At the peak of his career, Barry Michels was a psychotherapist who treated Hollywood’s creative and power elite. Along with his colleague Phil Stutz, he went on to write The Tools, a buzzy New York Times bestseller. Michels was driven, a type A personality who found his work tremendously rewarding. And then he was blindsided by a diagnosis of Lewy body dementia, a degenerative disease that would, in a matter of years, erode his physical and intellectual abilities. The same illness that had taken his father’s life would take his own.
At first, he was plunged into an abyss of despair, finding respite only in his practice and on long, defiant hikes. And then Stutz gave him life-changing advice: He told Michels to walk the karmic path before him, to write in order to find meaning, and to fight like hell. He challenged him to transform pain into purpose and claim inner freedom.
In the weeks and months that followed, Michels reached out to friends and patients about his diagnosis. And in this process of making himself vulnerable, he activated community. In his persistence, he found inspiration, even joy. His heart opened, his relationships grew deeper, his creativity was unleashed. He connected with his Life Force. He began writing poetry—an unstoppable outpouring from his soul. His capacity to love was unfettered. Beauty—in nature, in a piece of music or art—could move him to tears. And most surprising of all, this lifelong atheist embraced the divine.
Ahead of All Parting is the inspiring story of Michels’s spiritual, emotional, and creative transformation. It offers lessons on living a more meaningful life, written with the exquisite clarity conferred as the end comes into focus.
Profound essays that cut through the messiness of life to help you get the good from the bad—by famed therapist Phil Stutz, the New York Times bestselling co-author of The Tools and subject of the Netflix documentary Stutz
“Is there another way? Can you live life with its conflicts, uncertainties, and disappointments and somehow feel good about yourself? You can. But it requires a completely new orientation.”
There are issues, and there are issues—love, loss, success, failure, hope, regret, life, death. How can we even begin to think clearly about dilemmas so universally confounding? Phil Stutz has spent his life pondering the big challenges that we all face, and this profound book puts the conclusions he’s reached at your fingertips.
Stutz has been writing these remarkably insightful short essays since the late 1990s, which are collected here for the first time, along with new insights specific to the unique challenges of today. Each one will change the way you think, but taken all together, this book becomes something far more than the sum of its parts: a compendium of human experience and knowledge that will reframe your worldview. There are hard truths here—the acknowledgment that life is full of pain and not a single one of us is special enough to escape it—but we need to understand and accept them in order to realize our full potential.
In Coming Alive, Barry Michels and Phil Stutz describe how to identify and master the enemy within, which they call Part X. They offer four Tools to connect you to your life force and harness the energy and will to combat Part X.
These Tools activate your aspirational self; they spark creativity and resilience; they help you to transcend the mire of negative thoughts and circumstances and align with a powerful ally that unites us in our common desire to live lives of meaning and engagement.
Drawing insights from their decades of psychotherapeutic practice, their lived experience, and their moving and generous understanding of our interconnectedness, Michels and Stutz have created a paradigm-shifting guide to achieving optimal mental health and spiritual well-being.
The Tools is a dynamic, results-oriented practice that defies the traditional approach to therapy. Instead of focusing on the past, this groundbreaking method aims to deliver relief from persistent problems and restore control—and hope—to users right away. Every day presents challenges—big and small—that the tools transform into opportunities to bring about bold and dramatic change in your life.
For years, Phil Stutz and Barry Michels taught these tools to an exclusive patient base of high-powered executives and creative types. Now their revolutionary practice is available to anyone interested in realizing the full range of their potential. Stutz and Michels want to make your life exceptional—in its resiliency, its productivity, and its experience of real happiness.
