The Healing Power of Doing Good
(Co-authored with Allan Luks)
Conventional wisdom has always held that when we help others, some of the good we do flows back to us. That satisfaction has always been thought to be largely emotional: feeling good when you do good. Now important widely- discussed research shows that helping others regularly produces significant health benefits as well. In fact, it has effects similar to those many of us experience when we exercise.
Both for those who are already giving back and for those who are considering it, this valuable personal guide tells you how to choose an activity that’s right for you, how to maximize the health benefits, and how to overcome the main obstacle to getting started: lack of time. The Healing Power of Doing Good reaffirms and explains that when we care for others we care for ourselves. It is an important read for those suffering from chronic health problems as well as the health conscious, anyone interested in how our mind affects our body, and people in the helping professions. And it reminds us that never has there been a greater need for caring than there is today.
It is almost impossible to read this book without wanting to do good. Both for those who are already volunteering and for those who are considering it, this valuable personal guide tells you how to choose an activity that’s right for you, how to maximize the health benefits and how to overcome the main obstacle to getting started: lack of time.
The Healing Power of Doing Good reaffirms and explains that when we care for others we care for ourselves.
Co-author Alan Luks teaches at Fordham University. A leader in the social and health service fields, he is also author of Will America Sober Up? and You Are What You Drink, as well as editor of Having Been There.
“Read it! Follow its teachings and heal your life and the life of others.”
Bernie Siegel, MD,
Author of Love, Medicine, and Miracles
“In The Healing Power of Doing Good (Ballantine), authors Allan Luks and Peggy Payne report: … It is the process of helping others that is the healing factor, regardless of the kind of help offered or its outcome.”
Glamour
“The findings of your survey support what many who volunteer already know: By serving others we are able to lead happier, healthier, and more productive lives.”
President George H.W. Bush
“Can holding abandoned babies really cure a backache? It seems to. Such caring might reduce the growing violence of our society….”
Library Journal
“If heeded, this is a book that could change the fabric of society and the health of nations.”
Mental Medicine Update
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At Sea With My Writing
A Novelist Cruises to Book Deals
A 20-page mini-book
Twice Peggy Payne has set sail across the Atlantic hoping to take a break from obsessive worrying over a novel-in-progress. Twice she has come home with unexpected, valuable, near-magical answers to writing and publishing problems and, in fairly short order, a fresh book contract.
The first voyage, on the Queen Elizabeth 2, led ultimately to publication of Sister India, a story set in the Hindu holy city of Varanasi beside the Ganges. (Water always seems to provide some writing magic.) Appropriately, the publisher that brought the novel out was Riverhead, an imprint of The Penguin Group.
Obviously, this writer should have boarded ship immediately when she started having trouble with her next novel, Cobalt Blue. Exhausted and frustrated, she ultimately went back to sea on the Queen Mary 2.
Cobalt Blue emerged in the spring of 2013, nine months after that voyage. It was chosen as the May book of the month for a Playboy Radio Network program and has hit the top 100 Kindle books on spirituality. All of Payne’s fiction focuses on the intersection of sex and spirituality.
At Sea with My Writing is two articles, one for each voyage, on what Peggy learned (and ate), offering, too, glimmers of the profound pleasures of writing and a few days at sea.
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Doncaster: A Legacy of Personal Style
This book is the story of a women’s clothing company built on helping every person develop their individual style and meet their personal goals. That means every employee as well as every customer. The author found, as she began work on this project sponsored by the clothing company, that what might have been a routine copy-writing job instead became an important piece of her life’s work. As an outsider to the company, Peggy realized early in the process of the research that this organization was serious and enthusiastic about encouraging the development of individual potential. This was a philosophy close to her own heart. So writing this company’s history helped her to get out a piece of her own message. Thus, she became an example of the company’s hiring philosophy: to find people who could meet the company’s needs through fulfilling their own individual dreams. While a bit out-of-date on the details of the firm, this is still a valuable picture of how a business can bring out the best in people.
