Every writer has a beautiful, authentic, wild voice. This is where we start early on, using our imagination and our natural wildness to express the stories our creative minds conjure. Then something happens: we’re taught the correct way to make a sentence, we learn the rules of grammar, which, of course, we do need to know, and slowly all that correctness begins to outweigh imagination. We learn what others (teachers, parents, authorities) want to hear and, over time, allow our wild voice to be tamed. We become cautious and self-conscious, and writing doesn’t hold the magic it had once upon a time.

In The Way of the Happy Woman, Sara Avant Stover shows how simple, natural, and refreshingly accessible practices can minimize stress and put us back in sync with our own cycles and those of nature. Here she offers insights into how we can make the most of the spring season.

When renowned futurist Barbara Marx Hubbard first issued her groundbreaking call to action in her seminal book Conscious Evolution in 1998, she was confronting the state of affairs at the momentous turn of the twenty-first century. Her clear-eyed, inspiring, and sweeping vision of a possible — and essential — global renaissance at the new millennium laid the foundation for the significance and impact around the world for the idea of evolving our world toward social synergy, interconnectivity, and spirit-based compassion for all.

Now, because current times are ever more ripe for — and in need of — radical reimagining, Hubbard has updated her vision in a revised edition of Conscious Evolution. We hope you’ll enjoy this excerpt from the book, in which she discusses the great awakening that is a key part of our collective evolution.