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Enter the Mind & Spirit Awards today!
The Categories of the Mind & Spirit Awards are:
- Enlightenment
- Motivational/Self-Help
- Spirituality
- Mindfulness
- Well-Being
- Meditation
- Energy
- Other
These books help others live their best life, whether through the author’s personal experience, or through a life of research and dedication to a particular topic – often drawing on both! Books that enter Mind & Spirit Awards embody this and change lives.
We are delighted to celebrate the 2023 Winners of the Mind & Spirit Awards!
- Kelly Bulkeley – The Spirituality of Dreaming: Unlocking the Wisdom of Our Sleeping Selves
- Pierre Pradervand – The Gentle Art of Spiritual Discernment – A guide to discovering your personal path
- Maureen Kane – A Guide Back to You
- Kasey J. Claytor – The Money Map, A Spiritual Guide for Financial Success
- Melo Calarco – Beating Burnout, Finding Balance
The Grand Prize Winner for the CIBA 2023 MIND & SPIRIT Awards is:
Psychological Secrets for Emotional Success
by Dr. Kelly Rabenstein
Articles celebrating both the First Place and Grand Prize Winners will continue to come, but, in the meantime, we would like to focus in on some of the great work that has come our way recently and improved our lives!
RUNNING AWAY From The CIRCUS
By Nove Meyers
Debut author Nove Meyers breathes life into the big tent of human aspirations and desperations, from his birth into a raucous circus atmosphere to his diligent study for Catholic priesthood.
Running Away from the Circus is a vibrant chronicle that opens with a vignette of his grandmother, clad in sequins and flying on a trapeze. She spun like a top to enthusiastic applause under the circus tent, until the fateful day when she included her young child in the act, dropping her thirty feet to the sawdust-covered floor below. But this did not prevent Nove Meyers from being born and having a story to tell.
The boyhood described was as wild as the circus acts. He was encouraged to smoke cigarettes like his father and watched in astonishment as his mother burned up paper money, possibly to protect his uncle, a counterfeiter. Yet despite his unusual upbringing as one of the family’s third generation of circus owners, Meyers was taken regularly to Catholic church services. There, he discovered God, an entity as mysterious as the traveling circus and carnie crowds he was raised among.
FINDING The LIGHT
By Kasey J. Claytor
Some stories are impossible to look away from, and from its very first sentence, Finding the Light, Navigating Dementia with My Son by Kasey J. Claytor proves itself one of them. “…when my 49-year-old son, Justin, was first diagnosed with a form of early-onset dementia, I was stunned.” Without hesitation, the book draws readers into a saga of family, illness, and resilience.
Although a memoir, Finding the Light is in many ways an instructional text, too. Readers don’t need similar medical situations to draw from Claytor’s lessons of improvement. The conversational, approachable writing style serves this purpose well.
Although it’s in chronological order, this is an unconventional, modern text.
THE BEST I CAN DO
By Cheryl Landes
Cheryl Landes’s The Best I Can Do: A True Story of Navigating the Complexities of Mental Illness and Homelessness, follows the devastation of a happy marriage as mental illness slowly takes over the mind of her husband. Landes must then make the journey back to peace.
Cheryl and her husband, Tom, had known each other since their college days. A classic love story, Landes does a beautiful job with the set up, and then delivers the tragedy of Tom’s spiral into paranoia as their plans for the future begin to fall apart.
The Best I Can Do tells the story of what happens when Tom insists someone is trailing him, believing a car passes by his and Cheryl’s home every day even though no one else sees it. He claims someone installed listening devices in their house and refuses to speak unless his white-noise devices are on. As his paranoia increases he locks the refrigerator with a chain and a padlock to protect himself from the certainty someone—perhaps Cheryl—wants to poison him.
WOMAN STRONG
By Anna Casamento Arrigo
Anna Casamento Arrigo’s Woman Strong showcases themes of love, heartbreak, death, disease, and political strife.
In the newly-released audio version, Casamento, with the help of her narrator Valentina Latyna, captures the essence of life and living. Latyna brings these poems to warm, sensuous life. Her accent, at once elegant and romantic, lifts the poems off the page and gives them voice.
The pearls strung into Woman Strong’s beautiful strand of poetry will stun and amaze readers. Many of them speak to the strength of women, as can be expected from the title, but many others talk about the fragile nature of life, of love, and of time.
We are so grateful to have these wonderful books from these authors.
We hope to see your work in the 2024 Mind & Spirit Book Awards!
This is the journey from beginning to end for the CIBAs Levels of Achievement is so worthwhile! Every list you make means more promotion for you and your work as each list is posted right here on our website, on our social media, and also out in our newsletter!
Your book deserves to be discovered!
