Books

Moving Through Fear:
Cultivating Your Seven Spiritual Instincts for a Fearless Life

Fear is an emotion that affects us every day, even when we’re not fully aware of it. While it can occasionally be helpful in guiding us away from danger, fear is far more often crippling and debilitating; it holds us back from goals, relationships and personal fulfillment and attempting to avoid fear often only makes it worse. What, then, can we do about it?

In MOVING THROUGH FEAR: Cultivating the 7 Spiritual Instincts, Golliher, a cultural anthropologist, explains that while we can’t outrun fear, hide from it or will it away, we can move through fear by cultivating seven key instincts: awe, love, intent, rest, community, justice and faith. According to Golliher, the acknowledgement of fear and the development of each of these instincts will allow us to free ourselves from lives ruled by fear in all its forms.

The basis for MOVING THROUGH FEAR is five insights, developed over Golliher’s three decades as a priest and cultural anthropologist. These five insights are as follows:

  • Fear can close our hearts, shape our emotions, and freeze our attention, but the only power that fear has is the power that we give to it. We can take that power back. What we need is to have some understanding of what we really want in life and why we want it.
  •  The freedom we want the most is found beyond the fear that we avoid the most; and when we move through our very worst fear, we realize that, ultimately, there’s nothing to be afraid of.
  • We don’t need to become experts on fear to move through it. Rather, we must strengthen our Spirit, which means cultivating the very spiritual instincts that our fear would have us neglect or ignore.
  • One fear contains the power of every fear within it. Burst the bubble of one fear, and all our other fears begin to lose their power over us too.

These two questions – “How can we move through our fear?” and “How can we become who we are meant to be?”- are, for all practical purposes, one and the same

Using stories and anecdotes from Golliher’s own life, MOVING THROUGH FEAR illuminates the tangled relationship between human nature and fear and the many forms it can take in our lives. It also offers spiritual practices drawn from each of the seven instincts, including putting your biggest fear into perspective by exploring the great outdoors; acknowledging love as something we ‘do’ and not something we ‘have’; and learning how to recapture the confidence and fearlessness of childhood.

A sensitive, highly personal guide to living a life free from the shackles of fear, MOVING THROUGH FEAR reminds us that we always have the choice to say ‘no’ to fear and become the people that we’re meant to be.

Read Jeff’s article: The Huffington Post
How Religious Wisdom Frees Us From Fear

Book Reviews:
Kirkus Reviews
Publishers Weekly

Purchase the Book:

IndieBound Amazon.com Barnes&Noble Booksellers www.bn.com


A Deeper Faith:
A Journey into Spirituality

In the tradition of Madeleine L’Engle, Frederick Buechner, and Thomas Merton comes a brilliant new voice—Jeffrey Mark Golliher—whose life, teachings, and writings will inspire and instruct a new generation.

The spiritual journey is an adventure that has few road maps. Filled with amazing highs and deep lows, the journey of the soul can be confusing, confounding, and at times elusive. Seekers both new and seasoned need a guide to help them through each phase of growth and learning.

A modern-day Merton, Episcopalian priest and cultural anthropologist Jeffrey Mark Golliher is such a guide. He uses the form of letters to a spiritual seeker to act as a mentor and friend, answering questions that we all can relate to, as well as telling stories from his own life and from the lives of the thousands he has counseled and helped over the years. The book follows the liturgical seasons of the Christian calendar, as Golliher brings into focus the perils and promises that a life filled with holiness and awe will bring.

Divided into three sections—“Responding to the Call,” “Making the Passage,” and “The Path of Love”—Golliher’s work ushers his reader through the rhythms of the soul, bringing wisdom to the road traveled by all who seek a great understanding and deeper connection to God.

This is a book for any reader who wants spiritual nourishment, especially during the dark nights when doubt reigns supreme and faith is hardest to find. Graceful without being preachy, A Deeper Faith is the story of believing when all else fails and of holding on to the promise of a devotional life. Honest, revealing, and important, this is a modern classic of an ancient rite of passage, the path of the soul, written by a man who has traveled the path and come back to help each of us.

Book Reviews:
Franciscan Times
art&soul – Episcopal Life Review

Purchase the Book:

IndieBound Amazon.com Barnes&Noble Booksellers www.bn.com