Product Description

Contends that childhood pain can be the source of happiness and includes a twelve-step outline to help adult children of troubled families heal childhood wounds that are prohibiting happiness in adulthood. 20,000 first printing. Tour.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #46258 in Books
• Published on: 1993-02-01
• Format: Bargain Price
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

From Publishers Weekly
In this gentle book, therapist Muller explains that the private place to which a traumatized child flees remains the adult's spiritual home.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Overflowing with wisdom and inspiration!
I once heard Oprah say that we need to nurture ourselves the way we might nurture and care for our best friend. . . and that really blew me away as I have always been very hard on myself. This book gave me the tools to begin to learn how to do just that. Part of me will always be the frightened little girl that grew up in a houseful of alcoholics, trying to make everything that was topsy-turvy seem somehow normal, but this book has helped me to let go of and learn from that painful part of my past.

I've practically underlined the whole book, it contains so much wisdom and excellent advice! I want to highly recommend it to anyone who has suffered a painful childhood. It fills you with hope and gives you the courage to look at the garbage from your past, toss it out and get on with your life.

To quote part of the Publisher's Weekly blurb on the back of the book, "Like a lullaby, this gentle book soothes the spirit, reaching out to the inner child and reassuring the wounded adult..."

Absolutely best book of its kind--start here
As a survivor of a very dysfunctional and abusive family and as someone who suffers from depression as a result, I can say that Legacy of the Heart is without doubt the single best book I have ever read on the subject of childhood trauma and abuse. It is vast and open, appropriate for so many different wounds we confront as adults. More importantly for me (since I am a professor and an "intellectual"), this is not the vapid New Age, psychobabble that is so often dished out. This is substantive, thoughtful, thorough, articulate. If you like Thomas Moore's books, you will love Wayne Muller! If I were to give only one book to a suffering friend, it would be this one.

Life-saving, Life-altering and Life-affirming
Wayne Muller's gentle approach to the reader's taking ownership of his pain without allowing victimhood to take ownership of the reader is the most valuable non-fiction I ever have read. Muller takes the reader through spriritual practices that promote growth from experience of ever the most hurtful sort. He uses ample and varied examples to show how we repeatedly shoot ourselves in the foot. Better yet, he helps change thinking patterns to avoid those life-laming foot-wounds.

Everyone has some sort of pain from childhood. Some pain can cut more deeply and last longer than others. Muller validates all pain and all the scars it leaves. But, he takes the reader through the pain, without denying it, to a plain of coping with it. And, he helps the reader climb a mountain from which he can view the pain that helped shape but no longer defines the reader.

Muller's book is a gift to every person who reads it. The author combines eastern, Indian and Christian beliefs and practices to produce life-saving, life-altering and life-affirming practices and phiolsophy.

Thank you, Wayne Muller!