Two powerful self-help books have recently been published, each showing its readers how to draw upon compelling psychological and spiritual principles for creating a better life. Each provides reliable methods for freeing yourself from the grips of unconscious patterns that have interfered with your happiness, success, and well-being. Each shows you how to move on to new vistas led by your deepest wisdom. And each is an authoritative guide for personal evolution that also holds strong social implications, as we must all evolve quickly if we are to save our species and planet from the ravishes of the collective habitual behaviors that are leading us toward destruction.

The Promise of Energy Psychology: Revolutionary Tools for Dramatic Personal Change introduces an innovation that was not available during the Hopkins research project in the early 1970s. It is, in fact, one of the most exciting developments to come from the psychotherapy arena in decades. Energy psychology is a tool for emotional self-management that allows you to change the tones on the keyboard of your psyche. Through simple, mechanical procedures, you are shown how to eliminate irrational fears, inappropriate anger, maladaptive anxiety, prolonged grief, unwarranted jealousy—the whole spectrum of everyday emotions that may go awry. You also learn how such emotions keep us trapped in lifelong patterns that interfere with our happiness and success. The field of energy psychology applies the 5,000-year-old healing art of acupuncture to psychological problems and goals. Called "acupuncture without needles," you tap a set of points while bringing the psychological problem or goal to mind. The tapping is believed to send signals to the brain that change the neurological underpinnings of the problem. Simple, neat, effective. Replant a few trees in your emotional landscape and the forest starts to take on a new contour. The approach is proving itself in some of the toughest situations imaginable, where it has been successfully utilized by disaster teams going into post–civil war Kosovo and Rawanda and post-hurricane and post-tsunami areas. The book is written by Feinstein and two other leaders in this rapidly emerging specialty, Donna Eden and Gary Craig.

Feinstein, in his preface to the new third edition of The Mythic Path (co-authored with the renowned psychologist Stanley Krippner), describes how after three decades of refining their model for helping people consciously change their guiding myths, the emergence of energy psychology was a shocking and exciting development. The authors found that by applying energy psychology methods at various stages of the personal mythology program, the results were even more profound and lasting. And that is why there is a third edition to the already highly respected book, whose first edition in 1986 was lauded by Joseph Campbell, Jean Houston, Ashley Montagu, Stanislav Grof, and many other luminaries in the field. The third edition adds a support guide for introducing energy psychology into the personal mythology model. The support guide is an optional addition to the program, but a powerful one. It assumes that the reader has some basic skills in energy psychology.

DOUGLAS J. MOORE, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist with Mosaics Integrated Health in Cleveland, Ohio. He integrates traditional psychological methods with the practice of mindfulness, the wisdom of the Enneagram, and principles from energy medicine and energy psychology. He may be reached at DougJMoore@aol.com.