Becoming a master in a particular area is not tied solely to innate ability or talent, nor to years of rote practice. As martial arts master and consciousness explorer Peter Ralston explains, the secret to mastery lies in accurate perceptive awareness and effective interaction. In this detailed guide to what it takes to master something, Ralston examines the powerful dynamics behind the art of mastery. He explores in depth the foundational skills and operating principles that empower mastery, including the principle of effective interaction, the mind-body alignment principle, and creative intelligence. Examining “reaction” versus “response,” he looks at how to control your mind and transform your perceptive awareness so what you are experiencing aligns with what’s actually occurring, the first step toward reaching your objectives and taking the appropriate actions to produce your desired results. Sharing methods to overcome the major obstacles to mastery, he presents a step-by-step breakdown of the principle of effective interaction and explains how to adapt when the people or objects you’re interacting with are not aligned with your objectives or when they are working contrary to your goals, including in sports, business, warfare, politics, or any arena in which you’ve committed to pursuing mastery. Revealing the elements that lead to masterful interactive skills, this guide shows how to do the work of personal transformation necessary to access mastery as a real, functional experience, as well as providing an opportunity for deeper insights into yourself and life.

In this inspiring guide, Peter Ralston presents a program of "physical education" for anyone interested in body improvement. Using simple, clear language to demystify the Zen mindset, he draws on more than three decades of experience teaching students and apprentices worldwide who have applied his body-being approach. More of a transformative guide than a specific list of exercises devoted to any particular physical approach, "Zen Body-Being" explains how to create a state of mental control, enhanced feeling-awareness, correct structural alignment, increased spatial acuity, and even a greater interactive presence. Exercises are simple, often involving feeling-imagery and meditative awareness, which have a profound and sometimes instant effect. Where similar guides teach readers what to do, this book teaches readers how to "be,"

Over decades of martial arts and meditation practice, Peter Ralston discovered a curious and paradoxical fact: that true awareness arises from a state of not-knowing." "Even the most sincere investigation of self and spirit, he says, is often sabotaged by our tendency to grab too quickly for answers and ideas as we retreat to the safety of the known. This "Hitchhiker's Guide to Awareness" provides helpful guideposts along an experiential journey for those Western minds predisposed to wandering off to old habits, cherished presumptions, and a stubbornly solid sense of self. With ease and clarity Ralston teaches readers how to become aware of the background patterns that they are usually too busy, stressed, or distracted to notice. "The Book of Not Knowing" points out the ways people get stuck in their lives and offers readers a way to make fresh choices about every aspect of their lives, from a place of awareness instead of autopilot.

Located off the southwest coast of Mount Desert Island in Maine, Gotts Island, a mile across and three miles round, is ringed with bright granite--a "rock bound belt" that suggests concreteness, independence, and separation from the sea around it. But no island, no place, ever stands alone and unchanging. The small, close-knit community established on Gotts Island in the late eighteenth century disappeared in the twentieth, leaving behind mere traces, names on the cemetery stones. In its wake came the summer people, returning year after year, with "bags, bundles, and memory."
Having purchased the house of poet and writer Ruth Moore in 1965, Christina Gillis has been a summer resident of Gotts Island for more than forty years. Each summer she and her husband, John, arrive with their books, projects, and lives. On the island they watched their young sons, Chris and Ben, turn from "two small blond boys in high-top overalls" to "shirtless adolescents" and finally to young men.
But the place that was a constant center in their lives, that nourished them and their friendships with visitors and neighbors, assumed a more profound significance for the Gillis family in 1992 when they buried the ashes of their son Ben in the island cemetery. Ben had been killed seven months earlier while flying a small plane in Kenya. In the cemetery overlooking the sea, once the heart of the village and still central to the community, he joined generations of earlier islanders to become a "name in stone."
In this elegant and gentle memoir of place and experience, the author takes the reader on a tour of the island, making connections between its stark physical beauty, its known and unknown places, andthe decades of memories and myths it encompasses. Gillis describes the social role of the dock, the portal for arrivals and departures that are so important to island life; she traverses the pathways that cross the Island, offering up its topographical intricacies and secrets; and she revisits the cemetery that, though bounded by its fence, shares a field with the annual Fourth of July softball game. A location of loss is also a place of life.