Vital Signs: The Nature and Nurture of Passion

Discover - or rediscover - your passion for life. What inspires passion in your life? And what defeats it? How do you lose it, and how do you get it back? In this exuberant and compelling book, Gregg Levoy, bestselling author of Callings , explores how you can cultivate not just a specific passion, but passion as a mind-set - a stance - that helps bring vitality to all your engagements, from work and relationships to creativity and spiritual life. Vital Signs examines the endless, yet endlessly fruitful, tug-of-war between passion and security in our lives, the wild in us and the tame, our natural selves and our conditioned selves - and shows how to stay engaged with the world and resist the downward-pulling forces that can drain our aliveness. Vital Signs also encourages courageous inquiry into our dis -passion - where we're numb, depressed, stuck and bored in our lives - so that we can rework these tendencies in ourselves and claim our rightful inheritance of vitality, and get our spark back. In this book, you'll learn that- Passion can be cultivated. Turned on as well as turned off. And this happens most readily at the level of the gesture and the moment, not the five-year plan. Passion is in the risk. In the willingness to step from the sidelines onto the playing field. Passion breeds passion and disinterest breeds disinterest. If you lack passion in your life, your other relationships - your partnerships, friendships, communities, classrooms, corporations and congregations - will be denied that energy. Passion is more than exuberance; it's endurance . It's sometimes shoulder-to-the-wheel stamina and patience on the order of years. Passion is intimately related to health. To the degree that passion is vitality, honoring your passions enhances your vitality. Drawing from centuries of history, art, science, psychology and philosophy, as well as in-depth interviews with people who rediscovered and reignited passion in their own lives, Vital Signs offers an expansive menu of possibilities for claiming or reclaiming your passion. It will help you maintain a keen awareness of where the pulse is and a determination to plug into that place. Praise for Vital Signs 'This magnificent work brimming with gorgeous prose and life enhancing stories and insights reveals how the cultivation of passion is key to the energy, love, creativity, health, and just about everything else that is good and true in our existence. Levoy offers us a thrilling new map to the vital core of all our becomings. To read this book and follow its principles is to stop boring God!' Jean Houston, Ph.D, author of The Possible Human and The Wizard of Us , and consultant in human and social development to the United Nations 'Our society seems increasingly obsessed with security and playing it safe in every area of life. But along with this trend often comes a deadening and listlessness in living - as risk-taking, excitement, and novelty are shoved aside. Gregg Levoy's Vital Signs is a marvelous corrective to this trend. If you could use more passion, wonder, awe, and the sheer juice of being alive, this is your book.' Larry Dossey, M.D.,author of One Mind- How Our Individual Mind Is Part of a Greater Consciousness and Why It Matters 'If you want to fall in love with life, this is your guide! Vital Signs is a road map to living a life using your passions as a compass.' Dennis Merritt,author of Your ReDefining Moments and The Art of Uncertainty 'Gregg Levoy has written a beautiful book about being enthralled with life by activating the passion that is withi