’s challenges with greater peace and purpose. Whether your work offers ancient wisdom adapted for modern life, innovative meditation techniques, energy healing practices, or motivational frameworks for personal transformation, the Mind & Spirit Awards provide the recognition and promotional platform your insights deserve.

Spiritual and wellness literature has the unique power to heal, inspire, and awaken readers to their highest potential. From mindfulness practices that bring immediate relief to profound teachings that shift entire worldviews, every thoughtfully crafted work has the potential to become a treasured guide on someone’s spiritual journey. Don’t let your wisdom remain hidden—submit to the Mind & Spirit Awards today and join the visionary authors who’ve found their spiritual community through Chanticleer!

Submit to the Mind & Spirit Awards today! Deadline: September 30th

You know you want it…
September 15, 2025
COMING OUT Of The METAPHYSICAL CLOSET by Lisa Rhyne – Spirituality, Metaphysics, Memoir

Lisa Rhyne offers a view into her beliefs, education, and personal experiences with the mystical and otherworldly in Coming Out of the Metaphysical Closet.

In this autobiographical compendium of supernatural phenomenon, Coming Out of the Metaphysical Closet is a combination of multiple original manuscripts, beginning with a hefty overview of the foundational science and concepts to help frame Rhyne’s experiences, the metaphysical world, and those who claim to work in it. Rhyne explains her perspective on walking between and having to function in both the ‘normal’ and ‘mystical’ worlds and, like many visionaries, describes this reality as illusory and subjective, created by the collective consciousness of living beings through morphogenic fields and a universal repository of knowledge.

Within this metaphysical framework, humans reincarnate from an ‘Oversoul’ that seeks to learn through each lived experience—the good, bad and everything in between. As such, Rhyne relates that shamans such as she can step between past and present lives, and even across different planes of existence. Throughout the book, Rhyne expands on the powers, dangers, as well as unique transformative opportunities that these spiritual journeys can lead to.

Her own path within the metaphysical community takes center stage as she shares impactful moments in her life. From a complex and abusive relationship with her mother, to a dangerous stalker, to joyous life-changing personal revelations, she insists that metaphysical forces have watched over her since before she was born.

Rhyne maintains a strong sense of yearning and hope throughout these stories, with moments of evocative description that paint both the mundane world and her enchanting mystical visions. Emotional scenes frame otherworldly ideas with experiences that readers can easily connect to—the pain of supporting a loved one through illness, the simple love between a girl and her cat, the joy and satisfaction of feeling that you’ve helped another person.

As she learned more about mystical practices and her relationship to them, Rhyne continuously connects with many fascinating people. Her continued studies include a wide variety of scholars, healers, and thought leaders, Hopi and other indigenous elders, fellow Metas (her term for those who share her beliefs, abilities and practices), and renowned authors such as Michael Talbot, Phillip K. Dick and shamanic practitioner Dr. Hank Wesselman, PhD. Coming Out of the Metaphysical Closet contains numerous references and links, so curious readers will find many more valuable threads of knowledge to pursue.

Rhyne shares examples of her metaphysical experiences and powers such as manifesting desired outcomes into her life, healing herself and others by moving between dimensions, and being guided by higher beings to pursue or avoid certain relationships. The full nature of these higher beings remains elusive, with references and stories that paint them in angelic, ancestral, and even extraterrestrial light.

Coming Out of the Metaphysical Closet seeks to inspire readers—encouraging those who not only believe in but know the mystical to utilize their powers and share their abilities and perspectives with the world to foster understanding and acceptance of all things metaphysical.

Some readers might find some ideas difficult to grasp, as this book is oriented more towards those who already have some education and connection to various metaphysical theory and beliefs, but Rhyne grounds the more esoteric ideas with figurative language, scientific foundations, and recurring explanations. Additionally, as some ideas are often drawn from various mythologies across the world, they show interesting connections between belief systems that at first glance appear disparate but share foundational concepts.

Coming Out of the Metaphysical Closet has over 300 images including pictures and video stills of sometimes unexplainable supernatural phenomena, and significant moments for Rhyne, with an online gallery that further expands on them, including transcripts and videos.

Rhyne’s online gallery includes images in the book and provides readers a chance to view the photos on their computers to be able to see the details better. More significantly, she includes security camera videos of drifting motes of light. The true nature of these videos is interesting to consider, whether one believes them to be small spiritual manifestations, or physical things catching the camera’s attention. Similarly, the photos and videos, and recording of the Mysterious & Unexplained show, include significant technical issues and comments by others experiencing the phenomena, giving tangible examples of Rhyne’s claims that her energy disrupts electrical systems.

Rhyne also provides supplemental documents like the full Dragon dictation messages (from Chapter 8) in this gallery. These messages contain some ominous and even poetic lines, though similarly to Rhyne herself, readers will find it difficult to parse meaning from this text. Much could be read into it, however, and the lack of clarity prompts one to wonder how an otherworldly entity might struggle to communicate with someone in our reality utilizing electronics.

All these examples might encourage others with metaphysical beliefs to openly share their experiences, their own documented phenomena, and could certainly spark fascinating discussions which is one of the goals of this book—to start authentic dialogue without any fear of negative repercussions or discrimination.

This book will resonate with those who experience—as well as seek to experience—seemingly unexplainable mystical things, and ultimately advocates for a world of understanding, love and authentic personal empowerment.

At the core of Coming Out of the Metaphysical Closet is the idea of inclusion and universal connection—through past lives, Aka cords, soul groups, or even just the small moments of kindness that turn strangers into friends. Whether or not readers share every belief with this book, Rhyne reminds them to search for people who enrich their lives and live the ideals of empathy and equality.

For readers on a journey of metaphysical spirituality, or for those who are merely ‘psi-curious’ (to borrow one of Rhyne’s terms), this book will spark curiosity and a sense of community. Rhyne understands there will be those who doubt and no matter how much evidence is presented by her or anyone else, some will never accept. And that’s perfectly fine with Rhyne. This book is a beacon of light for those who wish to be the masters of their lives and dreams. There are two questions that sum it up nicely. “What if she’s wrong?” and “What if she’s right?”

April 1, 2024