As she approaches her 90th year, Gayle Alexander, looks back over a career of service as a master counselor, gifted teacher, and minister. She was blessed to be mentored by some of the great souls of our time, Viktor Frankl and Norman Cousins as was her late husband by Mother Theresa.
She shares the Love Motif, her unique approach to connecting with others at a deep level, offering a practical guide that anyone might use as a manual on their spiritual journey.
Full of rich insight and profound and inspiring life lessons gleaned from 50 years of private practice, being a “companion on the way” to thousands of individuals, she offers powerful tools to a new generation of helpers. It is her hope that educators, clergy members, physicians, clinicians, therapists, counselors, and anyone involved in the mentoring process find their own Way to Stillness and pass it on.
Gayle collaborated on The Way to Stillness with her daughter, Anne Vincent, an Ordained Minister of Pastoral Counseling and the Owner of Cottage in the Woods, a licensed ministry center of the National Christian Counselors Association. Anne is completing her PhD in Clinical Christian Counseling through the NCCA. With more than 30 years of counseling experience, she has completed her 8th year of intensive training under Dr. Patrick Carnes, PhD as a Certified Multiple Addictions Therapist and Certified Sexual Addiction Therapist and with the International Trauma and Addiction Professionals as a Trauma and Addictions Therapist.
Read an Excerpt!
The Story of Mike
Mike was a legally blind young boy from an economically disadvantaged home in the rural south. Somewhere in first grade the schools had given up on him. Students and teachers had pushed him aside saying, "Never mind Mike, he can't read." And Mike cooperated – if he “couldn't read,” he wouldn't read.
Dr. Kirk, a psychiatrist at Vanderbilt had worked and worked with this boy and had been unable to determine why he was not reading. She heard that I had a special gift for teaching kids to read, and asked me to assist.
Mike's family drove him from Kentucky to Nashville to meet with me. Since it was all they could do to put together the gas money for the drive to Nashville, I knew I had to make every moment count.
We started talking and Mike expressed an interest in machines. I checked with his parents and took him down to the boiler room at Peabody College on the campus of Vanderbilt University, where we went in and asked to meet the engineer.
The engineer was a patient man with a wonderful heart, and Mike asked him all sorts of wonderful questions about the boiler and the heat it was radiating. The engineer allowed Mike to touch and explore the machinery - and I realized that Mike inherently knew more about science than he could learn from any book. He already knew more than many students at the graduate level, and here he was coming to me because his school thought him slow!
His parents found the gas money to bring him back again the next week and at the next session, I gave him an article on heat. I told him “Don't read it. Just look at the words that you can make out." He started picking out just choice words so that he could get the idea - and of course, he could tell I knew nothing about the subject. Here, in my complete ignorance of this subject, was a boy who knew so much.
I thought to myself "He is my teacher! Here I am with this treasure, this miracle in my hands!"
After some time his teacher from Russellville, Kentucky called me, amazed at his improvement, saying, "This boy's never read before, and suddenly, he's scanning the material in class and raising his hand to respond to my questions. The other kids just look at him now in disbelief. I have to look at the book just to stay ahead of him!"
It was disturbing to me because it happened so fast. These wonderful things were happening for Mike and I knew they were real; yet, it seemed like magic, and I had difficulty accounting for everything that was happening. I wasn’t completely sure what to think. I experienced great self-doubt because the results of my work with Mike far exceeded what I had believed possible.
One of the things that made me more comfortable with Mike's turnaround was this: I had invited Dr. Lillian Bloeschl to come to Nashville. She was in charge of counseling at the University of Graz in Austria. I had met her there, and invited her to spend a month here in Nashville. Having sat in on one of my sessions with Mike she said, "You know, Gayle, you don't have to know clinically what's happening here - it's enough to know that Mike is now reading at grade level and beyond."
But I wanted to fully understand how I was able to achieve these results, and I couldn't. “Lillian," I said, "If I could explain this scientifically, it would be one thing, but I feel kind of like the medicine man at the circus or a magician at the carnival that magically unlocks the box through some kind of trick. What's happening here that this boy can read?"
Mike’s success was not coming from me.
Read the Reviews!
"Reading this book will impact your life and if you apply what you learn the lives of others." --4 the Love of Books
Read an interview with the author at www.pumpupyourbook.com.
You can follow Anne's tour all month long by visiting http://virtualbooktours.wordpress.com/. Visit Books on the House for your chance to win one of four copies of The Way to Stillness.
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