Mindfulness for Chocolate Lovers: A Lighthearted Way to Stress Less and Savor More Each Day

by Diane R. Gehart PhD, California State University, Northridge

Overview

An accomplished and honored professor, psychotherapist, author, and chocolate connoisseur, Diane Gehart identifies surprisingly efficient and fun ways to increase your daily dose of joy. Drawing on positive psychology, Eastern wisdom, and three decades of psychotherapist know-how, she outlines a no-nonsense yet good-humored path to get you where you want to go. She will teach you step-by-step how to:

• Identify the essential elements necessary for life-long happiness and add them to your everyday habits.
• Develop an unshakable sense of inner joy that sustains you in good times and bad.
• Engage your most painful life circumstances to dramatically improve your life for the better.
• Navigate common pitfalls and challenges, including skillfully handling the most difficult personalities and relationships.
• Transform how you journey through life—making it a joy ride regardless of weather or other unforeseen circumstances.

First, she debunks popular myths that have us looking for happiness in all the wrong places and then offers an accurate map for getting where we want to go. Next, readers will learn the hardest but ultimately most liberating lesson: making friends with life and all that is, including the good, the bad, and the ugly—which includes black widow spiders for some of us. From there, you will learn surprisingly playful and palatable options for maximizing your joy, including mindfulness, crazy wisdom, compassion, and ethical living. Finally, you will learn how to avoid—or at least survive—the common pitfalls and the dangerous snakes that line the path from where you are to where you want to go.

If you have avoided meditation and similar practices for most of your life because they are dull and boring, you may find something that suits your refined and zesty taste for living here. Along the way, you will have numerous opportunities to laugh, to cry, and to reconnect with the best within yourself. You will suddenly discover your most desperate challenges dissolving before you, revealing an easier path and renewing your delight in living and loving. Worst-case scenario: You will have educational excuses to savor some chocolate delights, enjoy a few good laughs, and gain a handful of new insights about your life.

Whether you are reeling from a devastating break-up; feeling adrift professionally; struggling with depression, anxiety, or more severe mental health issues; or simply wanting to feel happier given the numerous blessings in your life, this book will help you make changes that you could never accomplish before because you will now be motivated to do something different.

Ultimately, this book invites you to play. To laugh. To love. To heal old heartbreaks. To overcome what was once impossible. To open your heart to life and all it has to offer: white, milk, and dark. The stresses of modern life often create the illusion that life is hard, painful, and lonely. You are only a few bites away from an entirely different approach to living a sweeter life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781538129067
Publisher:	Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Publication date:	09/05/2019
Pages:	200
Sales rank:	1,160,253
Product dimensions:	5.52(w) x 8.42(h) x 0.52(d)

About the Author

Diane R. Gehart, Ph.D., is an award-winning professor of Counseling and Family Therapy at California State University, Northridge, and author of numerous best-selling books for professionals, including Mindfulness and Acceptance in Couple and Family Therapy and Mastering Competencies in Family Therapy. She maintains an active psychotherapy practice in the Los Angeles area, working with adults, couples, and families to find effective and meaningful ways to address their greatest life challenges—while having some fun along the way. You can follow her on YouTube. Learn more: www.dianegehart.com and www.mindfulnessforchocolatelovers.com.

Table of Contents

Author’s Introduction: Would You Rather Eat Chocolate than Meditate? Warning: Couch Potatoes and Voyeurs 1 Chocolate Meditation: A Taste of the Good Life 2 From Chocoholism to Chocolate Snobbery: Becoming a Seeker of Extraordinary Happiness 3 Chocolate Is a Vegetable: Mapping the Truths You Live By 4 Who Moved My Chocolate? Befriending Problems, Befriending Life 5 One Bite Is All It Takes: Mindfully Waking Up to Your Life 6 With or Without Nuts? Crazy Wisdom and the Back Door to Happiness 7 Fierce Compassion: Opening Your Heart to Milk, White, and Dark 8 There’s No Wrong Way to Eat a Reese’s—Or Is There? Ethics and Happiness 9 Artificial Chocolate and Comfort Foods: Dangers and Pitfalls on the Path 10 The Art of Savoring: Joyfulness as a Way of Life Notes: Academic Bits and Pieces Bibliography Acknowledgments Index About the Author

Editorial Reviews

[A] great book to help you calm your mind, ground yourself and find your inner peace. With Gehart’s professional experience in therapy, she is able to guide readers through exercises that help them feel more at ease. Gehart uses chocolate to aid in her descriptions and encourages readers to enjoy some chocolate while performing various mindful exercises. This is a great book to start with if you are new to mindfulness and meditation. However, this is also a great book if you’ve been practicing for a while. Gehart provides many helpful tips and tricks to help keep your mind right.

Nonfiction Chocolate (Blog)

Readers will find "Mindfulness for Chocolate Lovers" to be a therapeutic book that opens the heart, touches the spirit, and expands the mind. Gehart artfully and vulnerably offers her expertise and experience, weaving humor, research, and spiritual teachings to lead readers toward growth and groundedness. A must-read for anyone healing from pain or longing for more.

Jessica ChenFeng

In Mindfulness for Chocolate Lovers, Dr. Gehart shows readers how to savor their lives, literally and metaphorically. This deliciously wise book is a practical, humorous, directly applicable, and delicious path to embracing you life fully, with all of its twists and turns and swirls. I will personally enjoy this chocolatey, mindful-y goodness as well as use it professionally to help others sweeten their journey.

Tanya J. Peterson

Mindfulness for Chocolate Lovers is well written and constructed from beginning to end and stands as a work you can return to long after first reading.. .. I hope this won’t be Gehart’s last word on the subject; the world can use more books like this.

Mobangeles

In this interactive study, the author walks readers through meditations, worksheets, and exercises that provide a road map (not a treasure map) to joy.. .. Chocolate is used as a lure and a reward for these activities, enabling readers to understand just what does and doesn’t result in happiness. It’s quickly apparent that happiness lies in the present moment, and Gehart uses a sense of play and years of experience as a counselor to encourage participants to shift their thinking from an outer to an inner focus and to enjoy the journey. Readers willing to put in the effort and dig deeply into their thoughts will be rewarded with both chocolate and inner peace.

Booklist

A refreshingly fun and sweet take on mindfulness and joyful living. Diane’s gift for translating ancient Eastern philosophies into everyday contexts shines in this approachable yet in-depth contemporary guide.

Bettina Bush

Freud famously said that the most we could expect from life is ordinary misery. Diane Gehart's Mindfulness for Chocolate Lovers refutes this cynical idea. It combines disparate elements (one ancient–Buddhism and one modern–Positive Psychology) to provide a tested roadmap to extraordinary happiness.

Bill O'Hanlon

.. . one of the most impressive aspects of Diane R. Gehart’s Mindfulness for Chocolate Lovers is her willingness to recognize, from the outset, that her potential readers likely know what changes they need to make in their lives to enjoy greater personal happiness. She identifies motivation, or lack thereof to be exact, as the principal stumbling block preventing people from incorporating a different design for living promising greater personal satisfaction and a stronger connection to individual ideas of happiness. Her positive point of view on the latent potential within us all is refreshing; each of us, mired in discontent, can slip into the trap of blaming insurmountable internal limitations on our failure to know joy. Gehart sees no such limitations, only possibilities.

Inc. Independent Music and Arts

An empowering and hopeful book that offers practical ways we can all slow down, exhale, and linger in joy, gratitude, and inner calm.

Stephen Mardell

This is the only mindfulness with chocolate! This playful book offers opportunities for practice that are clear and accessible. The simplicity of practice is too often difficult to grasp because we complicate it with our concepts, hopes, and expectations. With chocolate, however, you can settle into the pleasant experience, pay attention, and practice more clearly. Attention and presence with chocolate enhances the pleasantness of the experience and provides positive reinforcement for being mindful and skill-building by practicing chocolate-centered meditation. More practices makes more room for more self-awareness and insight and more choice in how you want to live your life. Then your life becomes one of intention and applied skill rather than just condition, habit, and reactivity. I want my life to include more compassion, more peace, and more deep, rich chocolate.

Frank Baird

Mindfulness for Chocolate Lovers: A Lighthearted Way to Stress Less and Enjoy More Each Day provides scientifically-supported, yet simple, practical tools for helping us along the road to happiness. The concepts are clear and help break though the confusion and inaccuracies disseminated by different sources about what happiness is, how it can be achieved and maintained. I recommend the book as an accessible guide to empirically support principles.

Russell Crane

Mindfulness for Chocolate Lovers is an intelligent and humorous guide for anyone who is seeking greater happiness and fulfillment. The wisdom, techniques, exercises and antidotes each give the reader an opportunity for both education and self discovery. This is a great read for those who are knowledgeable in this subject and those who are just beginning.

Stacy Kaiser

Rarely has a work tackled life’s weightier themes with such relaxed confidence and freedom. Gehart faces down subjects fraught with meaning in every reader’s life with a smile rather than a wagging finger and it makes the experience of reading Diane R. Gehart’s Mindfulness for Chocolate Lovers a rewarding ride from beginning to end.

Indie Source Magazine

Dr. Gehart deliciously unwraps the depths of life secrets in this profoundly accessible book that teaches us the golden rule of attaining true happiness.

Gerald Monk

"Mindfulness for Chocolate Lovers" is a delicious and simple guide, to alleviate stress and anxiety. The exercises are fun, the content makes it possible for readers to learn how to be in the moment with ease and intention, as well as learning to be okay when uncomfortable. It's not just about smelling the roses, it's about eating the chocolate too! I will be recommending it to all my patients.

Laura Rhodes-Levin

In this interactive study, the author walks readers through meditations, worksheets, and exercises that provide a road map (not a treasure map) to joy. . . . Chocolate is used as a lure and a reward for these activities, enabling readers to understand just what does and doesn’t result in happiness. It’s quickly apparent that happiness lies in the present moment, and Gehart uses a sense of play and years of experience as a counselor to encourage participants to shift their thinking from an outer to an inner focus and to enjoy the journey. Readers willing to put in the effort and dig deeply into their thoughts will be rewarded with both chocolate and inner peace.

Booklist